The shows ran for half an hour weekly at 6.30 on a Saturday night, setting the tone for the ITV evening, and in all I think there were three series, each consisting of eight programmes. It was definitely a success, albeit not to the extent that would come with The Two Ronnies, and I thoroughly enjoyed doing it, but I think that the most significant thing about it was that I got well on the way to establishing my style as a stand-up comedian.
Ronnie’s series was called Hark at Barker. It was the one about the English lord not over-endowed with intelligence, which was chosen from The Ronnie Barker Playhouse. He was given the name of Lord Rustless. Supporting Ronnie was Josephine Tewson, and it was also notable as the very first time that he worked with a promising young character actor named David Jason.
And then it was back to Frost on Sunday for a second series. How good it felt to be so busy and have so much continuity in our work, after all our years of struggle in this most precarious of professions.
Ron and I, along with David, were now the main regulars on the programme. There were twenty-six shows in a series, and we did our sketches live. It was exciting, but it was also demanding. In fact I would say that it was a great bonding experience. We had got on well on The Frost Report, but now we were more reliant on each other, and our respect for each other, and our trust, deepened. David had always been the boss on The Frost Report, but for the first time, at London Weekend, we would sometimes knock on his door and say, ‘Look, David, we’re not saying this. This isn’t right.’ We were starting to be more aware of what we were doing. It was a major coming together for the two of us.
Nevertheless, it was during the run of Frost on Sunday that Ronnie and I had the one serious argument that I mentioned in the first chapter. We came nearer to falling out with each other than at any other time during our long, happy relationship. It was all about the casting of a sketch. Usually we had no problems about which of us should play which part. Sometimes writers would put RC and RB in front of their dialogue, but even if they gave the characters fictitious names, it was obvious which of us should play which role. There was a kind of fictional reality to our relationship. Stray too far from it, and our comedy would be less effective. For instance – and I’m not a bitter man, it didn’t worry me – if there was a girl to be got, guess which Ronnie got her. It got so bad – not, as I say, that I’m bitter about it – that even when we did a wedding sketch, in which Ron was the vicar and I was the groom, it was the vicar who walked off with the girl.
On this one occasion, however, Ronnie and the director, Phil Casson, suddenly wanted us to swap roles in a particular sketch. I was dead against it. I couldn’t see a valid reason for it. There was something unusual in the atmosphere, a feeling that Ron and Phil were colluding, that I was being manipulated. I strode off to the loo to cool down, but I was still very
With Josephine Tewson and Ron, Frost on Sunday, 1968.
annoyed when I walked back. The whole atmosphere was uneasy. Our goodbyes at the end of the rehearsal were brusque and strained. It was not at all a pleasant feeling.
When I got home I complained to Anne. ‘I’m being got at and I don’t like it.’
Anne said I should forget it, it wasn’t worth falling out over. I tried to forget it but I was still in a curmudgeonly mood the next morning at rehearsals. This was very unusual. I was the placid one. If anybody was at all pernickety, it would be Ronnie, but his pernicketiness wouldn’t be directed at me, it would be directed at somebody who wasn’t getting something right on the show. Ronnie wanted everything to be of a very high standard, so he could be demanding, but only for rational reasons. Here I felt that something irrational was going on, and that it was directed at me.
Another of our sketches in the show that week was on the subject of This Is Your Life. It was about a man who was paranoid about appearing on the programme. If the milkman or the postman came to the door, he was convinced that it was Eamonn Andrews with his big red book. In the end Eamonn turned up, and he didn’t recognize him. Now there was a problem with this sketch. The tag wouldn’t work unless it was actually played by Eamonn Andrews, and he was a very busy man, not likely to be too eager to come in just to play the tag line in a sketch.
The sketch had been hanging around for some time, but suddenly they announced that Eamonn was available. Now what I didn’t know was that I had been chosen as the secret subject of that week’s This Is Your Life, so I had to play the lead part in that sketch. This meant that Ronnie had to play the lead part in the other sketch, in order that the show should not seem too unbalanced, since it was an absolute principle of our shows that we had, overall, a roughly equal amount of the comedy. I was right. I was being manipulated. My dear friend Ron, my estimable producer Phil and my beloved wife Anne were indeed in collusion, and for the very best of reasons, and there was I being temperamental and suspicious about the whole thing. It must have been very annoying for them.
Even so, it was touch and go. I saw Thames Television vans everywhere when I went to the canteen.
‘I wonder if they’re doing This Is Your Life,’ I said. ‘I wonder if that’s why Eamonn has agreed to do the sketch.’
Ronnie didn’t turn a hair.
‘I bet it’s David Frost,’ he said. ‘I’ll go and find out.’
He went, came back and said, ‘I was right. The rumour is that it is David.’
‘Of course, it could be one of us,’ I said.
‘No, it couldn’t be one of us,’ said Ronnie.
‘Why not?’
‘Because the other one would know.’
This was devious, not to say wily. It was quick thinking of a very high order. It was nonsense, of course. He did know. But I didn’t have time to work that out, and he said it so convincingly that he saved the situation. So it was a complete shock to me when, at the end of the sketch, Eamonn said, ‘Ronnie Corbett, this really is your life.’
I mouthed, ‘You bastard’ at Ronnie. Quite a lot of people seem to mouth that when caught by the man with the big red book.
The sets for This Is Your Life were actually hanging there, in the flies, above the sets for Frost on Sunday. If I’d looked up, I’d have seen them. But we weren’t doing a class sketch that day, and, since I do have to look up at people quite a bit, I tend not to look up when I don’t have to.
The audience for Frost on Sunday got a completely unexpected bonus, an edition of This Is Your Life. They were asked if they were prepared to stay on, and they all did, and loved it. I enjoyed doing it too. The show, of course, was very sweet and moving. My mother and father were there, my mother forgetting what she was supposed to say and being prompted off camera by my father, putting words into her mouth much as he always did. My dear brother, Allan, the tall one, was also present, pretending that he spent most of our childhood beating me up. My sister, Margaret, had been flown in from Florida, very pregnant with her second child. My old Sunday school teacher made an appearance, as did Danny La Rue, wearing an identical kipper tie to mine.
About three years ago they approached Anne with the idea of my doing it again. She said ‘no’, quite rightly.
Ronnie never did the show. He had made Joy swear that, if ever they approached her for him to do it, she must tell him. He just didn’t want it done. He was intensely protective of his private life.
I’ve said already that Ronnie and I didn’t consider ourselves to be stars. In fact he was so starstruck that even at the height of our success in Frost on Sunday he was still approaching all the famous acts that appeared on the show and getting their autographs. One of the reasons that I didn’t twig what was going on that day was that I really didn’t consider myself a big enough star, certainly not at that stage in my career, to be the subject of This Is Your Life. I was flattered as well as moved.
We had a very good team of writers, and they wrote some very good material, but at times we did feel the strain of having to do more than 150 sketches. A few well-known writers were occasionally drafted in to supplement our regular
team, but sometimes their difficulties showed just how good our team was, and proved how hard it was to get our material exactly right.
In fact at one stage the writers were summoned to David’s house for what was described as a crisis meeting. David dealt with the crisis in his own way. ‘I’ve called you here to congratulate you on an absolutely super series and to work out how we can make it even more super still.’
Then one day Ronnie came in with two sketches that he said had been given to him by Peter Eade, his agent, written by a client of his who had his reasons for not wanting his name to be revealed, so he had sent them under a pseudonym, Gerald Wiley. They were very good, and we did them. Ronnie said he thought they might be from some short-story writer or possibly even a playwright who wanted to try his hand at something different.
One of the sketches was a particularly good vehicle for me. It was set in the waiting room of a rather posh doctor’s surgery. Seven or eight people were sitting around, looking tense, wondering what the other patients were there for and not sitting too close to them in case it was infectious. They were all reading magazines like the Tatler and the Field.
Then I breezed in, carrying a copy of the Telegraph. My whole manner was altogether too cheery for the setting.
‘Good morning,’ I said.
No response.
‘I said, “Good morning”.’
Still no response.
I plonked myself down next to Ronnie Barker, who was playing a very military moustachioed type, aged about sixty.
‘Isn’t it extraordinary how nobody ever talks to each other in a doctor’s waiting room?’ I commented.
Again, there was no reply.
‘I see they are stopping all the tube trains tomorrow,’ I said.
There was some surprise at this, but no eye contact from anybody. Nobody wanted to get involved with this strange new man.
‘To let the people get on and off !’
I smiled at my wit. The patients showed no amusement, burying themselves in their magazines.
Next I recited ‘Simple Simon met a pieman’, and when this failed to elicit a response, I sang ‘Night and day, you are the one’, ending with a soft-shoe shuffle and a tap dance.
‘Well, I’ve done my best,’ I said. ‘I can’t think of anything else.’
Suddenly Ronnie B. was shamed into standing up and reciting A. A. Milne’s poem ‘John had great big waterproof boots on’.
One or two patients clapped. The ice had been broken.
A very sweet maiden lady now stood up and sang, very sweetly, ‘If you were the only boy in the world, and I was the only girl…’
We were off. We were at the races. Everybody joined in. All the patients were on their feet.
‘Wonderful, wonderful,’ I exclaimed. ‘Right. Everybody conga.’
I led them round and round the waiting room, doing the conga.
‘Come on, everybody,’ I shouted. ‘Back to my place.’
I led the conga out of the waiting room into the street.
There was a short pause, and then the door to the doctor’s room opened and a nurse came out.
‘Doctor!’ she cried. ‘There’s nobody here.’
The doctor emerged and said, ‘Ah, I thought as much. That bloody little Doctor Corbett has been here again and pinched all my private patients.’
It was a very good sketch, with a very strong tag, and it played beautifully in the show. (It also demonstrates that we weren’t averse to another actor getting the tag line, if the situation demanded it.)
During the rehearsals for the next show, Ronnie said to me, ‘I don’t know why you don’t try to buy the rights for the waiting-room sketch, because it would be excellent for you when you do your summer seasons,’ and indeed I did do it in a summer season in Brighton, with Anne playing the lady who stood up and sang.
He suggested that I got my agent, Sonny Zahl, to ask Peter Eade if he could get in touch with the author and make an offer for the rights. The message came back a couple of days later from Peter Eade that the author would like £3,000 for theatre rights. Ronnie asked me if I’d followed up his suggestion, and I told him I had and I told him that the author was asking for £3,000.
‘Three thousand!’ said Ronnie. ‘That’s a bloody cheek. I should offer one thousand for the rights for everything, and see what happens.’
So I told Sonny that Ronnie thought £3,000 was ludicrously steep. Sonny rang Peter and came back to me and said, ‘I’ve been on to Peter, and the author has very kindly said that, because of the joyous way you did it, he’s going to give you the rights for nothing in perpetuity.’
So next day I said to Ronnie, ‘Well! Gerald Wiley has given me the rights to this sketch for nothing. What a darling person he is.’
So I went to Aspreys and had some goblets, half a dozen cut-glass goblets, made, and had them engraved with the initials GW, and send them to Peter Eade to give to this darling person.
The sketches kept coming in. Most of them did very well, but one, a ventriloquist sketch, didn’t work, and Ronnie said, ‘Well, Gerald Wiley let us down there.’ I said, ‘Give him a chance. He’s given us seven or eight belters. He’s bound to fail occasionally.’
And of course all the time speculation grew as to who this mystery writer could be. All sorts of names were mooted, including Tom Stoppard, Alan Bennett, even Noël Coward.
In fact Tom Stoppard – speaking on tape in an awards show many, many years later, by which time he was Sir Tom Stoppard – said, ‘One of the sort of bitter-sweet memories of my life was when the rumour got around that I was actually the famous Gerald Wiley, the mystery man contributing brilliant sketches. I had to admit to myself that I hadn’t written them, and somebody else must have.’
By this time we were rehearsing the very last of the twenty-three shows. All the others had been done live on a Sunday night, but for some reason this last one was taped on the Thursday before transmission, and it was arranged that, afterwards, there would be an end-of-series dinner at a Chinese restaurant over the road from the studios, and Ronnie told us that Gerald Wiley had accepted an invitation to come and reveal himself. Well, reveal who he was, not reveal himself. It wasn’t that sort of restaurant.
By this time speculation was even more rife. I had rarely known things to be rifer. And then, halfway through the studio rehearsals, there came a knock on the door of my dressing room. It was Ronnie.
‘I just want to tell you,’ he said, ‘before I tell everyone else. I am Gerald Wiley.’
I was stunned. And thrilled.
And so we all met in the restaurant that night, production team, actors, writers. I appreciated Ronnie having told me in advance. Not only was it much less embarrassing for me, but I was able to relish the drama of the situation all the more.
There was an empty chair, and it was past the time for the meal and there was still no sign of Gerald Wiley. Perhaps there was a party at the Pinters’ and he couldn’t drag himself away. Or perhaps his flight from the Caribbean had been delayed.
Then Frank Muir, our boss at London Weekend, came in and there were cries of ‘It’s you!’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I can’t stay. I just popped in.’
So then Ronnie stood up and said, ‘It’s me. I’m Gerald Wiley.’
There were cries of ‘Sit down’ and ‘Shut up’, and there was laughter, but then he spoke again, very seriously, and said, ‘No. It really is me.’
There was a stunned silence. Michael Palin later described the moment as ‘a wonderful sort of Agatha Christie revelation’.
The silence was eventually broken by Barry Cryer, that great breaker of silences, with ‘Nobody likes a smartarse.’
I think that to an extent Ronnie regretted that he had revealed the secret so early in our working lives. The reason for the deception was that he wanted his material to be judged strictly on its merits, and not because of who he was. He didn’t want us to do sketches that weren’t good enough just because he’d written them. No
w, of course, with the cat out of the bag, he was in the position he had tried to avoid. I think there was a tinge of feeling among the writers, as The Two Ronnies progressed, that some stuff that he wrote did get on because of who he was.
But, of course, when he revealed that it was him, neither of us had any idea that it was so early in our working lives. The Two Ronnies had not yet even been considered as a possibility.
Also, I think he enjoyed the deception too much to have carried it on successfully much longer. Joy did all Ronnie’s typing, and they must have invested in a second machine, with a very different typeface, for the Wiley stuff, because it didn’t look at all like the letters and rewrites and other little things that were typed for Ronnie by Joy. And then there were all the remarks that he made. ‘He’s really let us down this time.’ Even, on one occasion, ‘I don’t understand this line. What’s he getting at?’ Wily, indeed.
If he had revealed it after about twenty years, I might have felt a little bit irritated at being duped for so long, and Ronnie might have got more goblets than he’d have known what to do with. I can imagine him saying, ‘Joy! Ronnie’s coming to dinner tonight! For God’s sake hide all those goblets.’
The following Sunday, David Frost gave a vast party for what the newspapers described as 2,000 of his closest friends. It wasn’t just for our show, it was to celebrate the success of London Weekend Television. The Alexandra Palace, high on its hill above the North Circular Road and the unexciting suburbs of North London, had been transformed into a huge fairground. As we wandered among the celebrities thronging the helter-skelter, dodgems and all the side shows, Ron and I felt confident that we now belonged in such a world, and that the ending of Frost on Sunday was not the end of the road, but merely a staging post.
Now, however, quite unexpectedly, a problem arose. A rift had developed between London Weekend Television and David Paradine Productions. Stella Richman, the relatively new programme controller at London Weekend, made it clear to us that, while she admired us, she was no longer prepared to work with David’s organization, to whom we were still under contract. It was never suggested that, if we broke with Paradine, we could continue to be employed by London Weekend, but we couldn’t help wondering if there was an implication there. Creative artists almost invariably leave the politics to others. The very qualities that make them good at what they do render them highly unsuitable for political in-fighting. Was there an implication? We’ll never know, because we had no doubt what to do. Our association with David had done us nothing but good. I described him as waving a wand. I wanted him to continue to do so. We would see out our contract with Paradine.
And It's Goodnight from Him . . . Page 6
