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1. #When were laurel and hardy movies made series#
2. #When were laurel and hardy movies made tv#

I had a letter from a guy at the Bank of Ireland there, telling me that all the staff, due to the excitement, left the bank wide open to come and see us, then realising, they all rushed back! Can you imagine? It really was a sight.”īecause the pair expected to be away for more than half a year, they were joined by their wives. “People came out in row boats, whistles blowing the schools had specially closed so the kids could be there with the cheering crowds. “This was no publicity stunt,” Laurel wrote to a friend. When they sailed into Cobh harbour in Cork they were astonished at the warmth of the greeting. To avoid using up work permit time in England, the comedians had decided to rehearse in Ireland. It started in glorious style, though, on 9 September 1953. The final visit, which came only 11 months after a 10-month tour in 1952, really was another fine mess. This tour is explored in the forthcoming biopic Stan and Ollie, which stars Steve Coogan as Stan and John C Reilly as Ollie.

They literally cried tears of gratitude.”Īll of which makes what happened in 19, when they were back in the United Kingdom for what turned out to be their last ever tour, all the sadder.

#When were laurel and hardy movies made tv#

“From 1945, they were never paid a single penny for anything, not a public appearance, not a TV appearance, nothing. “They had suffered shocking treatment by the Americans,” says Marriot. Laurel and Hardy sometimes had to wait more than five minutes for the cheering and hooting to stop before they could begin their stage act. The tumultuous reaction from British theatre audiences stunned them.

The pair had been doing more and more stage shows in America and Europe. They received no royalties for their films and Hardy had a history of gambling, reportedly once losing around £350,000 in a week on the horses. With no new movies on the horizon, they were also in need of money. That shows their lack of status back in the States”, he tells The Telegraph. He said when he was in a queue shopping for groceries, a man recognised him and said ‘Get out of my way, Fatty’. “Oliver Hardy told a story about how they were considered past it. “America was treating them as absolute has-beens,” says AJ Marriot, author of the 1993 book Laurel and Hardy: The British Tours. Laurel, a master at directing and producing, had lost artistic control over their movies and described working with the latter studios as “a disgusting affair to us all the way through”.

#When were laurel and hardy movies made series#

After the wonderful films with Hal Roach’s studios in the Thirties, they made a series of weak comedies in the Forties for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and 20th Century Fox. Stan Laurel and Oliver Norvell Hardy had been unsure about their reception in 1947, a time when they were just happy to be away from America and a film career that was on its last legs. These British fans, desperate for something cheerful after years of war and shortages, were even more ecstatic than the crowds who had greeted the pair on their first joint visit to Britain in 1932 – the year they won an Oscar for The Music Box, their comedy short about two hapless piano movers. Nine people were sent to hospital with injuries. The terrified duo were almost crushed as they left their train and were forced down a small pedestrian walkway. In Glasgow, more than 8,000 people gathered on the station concourse. In 1947, mounted police were called to Liverpool Lime Street to keep back frenzied crowds waiting for their comedy heroes. Nearly two decades before Beatlemania, there was Laurel-and-Hardy mania, when wild scenes greeted their visit to Britain after the Second World War.