Fitting tribute to a comic hero

Morecambe, Lowry Quays Theatre, Salford

HALF the nation watched their Christmas shows, and the entire nation mourned when first Eric Morecambe, then Ernie Wise, sadly made us laugh no more.

The indelible mark the great comic duo left on British comedy history is celebrated in this award-winning, one-man show performed by Bob Golding, written by Tim Whitnall, and directed by solo-show master Guy Masterson.

The show was a major hit at the Edinburgh Festival and in London and earlier this year picked up the Olivier Theatre award for best entertainment show. So we already knew it was something special: only fitting for comedians of this stature.

Unlike the rather weedy Tommy Cooper tribute show that did the rounds in the past few months, which simply re-created one of Cooper’s stage performances, Tim Whitnall goes further, cleverly mixing the career history of Morecambe and Wise from the first teenage partnership to their epoch-making TV peak 40 years later, with the visual and verbal gags for which Eric was rightly loved.

Everything from the vocal “whey-heys” to the brown paper bag-gag, the behind-the-curtain silliness and one or two of the most famous sketches and punchlines — most notably Andre Previn and the Grieg piano concerto — are bundled into a breakneck, 100-minute laughter festival.

Bob Golding’s skilled interpretation of Morecambe’s stage personality — we don’t really find out a lot about his offstage life — has already been described with all the superlatives critics can muster, and I couldn’t agree more.

He bears a passing resemblance to the young Eric, but more than that he hits Eric’s personality and comic timing better than any Impressionist I’ve seen — even if he doesn’t claim to be attempting an impression.

Using a ventriloquist’s dummy as Ernie Wise might sound a little cruel, but it’s an amusing device and is never allowed to get in the way of showing that the pair were a completely equal partnership, a brotherly duo who split every penny they earned down the middle.

And though we know how the story ends — and if we didn’t, the heart-attack incidents make it clear what is coming — Golding makes Eric’s life funny, heart-warming and completely focused on getting laughs, and his death a dignified exposition of an entire nation’s loss. The country’s current comedy pairings seem, and are, a pale shadow by comparison.