Chapter 15 THE DIARIES (1969)
Ernie: What’s the matter with you?
Eric: I’m an idiot. What’s your excuse?
AT FIRST GLANCE, the house doesn’t look like much – not from the main road, at least. It’s detached but fairly modern, built of unpretentious brick. The front lawn is neat but nondescript. Most of the garden is around the back. There’s a friendly Alsatian dozing in the drive. She sits up but doesn’t bark. There’s an outdoor swimming pool, but it’s purely functional, not fancy. In fact, the most remarkable thing about this house is that there’s nothing remarkable about it. It’s a place you’d be pleased to live in, but it’s hardly the sort of place you’d associate with one of the greatest comedians who ever lived.
Eric Morecambe’s house in smart, respectable, suburban Harpenden is a lot like the brilliant comic we all knew – or thought we knew – and loved. From the moment you arrive, it feels strangely familiar. Even on your first visit, it seems like somewhere you’ve been coming all your life. ‘It wasn’t a show business house,’ says Eric’s old chauffeur, Mike Fountain, who comes from Harpenden. ‘It was a family home.’ And it still is. Like Eric, it feels safe and comforting, without the slightest hint of ostentation. And from 1967 until his untimely death in 1984, it was the home of a man who, more than anyone, summed up the Great British sense of humour.
Britain has always been blessed with more than its fair share of comedians, but there’s never been another comic we’ve taken so completely to our hearts. Peter Cook, Peter Sellers, Tony Hancock, Spike Milligan – these were comics we adored, but there was always something remote, almost otherworldly, about them. We laughed at them rather than with them. Sure, we found them funny – but secretly, we thought they were rather strange. Eric Morecambe was awfully funny, but there was nothing remotely strange about him. To millions like me, who never knew him, he was like a favourite uncle, with a unique gift for making strangers laugh like old friends.
More than twenty years after he died, from a heart attack, aged just 58, Eric’s irrepressible personality still lingers in every corner of his comfortable home. There’s a framed photograph on the piano of him hobnobbing with the Queen Mother, and for a moment you wonder how on earth Eric, our Eric, got to meet the Queen Mum. But then you see a photo of Ernie Wise alongside it, and you remember. He wasn’t our Eric at all – that was his great illusion – but half of Britain’s finest, funniest double act, Morecambe & Wise.
From the 1960s to the 1980s, Morecambe & Wise were the undisputed heavyweight champions of British comedy. Christmas was inconceivable without their TV special. Their fans ranged from members of the Royal Family to members of the KGB. Their humour was timeless and classless, and that was what made them irresistible. They were stylish yet childlike, and they united the nation unlike any other act, before or since. You could laugh at Eric if you were seven. You could laugh at him if you were seventy. Old or young, rich or poor, you couldn’t fail to find him funny. He didn’t seem like a celebrity. He felt like one of the family, which is why it feels so normal to be standing here, in the cosy house where he used to live. Eric once said he wanted daily life here to be as average as possible, and funnily enough, it still is. ‘The overwhelming impression I formed of Eric,’ says his old friend Sue Nicholls, better known to the rest of us as Audrey in Coronation Street, ‘is just how ordinary he was.’1 Yet this ordinary man had an extraordinary talent, and the most extraordinary part of it is how ordinary he made it seem. As his wife, Joan, says, with simple clarity, ‘He was one of them.’
Joan still lives here, just like she used to live here with Eric. She’s never remarried, and she has no plans to move. She still wears his ring, and she still thinks of him as her husband. She sometimes refers to him in the present tense, as if he’s still around. After all these years, she still half expects to see him pop his head around the door. ‘To me it always seems as if Eric’s only just gone,’ she tells me. ‘It never seems to me that it’s been twenty years.’ Yet after today, there will be slightly less of Eric here than there was before. After twenty years, she’s been clearing out her husband’s study – a room that had lain dormant since he died. There was all sorts of stuff in there – photos, letters, joke books, diaries. It sounded as if there might be a book in it. ‘You can’t explain it,’ says Joan. ‘You can’t explain why people still remember him as if he’s still part of their lives.’ She’s probably right. You can never really explain these things – not definitively, not completely. But once I’ve spent a few hours inside Eric’s study, I reckon I’ll have a much better idea.
We go upstairs, past his full length portrait in the stairwell, and into a small room – barely more than a box room, really – where Eric would retreat to read and write. There’s a lovely view out the back, across the golf course and over open fields beyond, where Eric would go golfing or bird watching. He quite liked a round of golf, but on the whole he far preferred birds to birdies. He loved to watch them fly by, especially when he was resting.
However there’s nothing restful about this room, despite its peaceful vistas. This was where Eric came to work, not just to rest or play. ‘This book laden room was his shrine,’ observed Gary, just a few days after his father’s death. ‘Almost every previous time I had entered it, I had discovered his hunched figure poised over his portable typewriter, the whole room engulfed with smoke from his meerschaum pipe.’2 Two decades on, that same sense of restless industry endures. It may be twenty years, but it feels like Eric has just nipped out for an ounce of pipe tobacco. It feels like he’ll be back any minute. It feels as if we’re trespassing in a comedic Tutankhamen’s tomb.
On the floor beside the bookcase is an old biscuit
