Eddie Braben: Farewell to the man who brought us sunshine "They were closer than any two brothers I've ever met," Eddie Braben said of Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise. I thought, get that love and affection across to an audience and you're halfway home. Braben was asked to become the main writer for Morecambe and Wise in 1968, after their previous collaborators, Dick Hills and Sid Green, moved to America following Eric Morecambe's first heart attack. Braben's background as a gag writer for Ken Dodd ("His act requires a minimum of six gags a minute") was a suitable one, as Morecambe and Wise were, up until this point, still rooted in their early TV fame as a quickfire double act in the style of US vaudeville partnerships. Despite Morecambe's brilliance (the sparkle of anarchy in his eye letting the audience in on the fact that he, too, found what was going on ridiculous) and despite Wise's rock-solid straight-man work (in the wrong hands, the worst job in the world), Morecambe and Wise were at the time only excellent comics and their shows just very good. What Eddie Braben brought to the partnership was recognition of that "love and affection." Until then, double acts had been havens of little other than sniping and rivalry. On the various sets of their Road to... movies, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby regularly got the films" writers to supply each of them with put-downs in a spiral of comic one-upmanship. Abbott and Costello's entire act relied on mutual distrust and, in Bud Abbott's case, withering contempt. Only Laurel and Hardy, back in the Twenties, seemed actually to like each other. Morecambe and Wise, under Braben's influence, would be different. By making their friendship the bedrock of the act, Braben gave them space to breathe. Eric could improvise, knowing that Ernie would laugh went he went off script (and Eric was able to laugh when Ernie fluffed a line). Catchphrases sprouted everywhere. Insults between the two were bandied - as were, apparently, Ernie's legs. And, greatest of all, Eric and Ernie not only shared a flat, they shared a bed, a move which, far from adding a bizarre innuendo to their acts, actually shored up the innocence of it all (brilliantly, Braben convinced Morecambe it would be OK by pointing out that Stan and Ollie used to do it). In the double entendre inferno of the Seventies, when cats were never cats and ding-a-lings weren't ever bells, two grown men shared a bed and it was funny purely because they were funny. Eddie Braben is credited for almost everything they did, which isn't entirely accurate, but he did create the new tone of the show: the meta-comedy, in which the show would be about the show, where the guest star's performance (and the guest star) would have been sent up to the point of implosion long before the guest star actually performed, and when the show's finale wasn't so much a play as a parody of a pastiche of a mockery, wrapped up in a lampoon. The whole device of a show that takes itself apart as it goes along is now the basis of much American and British comedy, not so much self-referential as self-devouring, and while Eddie Braben may not have invented it, he made it the Christmas high point for millions. Not that there wasn't pressure. Rarely has one writer been so associated with one show (the workload on the almost equally popular The Two Ronnies was divided among an evenly spread team of writers, with contributions from Ronnie Barker himself). "The Christmas show," said Braben, "was a killer. People were judging the quality of their Christmas on The Morecambe and Wise Show. If they didn't like the show, they had a bad Christmas. This was an awful thing to have hanging over you, and it added to the pressure. This burden disappeared when the Golden Triangle was disbanded; Morecambe and Wise moved to ITV at the end of the decade, while Braben, still under contract to the BBC, stayed where he was. He went on to work on several highly regarded shows, and then with Eric and Ernie at the end of their career. His legacy was acknowledged several times in his lifetime, specifically with his collaboration on The Play What I Wrote, a hit stage rendition of those Golden Triangle years, and more generally in the BBC's policy of repeating and repackaging Morecambe and Wise's Seventies work. This ensured not only that fresh generations were aware of the classic Christmas specials, but also that they got to see entire shows from the era, something much more representative of the quality, and quantity, of Braben's contribution to comedy. In 1998, Eddie Braben spoke to a documentary team about the warmth of the relationship he saw when he sat down to study Morecambe and Wise at work. "I like to think I captured that," he said. And I like to think he captured much more than that.