Eric

ERIC MORECAMBE & Co

Among the most memorable and magical of all my assignments was to collaborate with that much-loved, legendary comedian Eric Morecambe on more than 100 columns for the Daily Express and the Titbits magazine. We wrote a 'Sportsmile' column for the Express and a weekly Laughalong with Eric column for Titbits.

We kicked off in the Express in the week that Don Revie was appointed manager of England's football team. "What," I said to Eric, "would you do if you were in Don Revie's shoes?"

"Walk with a limp, sunshine," said Eric. "They're a size too small."

I would have paid to do that job. Eric did it for virtually nothing. He asked me to arrange to have his fee paid to Luton Town, the club with which he was a director.

There were rewards apart from our fees. We went to Paris and Barcelona together for European Cup matches, and it was a laugh a minute all the way. Lovely Eric. There will never be another like him.

How did I get Eric to agree to it? Simple. I wrote to him with a dummy column and asked if he would be interested in putting his name to it. "A wonderful idea, madam," was the response from Eric, who always introduced me to friends as "Norma, whom I have known and avoided for many years." Then I put the idea up to my old Express paymasters, and Sports Editor Ken Lawrence was delighted to give me a platform for what became an enormously popular column that ceased only with dear Eric's premature departure. He was a joy to work with.

This underlines the point that I make in the Ghosting into Print section: If you make the right kind of approach to the right celebrity you will often find them willing to cooperate.

I have always had a comedy writer fighting to get out, and I wrote columns with several of the masters including Tommy Cooper and Benny Hill, the only two who were in Eric's league. Benny and I became good pals and he used to send me postcards showing football grounds whenever he went off on his lone tours through Europe.

I devised and scripted an adult video pantomime for Mike Reid and Barbara Windsor. It was called Pussy in Boots, and I blush when I think of some of the lines I put into their mouths. "You know why they call us Cockneys," I had Mike Reid telling the audience. "It's because our cocks reach down to our knees." Sorry, Mike. Sorry, reader.

Brian Klein (CEO of On the Box Productions) and I worked together with virtually every top comedian in the land when co-producing a weekly 63-show series for Sky called Stand and Deliver. During the series Bernard Manning was letting rip with some ripe language, and director Brian sent me on stage while he was in full flow to ask him to cut out the "eff" word. Bernard looked at me wide eyed and said, "But that's what I do," he said. "Now eff off."

It completed a remarkable win double for me. The night before I had been working as a scriptwriter on John Virgo's This Is Your Life tribute. One of the guests was the explosive Alex 'Hurricane' Higgins, and I was informed just before the show was about to start that he was refusing to leave the Anchor pub next door to Teddington Studios. I was sent to try to coax him to come into the studio. "Eff off," he said, miming as if to throw the bottle he was holding at my head. Eventually he arrived with the show half way through and he delivered his lines perfectly as if he was stone cold sober.

So in the space of 24 hours I asked Alex Higgins to leave a pub and went on stage to ask Bernard Manning to stop using the 'eff' word. This writing lark can be dangerous!