You'll Miss Me When I'm Gone (3 page)

‘I can’t watch any of the new productions of it,’ Hamish admits with a hint of melancholy. ‘Not after my involvement. The strangest thing of all was preparing the scripts for the first new cast. There came that point where I had to press the button which erased all our names—Me, Sean and Toby [Jones]—and replace them with the new cast. We were gone!’

I can’t help agreeing with Hamish when he says, ‘My personal feeling is that it could have run another year in the West End, it was such a big success and an award-winner. But it’s always something we could bring back to the West End in due course.’

The idea of the play making a return in its original form with the original team is an intriguing one considering that Hamish and Sean had gone their separate ways after a remarkable seventeen years together. ‘Not nearly as long as Eric and Ernie were together,’ Hamish said, ‘but still a considerable time.’ Was this a consequence of doing the play together? I wondered.

‘Not at all,’ Hamish was quick to point out. ‘We both had other things we wanted to try out. It was just time for change. And as I say, we would reunite for
The Play What I Wrote,
should that opportunity resurface.’

Hamish shares my misgivings about taking what was primarily a play about the spirit of Morecambe and Wise over to New York, where they were hardly known.

‘You say they are the spirit of the play; I would go further and say the entire soul of it,’ he said. ‘It became a different show. It became a show about a double act in crisis and their need to stay together, but it didn’t have that crucial emotional resonance that it had in the purely Eric and Ernie version in Britain. And you underestimate those things at your peril. Morecambe and Wise were the blood-line of the piece, and it made it much more difficult for us in America. We still got a lot of laughs, and good audiences showed up—we were never below half-full—but you sensed that vital connection to the audience was missing.

‘That was the magic thing about Eric and Ernie that made us want to do the play in the first place. Actually,’ he corrected himself, ‘it was what made us
not
want to do it at the outset. I mean, how can you go out and imitate an icon act like Morecambe and Wise? Until we found that device of it being about
us
as a way to do
them
, it wasn’t feasible.’

I can relate to this, of course, as I’d spent several years having the same discussions with David Pugh. Quickly we recognized that a pure imitation was not a possible way to execute the idea of a tribute to Morecambe and Wise.

After the low moment with Roger being taken to hospital halfway through a Broadway performance, what was for Hamish the high moment of the months spent in the West End, then on Broadway, and later on tour in the UK?

‘I have many,’ he said with a warm smile. ‘If we’re talking guest stars, and there were very, very few who didn’t really cut the mustard, then I suppose that you can name them on the basis of audience reaction. Firstly, we had Toby always on the side of the stage doing an impression of the guest star that then quietly walks on to the stage from the other wing. Some got muted applause, some good applause and some huge applause. But if they were a massive name, then you got a momentary pause during which the audience is thinking, can this really be them? Roger Moore was in this last category and also Sting, Kylie Minogue, Ewan McGregor, and Richard E. Grant. Richard did the show lots of times, a bit like Roger. John McEnroe, of course, in the New York production, was massive. He just got it totally. You had Toby Jones at one end of the stage and John McEnroe at the other shouting out in New York whines: ‘No,
I’m
John McEnroe.’ ‘No you’re not—
I’m
John McEnroe.’ Brilliant. Those names named are some of the big highs of the two runs and the short tour we did with the play. There were times in that show I would turn to Sean and say, “Listen to that laughter because you’ll never hear it as thick again.” That play really was a laughter machine. It was like being at a rock concert, not a stage play!’

After the play finished, Hamish and Sean did not immediately part company to pursue independent challenges. Quite quickly they went into a new stage production which reunited the whole
The Play What I Wrote
team of Hamish McColl, Sean Foley, Toby Jones, Kenneth Branagh (as director), and David Pugh (as producer). This was to be the maligned and ill-fated
Ducktastic!

The main reason it failed, in this humble writer’s opinion, is because the title is truly dire. For my money, any play named
Ducktastic!
sounds more like something the Krankies would come up with. Remember them? Fandabidozi! It must, therefore, have been an uphill battle from the opening onwards—and there wasn’t too much ‘onwards’!

But Hamish McColl has his own theories. ‘I think we set the bar too high with
The Play What I Wrote.
The next production just didn’t catch on,’ he explained. ‘It was an expensive show to stage, and they didn’t have the time to bridge that gap between an average start and developing it into something a bit special. So it was pulled.’

My mind drifts back to the opening night of
The Play What I Wrote
,
before
Roger was ill,
before
Hamish and Sean misfired with
Ducktastic!
, and
before
the lovely and talented Toby Jones began scaling the heights as the big star he deserved to become (he won stunning reviews for his depiction of Truman Capote): this was the opening night of
The Play What I Wrote
on Broadway and it was clearly very successful with the audience, if a little confusing for the fam
ily, friends, and fans of Morecambe and Wise. At one point the names of Morecambe and Wise are replaced with those of Laurel and Hardy. Inevitably it was only what it could ever be: a goodish play well performed with a famous guest star each night. Maybe that would have been enough for Broadway if there had been no 9/11 and no war on Iraq.

The first-night party was a very New York affair—lots of money lavished upon a vast number of guests in a huge first-floor room just off Times Square—and you sensed the party meant more to the American side of the production than their British counterparts. There were paparazzi-style columns of photographers and TV news crews, and unbearably bright lights and loud, chattering voices trying to be heard through fixed Botox grins. As David Pugh pointed out, he would rather have seen the thousands of dollars they splashed out on partying go towards publicity. But that isn’t the way American backers and producers do it on Broadway. They want their party and mean to have it.

A few familiar faces were in evidence—Mel Smith (with whom I’d done a breakfast television slot some years earlier), Michael Palin, and Eddie Izzard—all of whom I liked enormously and who talked to me at length with great understanding of Morecambe and Wise.

The absence of the spirit of Morecambe and Wise—or the entire soul of the piece, as Hamish McColl puts it—from the new production was painfully emphasized by the fact that not once did the huge media contingent in attendance try to speak with my mother or show any remote interest in the London production which had generated the play’s presence on Broadway in the first place. It would be interesting to know what film-maker Steven Spielberg made of the New York production. Allegedly he was a huge fan and devotee of the original London production and instrumental in creating the Broadway opportunity.

Kevin Kline, possibly best known to British audiences as the villain in the movie
A Fish Called Wanda
, made a good opening-night guest star and did further nights, as did other guests, such as Liam Neeson, Meryl Streep, and Glenn Close.

The play was doing OK business until America invaded Iraq. What with the
recent memory of 9/11 hanging over the country like the sword of Damocles and all Broadway productions suffering as a consequence, it was only a matter of time before audiences thinned and the first-night party was just a memory. On the fateful day of the invasion of Iraq, as the play went through its machinations, a man jumped up in the audience and shouted, ‘We’ve gone into Iraq!’, to which there was the kind of ‘Yee-hah!’ reaction that you tend to get when Americans are together in a relatively confined space. As Hamish said to me, ‘Talk about breaking the air of suspended disbelief! It took ten minutes to draw them back in.’

David Pugh hung on in there for as long as possible as the show was up for an award, but, when it didn’t win, the cast and crew were soon recalled to the UK. The production was given immediate notice and, with a brief countdown to closure, they were six miles up in the sky and flying home.

It was an interesting rather than a commercially viable run—an exercise from which we perhaps all learned something, and I include myself here in my vague role as consultant to the project. And there had been time for one cheerful celebratory event before leaving New York: Kenneth Branagh married his girlfriend Lindsay. As Hamish McColl recalls, it was ‘definitely one of the high moments of the run…a great memory.’

One final personal memory: I remember taking my mother to look at the splendid Grand Central Station. I’d seen it used as a location in so many films, so to actually stand there and marvel at this iconic sight was a treat beyond all other treats. A lady travelling from the station, clearly uncertain of which platform she was searching for, marched briskly up to a cop—great using that word in its appropriate context—and said, ‘Oh, do excuse me, but could you tell me…?’

‘I’m sorry, madam,’ interrupted the cop, gently raising his hands and giving an apologetic shrug, ‘but I’m closed Sundays!’ Both of them laughed loudly at this, and it reminded me of years earlier when my father had just returned from one of those Ed Sullivan shows he wrote about in his diary. ‘I have to say the one thing that struck me is the native New Yorker’s sense of humour,’ he once told me. And now I got it first-hand.

The story of
The Play What I Wrote
didn’t end in New York. In April 2007 its nationwide tour of Britain—happily back in its
original
format—concluded. And that was with its third cast since The Right Size created and starred in the show.

I still get involved with the publicity for the play whenever it’s recast and up and running, occasionally visiting venues where it’s due to open to talk with the press about Eric and Ernie, and about the play, its history, its metamorphosis in New York, its changing casts, and, of course, its guest stars. Sometimes I did a Q&A session with David Pugh for the touring productions. We would sit on stage in front of an invited audience and David would tell the story of how it all came together and then turn to me and ask relevant questions about Eric and Ernie to which I would give lengthy answers. We worked up quite a little double act ourselves.

In the last production I got talking with Andrew Cryer, who took on the Eric Morecambe role, while Greg Haiste played Ernie and Anthony Hoggard played Arthur and the myriad roles originally played by the great Toby Jones. Andrew recalled how, as little more than a toddler, once a week he would stay at his gran’s house because his parents would go out. It must have been a weekend, because it always coincided with
The Morecambe and Wise Show
being on. He was usually allowed to watch it, but has memories of times when he wasn’t supposed to: he’d sneak onto the landing and watch it through the banisters. That he should go on to portray Eric in a play seems deserved as well as ironic.

Echoing the thoughts of Hamish McColl, my own hope is that one day The Right Size will team up again to appear in the play—perhaps a special West End run, as Hamish suggests, with some mouth-watering guest stars equal to the long list of previous ones. Or, alternatively, they’ll take it to somewhere else
where Morecambe and Wise are recognized and hugely appreciated. I’m thinking specifically ofAustralia. My second wife, Jo, comes from New Zealand and has lots of family spread out across Australia, and visits we made when we were still married proved to me beyond doubt that admiration for Morecambe andWise still exists there. I found their books and DVDs on sale in many Aussie stores.

Mentioning that part of the world, if I have one recent regret—and I certainly have too few to remember, to paraphrase Frank Sinatra—it is not taking up the opportunity to join the actors and crew of
Lord of the Rings
filming on location in New Zealand. Jo and I had planned to visit the members of her family in Australia, and a quick, seven-hour hop over to NZ would have left us watching Peter Jackson directing Orcs andAragorn and Gandalf and Saruman and Frodo and Sam and…well, you get the idea. And to make it worse, Peter, I later learned, is a big Morecambe andWise fan. The offer to go there had come from Andy Serkis (Gollum), whom I’d met a few times, because for some serendipitous reason we’d ended up being interviewed on the same radio programmes with indecent frequency.

The big link between
The Play What I Wrote
and the
Lord of the Rings
movies is Ian McKellen, who played Gandalf. Throughout the playThe Right Size made constant remarks about him, encouraging the audience to believe that he was the permanent guest star in waiting and would soon be making his big entrance. But then Sean Foley—in Eric mode—kept explaining the actor’s absence by saying, ‘Can’t get him out of the pub’ and suchlike. When the play won an award McKellen fooled everyone by staggering on the stage behind Sean and Hamish and pretending to be drunk. Keeping up the act, he then tapped them on their shoulders mid-flow—to their huge and genuine surprise—and presented them with their award before reeling off the stage. It was another one of those nights that brought the house down.

Ken Branagh says, ‘It’s interesting to try and work out the mystery of what makes people laugh. I have great admiration for those comics who can stand in front of 3,000 people and make them fall about laughing—like Billy Connolly and Lee Mack. It’s truly jaw-droppingly impressive.