Amid the wealth of entertainment on TV today, a reminder - if ever it were needed - of one of the great double acts of British comedy and a reminder too of a time when humour came in gentler form. These days stars are made overnight, but Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise's success was hard-earned, the result of many years of apprenticeship. Eric's wife, Joan, once said there was never a moment when her husband became famous, it was more a gradual process. The Greatest Moment runs through some of the pair's finely honed sketches, including a musical number featuring Angela Rippon.

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You can warm your hands on the waves of affection that waft from writer Peter Bowker's funny, sweet-natured look at the early years of our most beloved comic partnership, Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise.

We follow the duo just before they hit the really big time, from their first meeting when they were both child stars on the same bill, through the days touring grotty clubs and music halls, right up to their first, disastrous television appearance: "Northern comedy just doesn't play on television," says a snitty BBC exec, before forcing the lads into a series of lame, generic TV sketches.

The evolution of the surreally brilliant act that was to make them adored is nicely done, thanks to Bowker's light touch and to a smashing cast, particularly comedian Daniel Rigby as the genial, uncomplaining but sharp-witted Morecambe, who manages both to look and sound like Eric without resorting to caricature. Bryan Dick is grafter Ernie, whose forbearance is frequently tested by his partner.

It's more than a quarter of a century since Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise's double act was stopped in its tracks by Morecambe's untimely death - which, in the world of showbiz, is certainly enough time to be forgotten, usurped or found to be desperately unfashionable by a new generation of viewers and performers. But the pair retain enough comic sparkle to put most of their successors in the shade.

Eric and Ernie is a biopic that follows the pair from their beginnings on Jack Hylton's youth theatre circuit up until the brink of TV success in the 1950s. Written by Peter Bowker, and starring Bryan Dick as Ernie Wise, Daniel Rigby as Eric Morecambe and Victoria Wood as Morecambe's ambitious, plain-talking mother Sadie, it's a wonderful piece of drama: warm-hearted, clever, beautifully acted and funny enough to make your cheeks ache.

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I'm Rimsky-Korsakov. I've got a brother at home - he's got a cold on his chest. We call him Nasty-Chestikov. Boom-boom. My girlfriend used to be in a circus. She chewed hammers. Was she professional? No, hammer-chewer.

Shall I stop now? In the early 1950s a comedy new wave was breaking on the shores of the Light Programme. Spike Milligan and Michael Bentine were breaking all the rules in Crazy People, later The Goon Show, while the improvised In All Directions featured Peters Ustinov and Jones in a Beckettesque road movie, driving round in a perpetual search for Copthorne Avenue.

But some of the emerging talent cleaved to more traditional comic values, as evidenced in my intro. Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise's idols were Abbott and Costello and the Marx Brothers, and it showed in their rat-a-tat routines. Apart from playing the perfect straight man, Wise took it upon himself to be the duo's archivist, and he recorded a stack of material which lay in suitcases in his garage for decades. "I don't think he ever played them back," his widow, Doreen, told Jon Culshaw in Morecambe and Wise: The Garage Tapes. "He just knew he should keep them." A wise decision, given the BBC's historic penchant for wiping stuff.

The elements we know and love from the TV shows are all there: the bad playlets, the song and dance routines, the guest stars ripe for mickey-taking, though not the stellar names of later shows. Then, it was the likes of Jack Jackson, Brylcreemed trumpeter and Housewives' Choice disc-spinner, or Brian Rees, star of The Adventures of PC 49 ("surely you remember his catchphrase 'Oh, my Sunday helmet!' "). It feels like aeons ago, not just half a century.

When the pair first tried to break into TV, in 1954, it was a disaster. For the rest of his career Eric carried round the Express review: "Is that a television I see in the corner of my living room? No, it's the box the BBC buried Morecambe and Wise in last night."

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