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The news that one of Britain’s most cherished comedy double acts, Morecambe and Wise, nearly broke up in 1950, before they ever achieved anything like the fame that they later went on to attain, opens up a “what if” in the history of twentieth century British humour. The brilliance of Morecambe and Wise as a comic partnership was that it turned conventional wisdom on its head – Morecambe, the supposed straight man, was the funny one – and the pair went gone on to influence countless other acts since.
However, it came very close to never happening. A letter that has surfaced at a forthcoming auction has Wise writing to Morecambe, “I want to get straight to the point. I want us to break up the act. I feel it would be better if we parted. I know this will be quite a shock to you but I had to come to some decision. I can’t go on as things are, I’m not satisfied with my work, I have lost a lot of zip and it will take time to regain it. I can’t keep you waiting around for me, I don’t know definitely when I will be out. I feel it’s a great pity after we had planned so much, but my mind’s made up.”
It ends: “All I know is that I want us to remain friends. Hoping to hear from you. Your Best Pal. Ernie”, but it took Morecambe’s robust rebuttal of Wise’s fears – according to his son Gary, he wrote back to say “what a load of rubbish” – to continue the partnership and thus lead to comedic history when the two attained fame. The existence of the letter had been known as far back as 2009, but this is the first time that it will be publicly available, thanks to Eric and Joan, Morecambe’s children, deciding to auction off memorabilia and items associated with Morecambe and Wise. They called the sale “the end of an era”.
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Morecambe and Wise overcame their hiccup to work harmoniously together for a further three and a half decades, becoming the most popular act in Britain and continuing at their peak even up until Morecambe’s death from a heart attack in 1984.
The same, though, can’t be said for many other figures in the entertainment industry. Here are some of the best-known duos and what happened to them.
Peter Cook and Dudley Moore
There is a serious debate to be had as to whether Cook or Morecambe was the greatest comedian of the twentieth century, albeit with wildly different upbringings and personalities. Morecambe was Northern, working-class and a former coal miner who worked his way into popularity through graft alone. Cook was the public school-educated son of a high-ranking diplomat, and he was all but anointed with fame from an early age: he was writing sketches for Kenneth Williams while he was still a student at Cambridge, and later went on to find fame with the satirical group Beyond the Fringe, along with Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore.
It was the latter with whom Cook formed a partnership, firstly as the Pete and Dud characters in the show Not Only… But Also, and then subsequently as the foul-mouthed Derek and Clive. However, the relationship between the two men was derailed firstly by Cook’s alcoholism and secondly by Moore’s unexpected Hollywood success with the adult-oriented romantic comedy 10, which turned him into a “sex thimble”. The final Derek and Clive recordings from the late 1970s demonstrate the barely concealed animosity between the two men, and make for uncomfortable listening.
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Although the two occasionally reunited for benefit performances in the 1980s, it was clear that Cook, for all his genius, was seen as a spent force, and that Moore was parlaying his charm and comic timing into a cinematic career. When Cook died in 1995 at 57 of a gastrointestinal haemorrhage from heavy drinking, it affected Moore deeply, and he spent the last few years of his life in seclusion, suffering from a brain disorder. Yet the work lives on beyond both men’s unhappy ends, and remains vastly influential on countless other comedians.
Wilfrid Brambell and Harry H Corbett
Wilfrid Brambell and Harry H Corbett were, on the face of it, one of Britain’s stranger double acts. Brambell was a character comedian who was initially best known for playing prematurely aged men while only in his forties, and Corbett was an up-and-coming Shakespearean actor who was at one point regarded, at least half-seriously, as “Britain’s Brando”.
When the two collaborated on the hugely popular sitcom Steptoe and Son – as an elderly rag and bone man and his socially aspirant son – the off-screen tensions between them and their wildly different performance styles meant that although the sitcom continued well into the 1970s, they eventually fell out irreparably on a tour of Australia in 1977, as Corbett lost patience with his “father” over his heavy drinking.
Nonetheless, Corbett predeceased Brambell, dying at 57 in 1982. The older actor’s tribute to his on-screen son was a masterpiece of bland disinterest, as he said “A nice guy, and we did work well together, despite the fact that we only met when we were working because we live different lives and miles apart. I, as you know, have a two-room flat; he had a large farm with a wife, two kids, dogs, cats and a mother-in-law.” The tension between the two is clear onscreen, but makes the relationship indelibly, fascinating and compelling; there is more than a hint of Beckett’s Godot or Endgame in their inescapable, endless co-dependence.
Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin
Today, Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin might be best known as respectively, a zanily innovative comedian and a suave lounge lizard nicknamed “the King of Cool”, but they worked together for a decade as a double act, Martin and Lewis, between 1946 and 1956, breaking up precisely ten years after they had first performed together.
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Their appeal lay in Martin’s strengths as an accomplished singer and straight man, and Lewis deconstructing and undermining the act with energetic mockery and comedic buffoonery. Initially this made them vastly popular, but by the early Fifties, Martin had tired of Lewis’s antics, once angrily commenting to the comedian that he meant nothing to him but a “f–king dollar sign”.
Martin wanted to go on into straight acting roles and singing, which he subsequently achieved but he was always in the shadow of his friend and mentor Frank Sinatra, the king of the so-called “Rat Pack”. Lewis, meanwhile, had a wildly successful comedic acting career in such films as The Nutty Professor, until his attempt at directing and starring in the Holocaust-themed black comedy The Day The Clown Cried turned into one of the most notorious debacles in Hollywood: the film remains unfinished and unreleased to this day.
Lewis and Martin were estranged for two decades after their split, but eventually reconciled during the 1970s, with Lewis quipping on stage in one 1989 show of Martin’s, “Why we broke up, I’ll never know.”
Tony Hancock and Sid James
When Tony Hancock’s famous television sitcom Hancock’s Half Hour was at its peak in the late Fifties, Hancock, somewhat to his chagrin, found himself sharing many of the laughs – if not the billing – with Sid James, an experienced television and film actor who had appeared in the Ealing comedies The Lavender Hill Mob and The Titfield Thunderbolt.
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The contrast between the two men’s personalities – Hancock played a caricatured version of himself as a lugubrious, unsuccessful comedian, while James played a similarly heightened caricature as a cackling, man-about-town character who took delight in puncturing Hancock’s melancholy and self-aggrandisement – was enormously popular, and led to the two being regarded as a double act in the public eye, if not by Hancock himself.
Although Hancock and James made six seasons of the television show together – as well as having appeared in the radio sitcom of the same name – Hancock decided that he wished to appear in the seventh and final instalment by himself, and fired James, because he no longer wanted to be regarded merely as part of a duo. Notoriously, he lacked the courage to do this face to face, and instead asked that his management do so instead.
The final series of the show, now simply called Hancock, is often regarded as the best, featuring such classic episodes as The Blood Donor, but Hancock was spiralling into both alcoholism and misanthropy; he fired his regular writers Galton and Simpson afterwards and attempted to make it by himself.
He died by suicide in 1968, at the age of 44. James later remarked that he saw him shortly before his death: “He looked dreadful. I tried to pull up and get over to him. I got the car parked, but by then he had disappeared. He was so full of liquor he didn’t see me. I wish to God I had.”
Tommy Cannon and Bobby Ball
Tommy Cannon and Bobby Ball were in some regards the successors to Morecambe and Wise. Both acts were Northern and working-class, came to prominence through working men’s clubs and eventually established themselves as one of the most successful comedy duos in Britain. Cannon and Ball enjoyed a hugely popular career on LWT with The Cannon and Ball Show between 1979 and 1988.
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Unfortunately, their success was bedevilled by two separate problems. First, as is often the way of these things, the pressures of fame led to a near-total estrangement between the two men for several years during the Eighties, during which time they only communicated when rehearsing or on stage. Second, by the end of the Eighties, Northern humour was felt to be incompatible with mainstream tastes.
The two men continued to perform, being regular faces in pantomime and on the 2005 series of I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!, but the strangest volte-face was that they published an entirely sincere book, Christianity for Beginners, in 1996. The two men were both born-again Christians and so this unintentionally surreal publication attempted to explain faith to the public, but in the jocular style that had made them so popular in their heyday. Nevertheless, after their falling-out was resolved, they remained on good terms until Ball’s death from Covid in 2020.