It’s 25 December 1972. I’m six-years-old and I sit cross-legged on the brown swirly carpet, in front of the television. There are two men on the screen in brown suits. One of them, the tall, funny one with the glasses, is holding a 12ft-long comedy leg. I look around the room and my whole family is doubled up laughing. We are not alone. It’s the same in millions of households up and down the country.
During the 1970s, The Morecambe and Wise Show brought the nation together in collective hysteria. At 8.55pm on Christmas Day 1977, a staggering 28 million people, half the UK population at the time, sat down to tune in to BBC1 to watch Eric and Ernie play host to Elton John, Penelope Keith and Richard Briers, some of the biggest stars in the UK at the time.
It was in this episode that they had every national TV newsreader in the land perform impossible dance moves to the tune of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “There is Nothing Like a Dame” from the musical South Pacific. A sketch that was to go down in comedy history and is still talked about 48 years later.
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It was the same for Tommy Cooper. Although not quite reaching the TV ratings heights of Morecambe and Wise, he was up there and, in 1978, The Tommy Cooper Hour on BBC1 was reaching an estimated 13.2 million households. His quick-fire jokes were told and retold and would-be impressionists were quoting “jus’ like that” followed by that unmistakable machine gun laugh in every pub, office and school playground across the country.
As well as the gags and magic tricks that went wrong, Cooper was also the master of the comedy pause. He just had to stand there in silence. He was a naturally funny man; he couldn’t help but be funny, it was innate, and the nation loved him.
