The Stripper
Strip away the façade, and who do you see?
The Wise didn’t come from Morecambe
There was a time, some time ago, when John Bartholomew and Ernest Wiseman ruled the BBC’s roost. With star billing on Saturday nights, a flock of the biggest names in entertainment as guests, and Christmas specials that went down in television history, Morecambe and Wise needed only to click their fingers, and the ratings came running.
Bartholomew took the stage name Eric Morecambe, after the town where he first beheld the light of day. Their humour was based around Wise’s lack of wisdom and the plays, like what he wrote. Morecambe’s persona dwelt on his clumsiness, his schoolboy humour and childish rants, followed by pigeon-toed wistfulness and an exit, soon followed by his head popped round the curtain and his right arm supposedly “hooking him off stage again”.
Their humour delighted millions and was all fundamentally based on getting it wrong. When a besequinned Shirley Bassey’s heel broke singing one of her old chestnuts, Morecambe and Wise were at the ready, dressed as stage hands, to replace the failed footwear, mid-song, with a miner’s boot; it was they who created the soubriquet for newsreader Angela “Legs” Rippon; and whilst the fearful Ernie retreated from an irate André Previn, complaining that pianist Eric was “playing all the wrong notes”, it was Eric who stood up to the tempestuous American and retorted with diva-esque venom, “I’m playing all the right notes, sunshine; but not necessarily in the right order.”
Their humour was chaotic but carefully timed: they had one take for the "stripper" grapefruit-cutting scene in their Christmas special one year, and Britain, it did truly roll uncontrollably in the aisles, even as we attended the next day’s church services.
Their humour was as old as the hills, but timed, timeless, hilarious and honed. And it made us laugh, because we could see the fallibility in ourselves. Yes, what Morecambe and Wise did more than anything was allow people to have uproarious fun, laughing at their plain, ordinary, human selves.
For the BBC, it was big business. And for big business, it should be a cue. One take, is all it takes.
I looked back at my article on Los Angeles. I sent it to the current owners of the hotel, just to ask if they were interested to read my reminiscences of their establishment. They didn’t reply, but, of all the articles I’ve written about the state of the world, few have been as popular as that article. It was shared once and read by — as at the time of writing — 50 people [as of 26 May 2023: 66 people].
Yesterday, on a social media website, a government agency pushed an ad in which an oriental gentleman in a suit performs a wondrous dance as he places three “sorted” waste bins in a lift lobby. My comments, having defended the rights of a friend who had fallen victim to this draconian government agency, read as follows:
Shades of Christopher Walken.
But why is OVAM so uncompromising on laying clean-up costs on the shoulders of tenants of properties? Why is it so unable to determine the true root of pollution, instead of opting for the easy-way-out, strict-liability solution? Belgium’s legislation makes of OVAM an uncontrolled Leviathan, which flattens all in its path.
“If it occasionally manifests dainty footwork, why not dainty detective work?”
Today, the agency reposted its push advert, and the 1,700 likers from yesterday had gone, to be replaced by five new ones. My comment was, of course, gone with the wind. So I wrote this one:
“In Czechia, they have an art form that is delightful and, if you’re ever in the city of Prague, you must make a point of seeing it: black light theatre.
“In black light theatre, all the artists wear stage blacks: black shoes, black trousers, black tops, black masks, black gloves. They’re entirely in black from top to toe. And, when the lights go on, you realise why: you cannot see them. The lights are fluorescent and ultra-violet and, as the actors move the objects that they hold through the air and across the stage, these shapes and dolls appear to float and have a magical life of their own. It is magical, and it’s worth the fee.
“Of course, if you could see the actors, as they manipulate their props, you’d know exactly how everything is done. You’d see their movements for what they are and nothing would come as a surprise. The Prague public pay proper pennies in order to be duped, and they delight in it, for being duped is what theatre is all about.
“Go, next time you’re in dear old Prague. But don’t forget to switch back to reality when you exit the theatre.
“Theatre, a magical world of compromise.”
I am currently composing my response to their third posting.