It happened one night. It happened, to be precise, at 8.55 p.m. on the night of 25 December 1977, when an estimated 28,835,000 people -more than half of the total population of the United Kingdom – tuned their television sets to BBC 1 and spent the next hour and ten minutes in the company of a rather tall man called Eric and a rather short man called Ernie. It was an extraordinary night for British television. It was – at least as far as that catholic and capacious category known as ‘light entertainment’ was concerned – as close as British television had ever come, in some forty-one years of trying, to being a genuine mass medium. None of the usual rigid divisions and omissions were apparent in the broad audience of that remarkable night: no stark class bias, no pronounced gender imbalance, no obvious age asymmetry, no generalized demographic slant.
It was also, of course, an extraordinary night for the two stars of the show: Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise – by far the most illustrious, and the best-loved, double-act that Britain has ever produced. Exceptionally professional yet endearingly personable, they were wonderful together as partners, as friends, as almost a distinct entity: not ‘Morecambe and Wise’ but ‘Morecambewise’.There was Eric and there was Ernie: one of them an idiot, the other a bigger idiot, each of them half a star, together a whole star, forever hopeful of that ‘brand new, bright tomorrow’ that they sang about at the end of each show. True, Eric would often slap Ernie smartly on the cheeks, but they clearly thought the world of each other, and the world thought a great deal of them, too.
Their show succeeded in attracting such a massive following on that memorable night because it had, over the course of the previous nine years or so, established, and then enhanced, an enviable reputation for consistency, inventiveness, unparalleled professional polish and, last but by no means least, a strong and sincere respect for its audience. The Morecambe &Wise Show stood for something greater, something far more precious, than mere first-rate but evanescent entertainment; it had come to stand -just as persuasively and as proudly as any earnest documentary or any epic drama -for excellence in broadcasting, the result not just of two gifted performers (great talent, alas, does not of itself guarantee great television) but also of a richly proficient and supremely committed production team.
The show, culminating in the record-breaking triumph of that 1977 special, represented an achievement in high-quality popular programme-making that is now fast assuming the aura of a fairy tale – destined, one fears, to be passed on with bemused fascination from one doubtful generation to its even more disbelieving successor as the seemingly endless proliferation of new channels and novel forms of distraction continue to divide and disperse the old mass audience in the name of that remorseless quest for ‘quality demographics’ and ‘niche audiences’. The Morecambe &Wise Show appeared at a time before home video, before satellite dishes and cable technology, before the dawning of the digital revolution, a time when it was still considered desirable to make a television programme that might – just might – excite most of the people most of the time.
Neither Morecambe nor Wise ever looked down on, or up at, anyone (except, of course, each other); both of them looked straight back at their audience on level terms. No celebrated was ever allowed to challenge this comic democracy: within the confines of the show, the rich and famous went unrecognised and frequently unpaid (a running gag); venerable actors with grand theatrical reputations were mocked routinely by Eric’s sotto voce comments; and two resolutely down-to-earth working-class comedians gleefully reaffirmed the remarkably deep, warm and sure relationship that existed between themselves and the British public.
‘It was,’ reminisced ErnieWise, ‘a sort of great big office party for the whole country, a bit of fun people could understand.’ From the first few seconds of their opening comic routine to the final few notes and motions of their closing song and dance, Morecambe and Wise did their very best to draw people together rather than drive them apart. Instead of pandering submissively to the smug exclusivity of the cognoscenti (they were flattered when a well-regarded critic praised the sly ‘oeillade’ that accompanied Eric’s sarcastic asides, but they still mocked him mercilessly for his use of the word), and instead of settling – as so many of their supposed successors would do with unseemly haste – for the easy security of a ‘cult following’, Morecambe and Wise always aimed to entertain the whole nation.
When viewers watched that show at the end of 1977, they witnessed a rare and rich compendium of the very best in popular culture: the happy summation of a joint career that had traversed all of the key developments associated with the rise of mass entertainment in Britain, encompassing the faint but still discernible traces of Victorian music-hall, the crowded animation of EdwardianVariety, the wordy populism of the wireless, the spectacular impact of the movies and, finally, the more intimate pervasiveness of television. When that career was all over, it was sorely missed. They were simply irreplaceable.