This thorough and thoroughly enjoyable biography of Britain's best- loved double act opens with the phenomena that was their 1977 Christmas Day television show. An unequalled audience of 29 million viewers watched Eric and Ernie do their stuff while Angela Rippon high kicked, Eddie Waring turned back flips, and a confused Elton John complained of having been all over the This thorough and thoroughly enjoyable biography of Britain's best- loved double act opens with the phenomena that was their 1977 Christmas Day television show. An unequalled audience of 29 million viewers watched Eric and Ernie do their stuff while Angela Rippon high kicked, Eddie Waring turned back flips, and a confused Elton John complained of having been all over the place looking for the studio. In that suit?, replied an incredulous Eric. This was the last great flowering of the music halls transported to nearly every sitting room in the UK. Graham McCann evocatively recreates the now lost world of entertainment where the young Eric Barthlomew and Ernie Wiseman learned their trade. But it was when they escaped sharing a bill with unicyclists and paper tearers and got on the box that they were finally crowned as a national institution. McCann does not hide the exhausting hard work that went into their shows, or stint in his praise for their scriptwriters, but it is in recalling their genius for making people of all classes laugh--apparently including the Queen who watched in 1977--that this book is a most affectionate and fitting tribute to two men who really did bring sunshine to millions. --Nick Wroe