You'll Miss Me When I'm Gone (4 page)

‘I was born in 1926 and when I was eight months old we moved to Christie Avenue into a new council house with three bedrooms and an outside loo. There was just me, my mother, Sadie, and my father, George…’

H
as there ever been an iconic entertainer who during his life generated such profound and continuous affection as Eric Morecambe? Probably not. Well, maybe Stephen Fry comes close. Mr Fry’s ability to jolly along as one of us, as it were, while intellectually towering above us Gandalf-like in a world of Hobbits, is very endearing. Just as with Eric, you can’t help but like Stephen. Whatever such persons’ problems might be—and they’re human, so they have problems—there remains this lovable, vulnerable, yet simultaneously optimistic air about them. As TV presenter Nick Owen wrote of Eric in his autobiography: ‘He had the ability to make you laugh just by entering the room…’

Morecambe and Wise emerged from an era when a performer was slowly nurtured and judged purely on talent and not tabloid-style TV programmes bolstered by self-interested tabloid newspapers. You didn’t grade Morecambe and Wise on an A-Z list—they were simply undisputed stars of the small screen, and hugely admired and loved stars at that.

The author Sidney Sheldon observed of his friend Groucho Marx, ‘Even when Groucho wanted to insult someone he couldn’t, because no one would take the insult seriously.’ That straightaway makes me think of my father and his forays into attempting to be serious—which he would have enjoyed more frequently had people been able to take him more seriously. But as well as being plain and simple Dad, he was plainly and simply hilarious almost all the time. Part of it was his nature and part was the burden he carried of not wishing to disappoint anyone. Being a living comic legend was certainly a two-edged sword.

Although I’m now in my fifties it all seems so incredibly recent and fresh in my mind. But that’s the Morecambe and Wise effect; that’s what living with such a master of comedy does to you—it preserved the moments as they occurred. And I know I’m not alone. People still come up to me in the street and say, ‘It must be nearly ten years since your dad died.’ And when I say, ‘No. It’s nearer a quarter of a century,’ a look of incredulity sweeps across their face.

The one thing that I knew so little about until very, very recently was my father’s own humble beginnings. Then, while recording a spot for a TV company filming in Lancashire, I was introduced to a few people who remembered him. One such person is Roger Obertelli, who, as a kid, along with his elder brother Kenneth, would play football with Eric in their street, Christie Avenue, Morecambe.

Roger and his wife, now in their later years, remarkably have settled back in that same street.

He explained to me how all the kids in the street would be playing football in the late afternoon when suddenly Eric’s mother, Sadie, would appear and whisk him indoors. Ten minutes later a rather solemn Eric would re-emerge dressed in top hat and tails. With a plaintiff wave of the hand, he would saunter off down the street and across what were then open fields stretching into the distance on his way to the dance and music lessons that Sadie broke her back to fund. Roger says that they would all chuckle at Eric’s departing figure and can recall his frustration at having to leave their game of football. But you sense from Roger that now there is an air of ‘Well, he had the last laugh, didn’t he?’

Eric once outlined his own upbringing. His account could have been composed by or for the Lancashire tourist board, but it’s a genuine personal look at the seaside town’s life through the seasons by Eric as he recalled the early part of the previous century:

I was born in 1926 and when I was eight months old we moved to Christie Avenue into a new council house with three bedrooms and an outside loo. There was just me, my mother, Sadie, and my father, George…We were working class, but comfortable, even though Dad earned only £2 a week in my youth. He worked for the council…Mother supplemented our income, particularly when I began dancing lessons. She used to scrub floors and work as an usherette at the pier theatre. I had four special friends, all of us football fanatics; we supported Preston North End and Morecambe FC. We went to all Morecambe’s games for the simple reason that we got in to see them for nothing by the somewhat devious method of bending the railings that surrounded the ground…One of our favourite haunts was a sweet shop loftily named Halfway House. It was run by one of the biggest men I have ever seen. I can’t remember his name, but he was at least six feet six inches tall…

Apart from the normal run of goodies at Halfway House, there was a kind of board covered in paper and on it were dozens of black spots. You paid
Mr ‘Bigman’ a halfpenny and he gave you a pencil which you forced into a black spot. If there was a number underneath, you won a prize. But there weren’t many numbers.

At home my favourite foods were shrimps, black puddings and tripe—the latter delicacies having been a staple diet for comedians’ material for years! I also loved mushrooms, which my father and I would pick from the fields around our home. But one delicacy—the taste remains with me still—was ‘cocoa dip’. Every morning my mother would mix a quantity of cocoa powder and sugar in a bag. The idea was to have the bag open in my coat pocket and keep dipping a wet finger into the mixture…It was like nectar!

When the summer came Morecambe became a different place. It was like being brought up to date; finding out what was going on in the world. You never saw many cars in those days, yet August brought a veritable motorcade of Austin Sevens and Morris Eights driven by the ‘well-to-do’, paying their three pounds a week, full board at the town’s desirable residences…

On the sands entertainment was provided by the Nigger Minstrels, then undeterred by the racial overtones of their title.

As the darkness came at summer’s end, there were the illuminations. Happy Mount Park was a fairyland and as the holidaymakers took their final glimpse of annual escape, I would warm with the thought of good things to come: Autumn and Bonfire night, winter with slides on the footpath and scarcely any rain. Spring with the town reawakening, the annual Carnival that had a West End polish to it and the grand influx of the immigrants from the mill towns, the Scots and the Midlanders. Summer again with its boat trips, bathing beauty contests and the ever-present Nigger Minstrels…

Obviously I knew my father intimately, and I sense the above was purposely drawn up in a Charles-Dickens-meets-Perry-Como way as he rendered his thoughts into print. My father could be very lacklustre when talking about his childhood days in Morecambe, but
writing
about them seems to have focused his mind. Certainly Eric returned often enough to the north, particularly to
spend time with his parents, which my sister and I enjoyed enormously too. But it never really felt like Morecambe was his home—that this was the place that had not just given rise to its greatest son, but had lent its name to him as a vehicle for his success. I also sensed that the longer he spent away from the county of his birth—which, excepting the occasional holidays, was most of the time as our family was based in the south—the more uncertain he felt about it whenever he returned. It was a little like he wasn’t sure how to behave, because there were so many friends and family who knew Eric Morecambe before comedy did.

A couple of years ago, while in Morecambe filming for the BBC series
Comedy Map of Great Britain,
I had the honour and pleasure of being taken on the official ‘Eric Morecambe Tour’. We visited all the significant sights from Eric’s youth. It was wonderful, though the strange thought hit me that the last time I did the tour was with Eric himself, decades before it even existed as a tourist walk. Back in 1968 or 1969, while staying with my grandparents, my father said he’d take me on a stroll down memory lane. He was very helpful, pointing out this and that significant building from his childhood. We even passed what had once been the cinema where he’d chucked fruit and veg down from the balcony onto bald-headed targets, and the address where he’d trundled off to for those music and dance lessons. Then there were the schools, the shops, and even the optician’s where he’d been eyetested for his first pair of glasses. What struck me at the time, but much more now decades later as I write

this book, is how dispassionate he was about it all. He didn’t dawdle lost in reminiscence. There was nothing rose-tinted about his memories: it was all quite brisk, almost as if he was explaining what had happened to someone else he had known incredibly well, but definitely not his own personal history.

Then suddenly it occurred to me that he
was
someone else back then, so the third-person approach to his childhood was quite comprehensible. John Eric Bartholomew had shed his identity to reveal the comic genius Eric Morecambe. And at the same time, and on that same walk, I came to notice how diluted his northern accent had become. He had more what writer-comedian Ben Elton calls his transatlantic accent, something both he and Ernie were especially fond of displaying in their musical numbers. His accent had become quite hard to place: certainly pure Lancastrian didn’t immediately spring to mind.

When I was a boy and Eric’s career was just starting to blossom, his northern tones—his birth signature—were very strong. ‘Grass’, ‘bath’, and ‘laugh’ had the same vowel sound as ‘ass’, and ‘look’, ‘book’, and ‘cook’ rhymed with the American way of saying ‘duke’. His parents would retain these pronunciations for the rest of their days (understandably, considering it was where they lived their whole lives), but I sensed with my father that he was a man of the planet, not a specific country, county, or town. In a way it gave him a sense of mystery, for while northern traits clung on in his accent, they were more evident in his delivery of a funny line than in everyday conversation. If anything,
Ernie retained his Yorkshire accent much more than Eric did his Lancastrian one, though both had taken on that same transatlantic twang.

This was something I hadn’t given much thought to until writing about film legend Cary Grant. He had started life as Archibald Leach of Bristol, England. Yet if anyone ever changed his name and identity so completely it was Grant. And I soon discovered that to many Americans he was believed to be one of theirs. Except for the big Cary Grant followers, the majority assumed he was born and bred in America. And Eric adored Grant’s poise, style, chic. He was a personal friend of Grant’s and I can imagine how affected he would have been by this luminary of the film industry. Maybe some of it rubbed off on Eric, who

was often described as classy. Ernie once told me that when Eric looked in the mirror he saw Cary Grant. There is a logical link here.

Despite the happy memories—real or invented—depicted in the piece he penned on Morecambe, I know this to have been a difficult time for the young Eric. He once told me that he was very torn as a kid between loyalty to his mates, all of them having childhood aspirations to become footballing legends like Tom Finney and Stanley Matthews, and loyalty to his mother’s dream of his getting a working act together and so improving his lot in life by following the showbiz path. He must have had shrewdness about him from an early age, for while he continued to push on his football—leading to the offer of a trial with a League club—he recognized the potentially greater longevity of a career in theatrical entertainment compared with one in football. One injury and that was it, and back then it was not a well-paid profession for even the top players, and he knew he was not good enough to be a top player.

But this is jumping the gun. The young Eric still had plenty of boyish mischief to burn off before the days of theatre and football really took a grip. And most of that energy was expended with his cousin George Trelfall, always known as ‘Sonny’.