David Goldie, who teaches in the Department of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde, is an editor of Beyond Scotland: Scottish Literature in the 20th Century, due later this year.
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Vol. 21 No. 8 · 15 April 1999
pages 34-35 | 3087 words
Sunshine
David Goldie
- Morecambe and Wise by Graham McCann
Fourth Estate, 416 pp, £16.99, October 1998, ISBN 1 85702 753 1
Nearly 29 million people watched Morecambe and Wise’s Christmas Special in 1977 – over six and a half million more than had watched the Queen’s Speech earlier in the day. Graham McCann proposes that this popular endorsement of Morecambe and Wise as de facto national comics is also a vindication of what were then the public service ideals of the BBC. As national broadcasting fragments under the narrowing commercial stresses of satellite and digital, and as political devolution threatens national news programming, this is an attractive argument, suggesting that it is more than an exercise in nostalgia to recall a recent past in which large parts of the nation sat down together. What McCann is trying to account for is not just the careers of two excellent funny men, but the culture – both national and televisual – that made them possible.
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Letters
Vol. 21 No. 11 · 27 May 1999
From Alan Gabbey
Writing about Morecambe and Wise (LRB, 15 April), David Goldie unaccountably describes as 'absurd non-sequiturs' lines like 'My auntie's got a Whistler – now, there's a novelty.' Such gems are not in the least absurd, nor is their status as sequiturs in doubt in the mind of anyone who gets the joke: the sexual double-entendre has long been standard fare in the British music hall and its descendant, the British TV comedy show. How would Goldie describe the following gag from the Isaac Newton routine? Eric and Ernie are sitting under a tree. Eric says that this is where Sir Isaac was sitting when the apple fell on his head. Ernie wants to hear more. 'Yes it's true,' says Eric. 'One day Sir Isaac was sitting under this very tree, examining his equations.' Ernie swivels round in alarm and the audience falls about.
Alan Gabbey
Barnard College, New York
