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Laurel and Hardy

“Double acts go back almost as far as showbiz goes,” says Evening Standard comedy critic Bruce Dessau. “Double acts started out in music halls in the UK and America.”

And the first great double act that leapt from stage to screen was Laurel and Hardy. They had the quintessential double act dynamic, with Oliver Hardy the serious, gruff leader convinced of his own excellence, and Stan Laurel the naïve bumbling fool getting things wrong.

As much as their comedy was based in conflict, there was also a softer side. “Without wanting to sound squashy and sentimental,” says Stephen Fry, one half of his own comedy double act Fry and Laurie, “there's an extraordinary love and need and dependence there.”

Laurel and Hardy made a total of 107 films together, including both shorts and features.

Morecambe and Wise

Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise started working together in 1941 but reached their peak on television in the 1970s. “Their Christmas specials were a viewing highlight for millions,” says Ellen. “They still hold the record for one of the most watched programmes on TV, and rightly so.”

Morecambe and Wise always played with their differences, but Mark says another of their great strengths was the way they incorporated guest stars who could unite them. Who can forget their performance with composer Andre Previn?

“Bringing an outside element in,” says Kermode, “and the joke becomes [Morecambe and Wise] are completely on the same page and Previn isn't. Most of the time, the friction between them is Ernie's pompous and Eric is deflating, but as soon as third party comes in they become of a piece. I think [the Previn sketch] is one of the greatest of all time because you've got a third party who doesn't get the joke.”

Listen to The Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise Show.

Victoria Wood and Julie Walters

Wood and Walters were an usual double act in the sense that only one of them wrote the material. Wood was the genius writer of the pair and Walters her perfect muse. They met in 1978 and appeared in their first show, the short-lived Wood & Walters, in 1982, then went on to work together for decades. Arguably, Wood would often generously give Walters the better roles, gifting her the likes of shuffling housekeeper Mrs Overall and the role of the highly eccentric Petula in Dinnerladies.

She instinctively knew how to wring maximum comedy from Wood’s writing. Again, in an unusual step for double acts, they also worked together in drama productions, mostly notably in the acclaimed Pat and Margaret.

Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson

The double act underwent a transformation in the 1980s, with the arrival of 'alternative comedy'. “It overturned all the comedy tropes,” says Mark. “You didn't have the straight man and the funny person. It would be two people on stage, completely anarchically out of control.”

No pair illustrated that quite like Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson. Their comedy was not so much about jokes as being so completely ridiculous, and often fairly disgusting, that you couldn't help but laugh at the absurdity. Their biggest hit was as part of The Young Ones, but they also had a huge cult following for their sitcom Bottom.

Listen to Adrian Edmondson's appearance on Desert Island Discs on 大象传媒 Sounds.

French and Saunders

Before Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders appeared, with their brilliantly daft sketch comedy, the world of double acts in alternative comedy was overwhelmingly male. They didn't position themselves as a 'female double act'; they just did whatever they wanted and became one of the UK's biggest comedy acts, with six series of their own sketch show (plus Christmas special) and multiple massive solo projects, like The Vicar of Dibley and Absolutely Fabulous.

“They're one of the all-time great double acts of any and all genders,” says Ellen. Comedian Carrie Howard remembers watching the pair as a child. “They were these two amazing women who were the best,” she says. “So in my head, when I was a little girl, there was equality [in comedy] because French and Saunders were so big that they were like 10 women on TV.”

French and Saunders star in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane Austen? on 大象传媒 Radio 4.

Fry and Laurie

Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie were introduced at Cambridge University by the actress Emma Thompson and immediately hit it off. Their comedy was not the manic, surreal sort that had been embraced by pairs who came shortly before them. They were silly but also literary, with their biggest hit coming in an adaptation of PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster.

Though too modest to directly describe what made he and Laurie great, Fry says the appeal of watching a double act, who know each other deeply and can play endlessly with their relationship, is that the closeness and combat is “like watching cats play with string, or puppies wrestle with each other. It sort of helps us.”

Mitchell and Webb

David Mitchell and Robert Webb are somewhere between Fry and Laurie and Morecambe and Wise. They began with the (not especially successful) sketch show The Mitchell and Webb Situation in 2001, then rocketed to fame in 2003 in the sitcom Peep Show, which ran until 2015. Mitchell played Mark, a man who could barely be more socially awkward, and Webb played Jeremy, who can’t imagine anyone thinking he's less than brilliant.

They returned to sketch comedy with That Mitchell and Webb Look, producing such endlessly memed sketches as Are We The Baddies?, about Nazis realising they might not be the good guys. Even that sketch alone would have them remembered among the very best.

Listen to That Mitchell and Webb Sound on 大象传媒 Sounds.

Simon Pegg and Nick Frost

You can't talk about the double act of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost without acknowledging the man who brought them together. Writer/director Edgar Wright first put the two actors together in the sitcom Spaced. And they've chiefly been a trio ever since, albeit with Wright off-camera.

In the films Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World's End, Wright wrote a winning formula for the pair, with Pegg often playing the ever-so-slightly neurotic one and Frost the sort who doesn't really worry what others think. They've had successes without Wright, like Tintin and Paul, but it's with him that their partnership truly blossoms.

Listen to Simon Pegg's Desert Island Discs appearance on 大象传媒 Sounds.

Hear more about the greatest comedy double acts from across the decades by listening to the episode of Screenshot in full.