You'll Miss Me When I'm Gone Read Online Free PDF

Andy Serkis (Gollum), whom I’d met a few times, because for some serendipitous reason we’d ended up being interviewed on the same radio programmes with indecent frequency.
    The big link between The Play What I Wrote and the Lord of the Rings movies is Ian McKellen, who played Gandalf. Throughout the playThe Right Size made constant remarks about him, encouraging the audience to believe that he was the permanent guest star in waiting and would soon be making his big entrance. But then Sean Foley—in Eric mode—kept explaining the actor’s absence by saying, ‘Can’t get him out of the pub’ and suchlike. When the play won an award McKellen fooled everyone by staggering on the stage behind Sean and Hamish and pretending to be drunk. Keeping up the act, he then tapped them on their shoulders mid-flow—to their huge and genuine surprise—and presented them with their award before reeling off the stage. It was another one of those nights that brought the house down.
    Ken Branagh says, ‘It’s interesting to try and work out the mystery of what makes people laugh. I have great admiration for those comics who can stand in front of 3,000 people and make them fall about laughing—like Billy Connolly and Lee Mack. It’s truly jaw-droppingly impressive.
    ‘With Eric and Ernie and other double acts, there is the protection that comes of having a partner that guards against the loneliness out there, but there’s still the basic concern of “are they going to like us tonight”? Yes, it goes with the territory but it’s that which actors admire most in comedians.’
    As I finished lunch with Ken Branagh, he made me smile when he told me of a play he had recently been doing—a dark, Russian tragicomedy called Ivanov. ‘And for no good reason,’ says Ken, ‘we all start doing impressions of Eric Morecambe as we walk up and down the corridors before going on. It was a way for the cast to get themselves going; almost like a vocal exercise.’
    It would seem Ken Branagh can’t escape Eric Morecambe!

The Early Days A Very Good Place to Start
    ‘I was born in 1926 and when I was eight months old we moved to Christie Avenue into a new council house with three bedrooms and an outside loo. There was just me, my mother, Sadie, and my father, George…’
    H as there ever been an iconic entertainer who during his life generated such profound and continuous affection as Eric Morecambe? Probably not. Well, maybe Stephen Fry comes close. Mr Fry’s ability to jolly along as one of us, as it were, while intellectually towering above us Gandalf-like in a world of Hobbits, is very endearing. Just as with Eric, you can’t help but like Stephen. Whatever such persons’ problems might be—and they’re human, so they have problems—there remains this lovable, vulnerable, yet simultaneously optimistic air about them. As TV presenter Nick Owen wrote of Eric in his autobiography: ‘He had the ability to make you laugh just by entering the room…’
    Morecambe and Wise emerged from an era when a performer was slowly nurtured and judged purely on talent and not tabloid-style TV programmes bolstered by self-interested tabloid newspapers. You didn’t grade Morecambe and Wise on an A-Z list—they were simply undisputed stars of the small screen, and hugely admired and loved stars at that.
    The author Sidney Sheldon observed of his friend Groucho Marx, ‘Even when Groucho wanted to insult someone he couldn’t, because no one would take the insult seriously.’ That straightaway makes me think of my father and his forays into attempting to be serious—which he would have enjoyed more frequently had people been able to take him more seriously. But as well as being plain and simple Dad, he was plainly and simply hilarious almost all the time. Part of it was his nature and part was the burden he carried of not wishing to disappoint anyone. Being a living comic legend was certainly a two-edged sword.
    Although I’m now in my fifties it