Morecambe and Wise, currently playing an unlimited engagement at some celestial comedy room, are unlikely to be best pleased with Britain’s latest double act, Dave and Nick, being compared to them. Several newspapers likened the debut performance of the new Tory Prime Minister and his Liberal Democrat sidekick to an M&W routine.
“In your dreams, sunshine”, said Eric, or so it was reported in the Heaven edition of Variety.
Ant and Dec, the immensely successful likely lads whose television rapport suggests more than a passing admiration for Eric and Ernie, doubtless harboured similar thoughts when a resemblance to their on-screen banter was suggested. But the papers had a point. David Cameron and Nick Clegg did arrive centre stage like a fully-formed entertainment partnership. But of which famous established double acts, past or present, do they most remind us?
Little and Large? No, wrong shapes. Mike and Bernie Winters? Hardly, other than probably sharing that departed duo’s capacity to irritate – when once Bernie poked his head around the curtain following Mike’s tedious introduction to the act, a wag in the Glasgow Empire audience loudly and famously cursed: “Christ, there’s two of them”.
The Two Ronnies? Not as skilled, although there is a huge audience longing for Nick to announce: “So it’s goodnight from me”, followed by Dave’s: “And it’s goodnight from him”.
How about Peter Cook and Dudley Moore? Now we’re getting somewhere. They both were Oxbridge graduates – Cook went to Cambridge, as did Clegg, and, Moore, like Cameron, to Oxford – and there is a political connection. In their film Bedazzled, Cook, as the devil offering the Moore character anything in exchange for his soul, says: “What would you like to be? Prime Minister?” No, that’s too surreal.
Resisting plunging further down the list of great home-grown partnerships – sorry, Cannon and Ball, but you didn’t make the cut – as role models for Dave and Nick, I strayed more successfully into fiction, thanks mainly to Nick’s admitted appreciation of Samuel Beckett. That’s it: having spent considerable time “Waiting for Gordo”, perhaps they see themselves as Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot, Beckett’s seminal work of, appropriately, the theatre of the absurd.
But that’s a giant intellectual leap for Dave. He would be more comfortable modelling himself on Captain Kirk of the Starship Enterprise, locked in an uneasy relationship with first officer Spock, who once told the skipper: “It appears, Captain, we have been doing what used to be called pursuing a wild goose.” Life could yet imitate art.
Better yet, I see these embryo political wannabes as being more like PG Wodehouse’s soft-brained toff Bertie Wooster and his butler, Reginald Jeeves, even if Nick is from too far up the social ladder ever to buttle. Or – the best yet – they are Rozencrantz and Guildenstern, liberated from bit parts in Hamlet into the big time by Tom Stoppard and embroiled in political intrigue that engineers their demise.
There’s a significant passage of dialogue in Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead as the couple near their end:
Rosencrantz: “That’s it then, is it? We’ve done nothing wrong. We didn’t harm anybody, did we?”
Guildenstern: “I can’t remember”.
Rosencrantz: “All right, then. I don’t care. I’ve had enough. To tell you the truth, I’m relieved.”
Guildenstern: “There must have been a moment at the beginning, where we could have said no. Somehow we missed it. Well, we’ll know better next time.”
Exit, stage right of centre .
Bill Hagerty is editor of British Journalism Review
