role, while Greg Haiste played Ernie and Anthony Hoggard played Arthur and the myriad roles originally played by the great Toby Jones. Andrew recalled how, as little more than a toddler, once a week he would stay at his gran’s house because his parents would go out. It must have been a weekend, because it always coincided with The Morecambe and Wise Show being on. He was usually allowed to watch it, but has memories of times when he wasn’t supposed to: he’d sneak onto the landing and watch it through the banisters. That he should go on to portray Eric in a play seems deserved as well as ironic.
Echoing the thoughts of Hamish McColl, my own hope is that one day The Right Size will team up again to appear in the play—perhaps a special West End run, as Hamish suggests, with some mouth-watering guest stars equal to the long list of previous ones. Or, alternatively, they’ll take it to somewhere else where Morecambe and Wise are recognized and hugely appreciated. I’m thinking specifically ofAustralia. My second wife, Jo, comes from New Zealand and has lots of family spread out across Australia, and visits we made when we were still married proved to me beyond doubt that admiration for Morecambe andWise still exists there. I found their books and DVDs on sale in many Aussie stores.
Mentioning that part of the world, if I have one recent regret—and I certainly have too few to remember, to paraphrase Frank Sinatra—it is not taking up the opportunity to join the actors and crew of Lord of the Rings filming on location in New Zealand. Jo and I had planned to visit the members of her family in Australia, and a quick, seven-hour hop over to NZ would have left us watching Peter Jackson directing Orcs andAragorn and Gandalf and Saruman and Frodo and Sam and…well, you get the idea. And to make it worse, Peter, I later learned, is a big Morecambe andWise fan. The offer to go there had come from Andy Serkis (Gollum), whom I’d met a few times, because for some serendipitous reason we’d ended up being interviewed on the same radio programmes with indecent frequency.
The big link between The Play What I Wrote and the Lord of the Rings movies is Ian McKellen, who played Gandalf. Throughout the playThe Right Size made constant remarks about him, encouraging the audience to believe that he was the permanent guest star in waiting and would soon be making his big entrance. But then Sean Foley—in Eric mode—kept explaining the actor’s absence by saying, ‘Can’t get him out of the pub’ and suchlike. When the play won an award McKellen fooled everyone by staggering on the stage behind Sean and Hamish and pretending to be drunk. Keeping up the act, he then tapped them on their shoulders mid-flow—to their huge and genuine surprise—and presented them with their award before reeling off the stage. It was another one of those nights that brought the house down.
Ken Branagh says, ‘It’s interesting to try and work out the mystery of what makes people laugh. I have great admiration for those comics who can stand in front of 3,000 people and make them fall about laughing—like Billy Connolly and Lee Mack. It’s truly jaw-droppingly impressive.
‘With Eric and Ernie and other double acts, there is the protection that comes of having a partner that guards against the loneliness out there, but there’s still the basic concern of “are they going to like us tonight”? Yes, it goes with the territory but it’s that which actors admire most in comedians.’
As I finished lunch with Ken Branagh, he made me smile when he told me of a play he had recently been doing—a dark, Russian tragicomedy called Ivanov. ‘And for no good reason,’ says Ken, ‘we all start doing impressions of Eric Morecambe as we walk up and down the corridors before going on. It was a way for the cast to get themselves going; almost like a vocal exercise.’
It would seem Ken Branagh can’t escape Eric Morecambe!
The Early Days A Very Good Place to Start
‘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…’
Has 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.
‘Being a living comic legend was certainly a two-edged sword.’
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.
A fishing licence and ration book, both showing rare occasions on which Eric signed with his real birth name of John Eric Bartholomew.
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
