fourteen,’ he told a journalist in 2002, ‘I wrote to Morecambe and Wise to ask for tickets for one of their TV shows. The letter that came back was one of the first ever addressed to me at my house. It had BBC stamped at the top of the envelope, and as I ran downstairs to collect it, my brother, who was in particularly bullying mode at the time, was so completely intrigued, he actually opened it.
‘Inside was a signed photograph. And although there were no tickets left, and I never got to see Morecambe and Wise live, I still have the photo to this day.’
Ken was fascinated by them from watching them on TV. ‘I vividly remember a documentary about Morecambe and Wise,’ he recalls, ‘and I couldn’t imagine anything more exciting than seeing what Morecambe and Wise did, and how they actually did it.’
The play was first tested at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool. ‘We did a lot of “dying” in Liverpool,’ says Ken, through a wry smile. ‘It wasn’t right at that time. Hamish [McColl, who portrays the Ernie part of the duo] swore that the answer to making it work was to have Sean wear Eric’s glasses. So for one show we did this and planned some more Eric-like business to be going on—and it was a disaster! Total disaster!
‘Audiences weren’t having it, even though it was one inch closer to being Eric. The audience somehow needed to see the play through a kind of prism—through someone else’s physicality.
‘It took the whole month in Liverpool to work out the shape for this homage; this affectionate presentation of Eric and Ernie.’
The run on the West End stage, and the wonderful list of guest stars who appeared in the show, reached a natural conclusion, but as is so often the case with Morecambe and Wise, so much seems to continue happening with them each passing year despite both having left us some time ago. Broadway is the biggest development in the history of the show.
Catching up for lunch with Ken some six years since we worked together on the project, it was wonderful to find his enthusiasm for both Morecambe and Wise and the play itself had not remotely diminished.
‘In Hamish [McColl], Sean [Foley] and Toby’s [Jones, who played myriad roles in the production] performances you have the perfect degree of ego and neurosis that keeps it edgy and really challenging,’ he explains. ‘Because Hamish and Sean as The Right Size had been together a long time with their own successful partnership prior to the production meant that they were bringing something to it which was way beyond re-creation of Morecambe and Wise. You need to have performers who come out of a similar kind of box—hard-working and talented as the act they are paying homage to.’
We discussed the first night, and all of us associated with the play were very nervy that day as tickets had gone on sale to little reaction. ‘One of the things I remember about that first night in London,’ says Ken, ‘was the quality of the audience—all these “names” dotted around the auditorium—and feeling this huge desire for it to go well.
‘When I saw Bruce Forsyth several times leaning forward doubled up with laughter, I felt so relieved. No disrespect to Bruce Forsyth, but comedians aren’t normally regarded for their generosity to other comedians, so I took it as a very good omen that Bruce was clearly loving it.’
It was the first night success and subsequent reviews that brought about its almost immediate success.
But taking it to Broadway was always going to be a very different venture. Ken Branagh had some reservations about Broadway from the outset, which were echoed by me, The Right Size and Toby Jones.
‘It was always going to be a challenge taking the play on to Broadway,’ explains Ken, diplomatically. ‘Despite a well-worked script and the comedic skills of Hamish, Sean and Toby, what it lacked in New York that it never had lacked in the UK in its West End life and various touring productions was a massive level of affection.
‘In a sense, Eric and Ern hijacked Christmas, but it was the most beautiful piece of hijacking.’
‘To the audiences in the UK it went way beyond finding Eric and Ernie funny; it was the whole nostalgia their memory and reputation brought to the stage production. As well as being genuinely, unmistakably on the highest level funny, Morecambe and Wise’s best work coincided with moments in the life of the nation—especially Christmas—when everyone was together. Symbolically they came to represent that togetherness.
‘In a sense, Eric and Ern hijacked Christmas, but it was the most beautiful piece of hijacking that meant that at that moment when the people of the nation were together they were simultaneously finding themselves associated with Morecambe and Wise’s comedy.’
Opening on Broadway would be less about Morecambe and Wise and more about the camaraderie of all double acts. I understood the logic behind the decision, but was concerned that by removing the spirit of Morecambe and Wise we were removing the whole purpose of why we originally set out to stage the show.
The general feeling was that many theatregoers who came to see the West End production were American, Japanese, Chinese, and other, and they enjoyed it enormously, laughing their way out into the Covent Garden night when the curtain came down. I wasn’t convinced about that: surely, I thought, its success was due to the feelgood factor of Eric and Ernie working on those mostly British members of successive audiences who remembered Christmases past? That invisible awareness was actively, if unwittingly, being sucked up by those in the audience not in the least bit familiar with Eric and Ernie or their work. In New York that would not be possible as there would be no such underlying sentiment.
I must credit David Pugh for having the balls to give it a whirl, as it was his reputation and money on the line. And—if in hugely diluted form—he did get Morecambe and Wise introduced to a much wider audience.
Decisions can be made quickly—if rashly—in the entertainment business I discovered, and in February 2003 one relatively under-utilized consultant to the US production was flown out in first-class style to join the team as the opening night loomed. My mother, Joan, was also to be there for that night, which, while it was expected, was a bit discomforting given that her husband—half the raison d’être of the London production—had inevitably been reduced from being the play’s subject to appearing in the programme notes.
My mother and I were put up at the colourful Algonquin Hotel at 59 West 44th Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, a spit from Times Square. The reason I mention this hotel with a hint of admiration is because one of my great heroes, Harpo Marx, a gentleman and a giant of visual comedy, many decades back would frequent the place to play cards with some of his mates: screenwriter Robert Benchley (father of Peter Benchley, who gave us the novel Jaws!) and poet, critic, and short-story writer Dorothy Parker, to name but two. They and others formed an exclusive club, the Round Table, to pursue their delight in gambling, intellectual conversation and dry wit. The only rule seemed to be that you had to be able to take the knocks—there was no room for taking offence or acting self-important. Harpo was invited to join this elite club by his good friend the critic Alexander Woollcott. As some people get excited by treading the well-worn paths that Eric Morecambe trod, I get the same thrill from being in the vicinity of where a Marx Brother stood, walked, talked, breathed, laughed, cried, and anything else they might have done, especially when it is my favourite Marx Brother, the mute and blond, curly-locked Harpo—not that he was either of those things in real life, of course. And I was doubly blessed when discovering the theatre we were opening at was the Lyric—the very same theatre the Marx Brothers had opened at with the musical The Cocoanuts many decades earlier.
One of the first people my mother and I stumbled across at the Algonquin was actor Roger Moore and his wife
