Eddie Braben

Comedy writer; Born: October 31, 1930; Died: May 21, 2013.

EDDIE Braben, who has died aged 82, was a comedy writer best known for helping to create some of Morecambe and Wise’s most famous on-screen moments.

Though he also worked with a range of other famous comedians and presenters, including Ken Dodd, Ronnie Corbett and David Frost, he made his name for his role in making Morecambe and Wise the most popular British television comedy act of the 1970s.

Born in Liverpool in 1930, the son of a butcher, he left school at 14 to start working on a fruit and veg stall. It was while he was doing this and dreaming of being a comedy writer that he sold his first joke, to BBC radio comic Charlie Chester.

He started earning his living as a writer in the 1950s and was a long-time collaborator of fellow Liverpudlian Ken Dodd. In 1969, however, he was recruited by the head of BBC TV light entertainment Bill Cotton to start writing for the Morecambe and Wise Show, though he carried on living in Liverpool where he had a wife and three children.

Having seen the pair perform on stage as a teenager, and not been impressed by what he saw, he set out to change the way the 28-year-old comedy partners related to one another in front of the camera. The two were famously good friends with a genuine liking for each other and Braben sought to bring this out in their act. He altered Ernie Wise’s on-screen image in particular, turning him from Eric Morecambe’s foil into a fully realised character of his own. Braben created for him the persona of egotistical playwright with a misplaced pride in his work, giving rise to the line “the play what I wrote”.

Braben was so key to Morecambe and Wise’s runaway success, he has become known as the “third man” of the show. He won the award for best light entertainment script from the Writer’s Guild of Great Britain for the first three years of his collaboration with the pair, and picked it up again in 1973.

Celebrities would clamour to get involved and among those to appear were Sir Laurence Olivier, John Mills, Vanessa Redgrave and Glenda Jackson. They were invariably treated with affectionate irreverence, with one running gag being the duo’s inability to remember their guests’ names (Andre Previn became “Andrew Preview” and Laurence Olivier “Lord Oliver”). Famous moments included the Greig Piano Concerto sketch with Previn in the 1971 Christmas Special, which became Braben’s favourite script, and the 1976 Christmas special when BBC newsreader Angela Rippon – only ever seen by audiences from the waist up – appeared in a high-kicking dance number wearing a dress with a thighhigh pleat.

As audience numbers grew, the pressure on Braben, especially to produce knock-out Christmas specials, also increased. He recently observed: “The Morecambe and Wise Show became more important than Christmas.”

Describing the pressure he felt to deliver laughs, Braben admitted that it did take a toll on his health. In 1972 he suffered from nervous exhaustion, though he later recovered and continued to write prodigiously. Morecambe and Wise’s popularity remained undimmed throughout the 1970s with an audience of 28 million tuning in to the 1977 Christmas Special, which featured Penelope Keith, Vanessa (“Vanilla”) Redgrave and Elton (“Elephant”) John.

As a child, Braben had harboured hopes of being a radio star after listening to comedian Arthur Askey on the wireless. He finally took to the airwaves in the 1970s with radio comedies such as The Show with Ten Legs, which he both wrote and performed in alongside actors such as Alison Steadman. He also wrote for other popular shows of the 1970s, including The Les Dawson Show and Little and Large. After The Morecambe and Wise Show moved to ITV in the late 1970s, Braben remained at the BBC and carried on writing for comics such as Mike Yarwood.

The death of Eric Morecambe in 1984 brought an untimely end to one of the most famous collaborations in British television comedy, but the affectionate tribute to Morecambe and Wise of 2001, the West End hit The Play What I Wrote, directed by Kenneth Branagh, provided an outlet for more of Braben’s famous gags. He collaborated on the venture with Hamish McColl and Sean Foley, and was delighted with the reception it had from audiences, saying Morecambe and Wise would have been “overjoyed” and observing that “the boys” – as Eric and Ernie were always known – would have been delighted to see their work celebrated with “such love, such affection and such respect”.

Braben died after a short illness and is survived by his wife Dee, his three children and six grandchildren.