The Sunshine boys (From The Northern Echo)

The Sunshine boys

11:39am Thursday 30th December 2010 in Features

Victoria Wood tells Kate Whiting why playing Eric Morecambe’s mother Sadie, in New Year drama Eric and Ernie, was a dream come true.

REPEATS of the Morecambe And Wise Show are as much a fixture of festive telly as the Queen’s Speech and Disney films.

But this winter, we’ll see the double act as they’ve never been seen before.

Victoria Wood has created a new feature-length drama about the first time Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise met.

“It was just an idea I had a long time ago,” she says, in that instantly recognisable, soft Lancashire burr.

“I have a list of ideas and that was one of them – and it really was just ‘When Eric met Ernie’ because nobody’s ever told that story. I thought ‘I’d watch that, it’d be good’ – and it is.” Wood teamed up with Bafta-winning writer Peter Bowker – and three sets of Ernie and Eric lookalikes – to tell a story spanning 20 years, from their first forays into showbiz to the formation of Britain’s best-loved double act.

Wood also stars in the drama, playing Eric Morecambe’s mum Sadie Bartholomew, who had a considerable influence on both boys (Eric took his stage name Morecambe from his home town in Lancashire).

An early showbiz mum, Sadie worked as an usherette to pay for Eric’s dancing lessons, encouraging him to enter talent shows and later becoming the business manager for the duo, accompanying them on tour.

“She was completely crucial – it was her idea that they have a double act,” says Wood, 57, who met Eric once – in a lift – and Ernie when he presented her with a comedy award, backstage in her dressing room.

“Sadie was integral in quite a random way in that she invited Ernie to sleep in their digs one night, when he didn’t have anywhere to stay, and put them in the same bed, which is the genesis of all those sketches where they’re sitting up in bed together.

“The story is that they were on a train one day, messing about and annoying everybody and she said ‘Go and do something constructive, go and work a double act out and stop bothering me’ – and they did. They went on stage together when they were 15.

“If she hadn’t said that, they might have gone on and done other shows and separated. Ernie I’m sure would have been a song and dance man, a bit like Bruce Forsyth, and Eric would have been a comedian.

But I don’t think they would have been so good separately.”

Sadie’s husband George is played by one half of another great British double act, Darlington-raised Vic Reeves.

“He was my favourite out of everybody who came to be interviewed, he just has the right presence and solidity about him, and was very, very believable,” says Wood.

“George must have been quite a modern husband to let Sadie tour with Eric and Ernie, rather than making her stay home and wash socks, but it was partly a case of anything for a quiet life, because she was very forceful and he was quite chilled out.”

The duo began their act on stage in 1941, but their first attempt at TV, with the 1954 series Running Wild, ended in failure after garnering bad reviews. Undeterred, they altered their approach and pioneered a new comedy technique.

“They were the first people to really use television as a separate medium and not just as a box which represented a theatre,” explains Wood. “Eric was the first person to turn to the camera and talk to the audience about Ernie, using the camera as if it was a person.

“They did one terrible series before they realised that’s what you had to do – to translate the relationship you had with a theatre audience to a television audience, you had to talk to people at home.”

Eric & Ernie ends just before the pair’s career really takes off. At their height, they were pulling in audiences in excess of 25m – unthinkable in today’s multi-channel age.

And their talent still endures today: “I think they’ve got such a wide appeal because they’re so daft and they’re not hard to watch,” says Wood. “We want people to watch it who don’t know who Morecambe and Wise are.

“They have a very universal relationship.

Eric’s the daft one and Ernie the cross one – it’s the basis of many classic double acts. But they also fed things of their own into the shows, which made them a bit more interesting.”

■ Eric and Ernie, BBC2, New Year’s Day, 9pm