Eric Morecambe

John Eric Bartholomew was born on 14 May 1926 in Morecambe, Lancashire, the seaside town whose name he would eventually adopt as his own. His mother Sadie, an ambitious and formidable woman, pushed her only child into talent contests from the age of ten. He won enough of them to be entered into an audition run by impresario Jack Hylton, where he first met a slightly older, more polished child performer named Ernest Wiseman — later Ernie Wise.

The pair began working together in 1940 as a boy double act on the wartime variety circuit. Sadie chaperoned them everywhere; when Eric was called up in 1943, he was sent to work as a Bevin Boy in the Accrington coal mines, an experience that permanently damaged his health. On demobilisation he and Ernie reunited, sharpened the act through years of northern clubs and end-of-pier seasons, and by the late 1950s had graduated to television with Running Wild for the BBC — a critical disaster now remembered chiefly for the review that read, 'Definition of the week: TV set — the box they buried Morecambe and Wise in.'

They didn't stay buried. Two Of A Kind for ATV in the 1960s, written largely by Sid Green and Dick Hills, established them as top-billing stars. The move to the BBC in 1968, and the arrival of writer Eddie Braben in 1969, transformed them again — softening Ernie's straight-man into a preening, wig-obsessed playwright and casting Eric as his adoring, mischievous flat-mate. The Morecambe and Wise Show became the fixed point of the British Christmas: the 1977 festive edition drew a UK audience of 28 million, still one of the largest ever recorded for an entertainment programme.

Eric survived a serious heart attack in 1968 and a second in 1979, both of which he mined for material with unnerving cheerfulness. He collapsed for the final time backstage at the Roses Theatre in Tewkesbury on 27 May 1984, minutes after coming off stage to a standing ovation. He was 58. Ernie later said that the act died with him — 'You can't have Morecambe and Wise without Morecambe.' Four decades on, his short-sleeved cardigan, his glasses shoved up on his forehead, and the phrase 'What do you think of it so far?' remain instantly, universally British.