A flicker of the lights and an electrical crackle, often used to indicate that something supernatural is happening in ghostly tales, opens this play written and directed by Paul Hendy that resurrects three of the largest figures in British comedy in the second half of the twentieth century.
They are played by three actors who have performed them before in successful plays in Edinburgh and elsewhere: Bob Golding as Eric Morecambe in Tim Whitnall’s Morecambe from 2009, Damian Williams as Tommy Cooper in Being Tommy Cooper by Tom Green from 2012 and Simon Cartwright as Bob Monkhouse in The Man Called Monkhouse by Alex Lowe from 2015.
This play, which Hendy has expanded from his award-winning short film from 2017 with the same three actors, opens with Cooper in just his underwear and a pair of chicken feet in his dressing room preparing for a show. To his surprise, Monkhouse arrives, though neither knew the other was on the same bill, then Morecambe joins them, also confused to see the others there.
The conversation covers various topics to do with comedy, performance and life on the road, each contributing an opinion that reflects their own approach to performing. When Cooper tells a joke, Monkhouse asks him if he knows who wrote it—knowing he’d written it himself—but Cooper doesn’t know or think it matters; if he finds a joke that suits him, he’ll use it.
Cooper also thinks a double act can’t have two funny people, but Morecambe insists that Ernie Wise is funny—“yeah, he’s funny, but he’s not funny funny”—though this conversation produces an emotional reaction from Monkhouse, whose first writing partner, Denis Goodwin, killed himself in 1975.
They reminisce about older comedians in the photos on the wall (though to Cooper, most were “not funny”) and give samples of some of their acts, including Rob Wilton, Arthur Askey, Max Miller and George Formby, the latter prompting Golding to get out his ukulele to accompany the first of the three songs, “With My Little Stick of Blackpool Rock”.
The ending isn’t unexpected as it is signposted from the start, and the dialogue is contrived to steer through this list of topics within an hour in a dressing room, probably not something they would do in real life, but the debates are interesting and there are plenty of funny lines in there, though the only really big laughs come from when one of them does part of his act, especially Williams’s Cooper.
But it’s an entertaining hour with three very impressive performances and a nostalgic trip for those of us who were around when these men were attracting television audiences that modern TV producers could only dream of.