It’s difficult to say when I first became aware of Morecambe & Wise. I used to love to watch their series and Christmas specials with my dad and my brother. This was when I wasn’t at boarding school. I wasn’t able to watch the shows when I was there as no one was allowed to watch telly. My tastes in comedy later became more alternative but I loved Eric’s naturalness and ability to ad lib. I liked his style and would have loved to be able to be funny like he was.
If you’re classically good looking when you’re at school, then you’re instantly popular and social success comes very easily. The rest of the 95 per cent of us have to make up for this in some other way like by being good at sport, being cool, being bad or, as in my case, being as funny as you can be. I guess the latter is probably what Eric did in order to become popular.
Eric was like a kid playing in an adult’s body; playfully pricking Ernie’s pomposity in their various brilliant Eddie Braben sketches.
If Tommy Cooper and Eric Morecambe were alive today, I think they would be termed alternative comedians. Both performers played with the medium of comedy and broke the standard rules in their own unique way.
In the ‘Grieg Piano Concerto’ sketch, Eric did what no other performer had done or I think could ever do to a guest and that was to pick André Previn up by the lapels of his jacket with such excellent mock violence and take him down a peg with fantastically silly logic – ‘I am playing all the right notes … but not necessarily in the right order.’ It’s a brilliant sketch, highbrow and lowbrow at the same time and for me is the perfect example of a piece that sums up Morecambe & Wise. Eric’s timing, and also impressively that of André Previn, is excellent.
The reason we will still be watching Morecambe & Wise in years to come is that their comedy is based in character play and is therefore timeless – as human character has never changed since the beginning of civilisation and I don’t think it ever will.
Morecambe & Wise would have been funny even back in Greek or Roman times.
