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“... Yet everyone assumes that they could write a novel if they only had the leisure to do it. Eric Morecambe had the leisure to try his hand during convalescence from his recent heart attack. (He’s now sufficiently recovered to go back to his main line of business.) To judge by Mr Lonely, should he ever pick up a violin he’d be able to play it ...”

“... to the Dictionary of National Biography there are photographs of David Niven, Diana Dors, Eric Morecambe, John Betjeman and William Walton. Dors has a leering ‘Come up and read me sometime’ expression on her face and Niven wears his yacht-club greeter’s smile. Morecambe seems to be laughing at one of his ...”

“... and Richard Ingrams cast Deedes as the foil to Denis Thatcher. He was Ernie Wise to Thatcher’s Eric Morecambe. But the role of straight man came naturally to him. Dear Bill (the book, that is) should make a merry Christmas for thousands of its ...”

“... parade of learning, write attractively (the collaboration works so well that, as the late lamented Eric Morecambe was wont to remark in a different context, ‘you can’t see the join’), and have made their book potentially useful to the self-instructing student and the self-mistrusting teacher by providing a little programme of exercises at the end of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... not only in the sense that all of its words were written first by Mallock (although not, as Eric Morecambe said of the notes in his piano playing, necessarily in the right order); but also because Phillips pieces together Mallock’s words to produce other writers’ lines. So there is Donne and Shakespeare, but also lines from books that in 1892 ...”

“... accompanied by anyone today?’ the chairman of the bench, an elderly man with a bald head and Eric Morecambe spectacles, enquires. He is too polite to comment on Ezekiel’s mode of dress. ‘Sir, good afternoon, I represent Ezekiel today,’ I stand and incline my head towards the magistrates, who incline theirs in return. I explain that his ...”

“... Stubbs has a nice section on this era, grouping together Ken Dodd, Les Dawson, Tommy Cooper and Morecambe and Wise. These five comedians in particular, he writes, achieved huge popularity despite the fact that they ‘represented a Britain that was not “with it”, mostly had to do without it. They were weatherbeaten, as familiar as old slippers, and ...”

“... tear your other arm off.’ Alfie has a better story. The same commissionaire was a big fan of Morecambe and Wise, to whom even he deferred. As they drove in one day he stopped their car and asked if there was any chance of a ticket to one of their shows. ‘No,’ said Eric. ‘We don’t want you.’ ‘Why?’ said ...”

“... tabloids, but animosity was not universal: an English woman travelling on the same London bus as Eric Huntley escorted him under her umbrella all the way to the Haroldstone Road house he was looking for. Vince Reid, on the other hand, recalls how people came up to him and rubbed his skin to see if the blackness came off (a ritual which, with the help of ...”

“... would have been in 1963 but now part of a free-standing unit in limed oak. It was this house where Eric Korn heard someone reading out the plaque as being to ‘William Butler Yeast’. ‘Presumably,’ Eric wanted to say, ‘him responsible for the Easter Rising.’ 17 February. Stopped by a man outside the post office in ...”

“... unit at Heysham, every Wednesday or Thursday night we would walk the two or three miles into Morecambe, and go to the dance in the Floral Hall. From about eight to midnight, several hundred men and women, nearly all in uniform, were packed in under a pink and gold dome, and wandered round in a haze, searching for a partner. I danced badly, and I was ...”

“... a particularly good collection of modern British paintings, and from which I was hoping to choose Eric Ravilious’s Train Landscape. It’s a painting redolent of all the journeys by train I remember, particularly in my teens and during my National Service, when it was still possible to explore the English countryside by rail, a period that the foolishness ...”

“... the city now grassed over. The name takes me back to childhood when going by train from Leeds to Morecambe on holiday you knew you were nearly there when the porter came along the platform shouting the mysterious invocation ‘Lancaster Green Ayre’.11 March. R.’s Aunty Stella rings from Edinburgh. She was 90 last week and apologises that she hasn’t ...”

“... under this orange canopy, their interest focused on computer screens. It’s the kind of subject Eric Ravilious would have picked out, or Ardizzone in the Western Desert.Walk back through Shepherd’s Market, now smart and gentrified, cafés on pavements and all that. Except it hasn’t altogether changed, as in one corner there’s an open door, a lighted ...”