pestered by starstruck patients. On the back of the door is his velvet smoking jacket – black and crimson, like a prop from one of Ernie’s dreadful plays. ‘He loved dressing in a Noel Coward kind of way,’ says Gary, vaguely, his thoughts elsewhere. But it’s the books on the shelves above that really catch your eye. Never mind Desert Island Discs. For the uninvited visitor, there’s nothing quite so intimate as someone else’s library. When you scan another person’s bookshelves, it’s as if you’re browsing in the corridors of their mind.
As you might expect, there are stacks of joke books: Laughter, The Best Medicine; The Complete Book of Insults; Twenty Thousand Quips And Quotes. And as you might expect, there are stacks of books about other jokers, many of them American, from silent clowns like Buster Keaton to wise guys like Groucho Marx. Yet it’s the less likely titles that reveal most about Britain’s favourite joker: PG Wodehouse, Richmal Crompton, even the Kama Sutra. And here’s Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers, ‘Eric always told me that The Pickwick Papers was the funniest book he had ever read,’ says Gary. ‘He used to read it on train journeys when he was travelling from theatre to theatre, from digs to digs. He said he’d get strange looks from the people in his carriage, because he was stifling his laughter as he read.’ There’s Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. There’s a bit of Eric in all these books – well, maybe not the Kama Sutra. Wodehouse? Certainly. Dickens? Of course. Eric and Ernie would have been brilliant as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but the character Eric most resembles is Crompton’s Just William, an eternal eleven year old with a genius for amiable mischief. ‘Maybe that’s why we loved him as kids,’ says Gary’s lifelong friend, Bill Drysdale, a regular visitor to this house ever since he was a child. ‘The thing that kids love more than anything is the idea of grown ups being naughty. Kids think that’s just the funniest thing, and that’s what I always loved about him.’
Eric wasn’t just a pipe smoker, he was a pipe collector too. He owned several hundred pipes. This one, which he called his Sherlock Holmes pipe, was a particular favourite
Mr and Mrs Eric Morecambe
Ernie: ‘I can see your lips moving. Eric: Well of course you can, you flaming fool! I’m the one who’s doing it for him! He’s made of wood! His mother was a Pole!’ Right to left: Ernie, Eric and Charlie the Dummy, who still resides at the Morecambe residence in Harpenden, awaiting repairs.
As a child, Bill wasn’t remotely awestruck by Eric’s stardom. ‘I never felt alienated by his status,’ he says. ‘You always felt like he was one of us.’ Yet he was full of surprises. After Eric died, Bill found a Frank Zappa album, of all things, in Eric’s record collection. ‘There was often the appearance of anarchy, but there was one person at the centre of things who knew exactly what was going on,’ says Bill, of Zappa’s music, ‘and that is an ideal template, I think, for Eric’s comedy.’ Eric’s comedy wasn’t just a job. It was a way of life. ‘His mind was always working on comedy,’ says Bill. ‘He’d be working in the study, he’d come out and he’d try out a joke on Gary and I, just to see what we thought of it, to see if it was funny.’ He knew if children found it funny, it would be easy to make their parents laugh.
We walk down the narrow corridor, to Eric’s old bedroom. The overflow from his study is strewn across the floor. There’s the giant lollipop which was his trademark before he met Ernie – a twelve year old vaudevillian, kitted out in beret and bootlace tie.3 Here’s a clapperboard from The Intelligence Men, the first feature film he made with Ernie. And there’s the ventriloquist’s dummy that was the highlight of their live show. ‘I can see your lips moving,’ Ernie would protest each time, in immaculate mock indignation. ‘Well of course you flaming can, you fool!’ Eric would answer, furious at this outrageous slur on his professional integrity. ‘I’m the one who’s doing it for him! ‘He’s made of wood! His mother was a Pole!’ ‘He had the common touch,’ says Gary. ‘He wasn’t trying to be hip or clever.’ But that was another part of Eric’s artifice. Eric did what all great artists do. He made it look easy.
There are heaps of photos all around us, some dating back to Eric and Ernie’s first turns together, as teenagers during the war. With his boyish good looks and eager grin, Ernie looks just the same as he always did. Eric, on the other hand, is almost unrecognisable – painfully thin and curiously feminine, with high cheekbones and a full head of dark, wavy hair. There are piles of cuttings too, newspaper after newspaper – countless rave reviews, even the occasional stinker. So important at the time, or so it seemed. All forgotten now, of course. As Eric used to say, to buck himself up after a bad notice, or bring himself back down to earth after a good one, the hardest thing to find is yesterday’s paper. And here they all are – all his daily papers from all his yesteryears. There are endless interviews, in every publication you can think of (and quite a few you can’t) from a profile by Kenneth Tynan in The Observer to a cover story in that classic boy’s comic, Tiger. Today these faded clippings all seem incongruously similar. Highbrow or lowbrow, they’re all mementoes of a life lived almost entirely in the public gaze.
This is a book about the part the public didn’t see. In the wings, in the dressing room, at home or on holiday, Eric Morecambe had a compulsion to amuse. ‘Even if he didn’t have an audience or wasn’t getting paid, he’d still entertain people in his kitchen,’ says Gary. ‘He used to wake up thinking funny. It was almost like an illness.’ Unlike a lot of comics, he didn’t hoard his humour for his paying punters. He was always on.
Some of it ended up on the small screen, where the rest of us could relish it. Some of it vanished into thin air. And the rest is in this room. Here’s his address book – a veritable Who’s Who of the glory days of British showbiz: Ronnie Barker, Roy Castle, Tommy Cooper and Harry Secombe. There’s a number for Des O’Connor, the patient butt of so many put downs, plus sporting pals like Dickie Davies and Jimmy Hill. There are numbers for his writer, Eddie Braben, his producer, John Ammonds, and, naturally, Ernie Wise – plus the British Heart Foundation, an association that ended with his third and final, fatal heart attack, bringing their lifelong partnership to an abrupt and inconclusive end. ‘Eric Morecambe’ reads Eric’s own inscription on the inside cover. ‘Comedian – Retired.’ But Eric never hung up his boots. He worked until the day – the very evening – that he died.
There are other books in this cardboard box, but they’re not address books. They’re notebooks filled with jottings, from diary entries to old jokes. Some, in childlike copperplate, date back half a century. Others, in geriatric scrawl, look like they were scribbled down yesterday. But buried in amongst these reflections, reminiscences and corny old one-liners, two quotations arrest the eye. One is by TS Eliot, from The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock: ‘I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.’4 The other must be from the Gospel of St. John, which is odd, since Eric wasn’t overtly religious: ‘That which was borne of this flesh is flesh – that which was borne of the spirit is spirit.’ Well, the flesh is gone – long gone – but in those photos and notebooks, and in this book, the daft, endearing spirit of Eric Morecambe lives on. ‘Even when he wasn’t here, it was as if this place was echoing with his infectious laugh,’ says Bill Drysdale. This book is all about the echo of that laughter.
My other car is a Rolls
My
