The highlights of their vintage Christmas shows have been rerun so many times that many of us can just about recite the lines in our sleep. So the news that a previously lost episode of The Morecambe & Wise Show has resurfaced after half a century has inevitably caused a stir. The sketches, first aired in 1970 and now repackaged as part of a genial ITV documentary, provide a glimpse of the double act as they were about to enter their classic phase.
Previous lost episodes have turned up as far afield as an abandoned cinema in Sierra Leone. The latest discovery emerged much closer to home, turning up in the attic of the house in Hertfordshire that still belongs to the family of Eric Morecambe, who succumbed to a heart attack in 1984, aged 58. (Ernie Wise, the other half of the on-screen partnership, survived him by over a decade and a half, dying in 1999 at the age of 73.)
Morecambe’s son Gary — an assiduous guardian of his father’s legacy — stumbled across the tape when he paid a rare visit to the attic in search of old scripts. “I was looking for memorabilia,” Gary Morecambe tells me over the phone. “I was thinking about finding more scripts. He had an office downstairs where he kept stuff, but my mother said there was also stuff in the attic. It hadn’t been opened for about five years; the door was jammed and you had to lay down planks to get across. I found about five reel-to-reel discs. They weigh a ton, but I got them down. One looked interesting because, although it had a torn label, it had BBC written on it.”
What he had stumbled across was, in fact, a black and white recording of the duo’s first show for BBC1, screened in October 1970, a period when Britain was still coming to terms with the idea of Ted Heath being prime minister, and England football fans were still in mourning after their team had been knocked out of the World Cup in Mexico by West Germany. It was an era, too, when the high cost of storing bulky cans of videotape meant that a raft of TV series, some of them classics, were lost to posterity because the tapes were wiped so that they could be re-used.
Judged by Morecambe and Wise’s own high standards, what we see in the ITV documentary — with Ben Miller, Wayne Sleep and other celebrities chortling at extracts — falls short of being top-quality entertainment. That is, though, what makes it so fascinating. What you see is, essentially, a work in progress. Already a national institution, the duo were piecing together a formula that was about to reach the level of genius. It’s a reminder too of how much hard work and perspiration go into the best comedy — and how much an act depends on its writers.
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In the golden age of BBC light entertainment, Morecambe and Wise’s Christmas show could command an audience of over 20 million. It’s no exaggeration to say that, in an era when there were just three TV channels — BBC1, BBC2 and ITV — people around the country would plan their social life around the double act’s appearances. So it comes as a shock to be reminded that, in 1968, when they moved to the BBC from Lew Grade’s commercial network, ATV, they first found a niche on BBC2, which was, in those distant days, a channel with its own much more distinct identity, leaning towards the highbrow. And, at first anyway, BBC2 transmitters covered a smaller proportion of the country.
What the channel did offer, though — apart from the assurance that the programmes would be repeated on BBC1 — was that they would be shot in colour. As Morecambe and Wise’s latest biographer, Louis Barfe, points out, it was this factor rather than the £3,500 per show pay offer (a princely sum for the time) that clinched the decision to move from ITV.
So it was that Morecambe and Wise’s insistence on the highest possible production values led them back to the BBC, for which they had made an ill-conceived variety series, Running Wild, in 1954. The reviews for that venture had been notoriously poor. One newspaper critic added the famously snarky observation: “Definition of the Week: TV set — the box in which they buried Morecambe and Wise.” Morecambe was so stung by the comment that he carried the cutting around in his wallet for the rest of his life.
Not that the first BBC2 series — of which only part remains intact — was an unqualified triumph. The problem lay with the scripts. What we now think of as quintessential Morecambe and Wise humour was actually the creation of the Liverpudlian scriptwriter Eddie Braben, who began writing for them in 1969 and delicately reshaped the duo’s dynamic, making Morecambe less the gullible butt of jokes and giving Wise the air of naive grandiosity so vividly expressed in the phrase “the plays what I wrote”.
For the first series, though, the lines were still being written by their long-time writers Dick Hills and Sid Green, whose work was more erratic. (Although, to be fair, it was they who came up with the germ of the much-loved Grieg piano concerto sketch, first aired in 1963, but with Wise, not André Previn, as the conductor.)
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As Barfe puts it in his book, Sunshine and Laughter, the episodes that exist “follow a similar pattern to the ATV shows, with a guest singer and Kenny Ball’s Jazzmen putting musical grouting in between the sketches. Unfortunately, the sketches seem, at best, to drag on aimlessly, and at worst are the sort of deeply problematic material not generally associated with the boys.”
Even in the newly discovered show, there is a faintly smutty Braben sketch, showing the duo listening to the newlyweds next door, which is more Benny Hill in tone. Indeed, in another episode the duo talk about taking compromising photos of the curvaceous actress Jenny Lee-Wright, who became a stalwart of Hill’s shows.
Is there any chance that more material will be discovered? Gary Morecambe jokes that he is “running out of attics”. He, at least, is now concentrating on putting his father’s papers and photographs into some kind of order. For their part, Barfe and his fellow Morecambe and Wise biographer Graham McCann wish that the BBC could apply as much care to Morecambe and Wise’s legacy. The duo made nine series for the corporation before being lured away to Thames TV in 1978. (The shows they made for the commercial network were decent enough, but often seemed second-hand.)
Repeats of the most famous BBC Christmas specials have long been a staple of the schedules. Yet the other shows — while available on DVD or occasionally mined for extracts — have generally languished in the archives. In his book, Barfe points out that, in contrast, Dad’s Army “is seemingly on constant rotation”. Why don’t Morecambe and Wise get similar treatment? Barfe speculates that money may be one reason (“They were expensive shows to make,” he writes, “and the repeat fees for guests would make them expensive to repeat as per the original contracts.”) Could it also be, as Barfe suggests, that there is a fear that the sheer quality of the Christmas shows could make the rest of the programmes seem an occasional anticlimax?
Perhaps, but it does seem a curious way to treat a mainstay of British comedy. As McCann told me: “I’ve never really felt that there’s been any clear and coherent policy within the BBC as to what to do with Morecambe and Wise, other than to package the highlights every now and again. I’d like to see the un-filleted Morecambe and Wise Shows, properly restored, put in their correct context and treated with genuine respect, but I’m not holding my breath.”
Morecambe & Wise: The Lost Tapes will be shown on ITV on Wednesday 28, 9pm
