You'll Miss Me When I'm Gone (9 page)

Eric:
…Remember how we copied Abbott and Costello when we started? How we liked Laurel and Hardy, and Jewell and Warriss?

Ernie:
We must be a mixture of all of them. Yet, pal, we’ve found our own style as entertainers.We lean on each other.

Eric:
Is that what it is? I thought you were drunk…

J
ust as comics today explain how they have been influenced by Morecambe and Wise—and, believe me, I’ve come across many and only a few are in double acts—my father was just as influenced by his own heroes. I think his taste in comedy fell into two categories—the comedians who influenced him at the outset and those who influenced him when he was firmly established.

Although it is true that Abbot and Costello were both Eric and Ernie’s earliest influence, it was above all Laurel and Hardy who shaped their act. Certainly they were very important for my father: not only he did he tell me so, but you can see it in their work.What fascinates me is that he discovered Laurel and Hardy when still only in his teens, and was still just as big a fan in his fifties. However, as stand-up comedian and sit-com star Lee Mack says,‘If you don’t get Laurel and Hardy then you might as well say you don’t like comedy full stop.’

Stan Laurel, christened Arthur Stanley Jefferson, was born on 16 June 1890 in Ulverston, at that time in Lancashire but now in Cumbria, about ten miles
as the crow flies from Morecambe, where Eric would come into the world thirty-six years later.

Oliver Hardy was born Norvell Hardy on 18 January 1892 in Harlem, Georgia.As a young man ‘Babe’, as he was also known, had been looking for a career in the military but a love for films made him open a movie theatre in Milledgeville in his home state.This led to his finding work as an actor in Jacksonville, Florida, the home of the Lubin Film Company. Hardy later moved to Hollywood, where he worked as an all-purpose comic at the Hal Roach Studios.

Laurel and Hardy’s partnership at Roach began in 1926—the year Eric Morecambe was born—and within a year of their first joint screen venture they were being announced as a new comedy team.

When he started out in comedy Laurel was much more of a fall-about comic than he would later become after teaming up with Hardy. It is fascinating to learn that Laurel’s earliest working relationship was with Charlie Chaplin, who has, since his death in 1977, been accused (if only in print and by independent observers) of plagiarism.The story goes that much of the concept of Chaplin’s huge universally acclaimed screen character the Tramp was actually Stan Laurel’s. Laurel, a very gentle man by all accounts, was fully aware of having had his brilliant idea ‘stolen’—and apparently it wasn’t the first or last time with Chaplin—yet Laurel never stopped thinking, and saying to anyone who would
listen, that Chaplin was the greatest comedian there had ever been.

Curiously, and significantly, Chaplin never made a single reference to Stan Laurel in his autobiography, an almost impossible feat when one thinks of their shared history, which included the early years spent on tour together for Fred Karno before the First World War.

Eric rightly claimed that Laurel and Hardy were an inspiration to any double act as they took the ‘fat man, thin man’ and ‘idiot and bigger idiot’ concepts to new levels. But Chaplin he disliked passionately. Chaplin, he felt, benefited greatly from the fact that his films were silent and therefore solely dependent on visual content, or pantomime, and to work at their best they needed to be screened at a greater speed than real time, because on screen anyone seen moving faster than people move in reality is straightaway more humorous.

However, when I caught up with comedian and silent-comedy aficionado Paul Merton, he suggested a different explanation as to why Eric hadn’t fallen for Chaplin’s comic wizardry.‘Your dad’s first sight of Chaplin films would have been the Saturday morning pictures at his local theatre, I imagine,’ he said. ‘At that time—probably mid-thirties—they re-released some Keystone films with Chaplin that were shown at the wrong speed.They were shot at sixteen frames a second and shown at twenty-four, and with a crap musical score thrown on to them, so I don’t think people watching them at that time would have a very positive view of Charlie Chaplin.’ He added,‘I know Eric Sykes in his autobiography complained of a similar disliking for Chaplin that matches your father’s observation. If you see Chaplin as he should be seen it is a very different experience.’

Lee Mack adds:‘As a lad I simply regarded Chaplin as the king of silent comedy. Growing up in an era when video first came in, we were able to appreciate such talents in our own homes.’

One thing with Chaplin is that, unlike Laurel and Hardy, he was unable to make the transfer from silent pictures to the talkies; at least as far as his Tramp was concerned. Eric once wrote,‘In my line of profession Laurel and Hardy feature very highly in my admiration. I never had much time for Charlie Chaplin, although I would not deny he was probably a genius. But to me he wasn’t as
funny as Buster Keaton. But he must have been a better businessman, because he made and protected a lot more money than most at that time. Harold Lloyd was a marvellous actor-comic and one of the few who successfully made the transition from the silent movies into sound.That is quite an achievement when you consider people such as Jimmy James, Sid Field, Dave Morris and others of that ilk who found it very difficult to perform even on the radio.’

As the above quote makes clear, if Chaplin left Eric a bit cold, Keaton ignited his enthusiasm.At our family home during my childhood and youth, pictures of Buster Keaton lined the hallway and in my father’s office there was a sketch, imprinted on a mirror, of Keaton in classic morose pose beneath a boater at the peak of his movie career. This had been a Christmas present from his nephew, Clive, which he really cherished.

Paul Merton went on to make a connection between Eric and Keaton.‘Much of [Morecambe and Wise’s] way of performing would have come from the vast wealth of experience of stage work they’d had down the years,’ he said.‘And Eric was such a physical comic.They were appearing on a
Royal Variety Show
at the London Palladium, and Eric does this great leap from one staircase to another at the back of the set, and then is having to do pratfalls in the same routine.Very, very physical stuff and brilliant. He was a great faller; an adroit physical comic, and you can’t help but wonder if, in view of his love of some of the silent comedians, there was some inspiration from Buster Keaton there.’

By the end of his life Keaton had advanced the art of film-making through his superb writing and direction, and he had developed unique camera innovations unsurpassed even today. He is universally acclaimed as a genius; certainly Eric Morecambe would have gone along with that. Groucho Marx was of the opinion that Chaplin was the funnier of the two, but that Keaton made greater films.
And there, perhaps, is the truth, if truth is to be found in what is ultimately a subjective issue.

I find the stories of Keaton’s life as fascinating as his work.When he was only around three years of age he caught his right forefinger in a clothes wringer, losing the first joint, gashed his head near the eye with a brick that ricocheted after he threw it at a peach tree, and was sucked out of an upstairs window by a passing cyclone that carried him floating through the air and deposited him, fortunately unhurt, in the middle of a street a few blocks away. No wonder he became an expert at taking heavy falls in his stage act with his parents.

Harold Lloyd was one of Eric’s biggest heroes. I recall afternoons of reruns of Lloyd on TV, me and my father sitting on the sofa, him smoking his pipe and falling about laughing. For him the most appealing part of Lloyd’s comedy was his abundant energy and sincerity: he seemed to do so much without any affectation or obvious effort—which is similar to the illusion Eric and Ernie themselves created.The harder the rehearsals and the greater the general effort put into each
Morecambe and Wise Show
, the easier and less complicated the final result appeared.The obvious analogy is of the duck serenely moving across the water’s surface while beneath the surface it’s paddling like crazy. That’s how the illusion always worked for Morecambe and Wise, and how it clearly worked for Harold Lloyd.

By the mid-sixties Eric was in search of a new direction, away from the stereotypical, hapless funny man and towards a much sharper, wittier comedy character, and here the most important influences were two American performers: the evergreen Groucho Marx and Phil Silvers.

Julius Henry Marx (Groucho) is generally agreed to be the most popular and widely recognized of all the Marx Brothers owing to his outrageous on-screen
insults and one-liners, which are as strong and as effective today as when first filmed. His screen character was always that of a wise-cracking, cigartoting, middle-aged man with wire glasses and a big black moustache. One of the reasons I know Eric adored him so much was because Groucho had such wonderfully eccentric notions. Eric’s favourite was that Groucho wanted, whenever on screen in a Marx Brothers movie, to wear a painted moustache.There was never any explanation as to why, but the effect was certainly distinctive.According to an interview with Groucho, the producers didn’t want him to have a painted moustache, but he just turned up with it anyway.

‘Everything comes harder,’ Groucho said about ageing during a serious interview with his biographer Charlotte Chandler in the seventies.‘You have to concentrate to do what you didn’t have to think about before.You can’t take things for granted.You can’t even take salt for granted.’ Groucho ended that particular interview by saying,‘I’m still alive.That’s about it.’

And this reminds me of my father just two weeks before his death.We were having lunch together in a London hotel restaurant and despite being just fifty-seven he was bemoaning the woes of ageing. ‘You know you’re getting older when it takes half an hour in the bathroom every morning to do what used to take five or ten minutes. And then you find you have all these wild nasal hairs and rogue eyebrows shooting off at tangents that never used to need sorting out: they just were never there before.’

It was Groucho at his zenith—the Groucho of the thirties Marx Brothers movies—that Eric turned to when looking to incorporate something else into his own comic persona.As well as being inspired by the man’s cheekiness and imposing screen presence, Eric, with the help of his and Ernie’s producer John
Ammonds, took the skip-dance that Groucho created in one of his films and modified it into the outro of each of their shows after they had sung ‘Bring Me Sunshine’. It remains perhaps the most vivid signature of Morecambe and Wise even today. I would go so far as to say it has become a symbol of seventies British light entertainment—the era of flared suits, gaudy colours, and politically incorrect gags.This image of Eric skipping away has adorned at least four biographies of Morecambe and Wise and a book of short stories of mine, was the basis of the poster for the West End tribute play
The Play What I Wrote
, and has been emulated in television ads such as those made for Marks & Spencer a few years ago and one shown in 2008 for a bedding company. Comic Relief also used the image in 2009 for their charity. Giant posters abounded showing Lenny Henry in the skip-dance pose, while wearing an Eric and Ernie T-shirt depicting the comics with red noses. It even appears throughout this book. And, to top it all, Sue Barker and John McEnroe emulated it to the sound of Eric and Ernie singing ‘Bring Me Sunshine’ as the two tennis presenters skipped across the rainswept Centre Court atWimbledon. I can’t imagine what Eric and Ernie would have made of all the fuss.They’d have been thrilled on one hand, no doubt, and utterly perplexed on the other.

The final piece in the creation of the BBC model of Eric Morecambe owed much to another great American comedy hero, Phil Silvers, who was born on 11 May 1911.The comic actor’s best-known work, and the one which influenced Eric, was
The Phil Silvers Show
aka
Bilko!,
in which Silvers played Sergeant Ernest G. Bilko.The plots were always inventive, the supporting cast sharp, and the scenes dominated by Silvers and his snappy comedy repartee.What Eric mostly admired was the way he had created this character that could devastate with a single line, and yet be the most charming person on the planet if it allowed him to get his own way.There is no better example of this in
The Morecambe and Wise Show
than when Eric confronts a guest star, one moment displaying utter charm and respect, the next being outrageously rude.A good example was when Alec Guinness walks up to them:

Eric (confidentially to Ernie):Watch out! There’s a drunk come on.

Or when the renowned opera singer John Hanson bursts into song:

Eric: Get off! We don’t want that rubbish here.

And there were many more, all pure Phil Silvers in terms of delivery and technique.

One final hero I should mention in passing, and who had absolutely nothing to do with comedy, was the late, great jazz musician Duke Ellington. Eric recalled how he came close to meeting his idol.

‘I was working in a theatre in Liverpool doing pantomime and Duke Ellington was due shortly to appear there. It happened to be that he was going to use the same dressing-room that I was in. I left him a short note saying,“Please help yourself to drink,” and so forth. He wrote me a lovely reply, being the kind man that he was, saying, “Hi there, thanks for the room, Eric…” and so on, and signed it the Duke.And I lost the damn thing.
And
I didn’t get around to going to his show, which is something I should have done…’

Some of the Duke’s courteous behaviour clearly rubbed off on Eric, for it was something I noticed shining through him down the years. He would always find a smile or a quip for anyone interested in him.The actor Tony Slattery recalled sharing a ride in a lift with him during which my father told Slattery that you can measure the character of a person by how they treat someone who is seemingly of no value to them. Maybe that’s how he came to judge Duke Ellington so highly.