The Morecambe & Wise Christmas Special 1976 with Angela Rippon
The party is finally over. Angela Rippon completed her final splits and made her final turn on the court with Kai Widdrington. She gave a stunning performance on Dancing with the Stars this year, dancing the tango, waltzing, performing a terrifying paso doble and flying the septuagenarian flag everywhere. The show's oldest contestant, at 20 episodes, became an inspiration. The only thing she didn't give was a surprise.
An hour later at The Morecambe & “Wise Show” for Christmas 1976: two words on a blue background announcing a news release. Viewers were not supposed to know that this was a pun, even though Angela Rippon appeared on screen looking as serious and cool as ever while reading the Nine O'Clock News.
“The economic report has just arrived from 11 Downing Street,” she intoned. “The Chancellor's statement reads as follows.” Sober for now – although Rippon's neckline was suspiciously deep, and her belt sparkled provocatively.
Viewers are used to celebrities getting mickey on the Morecambe & Wise. Earlier in the same episode, Elton John had an argument with his hosts over the counter-melody. In the previous sketch, John Thaw and Dennis Waterman, the flinty, unsmiling stars of The Sweeney, repeatedly allowed themselves to be splashed with mud. So the 26 million viewers at home were expecting something. But not what followed.
“There may be trouble ahead,” Rippon continued, “but as long as the moon shines,” and the sounds of strings and saxophones could be heard—“and music and love,”—then her desk parted to reveal a huge fluffy flower flower on the sofa. composition between two white columns – “and romance” – at that moment Rippon threw up her legs and stood up, and Eric and Ernie in top hats and tails jumped up and sang: “Let's meet the music and dance.”
Since then, Rippon has done a lot of things. She presented Come Dancing and danced for children in need and comics. And this year “Dancing with the Stars” appeared. But all these appearances are rooted in that sensational moment in 1976, when British television's first full-time female newsreader stood up and kicked high in a dress—actually two dresses: one a slit chiffon skirt, the other a florid frontless creation . all.
Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise with Angela Rippon, Christmas 1979. Photo: Hart/ANL/Shutterstock
“I was completely stunned by the reaction,” she says 46 years later. “I just was. It was far beyond anything I expected. I had no reference point by which I could judge this. It just exploded. It was simply extraordinary.”
It was such a coup that it got Rippon dancing, and surveillance was so easy at the BBC in those days that extra measures were taken to prevent news of her involvement from spreading. “Every studio used to have a viewing gallery,” recalls Bobby Warans, who worked as a prop buyer for the show, “so you could go in and see what was going on in rehearsal. I remember they closed all the studio doors so that no one knew about it except the direct production team.”
Rippon's face was familiar to him from last year. The idea of a woman reading the BBC news was such a novelty that audiences at the Royal Variety Performance caught the joke when Max Bygraves brought the audience back to watch the nine-hour special. “You know, she doesn’t have legs,” he joked. “They roll her around on wheels.”
From the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show, 1976. Photo: BBC Pictures
A similar curiosity about Rippon's lower limbs occurred to Ernest Maxine, producer-choreographer of Morecambe and The Wise Show. It all started when she showed a relative the studio while they were recording earlier that year. “It was the first time I saw her from there,” he told Louis Barf, author of Sunshine and Laughter: The Story of Morecambe and Wise. “I drank coffee with her in the dining room, but she always sat. And on the Nine O'Clock News it was always from there. Now I saw these magnificent legs.”
Rippon doesn't remember anything about it. She recalls that she first heard about the idea during a phone call. “I was in the newsroom on the sixth floor of BBC Television Center when the phone rang and the man on the end of the line said, 'I'm Eric and Ern's producer.' The boys would like you to be at their Christmas show. I think I screamed. “What!” “Can you sing?” “Not unless you want to clear the studio in 30 seconds, but I think I can still dance a little.” I stopped dancing when I was 17, but like all little girls, I wanted to be a ballerina.” She asked her editor Alan Prothero for permission. “What are you going to do?” he asked. “I’m not sure yet,” she replied. In fact, according to Barf, Morecambe was less interested in the idea than Wise, feeling that the show was already full of dancing stars. But Maxine sneakily arranged for Morecambe to meet her at a cricket dinner at Lord's. That evening he returned reassured and privately told Maxine, “Let's get Angela Rippon on the show.”
Ernie Wise and Angela Rippon during the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show, 1976. Photo: Fremantle Media/Shutterstock
It was only when she arrived at the BBC rehearsal studio in North Acton that Maxine showed her the number he had choreographed: a news show followed by an opening ballet that faded into farce, performed to the song “You're Charming” with a repeated chorus : “But what are we going to do with it?” before ending with a hot finale in a Latin bar. Over the course of three weeks, the rehearsal lasted a total of three hours. This was followed on the same day by a studio rehearsal, an on-camera rehearsal and finally a recording in front of a live audience.
Bobby Warans, just 22 years old at the time, is one of the few still alive from working on the 1976 Christmas show. As a prop buyer, he worked with show designer Vic Meredith. “Vic would do renderings to show the director, Eric and Ernie, and ask, 'Is this what you had in mind?' He then went to a senior contractor to build it. Then he would give me my list of props, and we would go out together and choose everything we needed. For Angela Rippon's dance, he had to fill the stage with chiffon drapes and chandeliers, as well as provide an announcer's chair.
Warens went on to supply props for countless BBC light entertainment shows including The Two Ronnies and, from 2006, Strictly Come Dancing. Morecambe and Wise was his first introduction to the royal family on television. “When I first did the show, I was in awe,” he recalls. “Throughout the series, Eric and Ernie learned your name, and in the end you didn't think of them as stars. It looked like a good club. Nowadays everyone comes with a bunch of hangers-on. In those days they just came on their own. Elton came by himself, and I'm sure he went to the dining room like everyone else.”
Eric Morecambe, Ernie Wise and Elton John in a sketch from the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show, 1976. Photo: BBC Pictures
The Rippon program was far from the biggest part of the show, of which Barry Cryer was the lead writer. In a grander spectacle, Maxine indulged Wise's Hollywood fantasies by recreating Gene Kelly's dance for Singin' in the Rain, the joke being that the only water on set was pouring from the drains and awnings onto the head of a Morecambe police officer standing nearby. Elton John appeared not only in his sketch, but also in front of the cover and sang “Sorry seems to be the hardest word.”
The centerpiece was “The Epic of the Great World War,” starring Thaw and glamorous actress Waterman. Keith O'Mara and the motorcycle stunt team, which lasted over 20 minutes. Even the credits were funny: “Ammunition provided by Sir Lew Garnet. Music performed by Cold Cream Guards, conducted by Lt. Col. Andrew. Preview of IOUTWOQUID. (This was a joke referencing André Previn's famous guest appearance five years earlier.)
Despite hiring bigger showbiz stars as guest stars, Maxine intuitively realized that Angela Rippon's dance was the show's greatest coup and called it the defining discovery. He also made sure that no one at the BBC could spread the information. “If there was a big musical number that was always filmed on a separate day,” Warens recalls, “because it was a much larger set that took up half the studio.”
Angela Rippon in Morecambe & Wise Christmas special in 1977. Photo: Fremantle Media/Shutterstock
All parts of the program were filmed in two takes. Rippon doesn't remember being nervous. “I worked on live television for a long time, so I was used to working in front of a live audience. It's a very, very simple routine. In addition, they were professionals to their fingertips. Ernie, of course, was a dancer. Eric was a good bully – he could take the music and make it look good. They were so nice to work with and I had fun.”
They had so much fun that she (and Elton) returned a year later for the 1977 Christmas show. Fourteen cancan dancers wearing blue basques and feather headdresses kicked their feet high in unison. Toward the end of the performance, the camera panned to the left end of the line to see Rippon with a wide, knowing smile as she walked out last, curtseying and turning around. “It was very funny!” she remembers.
At the very end of the show, Rippon appeared at the table, out of breath, still in her suit and blowing a feather out of her hair, as she announced that news was to follow. In fact, she was supposed to present the news that evening, so viewers saw her stagger off to change clothes, and then reappear moments later as the real newsreader.
“We had to do two endings,” she recalls. “We did a completely different ending, so if there was something terribly serious in the news, we wouldn't have used it.”
Her face was the last one anyone saw on Morecambe & Wise on the BBC. At the end of the 1977 Christmas show, it was announced that after ten years at the BBC, Morecambe and Wise had left. Bobby Varans heard it first, along with his colleague, production designer Vic Meredith, as they rode the elevator up to the sixth floor for a big party. “Suddenly Eric burst into the lift and said, 'Don't say anything, enjoy yourself tonight, we've signed with Thames.' We knew this before the BBC did.” An era is over.
Rippon is now 79 years old and one of the last remaining links to the golden age of light entertainment. Throughout her time on Strictly, people of a certain age wondered if she might somehow return to Maxine's choreography for Morecambe and Wise. But that was never the plan, she says.
“Why do I need this? I don't think that would be fair to the memory of Eric and Ern. It stands apart. People keep telling me it's a landmark moment. Why change that?
Strictly Come Dancing continues on BBC One, November 25, 7:30 p.m.
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