(Part Two)
‘Yes, I’ll always remember the first big laugh I got professionally. I can also remember the last big laugh I got. It was the same one.’
It comes as a big surprise to many people—including me when I set out on the journey that ended up as this book—that in the last three or four years of his life Eric Morecambe did three theatrical-release film projects that in no way involved Ernie Wise. I probably knew at the time, but with the passing years had forgotten. It was certainly a thrill to be reintroduced to them.
The first two of these films were based on Sir John Betjeman’s poetry and called Betjeman’s Britain (1980) and Late Flowering Love (1981). They were narrated by Betjeman himself, which was a particularly satisfying element of the project. The third film, The Passionate Pilgrim (1984), like the other two, was directed by Charles Wallace.
In London I caught up with Charles, the brains behind the films,
to find out more about this trio of screen releases starring my father as a solo actor of which hitherto little was known. ‘I had this idea of dramatizing some of Betjeman’s poems,’ explained Charles. ‘They’d already been set to music, and I thought I’d just take it a stage further. There was one poem called “Indoor Games Near Newbury”, which is basically a tale of a children’s Christmas party. In the verses there was talk of a “funny uncle”. Initially I’d thought of actors like Peter Ustinov and Robert Morley.
‘As it happened, Eric was being filmed at the time by Anglia Television having his portrait done. Someone atAnglia then suggested Eric Morecambe. This kind of wrong-footed me as it was so completely different from what I’d had in mind. In fact I would confess to you now that I wasn’t terribly positive about the idea.
‘The head of production took me to one side and said that if I could get Eric Morecambe then I must do so, because there was no one bigger.
‘I tracked Eric down, telephoned him and explained that the film, a short, would be called Betjeman’s Britain, and would he remotely be interested. Straight off he said, “Yes, fine!” In fact, I got the immediate impression he was very up for something different from the Morecambe and Wise format.’
This is something I know to be accurate from conversations I’d had with my father at this time. In fact as early as 1973 he had been saying that he felt Morecambe and Wise were getting themselves in a bit of a rut.
‘As I recall,’ continued Charles, ‘he came over for filming the afternoon before.We had dinner and a bit of a chat together, and filmed the next day and he went home. Just as he was leaving he came back to me and said, “Sunshine! If there’s anything you ever want me to do, just give me a call.” I smiled on the outside, but was thinking, “Shit! I’ve got the biggest star on television and he wants to work on anything I can offer him.” But what came out my mouth was, “What do you feel you’d like to do?” And he replied, “Do you know, I’ve always wanted to do something about ghosts!”’
‘The only thing that the film and TV people wanted was Morecambe and Wise, and they didn’t want anything that detracted from that.’
Hearing this from Charles triggered a memory of Eric standing in front of his mirror in the hallway of his house saying he would love to write a ghost story about a spectral life inside a mirror.
‘He was serious,’ said Charles.’ I mean he wanted to do it for real as a straight bit of acting—no comedy stuff.And I was pretty interested in the subject, and understood the line he wanted to take. It would be completely different from Morecambe and Wise, and that would have given me as much pleasure as it would have done Eric. I was understandably buoyed up about this. But could I get anyone interested? Not a chance! The only thing that the film and TV people wanted was Morecambe and Wise, and they didn’t want anything that detracted from that.’
‘That mentality of playing it safe was creeping in around this time as the more adventurous programme makers of the fifties and sixties retired or died.’
This was something Eric and Ernie experienced when they moved from the BBC to Thames Television in the late seventies. In essence Thames wanted the same shows the BBC had given viewers during the previous decade, and that despite the stars wanting to develop in other areas of their comedy work. For instance, both Eric and Ernie were keen to pursue the idea of a Morecambe and Wise series which had none of the variety guest stars, duologue in front of the curtains, and other familiar elements, but took place entirely in their make-believe flat and bedroom. At the time the flat and the bedroom represented about twelve minutes of their shows, so the idea was to make them into a sitcom that was quietly announcing itself along the lines of ‘You’ve seen short moments from our life in the flat and the bedroom, now here’s a series just of those elements.’ I, for one, encouraged him to push on this as I thought it was a great idea. But as Charles found out himself, no one was interested—even when it was Eric Morecambe making the suggestion.
‘Making the odd little cameo in a twenty-two-minute TV or cinema short,
or having his portrait painted on Anglia TV, was acceptable at a push, but that was it,’ said Charles. ‘Any thought of a new direction seemed to imply there was an element of risk as far as the powers that be at that time were concerned—the risk of killing the goose that laid the golden egg.
‘That mentality of playing it safe was creeping in around this time as the more adventurous programme makers of the fifties and sixties retired or died, and this new breed of programme makers came in. Even today there is a playing-it-safe feel to much of the programming we see.
‘But with Eric at least we were able to go on to film another Betjeman short,’ explained Charles. ‘Paramount Pictures had seen the original one, loved it, and asked if I would do something for them. Being a prat I went and offered them another Betjeman instead of taking advantage of doing something totally new. As it happened, the second Betjeman with Eric worked incredibly well. Eric played an army major in the film.The poem was called “Invasion Exercise on the Poultry Farm”. We got Susannah York and Beryl Reid involved as it was a kind of take on the movie The Killing of Sister George, in which Beryl had starred some years earlier.
‘In the Betjeman poem a paratrooper lands off course in the countryside. Susannah’s character takes a fancy to him and goes off with him. Beryl rings up the local military base and demands someone comes along [Eric] to deal with the wayward paratrooper. Instead, Eric’s character goes off with Susannah, leaving the paratrooper tied up.
‘It was fine—in fact it was good—but for me personally it felt too like the original film we’d shot a year earlier.What I should have done was something a bit more adventurous. However, it proved the most successful cinema short ever. The head of UIP thought it was just wonderful, and he put it out with everything, including the latest Bond movie of the day and Raiders of the Lost Ark.
‘What was pleasing for me, and no doubt Eric, was that short films are something everyone tends to avoid, but with this one they actually advertised it. It went out as “Late Flowering Love starring Eric Morecambe!” They knew that would get the punters in on Eric’s name.’
After filming was over, Eric joked with Charles as he left, ‘Same time next year, sunshine?’ Charles was up for that, especially as the second Betjeman had gone down so well, including a double-page spread in a national tabloid.
‘But a year later I still hadn’t managed to get anything together,’ said Charles, ‘probably because this time I really was keen to do something entirely different from the two Betjeman films. Soon, though, the idea of what would be The Passionate Pilgrim started to formulate in my head.The structure of the piece was to tell a story in three or four parts. It was all to be set around this eccentric lord in a castle—that being Eric, of course—trying to woo this very attractive damsel—who would be played by Madeline Smith—and this strapping knight trying to beat him to the damsel—finally played by actor Tom Baker.’
Interestingly,Tom Baker hadn’t been first choice for Charles. ‘Originally the role played byTom Baker was to be played by Sean Connery,’ he told me, which came as a big surprise as I had no previous knowledge of this. ‘Eric and Sean couldn’t match availability, and time was pressing and we needed to move on with the project, so I approached Tom Baker.’
Tom Baker, of course, is famous around the world as the fourth incarnation of the Gallifreyan with the keys to the Tardis, the Doctor, in the BBC’s Doctor Who.
Although I knew Eric and Tom had met some five years before the film and that they went on to make this film together, my knowledge till now had gone no further. Mind you, I knew that Tom Baker has a certain reputation for not being the easiest on-set actor to ever appear in front of a camera, yet, according
to Charles, ‘he was on his best behaviour.Tom was in awe of Eric Morecambe, and felt genuinely honoured to be working with him in this three-hander—Eric,Tom, and Madeline Smith.
‘There was only one time, when Eric wasn’t there, that Tom got a bit grumpy. But even then, with Eric’s energy on the set,Tom was not going to be difficult.Also Tom had seen how compliant Eric was, always willing to do whatever the director, me, wanted to do. It should also be pointed out that when I approached Tom to do the part, he said, “To be honest I’d never heard of you, but if Eric Morecambe has agreed to do it, then that’s good enough for me!”’
‘Eric wasn’t that accustomed to being without Ernie Wise, in whom he perhaps had the greatest straight man who had ever breathed.’
With some irony I sense that Tom Baker’s expression almost cues the moment from The Morecambe and Wise Show when Eric, on hearing Ernie say similar words, turns to the camera, and effectively to the viewer at home, and says, ‘This boy’s a fool!’
‘Eric, who liked Tom enormously,’ continued Charles, ‘wasn’t that accustomed to being without Ernie Wise, in whom he perhaps had the greatest straight man who had ever breathed. Sure, he could have little digs at Ernie, as partners always do, but you knew without a shadow of a doubt that he had a great love for him and a great loyalty to him. I think he also sensed that without his own contribution what would Ernie be able to do? And that probably is the sad truth of being regarded as the straight man in a double act.
‘Working with Tom Baker reaffirmed Eric’s understanding of how wonderful Ernie was as a straight man,’ Charles asserted. ‘Eric did say to me in the middle of filming The Passionate Pilgrim that working with Tom was like working with a piece of wood. “I love Tom, but I don’t get anything back from him.” Tom, as Eric knew full well, was a brilliant actor, but he’s not a stand-up comedy type. And that was Eric’s problem within the confines of the piece we were making.
‘Of course, Eric was so used to working with Ernie for over forty years by now, and almost to the exclusion of anyone else, that they had this rapport which had never failed them.You put Eric with someone who is a brilliant actor but not that type of natural comedy expert and it’s going to be tough.’
Charles explained his inspiration for this surreal short film with its double entendres. ‘As a kid I was, and still am in adulthood, a great fan of Tom and Jerry cartoons. I saw the basis of their relationship as the basis of Eric’s and Tom’s in The Passionate Pilgrim,and with Madeline Smith as a sort of Tweety Pie [the little canary-like bird that appeared in many cartoon films with Sylvester the cat] character.’
A rather bizarre, quirky little number, and with a Carry On-style narration by the late John Le Mesurier, The Passionate Pilgrim has something very naive and lovable about it. Whether this effect is enhanced by the knowledge that it was Eric’s very last piece of work is hard to know. But it has a genuine fairytale quality and it is a great pity that fate made it impossible to be completed in the manner wanted by Charles Wallace.
Charles began talking me through the process of what he originally wanted to achieve with the film. ‘The plan was to do three or four connected stories. Each segment, or episode, would star Eric as the lord, Tom as the arch-rival and a different girl—Madeline Smith being the first—as the one both men are trying to woo. These wouldn’t go out as individual films, but as one short film combining the three episodes.
‘I decided that the best way forward would be to shoot the first segment of The Passionate Pilgrim, show it to the right people, and then the money would come in for us to complete the other two segments and the film would be complete. The first segment, which was to end up being the whole film in the end, was shot as an historic piece at Hever Castle in Kent. I put it together roughly and showed it to various people, but unlike the Betjeman[-narrated] films I just couldn’t get the financial backing, which struck me as ridiculous. Eric rang me up: “How’s it going, sunshine?” Well, I didn’t have the guts to tell him I wasn’t getting anywhere with it. Also, I knew it would work—it was a great project with Eric starring. It was a guaranteed success. Feeling pretty certain therefore that all would come right in the end, we went ahead and started shooting the third segment of the story, planning to return to do the second segment later to finish the film off.
‘Again it was Eric and Tom, but by this time Tom was no longer a knight but a postman on a bicycle, and Eric was still the local lord, but now dressed in keeping with the much later times of our setting.
‘I was still under a lot of pressure, and I was only continuing filming to keep Eric on board. If I’d had to go to him and say I wasn’t able to get it together, he’d understandably have felt uncomfortable and reckon he’d backed a loser!’
Some of the filming was done back at Hever Castle.After that there came a long break as Charles tried to raise funds. He did so, but not in the manner he had planned.Tough times call for tough measures, it seems. ‘I sold my flat in the meantime, bought a house, got a whacking great mortgage, so I had the funding in place to get at least another day’s filming in the can.
‘By now another year had gone—1983 had become ‘84—and I knew I just had to keep Eric there with me, and I was sure that eventually we’d get the thing completed.
‘The following Sunday, Eric was dead.’
‘Then a slightly eerie thing happened. We were set to do another day’s filming, which would have basically finished the segment with Tom as the postman. We had Beryl Reid lined up to play Eric’s mother.
‘We had lined it up that we were going to shoot on a particular Wednesday—just with Eric and Beryl Reid and the new damsel, as Tom’s stuff was now all in the can. However, during the previous week I felt I didn’t have things totally together enough to shoot that day. I rang Eric up just to let him know, and to make sure he wouldn’t mind that we were putting back shooting until the following week. Eric was the easiest person to work with, and I thought therefore he would just say it was fine—no problem.And in this plaintive voice he said, “Oh! Do we really have to?” “Crumbs,” thought I. “I must’ve upset him somehow.” Eventually he said, “Well, if you really have to change it I suppose I can go and mow the lawn instead.” I hung up with this conversation nagging at me, because it was so unlike Eric to be that fussed by a week’s delay.
‘The following Sunday, Eric was dead.’
‘I cannot help but think Eric had an inclination that things weren’t right: a premonition that time was short, and that was why he wanted to finish the film.’
My father was very perceptive about his health, and all his close family felt with hindsight that at this time he was having quite a few premonitions. He was giving belongings away, like pipes and books, sorting out his photo albums and his office, and generally distancing himself from everyday mortal existence. And, looking back, Charles Wallace concluded the same.
‘I cannot help but think Eric had an inclination that things weren’t right: a premonition that time was short, and that was why he wanted to finish the film.
‘On the other hand, and from my own perspective, I’m rather glad we didn’t do that last day’s filming. It would have been very strenuous for him, and in light of what soon happened to him, I would have felt terribly guilty that it was the effort required to film that had brought on the fatal heart attack. I was happy to live without the thought that I was the man who killed Eric Morecambe!’
I suggested to Charles that it must have been a big shock for all the others involved in the project when it was announced that Eric had died. He replied, ‘To be honest, it was such a big shock to me that I didn’t really have the time or inclination to think about how the others might be affected, beyond his family, of course.’
With Charles left with an incomplete third episode, a second episode that hadn’t even been fully written, and only a first episode complete, what would be the new plan for The Passionate Pilgrim? Too much time and money had been invested to just shrug shoulders and walk away.
‘The first part that we had in the can eventually went out as a cinema short as the complete story of The Passionate Pilgrim,’ explains Charles. ‘It was only released in cinemas in the UK and again went out with a James Bond movie, and again it was advertised everywhere on the back of the name Eric Morecambe.’
As I was leaving, Charles was clearly keen to impart to me a few further thoughts about my father. ‘The only real chance of Eric branching out and displaying his full potential would have been if Ernie had gone first. Awful thing to say, but it’s true. I know Eric wouldn’t have done to Ernie what Dud [Dudley Moore] did to Pete [Peter Cook]—though that relationship was obviously more stressed. It didn’t mean Eric was any less keen to branch out. His view of Morecambe and Wise, as he explained it to me, was that he wanted to keep it going as long as possible, particularly because of Ernie. However, he felt they’d done all they could with the series, and it was increasingly becoming a strain to keep the standard up. Again it was this idea he had of “duty to the fans”—that desire to keep the people laughing—that drove him ever onwards.
‘Even when people were with him whom he knew well—indeed me while we were filming—he felt this need to entertain. But he didn’t have to for our benefit, he just felt he should.
‘Mind you, my girlfriend of the time often tells me how once she was driving Eric between locations and couldn’t find her driving glasses. Quick as a flash Eric quipped, “What you need is a prescription windscreen.”’
The last recorded work of Morecambe and Wise was their 1984 film Night Train to Murder.This was supposed to be the film that would not only be their first bigscreen release since 1967 but eclipse that trio of Rank movies made back in the mid-sixties. But it was truly poor, if not awful.
Actress Lysette Anthony was a very young actress back in 1984 when she was hired to play alongside Eric and Ernie as Eric’s niece in this sub-standard Agatha Christie-style murder drama. ‘We laughed and laughed and had such a great time making the film,’ she told me. ‘Even between takes the laughter went on, but nobody pointed out, perhaps because we were all having such a fun time, that the script was very thin and didn’t really work.’
I find Lysette’s observation interesting as it sort of confirms a niggling thought of my own which has been growing over the years: that Thames used its Euston Films arm to lure Eric and Ernie to take The Morecambe and Wise Show to Thames Television, but with no real intent to expend energy and talent on trying to make the film a big success.
What was surprising was that my father was unable to see beyond the merriment and realize he was involved in a duff project. It was only at the screening of the film that the horror of what they had done—for that was his opinion—was fully understood.As a wholly professional performer with fantastic perception and understanding of Morecambe and Wise, he was more gutted by his own failure to pick up on the failings at the time of filming than anything else.
Lysette Anthony did point out to me that everyone at least enjoyed the whole process. ‘Your father was one of the kindest people I’ve ever met, let alone work with. I was going through a really rough time on the domestic front while filming, and your father sensed things weren’t right, though I’d told him nothing. He was terribly protective of me.
‘He was a lovely, decent, very silly, naughty, gorgeous man. I still have a real soft spot for him.’
Lysette was surprised at the difference between Eric and Ernie. ‘With Morecambe and Wise,’ she explained,’when you met Eric it was exactly what you wanted and expected him to be: he was that funny and generous as both comedian and person. Brightening people’s day was very much at the core of his being. And with Ernie it was much less so. And that was a shock. Ernie was quite cold and very much more cautious with people on the set.Together, as a partnership, they were brilliant, of course, and Eric is beyond being an icon and deserves to be so.When I work with other great actors and comedians and let slip I worked on a film with Morecambe and Wise, they are both flummoxed and in awe, such is the reputation of their double act.’
Alongside Lysette Anthony and Eric and Ernie themselves were actors such as Fulton Mackay, best known for his role as the prison warder in Ronnie Barker’s Porridge. But it wasn’t enough to save this project.
After the private screening of the film, and when Eric was able to put a coherent sentence together, the first thing he requested was that the project be shelved. He was told it was impossible to do that.
As it happened, Eric would be dead within a few weeks, and as a mark of respect for his wishes, while not shelving the film altogether, Thames did not give it its theatrical release, finally screening it on TV in a children’s programming slot. How ironic that Morecambe and Wise were seduced to Thames from the BBC by the promise of a ‘big film’. And doubly ironic is the fact that the film has benefited from both video and DVD release, including international sales, proving quite popular in countries where Eric and Ernie were virtually or completely unknown.
Paul Merton told me an interesting story about the move to Thames. ‘I bumped into [the BBC’s] former Head of Light Entertainment, Bill Cotton, at Waterloo Station a while ago.We got to talking about Morecambe and Wise, and he told me that Eric had gone to the bar of the BBC for a drink during the last Christmas he was alive. Bill Cotton had been there too, and in conversation Bill had encouraged him and Ernie to return to the BBC. He did this because he inferred from Eric’s comments that all was not quite as it should have been at Thames; that the move to the different studio was more negative than positive. As it is we’ll never know what might have happened. Eric died the following May. But it’s interesting to imagine their return to the BBC and to see them possibly taking the Morecambe and Wise format even further.’
‘Brightening people’s day was very much at the core of his being.’
Michael Parkinson told me, ‘I don’t think Bill Cotton ever recovered from Morecambe and Wise leaving the BBC. He was devastated. Heartbroken.
‘Eric and Ernie had to make a decision for what they saw as best for them, but Bill took it very personally. I’d go and see Bill around 5pm at the close of play as it were. He was having personal difficulties much of the time back then as well, but he’d always come back to go on about why Eric and Ernie had left. But they never fell out with each other over it. It was more that Bill couldn’t come to terms with it. But he never stopped loving them as people and performers and would have taken them back at the drop of a hat.
‘There was no greater champion for Morecambe and Wise right from the very beginning.’