Bring us sunshine about Eric and Ernie, not this sneering nonsense
WHaT a bitter little box the television can sometimes be. The very stars who made it shine brightest are subjected to its sneers and sideswipes once they are gone.
We’ve seen this nasty treatment meted out to Tony Hancock, Frankie Howerd, kenneth Williams, Tommy Cooper and many more — and now, in a miserable distortion of the truth called Eric, Ernie And Me (BBC4), to Morecambe and Wise.
This hour-long drama was based on the life of eddie Braben, who wrote much of the duo’s material in the Seventies when they were at their peak. But according to this version, eric & ernie were nobodies before Braben arrived — rotten material, no rapport, behaved like strangers on stage.
That’s complete nonsense. They were a superstar double act, who had starred together in a series of films. even the Beatles clamoured to be on their show.
Braben was a brilliant gag-writer, who took the boys to new heights. But it was wrong to claim he plucked the andre Previn/‘andrew Preview’ sketch out of the air: the raw version was penned in the Sixties by eric & ernie’s former writers, Sid Green and Dick Hills.
The whole thing was a depressing BLOODBATH OF THE WEEKEND: The French police drama Spiral (BBC4) returned with Caroline Proust as the hard-bitten ‘flic’ or cop, hunting the butcher of a dismembered corpse. She found the head in a bathtub — Spiral is nothing if not ultra-gory. business, obsessed with Braben’s breakdowns and bouts of mental illness. Writer Neil Forsyth seemed to be reproaching us: see what agonies this poor man suffered to make us laugh.
Most scurrilous of all was the way it portrayed eric as a manipulative, cowardly tyrant, who bullied everyone around him. That bears no relation to any description of the man that I’ve ever read.
For an honest depiction, we had an hour of cine film shot by the boys themselves, in Eric & Ernie’s Home Movies (BBC2) — though why this was aired on a different channel was not explained.
Some of the best material was the very earliest, from a Fifties panto season. We saw the duo doing slapstick routines on stage, knocking each other down and riding about ( for reasons not specified) in a pram.
Other reels showed them in New York, hoping to conquer america, and touring australia — as well as larking about on family holidays and at home.
The tenderness that eric felt for his children, and the attention ernie lavished on his wife Doreen, shone through.
Because the stars were behind the lens most of the time, the really interesting moments were few, with much padding in between. and it wasn’t clear why the home movies stopped in the Sixties. Is there more to come?
If more panto footage exists, the Mischief Theatre Company might want to watch and take a lesson from the experts. Last Christmas they staged a delightfully silly version of Peter Pan, but this year’s attempt, A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong (BBC1), was dragged under by the weight of its own jokes.
The set-up, which had the pranksters kidnapping Sir Derek Jacobi during a ‘live TV production’ of Scrooge, was far too convoluted. So was the dialogue, which included great slabs lifted from Dickens.
The running gags didn’t so much run as limp. There was very little to take the audience by surprise: most of the jokes announced themselves in advance by telegram. With Dame Diana Rigg narrating, it was a starry affair, and the cast never lacked energy. They flung themselves at every pratfall.
But there was no need to make it so complicated. Sometimes, a custard pie is just a custard pie.