The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show

What do you think of it so far?

Friend in the Corner: The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special (1969—1980)

One-off seasonal episodes of one of the most popular TV variety shows in ‘70s Britain. Hosted by the comic double act of Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise, the shows featured sketches, guest appearances by stars of stage and screen, pop music performances, and little plays what Ernie Wise wrote.

How did you meet your friend?

The same way as everyone else: by being alive in the 1970s in a British house with a television.

Morecambe and Wise started performing together as a double act in the 1940s, working their way round the country and up the billing. They eventually made their way onto radio and, finally, television, where they were a complete and utter flop. As a review of their first TV show put it, ‘Definition of the week: TV set: the box in which they buried Morecambe and Wise.”

Ernie Wise apparently carried a clipping of that review in his wallet for the rest of his life.

It took almost ten years for them to get a new series, Two of a Kind. This went well enough for them to be poached by the BBC. Then, in 1969, they were put together with the writer Eddie Braben and the ‘Golden Triangle’ was complete; the gods of Saturday night television had assembled.

For the next decade, until they went back to commercial television in 1978, the BBC would broadcast a special episode of their show each Christmas Day. It became an institution. In 1977, somewhere between 21 and 28 million people watched it. This was the transmission audience, remember; before streaming, before asynchronous viewing, before videotaping.

At five to nine on Christmas evening in 1977, tripped out on turkey and Quality Street and Bristol Cream, getting on for half the population of the entire country watched the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special: all watching the same show, all laughing at the same jokes, all swaddled in the same cosy, Christmassy cultural wrapping.

This, of course, is something that today’s atomised and multi-channel media doesn’t deliver. We don’t have national television any more; we don’t have shows almost everyone is watching. It can feel like we do, when everyone is discussing some new, self-serious, stylised detective show in your corner of social media; but then you find out that billions of other people are watching a dead-eyed YouTuber reacting to videos by other rictus-grin YouTubers, and you have heard of none of them, despite the fact that they are the most famous people in the world.

In many households in the ‘70s and ‘80s there was a ritual in which you would go through the double-length Christmas edition of the Radio Times (the BBC’s TV listing magazine) with a biro, marking what you wanted to watch. You had to do this because there was only one television in the house. It was a massive box of a cathode ray tube that had its own supporting furniture, a cod regency cabinet or a wheeled stand; it took up a whole corner of the room, and everyone had to share it.

On Christmas Day in 1977, ITV was showing Young Winston (1972), a biopic of Winston Churchill starring Simon Ward; BBC 2 was, inexplicably, showing a compilation of home movies of other people’s Christmases. And so, instead, we and half the rest of the country watched The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special, because what on earth else were we going to do? Talk to each other?

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What kind of friend are they?

When they were small, side by side in their double Maclaren buggy, my father taught my twin sisters (they’re twins of each other, not of me; that would make us triplets, much to the disgust of everyone involved) to answer the question ‘What do you think of it so far?’ with a squeaked, unison ‘Rubbish!’. This was one of Eric Morecambe’s catchphrases — he would usually (badly) ventriloquise the ‘Rubbish!’ as coming from a prop — and it proved a hit, not just because children that age doing any kind of performance is funny but also because everyone knew the catchphrase.

Everyone knew all the catchphrases. You can’t see the join! Look at me when I’m talking to you. Boy’s a fool. Arsenal! Eric Morecambe was a kind of national uncle, supplying the whole country with little bits of schtick with which to fill a lull in conversation or a lack of personal wit.

But this kind of monoculture can also be stifling and oppressive, enforcing unpleasant norms. For several years in the early ’70s The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special was preceded on BBC 1 by The Black and White Minstrel Show, a long-running variety show in which male singers often appeared in, yes, you guessed it, blackface. Degrading racial stereotypes on the publicly-funded national broadcaster as a background to Christmas lunch.

To be fair to Morecambe and Wise, they rarely descended to that level. Their material tended to avoid easy racist caricatures and, indeed, sexist ones, which was quite remarkable for British TV in the ‘70s. There is a certain level of period smut, particularly in the specials written with Barry Cryer; but Eddie Braben’s material tends to play that stuff as guileless and playful rather than seedy and predatory. Kenneth Tynan accurately described their characters on screen as ‘fixed at a mental and emotional age of approximately 15’, who are thus unable to deal with adult sex. This was necessary because this was mainstream entertainment. You wouldn’t want to frighten Grandma or have to explain anything to confused children who’d been allowed to stay up late at Christmas.

At its worst, then, The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special is mild stuff. Banal sketches that go on a little too long; bits of business that rely a little too much on knowing the members of Ted Heath’s cabinet; dull musical turns by undistinguished Radio 2 acts.

But at its best, on the other hand…

Are you still friends?

You said that without moving your lips.

The thing about writing for a general audience is that when you do it well… well, then you have written material that absolutely everyone will get. Free of references and in-jokes, free of stereotypes and bullying; beautiful, essential jokes, uniting, uplifting and uproarious.

There’s a reason why Braben, Morecambe and Wise are so revered. They were exactly the right people at the right moment. They became national institutions not just because they were broadcast to a nation who didn’t have anything else to watch, but also because they were very, very good. One upside of a monopolised culture is that it gets to monopolise talent, titrating out genius and broadcasting it to the nation.

There is a moment in a 1973 BBC Omnibus documentary in which Morecambe says that Braben had the hardest job in the world, sitting in a room on his own with a blank piece of paper, trying to be funny. But the documentary shows Eric and Ernie rehearsing just one sketch from one show over weeks and weeks. Table reads and off-book blocking, technical and camera rehearsals and dress; running through their business relentlessly and thoroughly. You can see, right from the beginning, how their intonation and interplay lift a joke to another level, or uncover two more jokes underneath in performance and interpretation.

They cut and improvise, of course. The script starts with Big Ben striking four times, and they decide that no one wants to sit through that; two’s enough. But they know not to change the first line: ‘Nine o’clock!’ When you’re repeating the same, apparently mundane line over and over again through rehearsal after rehearsal, the temptation can be to fiddle with it for one’s own amusement, but they know better. Sure enough, in front of a live audience and a sonorous Big Ben sound effect, the disconnect between the chimes and Ernie’s earnest ‘Nine o’clock!’ gets a big laugh.

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If you want an example of this golden conjunction between writer and performers, you could do worse than watch the Christmas special from 1973, the year of that Omnibus documentary. It features one of the most perfect sketches of their career. The two of them sit side by side in bed — Eric with his pipe and Ernie with his Financial Times — discussing the Christmas presents they had as children: ‘I had a little Dinky’ says Ernie, to which Eric inevitably replies ‘You still do’. Then Eric gets up to close the curtains, an ambulance goes by with its siren on, and Braben gives him one of the great comic lines: ‘He’s not going to sell much ice cream going at that speed, is he?’, giving every Dad in Britain something to repeat all year.

The sketch’s actual punchline isn’t very good, but that’s not the point. The point is all the bits of business: the to and fro, their relationship, the whole rambling, joyous nonsense of it. Eric Morecambe was a stupendously, joyously funny man. In a conversation Tynan relates in his book The Sound of Two Hands Clapping, Morecambe worries about contemporary American comedy: ‘There are funny lines, but no funny men’. He was, first of all a funny man with funny bones, who could make every tiny movement funny, any line; a man whose mere presence delighted. But his performance of that comedy relied on Ernie, whose timing, understanding and interplay were just as skilled.

Eric and Ernie were, by this point, seasoned performers, with a comic rhythm and stock of business that could cover all manner of poor material. When Braben gave them gold to work with, they really wrought jewels. Key to this was Braben’s understanding of their partnership. Tynan described Braben’s version of their double act: ‘Ernie… is the comic who is not funny. And Eric… is the straight man who is funny.”

Far be it for me to disagree with one of his generation’s finest critics and the first man to say ‘fuck’ on British television, but I don’t think this is quite right. Braben described Eric and Ernie as ‘closer than brothers’; the overwhelming sense of their double act in the ‘70s is of Ernie as an over-enthusiastic and under-talented theatre kid, forcing his sardonically amused older brother to take part in his lunatic performances.

It worked beautifully as an amplification of their real life characters. Ernie had been a child star, billed as ‘Britain’s Mickey Rooney’. It was deep in him, that song-and-dance, eyes-and-teeth, light-ent razzle dazzle; the dream of being Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire. Braben’s genius was to convert this theatrical enthusiasm into parody, giving Eric a way to muck about without looking like a spoilsport. Indeed, Eric almost always takes part enthusiastically. Wise is still his Little Ern, after all; they are still brothers. Eric can make fun of Ernie, and his wig, and his short, fat, hairy legs; but if anyone else tries, they get grabbed by the lapels and slapped on the cheek.

What could be more Christmassy than this? Two brothers putting on a show for the rest of the family, hilariously amateur and ramshackle, calling in theatrical aunts like Glenda Jackson, Penelope Keith and Angela Rippon to play embarrassing cameos, constantly peppering us with asides and familial in-jokes. No wonder we all wanted to join in.

Would you introduce us?

Don’t watch the 1977 one. It was getting a bit tired by then. If you were to watch one, I’d recommend, for the full effect, 1971. As part of the research for this piece I watched that episode with Ro’s dad. It starts slow and somewhat mediocre, with a couple of weak sketches and very odd little musical interlude, and I was starting to regret suggesting it. But once Glenda Jackson arrives for a ludicrous dance number, things start to look up.

And then the next guest is introduced: the Principal Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, Mr Andre Previn, and everything becomes perfectly delirious. ‘Andrew Preview’, ‘Grieg with him and him’, ‘All the right notes, not necessarily in the right order’. If you’re a British person of a certain age, you’ve seen it a thousand times on clip shows and nostalgia compilations. It's practically a catechism now, a national ritual; but, and this is the crucial note, it's still funny. A thousand watches and fifty years later and it's still an hysterical masterpiece.

So, by the time we got to Shirley Bassey singing ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes’ with a perfectly straight face as Eric and Ernie accidentally destroyed the set around her (another joke that never gets old), we were all quite weak with laughter.

And I can’t think of a better way to spend Christmas evening than that.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00gw1d0/the-morecambe-and-wise-show-christmas-show-1971

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We’ve covered Morecambe and Wise before, in a piece in which we compared Eric Morecambe to a beetle and Doctor Who: