by Louis Barfe
Unfortunately, Davis’s pragmatism deserted him at the start of studio rehearsals, already limited in time by Davis’s tight schedule, as Tesler explains:
I had a huge white staircase constructed, with curtains at the top. The idea was that he [Davis] would do his first number, coming down the staircase. He comes into the studio on Saturday morning, sees the staircase and says ‘No, I don’t want that. I’ll fall down the staircase and ruin the show. Get rid of it, scrap it.’ So the big set piece had to go. Then, when we were rehearsing on the Sunday, we were using, for the very first time, a lavalier radio neck-mike. Because the studio was empty, there was a howlback on that precious lavalier mike, the first radio mike used in British television. He got so furious at the howlback that he tore the mike from his neck, threw it across the studio and destroyed it.
He hated everything about the day. I’m sitting in the control room at the end of rehearsals, going through notes, and the make-up lady comes in and says ‘He’s not going to do the show. He said he’s very unhappy, he doesn’t want to do the show.’ So I went to his dressing room and said ‘What’s all this about?’ ‘I don’t want to do the show.’ I asked why, and he replied ‘Because you’re a bunch of inefficient cocksuckers.’24
Not daunted, Tesler told Davis that the British public were dying to see him in action. The star replied that they could come to the Pigalle – a physical impossibility given the likely size of the viewing audience. The producer assured the star that all would be all right on the night.
As I’m talking, I can hear the B-movie accompanying music. ‘Sammy, you’ve got to do it. You don’t like me, I’m not crazy about you. It doesn’t matter. It’s the audience that matters. The British audience.’ Schmaltz like you’ve never heard in your life. At the end of which, I’m thoroughly ashamed of myself, but he says ‘Yeah, well, all right, I’ll do it.’ He did it, and of course it was a smash. It was the last thing I did, though, because it was a bastard to do. He was a bugger. I thought at the end of that, that’s it, I’m happy being an executive, I can’t do both, I refuse to do both.25
Another important LE contribution made by ABC was the hidden camera prank show Candid Camera, which began a hit run on British TV in 1960. In America, it had been developed from the radio series Candid Microphone by its presenter Allen Funt. In the UK, the first host was Bob Monkhouse, aided by pranksters Jonathan Routh and Arthur Atkins, and producer Ronnie Taylor. It was revived periodically over the following sixteen years, finally in 1976 with Routh as the host, but the premise remained the same. Present ordinary people with extraordinary situations and film them secretly. A memorable early stunt was the car that turned up at a garage with its driver claiming it was in need of some work. On closer inspection, the car was revealed to have no engine. Silent movie legend Buster Keaton had been involved with the original US show, which thrilled Monkhouse when he went to the States to see the show being made and met his hero.
ABC’s heightened profile in light entertainment brought problems with ATV. Although ITV had been set up as a free market, with the constituent companies competing for network slots and selling each other programmes, ATV regarded light entertainment as its fiefdom. ‘ATV was willing enough for ABC to provide church services, race meetings and children’s programmes for London networking, but they were determined to dominate all the major entertainment spots in the London week-end schedule,’ ABC managing director Howard Thomas recalled in his autobiography.26 At one point, Val Parnell tried to convince Thomas that he had no need to employ any programme-makers, but Thomas went the other way, realizing that he ‘could fight with Parnell and Grade only from a position of armed strength . . . Whenever I threatened not to network one of their programmes I had to be ready with an equally effective programme of our own to replace theirs.’27 At one point, ATV thought that ABC wasn’t paying enough for Sunday Night at the London Palladium. As Grade and Parnell regarded the show as a non-negotiable element of every ITV company’s schedule, they believed that the odds were stacked in their favour. However, Thomas, bolstered by the growing power of his light entertainment department under Tesler, threatened to pull the Palladium show altogether and produce an alternative from ABC’s newly rebuilt flagship theatre in Blackpool. In the event, the matter was resolved, but ABC made Blackpool Night Out anyway, and it became the summer replacement for Sunday Night at the London Palladium from July 1964.
Blackpool Night Out had developed from ABC’s Big Night Out, a vehicle for Mike and Bernie Winters. Unlike many acts with a common name, Mike and Bernie were real brothers, having anglicized their proper surname, Weinstein, for professional purposes. Brought up in the north London suburb of Tottenham, both had musical inclinations from an early age. Mike played clarinet and studied at the Royal Academy of Music at the same time as jazz musician John Dankworth, while Bernie played drums, which he studied at the Tottenham campus of the University of Life. Becoming eligible for his call-up at the tail end of the war, Mike Winters had tried to join the Merchant Navy, but been dismissed by the medical officer as unfit for service. Recommended by a pianist friend, the brothers joined the Canadian Legion, which was looking for musicians for troop shows. While others spent their time square-bashing, the brothers Weinstein, by their own admission, had it cushy. ‘Service as a legionnaire was the best time in my life,’ Bernie Winters recalled in the pair’s autobiography. ‘We were only playing soldiers, but that didn’t stop us getting all the perks other servicemen got in wartime . . . My only rank was entertainer.’28
Upon being demobbed, the pair took their chances as a double act, without much success. Mike went into the schmutter trade, beginning by selling scarce nylon stockings paired up from manufacturers’ seconds. Meanwhile, Bernie carried on as a solo act. An ill-advised venture into mail order scuppered Mike’s clothing business and, on a whim, he decided to rejoin his brother on stage. Their first major breakthrough was a year working on a touring bill with newly minted rock and roll star Tommy Steele, as a result of which they notched up their first television appearances, on Six Five Special. Their next big breakthrough, in 1962, was seen only by those present at a cinema in Cleveleys [probably the Odeon], near Blackpool, when technical troubles held up the recording of ABC’s Holiday Town Parade. Mike and Bernie filled the hiatus with twenty-five minutes of ad-libs, impressing producer Philip Jones enough to offer them their own show. It took a while for him to persuade his bosses of their appeal, but they took over Big Night Out. When they began their stint on the show, they were working in a summer show at Southsea with Arthur Askey. They would fly up to the ABC studios at Didsbury each week with a generous helping of material given to them by the veteran comic.
Just as the Weinstein boys were establishing themselves at ABC, another double act was making its name at ATV. Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise were not blood relatives, but had an almost-fraternal relationship. They had met as child performers just before the Second World War, and worked together in Bryan Michie’s Youth Takes A Bow revue in 1940. Ernest Wiseman was from Leeds, and was a junior song and dance man in the mould of Jack Buchanan. Eric Bartholomew came from the seaside resort of Morecambe in Lancashire, on the other side of the Pennines.29 Whereas Wiseman’s act aspired to and, by all accounts, achieved a sophistication beyond his years, Bartholomew’s schtick was firmly in the north-western tradition of the ‘gowk’ or simpleton. Wearing tails, a bootlace tie, short trousers and a beret, while holding a gigantic lollipop, he sang a number called ‘I’m Not All There’. Although disparate as performers, the pair became good friends. Bartholomew was usually accompanied on tour by his mother Sadie, and she effectively became Wiseman’s guardian. It was Sadie’s inspired suggestion that the pair channel their off-stage banter into an act.
By the early fifties, Eric Bartholomew and Ernest Wiseman had become Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise, with an uncommon wealth of show business experience for two men still in their mid-twenties. They had become popular radio performers, with their own series, You’re Only You
ng Once, beginning on the BBC’s Northern Home Service in November 1953. The script was the nominal responsibility of a writer called Frank Roscoe, but he was in heavy demand at the time, working for other Northern radio comics like Ken Platt, and some of the material was less than ideal. Fortunately, the performers could draw on their own reserves, as the show’s producer John Ammonds recalls. ‘Eric and Ernie used to bring their gag books to Piccadilly [the location of the BBC’s Manchester headquarters until 1975] on a Sunday. In fact, Ronnie Taylor, shortly after I got the radio job, said to me “Can you work a Roneo machine? That’s one of the main qualifications for the job,” because on Sunday nobody was in.’30
Their radio success made Ronnie Waldman keen to sign them for their own BBC television series, and he travelled to the Winter Gardens in Blackpool, where they were working, to make the offer. It seemed like the final push that would propel them into the big time, but in fact it was a considerable career setback. In the absence of any recordings, Running Wild, which aired fortnightly for six shows from 12 April 1954, is now remembered primarily for the verdict delivered by Kenneth Bailey of the People: ‘Definition of the week: TV set: the box in which they buried Morecambe and Wise.’31 It seems likely that the series was nowhere near as bad as had been made out, merely mediocre: in the words of their biographer Graham McCann, ‘neither unmissable nor unwatchable’. Some of the blame must be placed with producer Bryan Sears, who was not in tune with the northern comics, but the production’s main shortcoming seems to have been in the writing. Sears had hoped to enlist Bob Monkhouse and Denis Goodwin, but they were unavailable – almost certainly because they were preparing their own BBC show, Fast and Loose, with Brian Tesler producing. This left Sears with very little time to search for alternatives, but writers were found, including Lawrie Wyman, who would go on to create The Navy Lark for radio. Cobbling material together might have worked on radio, but the unforgiving eye of the new medium showed the cracks all too clearly.
Rather cruelly, Fast and Loose, the first show of which went out just three weeks after the first Running Wild, in the same slot, turned out to be a hit from the off. ‘The show was a high-speed smash, every gag worked,’ Monkhouse later recalled,32 but he and Goodwin were battling with similar time constraints to Morecambe and Wise, and both knew that the second show would not reach the same standard. It helped that they wrote their own material, but it also helped that they were far wilier than Morecambe and Wise. The first Fast and Loose was advertised as the start of a series, but at Goodwin’s suggestion, Monkhouse faked a dead faint at the end of the show, and the claims of exhaustion convinced Waldman to delay the rest of the series until September 1954.
In contrast, Eric and Ernie found themselves having to rebuild their reputations almost from scratch. The experience made them determined never again to go along with advice they didn’t agree with, no matter how exalted or experienced the adviser. They went back to doing spots on other people’s shows, including well-received appearances on the The Good Old Days, BBC Television’s long-running tribute to Victorian and Edwardian music hall. In 1956, they became the resident comedians on ATV’s Winifred Atwell Show, working with the popular pianist, and aided by scripts from Johnny Speight, who seemed to understand the pair better than their previous writers.
The next breakthrough came when they enlisted Billy Marsh as their agent. Bruce Forsyth, a friend and client of Marsh’s for over thirty years, described him as ‘a very tough negotiator . . . a showbiz legend, an agent who cared about his stars and was thrilled when things were going right for them’.33 Marsh, a Dover-born farmer’s son, had moved from working in his local theatres to working with agent Bernard Delfont in 1941. Throughout his career, he was well known for working on trust, as his colleague and successor Jan Kennedy explains. ‘Billy Marsh never had a contract with any of his talent, and neither do we. I want the talent to be happy. The first thing, after talent, is belief. If you believe in that talent, with a bit of luck and a few careful decisions, you should be able to get them up there.’34 This was the kind of backing that Eric and Ernie needed. Marsh showed his mettle during their preliminary meeting with him by calling ATV’s head booker Alec Fyne and landing them a spot on Sunday Night at the London Palladium.
By 1961, Marsh was convinced that Morecambe and Wise were ready for their own television series, and offered them to Lew Grade at ATV. Grade turned them down flat. He agreed that they’d come a long way from Running Wild, but did not think they were worth the risk. He changed his mind once Marsh began to offer them elsewhere – at one point, Eric Maschwitz was very interested in bringing them back to the BBC to make amends – and their first ATV show went out from the Wood Green Empire on 12 October 1961. On the recommendation of Ben Warriss (of the double act Jewel and Warriss), the performers had insisted on having Sid Green and Dick Hills, a pair of former schoolteachers, as their scriptwriters and Colin Clews as their producer. The recommendation was a good one, as this was to be the team that supported Eric and Ernie throughout their seven years at ATV.
Grade may also have had motives for taking on Morecambe and Wise other than the fear of competition. The actors’ union Equity was threatening ITV with strike action over fees for its members, but Morecambe and Wise were members of the rival Variety Artists’ Federation. Equity followed through with its threat on 1 November 1961, just three weeks after the series started. Oddly, the strike was just what the performers and their writers needed. The reception for the first couple of shows had been mixed. Morecambe and Wise themselves were unhappy with Hills and Green’s large-scale sketches with sizeable casts of supporting actors. One led Morecambe to complain that he had trouble finding his partner. Suddenly, a pared-down vision was required, with the writers being pressed into service as the stooges where appropriate. The result was ideal – Eric and Ernie had the space to develop their comic personas, while the writers’ initial hesitance and reluctance as performers gave them something to spark off. Morecambe was never better than when dishing out gentle insults. By the time the series found its feet, the ghost of Running Wild had been well and truly laid.
In their 1960s work for ABC, Mike and Bernie Winters followed the classic double act pattern of straight man and idiot, and so to a certain degree did Eric and Ernie at this time, although the dynamic of their on-stage characters would later change and become more complex and rewarding. Hills and Green’s contribution has been overshadowed somewhat by Eric and Ernie’s later association with the great scriptwriter Eddie Braben, but they produced some sterling work for the ATV shows. One particularly memorable sketch cast Eric as a flamenco dancer, with Ernie as a singer:
ERIC: What are we dressed like this for?
ERNIE [in strangulated Spanish accent]: Senõr, you are the great Spanish dancer El Rico Cavallero Gonzales.
ERIC: Am I? Who’s working you? [Aside] Someone’s working him.
ERNIE: No joke, sir.
ERIC [also in strangulated Spanish accent]: But eet’s a leeving?
ERNIE: I, sir, am Don Ernesto Philippo Manuel de Castile.
ERIC: That’s a cigar. A little fat cigar.
ERNIE [gesturing to guitarist]: This here is my comrade . . .
ERIC: That’s good, isn’t it? A Russian Spaniard.35
The sketch captures perfectly Eric’s role in the partnership as a disruptive element. It also underlines one of their great skills as an act: making a script sound spontaneous. Like all of their work, it will have been rehearsed to the point of destruction, but on the show, it still comes up fresh. Having been introduced to the guitarist, Eric then notices his female dancing partner:
ERIC: Who’s the dolly?
ERNIE: Lil.
ERIC [incredulous]: Whaddyamean, Lil?
ERNIE: It’s Lil. Come here, it’s a very sad story. You see her mother went to Spain on one of those cheap trips. Need I go on?
ERIC: If you don’t want the show to finish early, yes.36
ERNIE: She went to Spain, her mother . . .
<
br /> ERIC: On one of those cheap tours.
ERNIE: She met a bull-fighting fellow.
ERIC: They’re all the same. They carry their own sheets around with them. You’ve got to watch them.
ERNIE: The moon was out. Romance, a lot of this [mimes drinking].
ERIC: Ah, tequila, tequila. No, that’s Mexico.
ERNIE: Before . . .
ERIC: . . . her mother knew where she was, it was a package deal.37
In an earlier ATV show, recorded at the Borehamwood studios on 2 December 1963, they had showcased a new band from Liverpool. After performing ‘This Boy’ and ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, the Beatles were joined on stage by Ernie, who suggested that they perform a number together. Then Eric, ‘the tall handsome one with the glasses’, comes to join ‘the one with the short fat hairy legs’, and the four with what George Harrison refers to as ‘big fat hairy heads’:
ERIC: Ahhhhhhhh, it’s the Kaye Sisters! Fabulous. Have you dyed your hair?
ERNIE: It’s not the Kaye Sisters. This is the Beatles.
ERIC [as if talking to a small and very cute furry animal]: Hello Beatles. [Normal voice] Where is he? There he is. Hello Bongo.
ERNIE: That’s Ringo.
ERIC: Oh, is he there as well?38
The Beatles were among the first British pop stars to display their natural sense of humour. Indeed, it was their repartee that impressed record chief George Martin more than their music when they auditioned for EMI’s Parlophone label. Previously, stars had been under pressure from their managers to be humble and reverent whenever they opened their mouths to do anything other than sing. John Lennon felt no such compulsion, and appears to deflate Eric momentarily with a withering putdown, before Morecambe recovers his form: