PENGUIN BOOKS
AND IT’S GOODNIGHT FROM HIM…
Ronnie Corbett OBE has worked in the entertainment industry since the 1950s. He rose to prominence in the 1960s with his regular appearances on The Frost Report, where he met Ronnie Barker. Together, they formed The Two Ronnies which went on to run for sixteen years. Ronnie Corbett has been happily married to Anne for more than forty years. They have two daughters and live near Croydon.
David Nobbs has written sixteen novels and several television series including The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, A Bit of a Do and Love on a Branch Line. He has also written for many top comedians including Tommy Cooper, Ken Dodd, Les Dawson – and, of course, The Two Ronnies. He lives in North Yorkshire with his wife Susan.
And It’s Goodnight
From Him…
The Autobiography of the Two Ronnies
RONNIE CORBETT with DAVID NOBBS
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Michael Joseph 2006
Published in Penguin Books 2007
1
Copyright © Ronnie Corbett, 2006
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-190152-7
For dear Ron, a great friend and colleague who is deeply missed,
and for Joy, who has borne her loss so bravely and supported
this book so thoroughly
I would, personally, like to thank David Nobbs for
lending this book his truly light touch and splendid
way with words.
Ronnie Corbett
1
‘Same again, please.’
Those were almost the first words that Ronnie Barker ever said to me. Not quite, obviously, because if he hadn’t ordered a drink from me already, I could hardly have known what he meant by ‘Same again, please.’ But, sadly, I can’t remember his very first words to me as I can’t remember what he was drinking at that first meeting. It was a very long time ago.
It was 1963, in fact, the year of the Profumo Affair, in which John Profumo, Secretary of State for War in the Conservative government, confessed that he had lied to the House of Commons and had had an affair with Christine Keeler, call girl and model. Profumo resigned and, later in the year, largely as a result of this scandal, his Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, was also forced to resign. It was the year of the Great Train Robbery, when the Scotland to London Post Office express was ambushed near Cheddington and robbed of £2.5 million. It was also the year in which President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. It was a momentous year in the world.
Ronnie was thirty-three, and I was a year younger. He was beginning to establish himself as a character actor in the West End and on radio, and I was working as a barman between jobs. Somehow, that seems an appropriate beginning. If we’d done a sketch about our first meeting, that was the way it would have been cast.
My life at that time was very busy. During the day I was running the stores at the Victory Club in Edgware Road, which was owned by Mecca Ballrooms. I had my lunch and tea there, and at five thirty I drove my little bullnose Morris to the Buckstone Club, where I had my supper and ran the bar until after midnight. And the theatrical term for that is ‘resting’! Sometimes I was resting almost to the point of exhaustion.
The Buckstone Club was in a basement in Suffolk Street, right behind the stage door of the Haymarket Theatre, and was frequented by all sorts of theatrical luminaries – Sean Connery, Stanley Baker, John Gielgud, Edith Evans and many others. They felt safe from the public there, though not necessarily from the critics. The famous critic Kenneth Tynan – the first man to use a certain four-letter word on television, a word banned then and almost compulsory now – was a regular, in his velvet jacket, holding his cigarette artily between the wrong fingers. It’s strange what one remembers.
Ronnie B. struck me at those early meetings as a very pleasant, easy person, very comfortable with himself. I realized later, when I got to know him better, that he sometimes found it difficult to be comfortable with every Tom, Dick or Harry. In fact he was quite shy. But in the Buckstone Club, in the company of his peers, he felt quite easy and at home. He was always quite smartly dressed, often in a Glen Urquhart suit, but I don’t think he was actually particularly interested in clothes, certainly not as interested as I am. He didn’t share my feeling for colours and textures of materials. His style was a bit conservative.
Ronnie was playing a French gangster in the long-running musical Irma La Douce – too long-running for his liking. He was trapped in it for two years and came to hate it and felt guilty about hating it when he was in regular work in such a precarious profession. He used to come in occasionally in the evenings, but our first meeting was at lunchtime. I did sometimes work the lunchtime shift. Ronnie was recording the very popular radio comedy The Navy Lark round the corner at the Paris Theatre and used to come in for a light lunch with his wife, Joy, who always accompanied him when he was doing shows with an audience.
One of the many coincidences that seemed to stalk our lives was that I already knew Joy, who was a stage manager. She had stage-managed a pantomime I had done in Bromley. So Ronnie knew about my career, just as I knew about his, and there was plenty to chat about as I served him his drinks. Was there anything more than that, some intimation about future happenings, some feeling that our first meeting was, for us at least, one more momentous event in that year of momentous events? None whatsoever.
Ronnie and I actually had only one remotely serious argument in our lives, and very few disagreements, but, ironically, one of the disagreements involves this very first meeting. He always claimed that I was standing on a box in order to see over the bar. Later he embroidered the story and said I had two boxes, one marked ‘AGNES’ and the other ‘CHAMP’. It took him a while to work out that they were a champagne box cut in half. That sounds to me like a bit of typical Ronnie B. word play. Possibly he came to believe that I’d been standing on a box, but I promise you, I swear to you, hand on knee, that I wasn’t. I didn’t need to. It was a very low bar. Besides, I would have needed a whole row of boxes running the length of the bar, otherwise I would ha
ve been disappearing from view and popping up again all over the place. What did he think I was, a comedian?
The Buckstone Club was a cheery place, compact, almost scruffy in the best London traditions. In its poky dining room two delightful waitresses, Nancy from Ireland and Bianca from Austria, served light lunches, afternoon teas for actors between matinees and evening performances and very good suppers. It was one of the most enjoyable of all my jobs, not least because it’s intimately associated for me with the two most important people in my adult life. Not only Ronnie, my colleague and great friend, but also Anne, my lovely wife. Anne was five foot eight and appearing on stage with the Crazy Gang. I was naturally a little nervous about asking her out. The Buckstone Club provided a safe haven, where I was known, and we did much of our courtship there.
Our profession is an insecure one, and I didn’t dare commit myself to Anne until I had got myself properly established. Little did I know then that the man in the Glen Urquhart suit would help me get established beyond my wildest dreams, and that, before ten years had passed, The Two Ronnies would be a huge hit on BBC1 on Saturday evenings, and the BBC bosses would be echoing those words of Ronnie Barker in the Buckstone Club.
‘Same again, please.’
2
Three years after my first meeting with Ronnie Barker, David Frost invited me to tea at a much grander place than the Buckstone Club. The Methodist minister’s son from Raunds in Northamptonshire had been propelled by the success of That Was the Week That Was into a lifestyle in which it was natural for him to have tea at the Ritz. Only two people have ever invited me to tea at the Ritz. The second was much more surprising. Of which more anon.
Over the cucumber sandwiches, David put an immensely appealing proposition to me. He wanted me to appear in his new show, The Frost Report. TW3 had been a sensation, a live satirical show that had made TV instant and exciting and more talked about than it had ever been. David’s follow-up to it would be a major television event, and to be a part of it would represent a huge leap in my career.
The idea was that I would team up with two other actors, one of whom was Ronnie Barker. Ronnie was a much more well-known figure than me, through his stage performances and his work on two extremely successful and long-running radio shows, The Navy Lark and Variety Playhouse. He had been suggested by the producer, Jimmy Gilbert.
The third actor was not at all well known. David knew him from the Cambridge Footlights, and he was currently in Canada with a university show, Second City Review. His name was John Cleese.
David had seen me performing with Danny La Rue at Winston’s, a London night club. In those days the West End was packed with night clubs that put on proper little shows, slightly satirical, quite witty, a bit naughty, certainly glamorous, with lovely girls who would come on from The Talk of the Town or from musicals, and would be doing two jobs, and a nice little trio would play, and they would be specially written by people like Bryan Blackburn and Barry Cryer in his early days. Winston’s was one of the best of these clubs, and I had a very happy time there. David used to visit with his girlfriend, the actress and dancer Jenny Logan. Apparently he saw me and… no, I’ll rephrase that. I may be small but I’m not that small. He must have seen me. What I should have said is that apparently he liked what he saw. I say ‘apparently’ because he didn’t talk to me and tell me, so the invitation for cucumber sandwiches came as a complete surprise.
There was an enormous snag, however. I was appearing in a new West End musical, Twang, at the Shaftesbury Theatre. Unless it closed, I wouldn’t be able to do The Frost Report. Dick Vosburgh, later to become one of our regular and most brilliant writers, told me that he had urged Jimmy Gilbert to go and see me in Twang, in which I was playing the part of Will Scarlett. What Dick liked about my performance was that I was playing my part truthfully in a show in which, he thought, many of the cast were not.
David already felt that Twang wouldn’t run, and that I would become available. In fact he must have been pretty certain, or I don’t think he would have given me that tea. But how could it possibly fail? It was written by Lionel Bart, who had achieved massive successes with Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be and Oliver. It was directed by Joan Littlewood, who had become a legend in her own rehearsal time with huge hits like Oh What a Lovely War. It was designed by Oliver Messel and choreographed by Paddy Stone – great talents both.
As the King of Siam with Danny La Rue.
But Lionel Bart’s reworking of the Robin Hood legend did fail. It failed famously, spectacularly, dispiritingly. It was a right old mess, and the more people changed it and tried to save it, the more it became an even righter old mess. It just about ruined Lionel Bart, who had pumped enormous amounts of his own money into it.
There is a huge element of chance in an actor’s life. If Twang had not failed, I would never have done The Frost Report and I wouldn’t be writing this book. There are also many difficult emotional moments. I could not possibly want a play in which I was appearing to fail, especially when I admired its author and knew how much it meant to him. Being part of a failure is a horrible experience. But we all knew that there was a great deal wrong with the show, and I
Very, very young! Winston’s Club.
suppose I must have hoped that, if it was going to fail, it would fail quickly enough for me to be able to do The Frost Report. It did, and I would have to say, in retrospect, that its failure was as important to my career as any of my successes. At the time I took no pleasure from it, but I couldn’t regret it either.
Each programme of The Frost Report was on a different subject – politics, authority, religion, class, the countryside, etc. The script was created in a rather unusual way. First Antony Jay, a very clever man who later wrote Yes, Minister with Jonathan Lynn, wrote a thoughtful, incisive essay on the subject of the week. Then the writers and actors gleefully removed most of the thoughtfulness and incisiveness, turning it into a funny series. That isn’t quite fair. The show did contain some biting satirical material, and was never less than intelligent, and often very, very funny. We had some very clever writers, including Barry Cryer, Dick Vosburgh, Neil Shand, Graham Chapman, Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Eric Idle. The last four, with John Cleese, were later of course to become the stars of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
The format of the show was basically very simple: a continuous monologue by David, interspersed with one-liners, quickies and sketches from John, Ronnie, Sheila Steafel and me, and two musical numbers, one from the great Tom Lehrer, the other from the delightful Julie Felix.
Ronnie and I got on well from the start. There was an immediate comfort between us. It wasn’t spectacular. There was a sensible reserve in our relationship. It was, if you like, the beginning of a very British friendship.
People forget that John Cleese first tried out his silly walks on The Frost Report, and I did a filmed item, probably long forgotten now, in which I came upon a sign which said, ‘Do Not Walk On The Grass’, so I danced on the grass, hopped
on the grass, jumped on the grass, did everything but walk on the grass. But one item that everybody remembers is the class sketch, written by a very clever Glaswegian writer named John Law, who died tragically young.
The three of us stood side by side, in front of a bare background. John Cleese stood on the left of the screen, wearing a bowler hat. Ronnie B. stood in the middle in a trilby. I stood to the right, in a cloth cap and muffler. The sight of the three of us, John so tall and I so short and Ronnie rather plump in the middle (I mean the middle of the three of us, not the middle of himself – well, that too, I suppose), was intrinsically funny. Indeed, writing in the Listener, that distinguished author Anthony Burgess – creator of The Clockwork Orange and much much else – said, ‘Funny singly, the men are funnier still together, and part of their funniness derives from grotesque physical contrast – the very tall, the medium chubby, the very small. They are a kind of visual epigram made out of the intellectual fact of human variety. This epigram is al
so a paradigm for conjugating social statements – about class, chiefly – with great neatness.’ I felt like phoning my dad in Scotland and saying, ‘I’ve made it, Dad. Not only am I an epigram, I’m also a paradigm.’
All that did rather suggest the question, ‘Were we chosen not for our talent, but for our height?’ I’d like to think not, but, in any case, it hardly matters now.
‘I look down on him,’ began John, looking down on Ronnie B., ‘because I am upper class.’
‘I look up to him,’ said Ronnie B., looking up at John, ‘because he is upper class. But I look down on him…’ he indicated me ‘… because he is lower class. I am middle class.’
‘I know my place,’ I said. ‘I look up to them both. But I don’t look up to him…’ I looked up at Ronnie B. ‘…as much as I look up to him…’ I looked up at John even more. ‘…’cos he has innate breeding.’
‘I have innate breeding, but I have not got any money,’ said John. ‘So sometimes I look up to him.’
He bent his knees and looked up at Ronnie B.
‘I still look up to him,’ said Ronnie B., looking up at John, ‘because, although I have money, I am vulgar. But I am not as vulgar as him…’he indicated me ‘…so I still look down on him.’
‘I know my place,’ I said. ‘I look up to both of them. But, while I am poor, I am industrious, honest and trustworthy. Had I the inclination, I could look down on them. But I don’t.’
‘We all know our place,’ said Ronnie B., ‘but what do we get out of it?’
‘I get a feeling of superiority over them,’ said John, indicating us both.
‘I get a feeling of inferiority from him,’ said Ronnie B., looking up at John, ‘but a feeling of superiority over him.’
He looked down on me.
And It's Goodnight from Him . . . Page 1
