Bringing back the sunshine

Suppose, for argument's sake, that a golden age of television ever existed. Historians might carbon-date it to the 1970s, when the Morecambe and Wise Christmas specials drew 28 million viewers. The alchemy of turning material into 24-carat entertainment exacted a suitably fabulous price. Eddie Braben bunches his knuckles and his mouth hardens into a grimace as he recalls writing the pair's classic routines. "I used to say to my wife: 'I'm going to fight the dragon'," he says. "Once I sat in my room on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, and I had three showers a day because I was saturated with the intensity of trying to come up with something. But by the Wednesday night I still hadn't written a single word. Then on the Thursday," Braben snaps his fingers, "I had a breakthrough and the words came flooding out. I couldn't get them down on paper quickly enough. I never enjoyed writing, never. But I got off lightly compared to Eric and Ernie."

Morecambe was only 58 when a heart attack killed him. His partner enjoyed a longer run - Wise died two years ago at the age of 74 - but, in his declining years, smarted from a cheap-shot documentary which suggested he'd been a passenger in the act.

The writer himself, now 78, has been seriously ill. "The doctors say he is lucky to be alive," murmur the producers of a new Braben collaboration. This is an entreaty to be gentle with the famously diffident gagsmith, who has been winkled from his home in Snowdonia to promote the production. The Play What I Wrote borrows its eponymous howler, as well as much else besides, from the Braben sketchbook. It was much admired by the critics. A skidpan of pratfalls and physical comedy, its storyline, in so far as it has one, centres on the contemporary tag-team of Hamish McColl and Sean Foley, otherwise known as the Right Size, and the pros and cons of staging a tribute to Eric and Ernie in the West End.

Of the nuggets that wink up at you from the script, a disproportionately large number were prospected by Braben.

He says it was when Morecambe was getting over his first bout of heart trouble, and it was feared the partnership was finished, that he was put in harness with the pair by Bill Cotton of the BBC. "But I didn't like them. Eric was silly and Ernie was too hard, too much like an American comic. I'd done 14 years with Ken Dodd and I told Bill I didn't think I was right for the boys." They found that they all laughed at the same jokes, though, and admired the same turns. Braben agreed to write them a draft script and ended up rewriting their act. As theatre critic Kenneth Tynan noted: "Ernie today is a comic who is not funny. And Eric is the straight man who is funny."

It was Braben's idea to put two grown men in bed together. "It was all part of putting them into a confined space - the equivalent of being inside a music hall horse-skin. We were so naive, we never thought anything of the bed. When I was growing up, and people stayed over after a party, we would be three to a bed. When Eric and Ernie started on the road, they shared a bed to save money. The clincher was when I said to them, 'If it was good enough for Laurel and Hardy, it's good enough for you'."

Braben's first job was working on a market stall in Liverpool, around the corner from pitches run by Anne Robinson's family and the parents of critic Gillian Reynolds. "Later, I'd be sitting down to write at 7.30 in the morning, and I'd look at people on the bus going to the factory or the shipyards. They didn't look particularly happy. I thought, some of them might be saying to themselves, 'Great, it's Morecambe and Wise tonight', and that's what drove me on."

In their pomp, Eric and Ernie - and Eddie - would have been taping the Christmas show at about this time of year. When the rest of the country finally sat down to enjoy it, with nothing worse than indigestion to distract them, Braben would be suffering agonies. "I used to watch it like this," he says, emphasising his own credentials for physical comedy by holding his breath and going rigid with tension. "When it was all over ..." He exhales with relief.

? Stephen Smith is a Channel 4 News reporter

The Play What I Wrote