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Interviews
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Two by Two Al Senter interviews Eddie Braben Last year The Right Size duo of Hamish McColl and Sean Foley brought plenty of sunshine to audiences flocking to the Wyndham's Theatre in London. The Play What I Wrote, their tribute to the enduring spirit of Morecambe and Wise, became one of the hottest tickets in the West End. Now they are on tour, en route to a second, eagerly-awaited stint in London, and once again they have been aided and abetted in their celebration by Eddie Braben, one of the key figures behind Eric and Ernie's glory years in the 1970s. Throughout the decade The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show grew to be a national institution: a phenomenal twenty-eight million viewers tuned in to watch the 1977 Yuletide spectacular - an extraordinary achievement and completely unthinkable in today's multi-channel environment. Eddie believes that The Play What I Wrote perfectly captures the essence of these bygone days. "Looking back at that time, it's almost as if it never happened, as if it were part of some Technicolor fantasy" says Eddie. "We think of the Morecambe and Wise shows in the way we remember our childhood - as a time when the sun was always shining. The Play What I Wrote reminds audiences of good things and of good times, when the family would sit round together, watching television. And like Eric and Ernie, Hamish and Sean are instantly loved by the audience - you can sense great waves of affection rolling towards them. This is a much less affectionate and a more cynical age than when I was writing for Morecambe and Wise but with The Play What I Wrote, the audience says to itself - we like these two people. Whatever they do next, we'll go with it" Eddie confesses that he had his doubts - not simply about the prospects for the show but about the convention of the double act itself. "I didn't think I'd ever see a double act working so well again. I couldn't believe the audience's reaction to The Play What I Wrote on opening night at Wyndham's. I'd only ever seen a standing ovation twice before: for Laurel and Hardy at the Liverpool Empire and for Eric and Ernie at the Royal Court in Liverpool" Not that Morecambe and Wise had always gone down a storm with the Scousers, as Eddie recalls all too clearly. "I saw them at the Empire in 1952 and they were dreadful. Their names were so far down the bill, I thought Morecambe and Wise were the printers" By the time Eddie was brought in to write for 'the boys ', as they were always known, Morecambe and Wise had been tempted back to the BBC. This was the late 1960s and when he was not contributing material to Ken Dodd, Eddie had been studying the dynamics of Eric and Ernie's relationship - on and off the screen. "When you talked to them, you could see there was a bond of genuine affection between them, as if they were brothers. So I set myself the task of using that relationship and surrounding it with comedy. I also wanted to develop their personalities in a different way. To my mind, Eric had always played the gormless one, in the manner of George Formby, while Ernie was the basic straight man, feeding Eric questions in order to get to the jokes. So I suggested making Ernie the egotistical writer with Eric a bit cleverer and more streetwise. He could then insult Ernie and his work but was the only person allowed to do so" Therefore in The Play What I Wrote, Hamish takes on the Ernie role of the pretentious and self-deluding writer whom Sean, as the Eric figure, has to persuade that their double act is worth preserving. Eddie argues that there was never any chance that Eric and Ernie would have gone their separate ways. It was only Eric's death in 1984 that brought the double act to a close. "Had it been the other way round and had Ernie gone first then Eric would have had the same problem that Ernie faced. With Ernie beside him, Eric was very funny but he would never have been gone on stage on his own. He would probably have written more books and he certainly had the talent to become a very good comedy actor but the double act would still have been finished." The Play What I Wrote continues the tradition of tempting the acting profession's finest to make fools of themselves. In London Ralph Fiennes, Ewan McGregor, Richard E.Grant and many more household names queued up to be insulted and humiliated in the way that some of the biggest names in show business - Laurence Olivier, Andre Previn, Penelope Keith - even Dame Flora Robson involved themselves in Eric and Ernie's antics. Eddie singles out Glenda Jackson's game attempt to play Cleopatra with 'the boys' for particular praise. "The lines are very sharp, Glenda was quite breathtaking and Ernie superb" From his fourteen years writing for Eric and Ernie, Eddie treasures one particular memory. Appropriately enough, it took place during one of the shared flat sequences that he had devised. "It was the final dress rehearsal of the very first bed sketch. It was five o'clock in the afternoon and Eric and Ernie were lying in bed, still in their pyjamas. Ernie had been scribbling away at one of his plays while Eric, by contrast, had been reading The Wind In The Willows. Eric took the book, wrote on it - To Eddie, stolen from BBC props - and handed it to me. I still have it and it's very precious to me" Does Eddie think that Morecambe and Wise would approve of The Play What I Wrote? Are they looking down and chuckling in company with the audience? "I think they'd be overjoyed" says Eddie. "I can see Eric looking at me over the top of his specs and telling me - now that's funny!. The boys would be delighted that what they achieved is celebrated in the show with such love, such affection and such respect."
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