Warming Up

I made really good progress with script four and it’s over 50% of the way to being a first draft. It feels wrong that sometimes things can happen this quickly, when the first two scripts especially took me months of wading through stodge. But the prospect of a deadline and facing the embarrassment of professional actors having to read rubbish, or worse, turning up to read nothing, seems to be doing the trick. I still have little to no idea about what’s going to happen in episodes five and six, but the thing is, it will have to be something and that something will have to be written by the third week of January, because that’s when everything and everyone is booked.

There was still plenty of time to mess around on Twitter and I was pretty taken with this clip of Morecambe and Wise and Tom Jones which was tweeted by @archiveTVmus71 

There’s lots to love about it. On paper or at the pitch it must have seemed like quite a thin idea - what if Eric and Ern pretend to be female backing singers (though don’t dress up or anything) and do a funny dance? But in execution it is joyous and filled with surprises and professionalism and astonishes the viewer with an adept bit of dancing. I like it too because Ern is really the focus of the piece. Eric is funny too if you watch him, but my eyes are on Ernie and his muppet-like enthusiasm (Rob Rouse made that connection) and skill is impressive and very funny.  It just shows how silliness can sometimes be the best kind of comedy and that if you like someone (and they’re good) they can more or less do anything. But what a testament to the human spirit this clip is. If your heart isn’t warmed and you don’t forget about the world’s troubles for a second then your heart is dead.

Vic and Bob had a crack at the same idea a couple of decades later  and though the anarchy of it is fun, it’s possibly too rough and unrehearsed and they don’t attempt the really impressive dancing.  The underwhelmed faces of the legends of showbiz in the audience probably say it all. Vic and Bob are the comic geniuses of their generation too, but I think if someone tried to do their stuff thirty years on, it would fall a bit flat.

Morecambe and Wise are still the best, for me and this clip distills that genius. Why is it funny? Just because they are so funny. Comedy is a very strange beast.