23 February 2025: the world has been without Stan Laurel for exactly sixty years. When he cracked his last joke, seconds before expiring back in 1965, I doubt I was even aware of who he was. Myself, I was three going on four. If I’d seen Laurel and Hardy at that age, then it was most likely on the flickering, silent medium of 8mm film – an uncle owned a projector and no self-respecting home movie buff was without a few L&H comedies.
The BBC had been showing Laurel and Hardy films since 1948, but in the years since I was born, screenings had dwindled to a mere handful: none at all in 1961 or 1962; a sole screening of the feature A Chump at Oxford in 1963, and a random broadcast of the 1934 short Oliver the Eighth in October 1964. Was this my first sighting of L&H? I can’t remember.
Back in the 60s, with only two channels available, the BBC were far less likely to mark the passing of a comedy legend than is the case today. Admittedly, the published schedule may have been altered to allow for the screening of a film in tribute to Stan at the time of his death, but such last-minute alterations are not reflected in the BBC’s Genome listings which derive from the Radio Times. It wasn’t until May of that year that another L&H film made it into the schedule, and it was another outing for A Chump at Oxford. In July, a brief season of shorts played on Saturday teatimes in the slot normally occupied by Dr. Who (he was on his summer holiday). These are quite likely the first Laurel and Hardy comedies I ever saw. The short season kicked off with the Academy Award-winning The Music Box (31.07.65, 17.40), with Hog Wild, Dirty Work, Towed in a Hole and Oliver the Eighth following in the same slot over subsequent weeks.
Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were both deceased, but for me, Stan and Ollie were very much alive on the small screen. Even when I was old enough to understand the fact of their mortality, I still couldn’t quite accept it. No one truly dies whose image has been immortalised in that way. I continued to enjoy their films on television through the 60s and into the 70s. At Christmas 1974, the BBC broadcast an Omnibus documentary about the comedy team, affording my first insights into the background behind the partnership. This week, it has been dusted off and shown again on BBC4 for the first time in 48 years.
Since that film first went out, I’ve read widely about L&H and their career, and the information it delivers now seems fairly sparse. Episodes in their careers that have since been covered in depth – Stan’s marital disharmony, his falling-out with Hal Roach, the team’s disastrous migration to Fox and MGM – were alluded to, but not examined in any detail: but with only 65 minutes of screen time and a big story to tell, this was only to be expected.
What the film also shows us is how we’d got used to seeing the L&H movies presented on television. There are plenty of clips of classic moments, all of them displaying the low resolution, degraded image quality that was typical of the TV screenings. The BBC was reliant on 16mm material for the bulk of its L&H broadcasts, and the same prints had most likely been in circulation since the late 40s. Most of the short subjects derived from resissues under the ‘Film Classics’ banner, easily identified by their opening title card in the form of a brass nameplate. Watching at the time, it was easy to draw the conclusion that the condition of the films was down to their age: the shorts were over thirty years old. It was only when the Roach studios embarked on a resmastering programme in the 1980s and 90s, returning to original materials, that it became clear exactly how much we’d been missing. I’d assumed that comedies from the 20s and 30s had always looked grainy and fuzzy. Now it was possible to see them in something approaching high definition.
Of all the clips included in the Omnibus documentary, only the dancing sequence ‘At the Ball, That’s All’ from Way Out West looked clear and clean, suggesting that the BBC held a 35mm print in its archive, and in general the feature films always seemed in better shape whenever they turned up on screen. The shorts, however, continued to be broadcast from the same worn-out 16mm copies until well into the 1980s: I taped many of them and came to recognise some of the splices and damage. One print even contained what I at first took to be an intriguing glimpse of an unknown closing shot, seemingly showing Stan and Ollie as ghosts. This was later explained as the fade-out from another film print, Oliver the Eighth, whose end title card had been roughly spliced onto the BBC’s copy of The Midnight Patrol.
Today, the films are slowly – and I mean very slowly – finding their way onto Blu-ray. At present, only a handful of classic shorts has been released, along with the first, silent year of the teaming. But with interest in physical media dwindling and customers increasingly favouring streaming or downloads, will their complete work ever make it into HD?
Stan and Ollie were well served by the BBC, who continued to show their films until the early 2000s, with the old 16mm prints eventually replaced by the 1990s restorations. Yet since then, there’s been next to no sight of them. Without those regular broadcasts, I doubt if I would have got to know them as well as I did, and who knows how many potential devotees are missing out. Their comedy is timeless, and there isn’t even the excuse of the films being in black and white to explain their absence from the schedules – Roach colourised all the sound shorts and features back in the 80s – admittedly with less than impressive results, but at least providing a more attractive alternative to potential broadcasters.
Clearly, whatever rights the BBC once held have long since lapsed, and the only item available from the archive that could be shown to mark 60 years since Stan’s passing was the Omnibus film, paired with the 2018 movie Stan and Ollie.
I was intrigued to see the documentary appear in the schedule, only two months after name checking it twice in this blog. Had someone read it? The BBC seems to have been oblivious as to the existence of the Omnibus film up to now: it could easily have been dusted off for Stan’s centenary in 1990, or the fiftieth anniversary of his death in 2015, but both occasions went by without sight of it. Either way, it’s good to have it back and hopefully this won’t be its last sighting on the network. There’s another anniversary due in two years' time – 2027 will mark one hundred years since the Laurel and Hardy partnership was first enshrined on screen.
I’d be interested to know the extent to which Laurel and Hardy are recognised by younger generations. In Britain, nobody born since the turn of the century has been given much opportunity to see them on television. Talking Pictures has shown a few selected shorts, but TPTV is old people’s television and I doubt they got through to a younger audience.
Today, the best place to find Laurel and Hardy films is online. But you’ve got to be looking for them. As memories fade and older audiences dwindle to nothing, who will carry Stan and Ollie into the future?
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