And It's Goodnight from Him . . .

by Ronnie Corbett; David Mattingly

  Anne went back to work, but not for long. She was soon pregnant again. Our first daughter, Emma, was born in the following April and our second, Sophie, in the April after that. Thank goodness they were healthy.

  The loss of a child puts everything in proportion, and it makes you all the more careful about protecting your other children. Anne had a glittering career ahead of her, but she had no hesitation in giving up for a while to look after the girls. She never intended to give it up for ever, but she remembered, when she was growing up, how her mother was always there for her, and she wanted our girls to come home to a house with life in it, a house where the kettle was always on, and where there were animals. We’ve always had dogs and usually a cat. We’ve had springer spaniels, golden retrievers, cairn terriers. We love them.

  There was always so much for Anne to do. Parent/teacher evenings were almost impossible for me: everyone knew me and everyone felt they had a right to speak to me. By appearing in public I had been deemed to be public property, and so I stopped going. This made things difficult for Anne, who had spent much of her school life at Conti’s learning drama and at Queens training to be an ice skater; she really was a class ice skater, and had not had any normal education at all, so she felt out of her depth when teachers asked awkward questions.

  The children needed Anne, and the years passed, and when she was offered work it never seemed to be the right time. In the end, people gave up offering, and suddenly she found that she hadn’t worked for thirty-eight years.

  It wasn’t easy for her. For many years she would burst into tears if she heard anyone singing a song that she had sung. She couldn’t listen to Barbra Streisand or Judy Garland, whom she had mimicked in the clubs. She started to listen to programmes like Gardeners’ Question Time instead, because they didn’t remind her of her lost career.

  The only plus points for her were that she had always been a nervous performer, so there was some element of relief, and that my career regularly brought her into contact with show business and gave her some of the atmosphere. I would always ask her opinion, and so she felt that she was a part of it. She says that she would have gone mad if she’d married a bank manager.

  Ron and I had had our moments, Ron particularly, but the fact remained that he had been a jobbing actor for nineteen years and I for only a few years less. Now, with families to provide for, we were both hugely grateful for The Frost Report, and there was a real aura of success around it. Much of this was due to the quality of the writing and, dare I say it, the performances, but there was an extra element – David. He behaved as if it was a huge success, and it became so. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. In fact, looking back on it, David himself was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  The show went out live on Thursday evenings, immediately after the Nine O’Clock News. We would begin putting the programme together in the studio in the morning, and David would arrive after lunch with a great armful of papers, covered in jokes written with a thick, felt-tipped pen. Out of this chaos would emerge his CDM. That stood for Continuous Developing Monologue, which was based on Tony Jay’s essay on the subject of the week, liberally studded with jokes.

  Not all of these jokes were sophisticated. When the subject was ‘law’, there was a quickie in which two policemen greeted each other. ‘Morning, super,’ said the sergeant to the superintendant. ‘Morning, gorgeous,’ came the reply. No, not all of them were sophisticated, but most of them were very funny.

  The final hurried rehearsals and the live transmissions were fairly hair-raising. I think John Cleese found it all quite difficult. He would go very white before his performance. Ron was helped so much by his time in rep, and I by my long spells performing in night clubs.

  The fact that the shows were live helped to give them a real sense of occasion. We were slightly hampered at first by an imminent General Election. We couldn’t use overtly political material. The first show went out on Thursday, 10 March 1966. The election was on Thursday, 31 March. In those days, polling stations closed at nine o’clock, so our fourth programme – on ‘politics’, naturally – was the very first programme to be free from restriction. This helped to give the series an even greater impact.

  At the end of the series, David Frost gave a party. A little affair for a few friends? Not quite. He hired the whole of the Battersea Funfair. I shall never forget the slightly frightened look of some of our writers as they were plunged up and down on the Big Dipper, some of them still clutching their glasses of red wine.

  After the first series we recorded a one-off special, called Frost Over England. The aim was to win the prestigious Golden Rose award at the Montreux Television Festival, and it duly did win it. I recall David bursting into our rehearsals in great excitement and saying, ‘We’re on the cover of the Radio Times.’ Ron and I were pretty excited too. It really was a great achievement to make the cover, and on our way home we both stopped to buy copies, only to find that it was just David who was on the cover. By ‘we’ he had meant the programme. Oh well. We got our own cover in the end, much later.

  Ron and I weren’t yet important enough members of the team to be invited to Montreux, but the BBC threw a celebration party – well, perhaps ‘threw’ is an exaggerated word to describe a BBC party – they gently tossed a celebration party. Performers and writers were invited with their wives. Graham Chapman, that sublimely funny man, had recently ‘come out’ as gay, not as easy then as it would be today. He took his somewhat weirdly dressed boyfriend, complete with a name tag saying ‘Mrs Chapman’.

  A second series of The Frost Report was commissioned, but the BBC had not thought yet of Ronnie and me doing

  Winning the Golden Rose. Back row – from left to right: Ray Millichope (film editor), Barry Cryer, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Dick Vosburgh. Second row – from left to right: Fiona Gilbert, Joy Barker, David McKellar, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Bernard Thompson, Anthony Jay, Michael Wale, Eric Idle, Sally (Jimmy Gilbert’s secretary), Neil Shand, Bill Wilson and his wife. Front row – from left to right: Marty Feldman, Sheila Steafel, David Frost, Jimmy Gilbert, Julie Felix and Ronnie Barker. For some reason I was not there that day!

  anything together as a pair. David Frost was a little more far-sighted. He signed us both up under contract to his company, David Paradine (Paradine is his middle name) Productions.

  The rehearsals for The Frost Report took place in a dusty church hall in Crawford Street. Sometimes David put in an appearance, and whenever he did, they would end in a frenzied three-a-side football match. David and John Cleese were both mad on football, while Ronnie B. definitely wasn’t. I loved the game, and often played for the Television All Stars, but I think I did prefer it on the football field. I must say, though, that the sight of David, sometimes criticized for being interested only in money, power and fame, hurling himself across the rehearsal-room floor in goal in a natty suit, was rather endearing. And then he would go off, covered in dust, to have lunch with Tony Snowdon or Norman St John Stevas or Princess Margaret.

  But of course those were the days when David was becoming all-powerful. Soon he would be interviewing American presidents. There was a joke about him that he was driving his drop-head Mercedes with the roof down, and it began to rain. No problem. He just pressed a button, and the rain stopped. You may laugh – please – but round about this time David went to a Test Match at Lord’s, and had to leave at twenty to one for a lunch engagement. At quarter to one the heavens opened, and play was abandoned for the day.

  While we were signing up with David, he in his turn had signed on with Rediffusion, the company that provided ITV’s weekday shows for the London region, and now he sold a Ronnie B. series and a Ronnie C. series to Rediffusion.

  My series was a situation comedy called No, That’s Me Over Here, with Rosemary Leach. I played a bank clerk, bowler-hatted and bespectacled. It was quite a conventional subject, but imaginatively treated, as one would expect from something written by the aforementioned Graham Chapman, with Eric Idle and Bar
ry Cryer. Graham was a wild young man. He drank heavily. When he was offered a drink, he would sometimes say, ‘Oh, thank you. Three pints, please. Well, I drink faster than you.’ He was easily the wildest and silliest of all the Pythons, so it was genius on their part to cast him as the officer type who tried to keep the programme from getting too silly. Even at his most impossible, Graham retained great charm and warmth. He died tragically young, having abused his body too much for too long, but lives on triumphantly as the man mistaken for the Messiah in The Life of Brian.

  Eric brought a different, individual, Pythonesque tone to the comedy, and, after all the hilarious shows he had written for the night clubs where I worked, Barry probably understood better than any man alive what I could and couldn’t do. Add that comic genius Marty Feldman as the executive producer, and I couldn’t complain that I wasn’t well served.

  Ronnie B.’s series was called The Ronnie Barker Playhouse and it illustrated one of his greatest talents, his immense versatility. Just to give you a flavour, the six shows presented him as a loud-mouthed Welsh poet, an English lord not over-endowed with intelligence, the chairman of the Hendon Cowpokes’ Association, an escapologist with ambitions to become the new Houdini, a silent monk caught between a married couple, and a shy Scotsman persecuted by a group of possessive women and a domineering mother.

  The aim, of course, was to find a winning formula for a situation comedy. In the event the poet was too foulmouthed, there wasn’t thought to be enough mileage in gun duels in Hendon, the Houdini character disappeared, the monk was destined to remain silent for ever, and he very kindly but unknowingly left the subject of a domineering mother for me to exploit later – much later. So I don’t need to tell you that the character who was eventually chosen for his situation comedy was the English lord not over-endowed with intelligence.

  In addition to The Ronnie Barker Playhouse, he played guest roles in two hugely popular TV series, The Saint and The Avengers. His role in the latter could almost have come straight out of The Two Ronnies. He played a mysterious cat fancier called Cheshire, who was head of an organization whose acronym was PURRR – the Philanthropic Union for the Rescue, Relief and Recuperation of Cats.

  He also played the role of the Russian ambassador in a situation comedy entitled Foreign Affairs, written by Johnnie Mortimer and Brian Cooke, and starring Leslie Phillips, who had of course been with him in The Navy Lark, and he landed a part in a film, The Man Outside, starring Van Heflin. It wasn’t a huge part, but there were a couple of good two-handers with Van Heflin right at the beginning, and the film had a full American release.

  The second series of The Frost Report was, if anything, even more successful than the first. The party at the end of it was bigger too, though not, I felt, more successful.

  David held it at the White City, where we ate overlooking the athletics track. It’s all gone now, of course, built over and handed to the massed ranks of the BBC’s accountants.

  It was a strange evening. There was a three-course sit-down meal, but it was interrupted by athletic events in which we all had to take part or risk being labelled bad sports. Some of the writers had to run the Olympic steeplechase course and eat a plate of cornflakes on top of the water jump. Personally I didn’t think the scripts were that bad. But at least, after their four-course meal – starter, steeplechase, main and dessert – they could relax and watch other people being humiliated.

  I don’t want to boast, but I think the talents of the Corbetts shone that night. In the egg and spoon race, Anne carried all before her, including her egg and spoon. Tommy Docherty, the legendary football manager, had suggested that she stick a piece of chewing gum on the spoon to keep the egg in place, but I like to feel that she ignored his advice and won through natural talent – and the superb balance of an ice skater. I had a chance to show off my natural talent in the all-star football match which brought the event to its conclusion at, I think, about 2 a.m. I positively sparkled on the wing. I have been to many Frost parties, all the others thoroughly enjoyable, but I wasn’t quite sure about that one. I decided that on the whole I didn’t want to run relay races when I went to parties.

  I never asked Ronnie for his opinion on that party, but since he was less of a partygoer than me, and less athletic, I can’t imagine it was one of the great highlights of his life.

  No matter. We owed a great deal to David Frost, especially me. By the end of the two series of The Frost Report, my life had been transformed and my career had been turned round. I felt a new confidence about the future, which I never quite lost. It seemed that David had waved a wand over my life. He was the founder of the feast in my life.

  Where would his wand take me next?

  6

  It took me to Frost on Sunday. David had also had the idea of forming a consortium to bid for the ITV London weekend franchise, held at the time by ATV. A formidable team emerged, including many of the most senior and experienced men in television, but the driving force was this great bundle of energy and ambition, David Frost, who had still not reached the age of thirty. They won the franchise. London Weekend Television was born.

  I don’t imagine that the first part of the new company’s autumn schedule took long to create. There would be three Frost programmes, one for each night. The Sunday one would be an entertainment show, and it would star… us, Ronnie and me.

  John Cleese had gone to pastures new and extraordinary. Sheila Steafel was replaced by Josephine Tewson, a very accomplished comic actress. In two series of The Frost Report we had done twenty-six half-hour shows. Now we would do twenty-six shows that were fifty minutes long, and they would be live, and in each show we would do four or five sketches, so that would be more than 150 sketches in all. It was daunting, but we were too excited to be daunted.

  In 1968, the House of Commons approved Harold Wilson’s programme to reduce Britain’s role as a world power, under which we would withdraw from east of Suez by 1971. There was a succession of peace plans to end the Vietnam War, but despite them all it continued escalating. Martin Luther King was shot to death in Memphis, Senator

  Ron and me with Josephine Tewson.

  Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles, and 400,000 cows were slaughtered because of foot and mouth. Such events make the need for some humour and comedy in life all the greater, and it was with eager anticipation that we prepared our first show, to go out live on Sunday, 4 August 1968, at 9.10. It didn’t. There was a strike. Some aspects of the formation of the new franchises had upset the unions. The very first London Weekend Television show, at seven o’clock on Friday, 2 August, would have been Frank Muir in a programme called We Have Ways of Making You Laugh. In the event he had no ways of making you laugh at all. The programme was blacked out completely. We were luckier than that, but it was clear early in the day that our studio would not be ready. We moved to the much smaller World of Sport studio, and a programme was cobbled together by the management. The show was taped from 9.30 and finally got on the air at 10.40. What an anti-climax, albeit a heroic one.

  Worse was to follow. The unions were upset at the management’s heroics, and for the next two Sundays there was no show at all.

  So it became a series of twenty-three shows. I said that it would star us, but as we got into the series it didn’t feel like that. Being a show of David’s, it attracted hugely famous and talented guests, and they were the stars. We were an enormously important part of a very successful show, but in no way were we stars. If I tell you that in the first week of September the guests were Peter Sellers, Sammy Davis Junior,

  From left to right: Josephine Tewson, me, David Frost and Ronnie, Frost on Sunday, 1968.

  Danny La Rue and Ted Ray, and the next week’s show was topped by the Beatles singing ‘Hey Jude’, you will get some sense of the scale of it. ‘We knew our place’, to quote John Law again.

  David Paradine Productions had also signed both of us up to do a show of our own, without the other Ronnie. Mine was a series called The Corbet
t Follies. I hosted the show, looking, if I may say so, extremely natty (lovely period word) in a fancy dinner jacket or a white silk jacket piped in black, and I would be fronting a lot of very glamorous girls, who all seemed to be about six foot tall. There was quite a lot of fronting going on. These were the sort of girls that you would find in those shows I mentioned in glittering night clubs like the Talk of the Town, and the idea was to give my show some of the feel of the night-club world that I knew. We did sketches and we had famous visiting American artists like Henny Youngman and Peter Nero. It was quite an achievement for me, I felt, at this relatively early stage in my career, to have visiting artists of the calibre of Engelbert Humperdinck, Tom Jones and Sergio Mendes. The new element was the patter, my patter. The most significant thing about the show, I suppose, was that I was beginning to find the style that I would use in the chair in The Two Ronnies. In this I was enormously helped by the arrival on the scene of a writer called Spike Mullins.

  Many of the team of writers from Frost on Sunday were working with me again on The Corbett Follies. Particularly valuable was Barry Cryer, who knew my work so well from my night-club days. There were also Ian Davidson, a very clever writer who had worked a great deal with David; Dick Vosburgh, of whom more anon; and a team of three, David McKellar, Peter Vincent and David Nobbs, who were referred to, corporately, as McVinnob. When David McKellar left for a new career in the expanding world of corporate videos, the name died. McVinnob had a certain ring. Vinnob would have sounded like a rather disgusting medical product.

  But the great new mystery ingredient was Spike. He telephoned me and he said, in his dry, rather whiny north Slough voice, ‘I’ve noticed that when you do your introductions, you waffle a bit. I think I could waffle a bit better for you.’ He said it without fear, but also without conceit. It sounded like a fact, and it was a fact. He waffled a great deal better for me. He raised waffling to an art form. He would deliver a vital element of The Two Ronnies, though of course we didn’t know that at the time.