You'll Miss Me When I'm Gone Page 12

  My brother, Steven, who was not born until five years after my parents built their villa, grew up, like me, with fond childhood memories of long summer holidays in the Algarve sunshine. Fast forward to winter 2006 and the two of us are making a nostalgic trip to see what the villa looks like now.

  We were staggered. My father had always warned us that it was destined to ‘do a Spain’, as he put it. Not only had the coastline been submerged beneath a wave of whitewashed houses, hotels, and other developments, but the villa—our little piece of Portuguese paradise—was now lost in a large town that had appeared like some ghastly mirage across the landscape of this former tranquil farming commune. Pubs, clubs, restaurants, guesthouses, hotels, neon lights constantly flashing day and night, traffic pouring down streets that once had been our open pastures and a haven for all kinds of wildlife. Different wildlife now! This is what had happened to paradise. It was a considerable shock.

  After Eric died my mother had kept the villa until the end of the eighties and nothing had really changed. Following an eighteen-year absence I discovered that a villa that had stood in the open countryside with distant views of the sea from its rooftop was now just one house in a town that hadn’t before existed. The back garden, which once had allowed hundreds of grapevines to flourish at its far end, was now supporting an apartment block, with another one quickly going up near by. My father got it right: it had done a Spain.

  ‘Eric and Ernie were still metamorphosing when they made their films.’

  In between the holidays in Portugal that punctuated my father’s working trips to New York, something else also developed that was perhaps just as inevitable as Eric and Ernie’s wish to test their humour in America on Americans. They were serenaded into making movies. Not that they needed much serenading. Ever since my father had gone to the cinema as a kid and been dazzled by Cary Grant, Fred Astaire, Laurel and Hardy et al., and Ernie had been considered the British equivalent of Mickey Rooney, the glamour and glitz of the big screen had appealed greatly to them. Even today comedians who have a good TV shelf life soon enough end up in movies—Cannon and Ball,Ant and Dec, Lee Evans, Ricky Gervais, Mitchell and Webb—and, in the past, Eric and

  Ernie’s peers Tony Hancock, Norman Wisdom and others also went the cinematic route to a greater or lesser degree.Tragically, most of them fail. It doesn’t seem to stop them all from trying, which is to be congratulated even if those on the outside can’t help but feel they are allowing the doubts to be suppressed by the sheer challenge.

  For Morecambe and Wise, still Lew Grade’s top comedy stars atATV, it was sooner rather than later that it happened.With that wonderful thing called hindsight, I can’t help thinking that the whole three-movie affair for Rank at Pinewood Studios would have been just that bit better—more polished and more complete—had Eric and Ernie ended up on the cinema screen after the changes brought about by scriptwriter Eddie Braben and described in the previous chapter.That is the problem I have: Eric and Ernie were still metamorphosing when they made their films. Fundamentally they were captured by the big screen five years too soon.Accepted that the films work on various levels— especially zest, innocence, location—and the boys were still very funny together; that hadn’t changed since childhood. But they weren’t the finished article they could have been. And when the chance eventually came around again, both men were too old to present themselves as they had been at their BBC peak.Their film Night Train to Murder did not receive cinematic release and would disappear virtually unnoticed except by their true fans. Eric himself died shortly before it was first shown publicly, on television, in 1984.

  The fact that, back in the early and mid-sixties, Eric and Ernie had missed out on becoming the Morecambe and Wise of their peak years wasn’t anyone’s fault.They weren’t to realize they would leave Lew Grade in 1967 and move to the BBC, where a new scriptwriter they’d never before met would be instrumental in reinventing and redefining them. Or that a massive heart attack at the age of just forty-two would make the idea of doing any further big-screen outings a matter of little or no interest to Eric. Sometimes I’d ask him if he intended to make another movie, but he was evasive and uncertain. ‘Might get round to it,’ he would say, but you could tell that he was a man safe in his own environment—the TV studio—so why take any chances? Also, he felt they never were given any really decent film scripts, and by way of example he cited the Pink Panther scripts which had been so successful for Peter Sellers. So in a way it is a kind of blessing that Eric and Ernie made it to the big screen at all: that they had their opportunity to do something, however limited.

  ‘As a very spontaneous act they were dependent on audience reaction.’

  It should be noted that these were not bad films.Admittedly they do little justice to Eric and Ernie, but that is because the Eric and Ernie they became—the ones we grew to know and love through their fantastic Christmas shows—had still to be created.The Eric and Ernie of the films were still more akin to the acts of the music-hall era like Abbot and Costello.Their transformation into the

  new Laurel and Hardy had not happened, yet nowadays the films do tend to be judged on who they became rather than who they were when they made them, which is slightly unfortunate.

  Furthermore, Eric and Ernie’s humour was not the type to transfer to the movies.They were not comic actors in the mould of the brilliant Peter Sellers or Ronnie Barker or David Jason.As a very spontaneous act they were dependent on audience reaction.They were never as visually frantic or character-based as the Marx Brothers: qualities which might have allowed them to be really brilliant without the intimacy of the audience and the studio that their brand of humour and technique demanded.

  They kicked off with The Intelligence Men (1964) and rounded it all off with The Magnificent Two (1967). And in between was a little gem of a film, which has a big following to this day, called That Riviera Touch (1966).

  All three films were produced by Hugh Stewart and the first outing, The Intelligence Men, was directed by RobertAsher. One of the film’s guest stars was Francis Matthews, who not only worked with Eric and Ernie several times over many years but maintained a friendship with them both over many decades.

  I caught up with Francis at his home in Surrey before he was leaving for yet another performance in the West End play Cabaret. I’d always been eager to meet him, for he had been a childhood hero of mine from nearly forty years

  earlier when he starred in BBC’s first drama series in colour, Paul Temple. He had fond memories of both the Morecambe and Wise double act and the times they spent and worked together.

  ‘I was a bachelor actor in the fifties and sixties, living inWest Hampstead,’ he told me. ‘I was invited to some party in Bayswater—there were always parties going on back then—and I didn’t really know anyone there. But Eric and Ernie were there. They arrived late because they were on a show at the Palladium, I think. I’d seen them in panto when I was even younger. So as soon as I saw them at this party I had something to talk to them about.We got along really well, but the next time I saw them was a few years later when I took the offered role in The Intelligence Men.’

  Francis remembered the film vividly because it gave him the opportunity to work alongside not just Eric and Ernie but also his two closest friends in show business,Terrance Alexander and Bill Franklin. ‘This was like an accolade. I was gobsmacked with joy,’ he recalls. ‘When we started working with Eric and Ernie at Pinewood, Robert Asher, the director, and the film’s producer, Hugh Stewart, who was also producer of the Norman Wisdom vehicles, were always

  keen to under-crank all the time, which basically makes people on film look like they’re moving quicker than normal speed. Eric would say to Robert, “Please don’t do that. It’s not very funny. It’s all right for Norman, but not for us.” I thought that was a particularly perceptive observation.’

  The thing that struck me as Francis reminisced is how friendly the set clearly was. ‘We were all friends from the beginning,’ he said
. ‘Bill,Terry, Me, Eric and

  Ernie all gelled. I suppose it was because we were having such fun. Eric was a huge generator of good energy. Every one had to have a good time.’

  Francis recalled talking to Eric about the late Bill Franklin, who will for ever be remembered by those old enough as the man who suavely delivered his lines in the Schweppes ad on television, spreading the catchphrase ‘Shh, you know who!’ ‘Eric told me that he found Bill really funny,’ said Francis. ‘And Bill was a funny man, by the way: a great sense of humour. But it was very black humour and often quite cruel and dismissive.And Eric continued by saying, “Bill doesn’t really do Funnies, he does Hurties!” That expression has always stayed with me. Wonderful! But they got along really well—they loved each other. It must be the thing of opposites attracting.’

  Then Francis told me about rehearsing the film’s debriefing scene, where Eric did a routine that became famous through their ATV shows in the sixties: he puts his hand under the other person’s chin (mostly Ernie’s) and says, ‘Get out of that—yer can’t, can yer?’

  ‘I was the MI5 man, called Grant, I think,’ explained Francis. ‘I had a briefcase on a desk, and Eric, as a spy, came in for debriefing and started saying things like, “I want that thing…the thing with the gun; and the shoe thing…”Then he started doing the can’t-get-out-of-that bit, saying, “Now if you were holding that briefcase…I’ll show you. Can I borrow your briefcase, Mr…er…?” And I at once say, “Do, do,” and go to fetch the briefcase. And Eric ad-libbed, “Thank you, Mr Do-Do!” This stuck, of course, and Robert kept it in for the final take.And Eric took it a stage further. If you watch the film, every scene I’m in after that scene, he calls me Mr Do-Do.There’s one line he ad-libbed where Eric has to go somewhere and he says, “Can Mr Do-Do come?” He was instinctively funny.’

  Lunch on the first day of filming was another event Francis recalled. ‘Eric made me smile because he said to me, “Are you going for lunch?”“Yes!” I told him. “Can I come?” What a question! The co-star of the film asking if he can come for lunch with me! So off we went to the main dining room for lunch, and as we go in Eric says, “Where are the stars? Show me all the big stars. Point them out, Fran.” He was the kid in the sweet shop. But of course Eric expected to find the room crammed with the likes of Cary Grant, but other than Richard Harris there was nobody. I turned to Eric, who looked a bit despondent, and said the truth, “You and Ernie are the biggest stars in this room.” Eric wouldn’t have it, though. “No, no, no…I mean the film stars.” “But Eric,” I said,“You are a film star. You’re here making a film, and you’re the one every one else wants to meet.”’

  Francis had been telling Eric a lot about his wife,Angela. ‘By a happy coincidence she was at the same time filming an American TV series at the studios with Peter Graves called Court Martial. I’d pop over to her set every now and then, and on one occasion she was able to join us all for lunch. When she arrived for lunch, Eric walked straight up to her and said, “Oh, hello, love!” Then to me, “Is this the Elizabeth you keep talking about? Oh no, it’s your wife—I’m sorry.” And of course when he went to shake her hand as he said all this, he did the thing of pulling his hand back and prodding the centre of his glasses. Do you know, he did that every time we met up!’

  “Can I borrow your briefcase, Mr…er?”

  “Do, do.”

  “Thank you, Mr Do-Do!”

  While it was clearly a lot of fun on set, Francis was quick to point out that, for Eric and Ernie, making those three films for Rank was a huge change from doing TV and so there was a serious side to entering upon this new venture. I know myself how keen they both were at this time to become film stars—Ernie perhaps more than Eric, in that Ernie, just as he longed to make it big in the States, would chase the dream till his last breath—so to underachieve in this medium would have been a severe body-blow to them.

  The middle picture, That Riviera Touch, was filmed in the late summer of 1965 on the Grande Corniche, a spectacular road which runs from Nice to Menton on the border with Italy. In his diaries Kenneth Williams wrote: ‘There were

  some very original things in this film, which was very well done.These two came out of it very well indeed—very much “innocents abroad” and at times a real note of pathos was established.’

  Actress Suzanne Lloyd guest-starred in the film. ‘I didn’t have to audition for That Riviera Touch, amazing as that is,’ she said. ‘There was a body of my work for anyone to see.The producer, Hugh Stewart, met with me at Pinewood, and that was that.’

  Suzanne recalled the first time she met up with Eric and Ernie. ‘We met as we were getting on the plane, and we were all a bit nervous with one another, which is usual before a film. I’m sure they didn’t know my work and were wondering who I was and who they were stuck with.We worked in different genres. I was aware of Eric and Ernie, but hadn’t seen them on TV. I was told they were as funny as [Dean] Martin and [Jerry] Lewis and indeed they were.’

  She was able to confirm that film-making was ‘not the boys’ level of comfort’,

  as she put it. ‘They were improv specialists.They did it once on TV and that was that. In film they had to do it over and over, and matching was a nightmare for both of them.’ Apparently this led to their becoming concerned that the spontaneity would not be there and that they wouldn’t be able to keep the takes fresh, which of course is not a problem in television, where their shows were virtually shot live. I remember many studio visits in the seventies, and if there was a technical problem requiring a retake of a part of a scene, both Eric and Ernie would deliberately wrong-foot the audience on the retake by adding a gag or changing their dialogue, just so as to keep it fresh. Sometimes Eric would say to the studio audience, only half-jokingly, ‘Clear your mind and pretend you didn’t see that last bit.’ On a film set, without an audience, you can change it as much as you like, but there is no one to judge what went before: you just hammer on, retake after retake, until it all matches.

  ‘They did not give me any advice as to how to make a scene funny,’ said Suzanne. ‘I wish they had. But they were concerned about stepping on the director’s toes, I think.They did ask me about “matching” from scene to scene and from time to time we spoke about it. I would have loved it if they had taken me aside and given me some pointers.’

  A particular point Suzanne Lloyd made, and one which informed how different my father was when working in this new medium, was his seriousness in making the film deliver its very best. ‘Eric was not always “on”,’ she explained. ‘This was hard for them. I cannot stress this enough. They had a lot riding on this film and they knew they were not in their element. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t laughs. There were a lot.The crew had a devil of a time not ruining a take by laughing out loud.And the Khartoum crew and cast would come over to be entertained. They had to stop that because the set was getting too noisy, and besides, they were drinking all our tea and eating our biscuits!’

  My personal favourite scene from the film is the balcony scene when Eric is trying to seduce Suzanne’s character, Claudette, with a song, and he’s miming to Ernie’s vocal. I was pleased that Suzanne too thought it the best scene.

  ‘The boys had a good time with that one.Also in the dining room with Ernie trying to eat frog legs and snails without throwing up. That scene didn’t require acting.’

  ‘The crew had a devil of a time not ruining a take by laughing out loud.’

  My mother tells me that the late summer of 1966 in the South of France is one of the happiest memories she has of her years with Eric. Suzanne Lloyd recalled of the times away from the cameras, ‘Their wives were in the South of France and I remember liking them both, but then my husband knewTony Curtis and we hung out with Tony and his wife and daughter. I can’t remember socializing much with the boys.’ But there was much socializing going on. Warren Mitchell and Lionel Jeffries were out there filming, and with or without Suzanne, the boys met up with Tony Curtis.There is
a photo commemorating the occasion.

  Suzanne’s final comment is so consistent with the views of everyone I’ve talked with while working on this book. ‘I liked the boys very much. Eric was thoughtful and considerate. Ernie was always smiling. They did not have a mean bone in their bodies. I was saddened to hear when they passed on.Too soon for both.’

  Eric and Ernie’s final big-screen outing, The Magnificent Two, was a strange film. Considering it was supposed to be a comedy, it was rather violent in places and drew critical fire for this reason. But for me this is one of the film’s few strengths: it pulls away the safety net and makes what is a lightweight and irritatingly preposterous story suddenly a bit more engaging, a bit edgy. It led to talk of further films, but Eric said he didn’t want to make any more if it involved Robert Asher or Cliff Owen as he felt they were too concerned with their own decisions and therefore less receptive to external suggestions. He also felt they had personal distractions on set, which he found disconcerting as it detracted from the 100 per cent commitment required to make a bunch of half-decent films.

  The basic storyline is that two salesmen, played by Eric and Ernie, travel to South America to sell their products and become entangled in a revolution. It’s the story of Eric having a doppelgänger and having to replace him after this lookalike (well, he wears the same hat and glasses) is bumped off. Eric has to take on his identity and later becomes ruler of the South American country when the revolution is at an end. Far-fetched in the extreme—Hans Christian Andersen would have blanched at the script—the film still contains Morecambe and Wise’s irrepressible enthusiasm and joie de vivre.Also, no one plays it for laughs—except for Eric and Ernie, and even they keep it within the characters they are portraying—which makes it more acceptable as a film than it might otherwise have been.