My Father, Eric Morecambe
Believe it or not, there are people who are immune to the charms of Morecambe and Wise. Though few in number and usually wise enough to keep their strange views to themselves, they exist. They must be baffled by the fascination with and love for these two very funny men that endures 29 years after Eric’s third and final heart attack. It must be hell for them every Christmas when television commemorates the greatest double act Britain has ever seen. How must these poor souls feel when they walk into a bookshop and see the numerous volumes written about Eric and Ernie on sale?
Having read most of them, I found myself wondering whether the world needed another book on the tall goodlooking one with glasses and the one with the short, fat hairy legs. Until, that is, The Treasures Of Morecambe & Wise: ‘Bring Me Sunshine’ arrived in the post.
Lavishly illustrated, it contains several envelopes in which can be found replicas of scripts, jottings, full-size posters and even Eric’s first birthday card from his auntie. For a completist fan like what I am, it’s the next best thing to being allowed to rummage in Eric or Ernie’s attic.
As the writer of several books about his father, as well as biographies including one of Cary Grant, and a successful series of fantasy fiction for teenagers, Gary Morecambe wasn’t convinced there was room for another book either.
‘I wasn’t going to do this,’ he explains, ‘but when I saw what they [the publisher] had, that convinced me it had to be done. We’d never before had the chance to access Ernie’s archive. He kept tapes, his own pictures and notes. To have that with Eric’s and combine them, and then do a biography with it, was just great.’
Morecambe already knew his father’s personal archive well, but discovering that Ernie had kept just as much memorabilia came as a delightful surprise. ‘We didn’t know that he wrote gags down, that he kept notes wherever he went,’ he says, with obvious enthusiasm. ‘He wrote his own speeches when he gave talks, so it was a bit of a revelation finding that he had stuff . Being able to have a balance of material, that’s what made the book worthwhile.’
Over the years, Eric’s reputation has tended to overshadow that of his partner, but he knew better than anyone the importance of being with Ernie. Friends from boyhood, when they met as protégés of the bandleader and impresario Jack Hylton, they were closer than many brothers. Their mutual trust was complete. If one of them didn’t like a gag, it was out.
For the first 20 years of their career as a double act, they operated as a more conventional funny man and feed. When they moved to the BBC in 1968, their new scriptwriter Eddie Braben’s spark of genius was to harness the genuine warmth that existed between the two men and translate it into unforgettable comedy.
‘They were like children in an adult’s world,’ Gary Morecambe observes. ‘The plays were such a wonderful Eddie device. Eric sending him up, but nobody else was allowed to. Once someone else comes into the picture, Eric protects him. That’s quite a complicated scenario. Very human.’
It worked the other way, too, as in the famous Grieg’s Piano Concerto sketch with André Previn: ‘One of my favourite lines in that Previn sketch is when Eric says something really stupid and Ernie says “That sounds reasonable to me”.’
In many ways, the 1971 Christmas show, containing that Previn sketch and the sequence with Shirley Bassey and the boots, was the moment where Morecambe and Wise became the act we know and love today. Before it, they were popular, but after it, they were untouchable. Gary Morecambe notes the respect in which the headline entertainers of the day held each other.
‘Tommy [Cooper] was Eric’s hero,’ recalls Morecambe. ‘Tommy doing all the gags, magic tricks, my father would just sit there, watching. He’d never compete with Tommy because he loved him so much. Eric and Ronnie Barker were such good friends. Ronnie Barker with my father was like my father with Tommy Cooper, in awe of him. He always gave me stories about my father. Really nice stories. There was no real competition. Yes, you were in the same line of work. My father was never very competitive anyway. It’s all about the show being good. That’s all that mattered to him. It was never “Oooh, we’ve got to be better than the Two Rons”.’
Like the two Ronnies, Eric and Ernie believed in exhaustive rehearsals, but Eric, his son argues, spent his entire life fighting a tendency towards laziness, the lack of competitive edge being part and parcel of that side of his character. When Eric was a boy, his mother, Sadie, signed him up for music and dancing lessons as an attempt to get him motivated.
‘She saw this lad who was going to end up working in the corner shop, which was fine, but she was very wide-seeing,’ says Morecambe.
‘She just wanted Eric to get off his arse, really. She really did. And he didn’t until he discovered comedy, and he only discovered it by doing piano, dancing and singing.’
Ernie had no trouble with motivation, and had gone to similar classes of his own volition. ‘So that’s why in the shows, they can do all that. They were both trained,’ Morecambe underlines. Sadie saw how the two boys complemented each other and came to view Ernie almost as a second son.
Morecambe is full of praise for the way Peter Bowker and Victoria Wood depicted the early years of the Morecambe and Wise partnership in the 2011 warm, affectionate drama Eric and Ernie, a marked contrast to the usual family reaction to such biographical dramas. In particular, he adored Jim Moir’s [aka Vic Reeves] portrayal of his grandfather, George Bartholomew.
‘You can get so pernickety, but the thing is that George didn’t smoke a pipe,’ Morecambe corrects, ‘so when he was in the kitchen, it wasn’t a pipe, he was a cigarette man. But what he got brilliantly was the laid-backness. He underplayed it, and George underplayed life. That’s how George was.’
The middle of Eric and Joan Morecambe’s three children, Gary Morecambe flips between referring to ‘my father’ and ‘Eric’, noting the difference between the private man and the public figure. However, as their fame grew, the two entities began to merge.
‘Michael Grade says [my father] played Eric Morecambe until he became him,’ Gary relates. ‘My father, when I was three, four, five, six, maybe, he wasn’t the Eric Morecambe that we all know and love, but he became that character, even at home. Over about 15 years, he changed into this other person, both of whom were very nice in their own ways, but the Eric Morecambe one was so much larger than life. He’d still sign cheques in the old days as Bartholomew, John Eric Bartholomew, it was normal to do that, but once he became Eric Morecambe, superstar, the rest just went.’
Morecambe junior understands the process better than most. At home and to friends, he’s Gary Bartholomew. When on professional duty, he’s Gary Morecambe. It began when he started working for his father’s agent, the legendary Billy Marsh, who knew that the famous name was a perfect calling card for a young man starting in the business: ‘If I’d said Bartholomew, Billy would have killed me.’
Gary Morecambe wonders whether his father wouldn’t have had a longer life if he’d made more time to be Eric Bartholomew, family man, ornithologist and keen amateur photographer. ‘I think he should have pursued those more,’ he avers, ‘had them as passions rather than interests.’
Perhaps the trouble was that the work, hard as it could be, was – to use a phrase beloved of Eric’s Über fan Miranda Hart – such fun. ‘Places like Television Centre were called the Fun Factory. Now you just associate them with accountants, and Operation Yewtree,’ Morecambe jokes, before questioning seriously the application of modern values to past events. ‘You didn’t think in terms of health. We were all smoking, and, if you didn’t smoke, people were smoking around you. Everything was unhealthy.
‘Roy Castle died of passive smoking, all those pubs and clubs. It’s tragic and it’s all changed now. It’s easy to look back, a bit like Operation Yewtree, and then judge. When you think about it, [you need to] watch things like Life On Mars to remember what the era was like.’
Had his father lived long enough, Morecambe suspects he would have been a huge fan of French and Saunders and would have reciprocated the huge respect in which he is held by the aforementioned Miranda. ‘She’s a great mate,’ Morecambe enthuses. ‘She comes round a lot to my mum’s house. She’ll help wash up and things just because she likes being in Eric’s house. It’s bizarre and wonderful, because we don’t know anyone who’s famous who does that.
‘There are a lot of people who’d like to do that, but not someone who’s a brilliant comedian. That’s what I love about her.’
Morecambe is also sure that Eric would have adored Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer.
‘Outside of Morecambe and Wise, they’re my favourite double act,’ he says. ‘What I really admire about Reeves and Mortimer, particularly that early stuff they were doing at Channel 4, was that they took it in their own direction. So many have tried to be Eric and Ernie and it just didn’t work.’
Which is why we keep returning to the originals time and time again. Spare a thought for the naysayers.
The Treasures Of Morecambe And Wise: ‘Bring Me Sunshine’ by Gary Morecambe is published by Carlton Books, priced £29.99.
Having read most of them, I found myself wondering whether the world needed another book on the tall goodlooking one with glasses and the one with the short, fat hairy legs. Until, that is, The Treasures Of Morecambe & Wise: ‘Bring Me Sunshine’ arrived in the post.
Lavishly illustrated, it contains several envelopes in which can be found replicas of scripts, jottings, full-size posters and even Eric’s first birthday card from his auntie. For a completist fan like what I am, it’s the next best thing to being allowed to rummage in Eric or Ernie’s attic.
As the writer of several books about his father, as well as biographies including one of Cary Grant, and a successful series of fantasy fiction for teenagers, Gary Morecambe wasn’t convinced there was room for another book either.
‘I wasn’t going to do this,’ he explains, ‘but when I saw what they [the publisher] had, that convinced me it had to be done. We’d never before had the chance to access Ernie’s archive. He kept tapes, his own pictures and notes. To have that with Eric’s and combine them, and then do a biography with it, was just great.’ Morecambe already knew his father’s personal archive well, but discovering that Ernie had kept just as much memorabilia came as a delightful surprise. ‘We didn’t know that he wrote gags down, that he kept notes wherever he went,’ he says, with obvious enthusiasm. ‘He wrote his own speeches when he gave talks, so it was a bit of a revelation finding that he had stuff . Being able to have a balance of material, that’s what made the book worthwhile.’
Over the years, Eric’s reputation has tended to overshadow that of his partner, but he knew better than anyone the importance of being with Ernie. Friends from boyhood, when they met as protégés of the bandleader and impresario Jack Hylton, they were closer than many brothers. Their mutual trust was complete. If one of them didn’t like a gag, it was out.
For the first 20 years of their career as a double act, they operated as a more conventional funny man and feed. When they moved to the BBC in 1968, their new scriptwriter Eddie Braben’s spark of genius was to harness the genuine warmth that existed between the two men and translate it into unforgettable comedy.
‘They were like children in an adult’s world,’ Gary Morecambe observes. ‘The plays were such a wonderful Eddie device. Eric sending him up, but nobody else was allowed to. Once someone else comes into the picture, Eric protects him. That’s quite a complicated scenario. Very human.’
It worked the other way, too, as in the famous Grieg’s Piano Concerto sketch with André Previn: ‘One of my favourite lines in that Previn sketch is when Eric says something really stupid and Ernie says “That sounds reasonable to me”.’
In many ways, the 1971 Christmas show, containing that Previn sketch and the sequence with Shirley Bassey and the boots, was the moment where Morecambe and Wise became the act we know and love today. Before it, they were popular, but after it, they were untouchable. Gary Morecambe notes the respect in which the headline entertainers of the day held each other.
‘Tommy [Cooper] was Eric’s hero,’ recalls Morecambe. ‘Tommy doing all the gags, magic tricks, my father would just sit there, watching. He’d never compete with Tommy because he loved him so much. Eric and Ronnie Barker were such good friends. Ronnie Barker with my father was like my father with Tommy Cooper, in awe of him. He always gave me stories about my father. Really nice stories. There was no real competition. Yes, you were in the same line of work. My father was never very competitive anyway. It’s all about the show being good. That’s all that mattered to him. It was never “Oooh, we’ve got to be better than the Two Rons”.’
Like the two Ronnies, Eric and Ernie believed in exhaustive rehearsals, but Eric, his son argues, spent his entire life fighting a tendency towards laziness, the lack of competitive edge being part and parcel of that side of his character. When Eric was a boy, his mother, Sadie, signed him up for music and dancing lessons as an attempt to get him motivated.
‘She saw this lad who was going to end up working in the corner shop, which was fine, but she was very wide-seeing,’ says Morecambe.
‘She just wanted Eric to get off his arse, really. She really did. And he didn’t until he discovered comedy, and he only discovered it by doing piano, dancing and singing.’
Ernie had no trouble with motivation, and had gone to similar classes of his own volition. ‘So that’s why in the shows, they can do all that. They were both trained,’ Morecambe underlines. Sadie saw how the two boys complemented each other and came to view Ernie almost as a second son.
Morecambe is full of praise for the way Peter Bowker and Victoria Wood depicted the early years of the Morecambe and Wise partnership in the 2011 warm, affectionate drama Eric and Ernie, a marked contrast to the usual family reaction to such biographical dramas. In particular, he adored Jim Moir’s [aka Vic Reeves] portrayal of his grandfather, George Bartholomew.
‘You can get so pernickety, but the thing is that George didn’t smoke a pipe,’ Morecambe corrects, ‘so when he was in the kitchen, it wasn’t a pipe, he was a cigarette man. But what he got brilliantly was the laid-backness. He underplayed it, and George underplayed life. That’s how George was.’
The middle of Eric and Joan Morecambe’s three children, Gary Morecambe flips between referring to ‘my father’ and ‘Eric’, noting the difference between the private man and the public figure. However, as their fame grew, the two entities began to merge.
‘Michael Grade says [my father] played Eric Morecambe until he became him,’ Gary relates. ‘My father, when I was three, four, five, six, maybe, he wasn’t the Eric Morecambe that we all know and love, but he became that character, even at home. Over about 15 years, he changed into this other person, both of whom were very nice in their own ways, but the Eric Morecambe one was so much larger than life. He’d still sign cheques in the old days as Bartholomew, John Eric Bartholomew, it was normal to do that, but once he became Eric Morecambe, superstar, the rest just went.’
Morecambe junior understands the process better than most. At home and to friends, he’s Gary Bartholomew. When on professional duty, he’s Gary Morecambe. It began when he started working for his father’s agent, the legendary Billy Marsh, who knew that the famous name was a perfect calling card for a young man starting in the business: ‘If I’d said Bartholomew, Billy would have killed me.’
Gary Morecambe wonders whether his father wouldn’t have had a longer life if he’d made more time to be Eric Bartholomew, family man, ornithologist and keen amateur photographer. ‘I think he should have pursued those more,’ he avers, ‘had them as passions rather than interests.’
Perhaps the trouble was that the work, hard as it could be, was – to use a phrase beloved of Eric’s Über fan Miranda Hart – such fun. ‘Places like Television Centre were called the Fun Factory. Now you just associate them with accountants, and Operation Yewtree,’ Morecambe jokes, before questioning seriously the application of modern values to past events. ‘You didn’t think in terms of health. We were all smoking, and, if you didn’t smoke, people were smoking around you. Everything was unhealthy.
‘Roy Castle died of passive smoking, all those pubs and clubs. It’s tragic and it’s all changed now. It’s easy to look back, a bit like Operation Yewtree, and then judge. When you think about it, [you need to] watch things like Life On Mars to remember what the era was like.’
Had his father lived long enough, Morecambe suspects he would have been a huge fan of French and Saunders and would have reciprocated the huge respect in which he is held by the aforementioned Miranda. ‘She’s a great mate,’ Morecambe enthuses. ‘She comes round a lot to my mum’s house. She’ll help wash up and things just because she likes being in Eric’s house. It’s bizarre and wonderful, because we don’t know anyone who’s famous who does that.
‘There are a lot of people who’d like to do that, but not someone who’s a brilliant comedian. That’s what I love about her.’
Morecambe is also sure that Eric would have adored Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer.
‘Outside of Morecambe and Wise, they’re my favourite double act,’ he says. ‘What I really admire about Reeves and Mortimer, particularly that early stuff they were doing at Channel 4, was that they took it in their own direction. So many have tried to be Eric and Ernie and it just didn’t work.’
Which is why we keep returning to the originals time and time again. Spare a thought for the naysayers.
The Treasures Of Morecambe And Wise: ‘Bring Me Sunshine’ by Gary Morecambe is published by Carlton Books, priced £29.99.