At one stage in the show, I was in bed doing my stand-up routine, known for this one show only as my lie-down routine, and it was time to introduce a guest. ‘Once in a while,’ I began, ‘you get the chance to welcome on to your show somebody who’s a particular favourite of your own, and tonight I’m very fortunate to be able to introduce to you…’
At which point an actress playing my mother came in with a cup and saucer.
‘Beef tea,’ she announced.
‘Thank you, it’s very kind of you, Mother, very kind of you to think of that,’ I said, ‘but I’m just doing a television show at the moment and…’
‘I’m sure Robin Day doesn’t say no to a nice cup of beef tea when he’s got a TV show to do.’
‘Mother, I’m introducing the next item, now just…’
‘You can’t introduce the next item with your sheets all crooked.’
‘Mother!’
She busied herself, tidying my sheets, saying, ‘I don’t expect Ronnie Barker introduced his next item with his sheets all crooked.’
‘Yes, but he wasn’t in bed.’
The show was written by Barry Cryer and Graham Chapman, and many, many years later, a similar idea would inspire a sitcom that gave me a starring role for five years.
The big musical number that finished the show was written by Dick Vosburgh. Dick is a tall, bearded, caustic but warm American from Elizabeth, New Jersey, with an encyclopedic knowledge of show business on both sides of the Atlantic, a sharp sense of humour, a love of complicated ideas and clever lyrics and the understanding that you can only satirize successfully what you love. He came up with the brilliant idea of Romeo and Juliet set to Sousa marches. It was a sheer delight, and it became the model for the big musical number which regularly formed the climax of The Two Ronnies.
So we had our opening routine at the desk, our Ronnie B. monologue, our Ronnie C. monologue and our big musical finish. There would be guest spots each week, and of course there would be sketches. A genre that we would make our own was the party sketch, with the two of us meeting for the first time as guests at a party. This was very often the first sketch in the show, and it helped set the tone for our comedy mood.
The format felt good, but it also felt as though something was missing. Most of the items would run for between three
A typical big musical number.
and five minutes. We needed to vary the pace. A few quickies would help, but there was a sense that we needed something more solid, something weightier, something to anchor the show, something to give it more variety, if we were to achieve the response that we wanted for a fifty-minute show at peak viewing time on a Saturday night. Yes, the BBC pitched us straight in to that prestigious slot. No experiments on the edge of the schedules. Straight in, the main event for all the family. No wonder we were being so punctilious in our approach.
We decided that the missing ingredient must be on film, to vary the visual effect of the show, and it must be quite long, to vary the feel of the show. The filmed serial was the obvious answer, and we included one in every series.
We had our format. We decided to change that format just once, nothing very startling, just a change of order. In fact I can’t even remember now what exactly we did, but whatever
A classic party sketch.
it was, it didn’t work. Never again. We had created our template, and we had to stick with it.
Of course we had our critics. We were not at the cutting edge, and we didn’t pretend to be. We were trying to create more than a show. We were trying to create an event, and that event was a moment for the whole family, to sit and relax together, to laugh and smile together, without embarrassment. The viewing figures suggest that we succeeded, and I venture to suggest that the families that our show was aimed at were intelligent, quite well informed, literate, musical and nice.
I don’t think we were ever what you would call violent. I don’t think we were ever wilfully cruel. If we were rude, we were rude in a very British way, in the manner of the seaside postcards that dear Ron loved so much. We had double entendres. Nowadays they have single entendres. I remember a double entendre of Ken Dodd’s. ‘My uncle was a farmer. Not in a big way. He had a smallholding and two acres.’ Maybe you have to spell it ‘achers’ in print. Anyway, the audience didn’t get it straight away, so he looked at them till they did. It’s nice to make the audience work just a bit.
It was a good format because, although it was the same every week, it allowed scope for enormous variety in the jokes within that format. It combined familiarity with freshness.
8
On 10 April 1971, it was announced that Britain would supply Libya’s revolutionary regime with £60 million worth of arms, Glasgow was six degrees warmer than London, teachers voted for action in pursuit of their 15 per cent pay claim, Prime Minister Edward Heath’s new 41-foot yacht Morning Cloud was launched in the Solent with champagne, and the very first edition of The Two Ronnies was launched on BBC1 at eight o’clock, right in the middle of the peak viewing period. I don’t think either of us felt, in retrospect, that this first show was particularly good. We felt that we began to hit our stride with the second, and were in full form by the middle of the series. Nevertheless, I think it would be interesting to take a look at the contents of that very first programme.
Our beginning at the news desk wasn’t typical: we were introducing ourselves and we didn’t actually do one single news item.
‘Good evening, and welcome to the show,’ I began. ‘I must say it’s very nice to be with you all, isn’t it?’
Ronnie’s very first line in the series did not exercise his verbal dexterity to the full.
‘It is,’ he said.
‘And to be with you,’ I continued.
‘Thank you, Ron,’ said Ron.
‘We decided, actually, to call the series The Two Arthurs,’ I went on, ‘but then we thought that wouldn’t work, because Ronnie Barker isn’t called Arthur, so we decided to call it A Ronnie and an Arthur. So then someone pointed out that I’m not called Arthur either, so we rather smartly thought up the title The Two Ronnies.’
‘Thank you, Arthur,’ said Ron.
Then we moved into our very first sketch, and our very first party sketch. I would say that this was probably the most important sketch we ever did, because it set the tone for ninety-eight shows. It was written by Michael Palin and Terry Jones, and it was very funny, as you would expect from those two clever men.
Ronnie B. stood in a dinner jacket, sipping wine, and I approached him, and he slapped me quite hard across the cheek. In fact he kept doing this. One time when I thought he would he didn’t, and I relaxed, only to fall straight into the next stinging slap. He apologized profusely, said he couldn’t help it, suggested I duck. So I ducked, and he kicked me somewhere very close to the Trossachs. He poured all sorts of things on me, including a large amount of icing and a couple of meringues which were supposed to attach themselves to my ears, but didn’t, so that in the tension of those early days I couldn’t avoid a degree of suppressed corpsing that wasn’t quite suppressed enough. But that all seemed to add to the fun.
What was so great about the sketch was that neither of us ever deviated from polite party attitudes. He was almost in tears as he explained that he just wanted to be loved and nobody loved him, and I would have bent over backwards to help him if I hadn’t thought that if I did he would kick me up the backside, which indeed he did when I’d finally had enough and was walking away.
The written tag was said to another guest on his approach to Ronnie B. – ‘I thought I’d never get rid of him’ – but, as Gerald Wiley, Ron added a tag upon a tag and began slapping this man too.
Next came our first musical guest, Tina Charles, just sixteen years old and making her first appearance on television, singing ‘River Deep, Mountain High’.
This was followed by Ronnie B.’s monologue, in which he played a doctor who couldn’t help saying everything twice. He had been to Baden-Ba
den Baden-Baden and had been to see Chitty Chitty Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Bang Bang.
Our first-ever classic serial was called ‘Hampton Wick’ and featured the delightful Madeline Smith, well endowed with talent and two other things that Ron greatly admired. It was a period piece about a naive young girl in a world of hungry men. Ron and I each played about twelve hungry men. The first episode looked stylish and beautiful, as Madeline arrived at the home of a sex-starved aristocrat (Ronnie B.) as governess for his 36-year-old son (me).
Then there was a quickie, quite a long quickie, in which I took a long while to get through on the phone to Interpol, and then asked them to send some flowers to my mother. This was followed by our resident male group, New World, singing ‘Rose Garden’, and my very first monologue from the chair. The next item was a sketch about a man asking for a hearing aid from a deaf provider of hearing aids, both saying ‘Pardon?’ to each other quite a lot – once again I can just imagine the letters of protest these days – and so we reached our third guest, a speciality act, a man called Alfredo.
What can I say of Alfredo? He was, quite simply, the very best act involving doing a silent impression of Sammy Davis Junior, gurning frantically to give an impression of a military parade of old soldiers while playing a one-man band, running in circles round his musical instruments with a pint of beer on his head, saying ‘cheers’ in eight languages, drinking the pint of beer to the accompaniment of loud plumbing noises, producing large numbers of ping pong balls from his mouth, and spitting some of them on to a music stand from which they bounced back to be caught in his mouth that I have ever seen. Anne actually recommended him to Terry Hughes, and I think she has always had slightly mixed feelings about having done so.
The show ended with three songs from our post-Woodstock, long-haired Country and Western duo, Jehosaphat and Jones. This was an act that we returned to from time to time. The lyrics for the hairy duo were written by Gerald Wiley, often unashamedly influenced by the McGill postcards that he loved so much. A brief extract from a typical Jehosaphat and Jones song will give the flavour and bring it all back.
VERSE:
One day she went into a department store
And she said to the guy who stood by the door
I need some material to make a new belt
Perhaps you can tell me where I can get felt.
CHORUS:
We knew what she meant
We knew what she meant
We heard what she said
But we knew what she meant.
And then, for the very first time, it was goodnight from me, and it was goodnight from him.
The format for that very first show was almost exactly the one that kept us going throughout the next ninety-seven shows. The only variant was that, over the years, we began to do more sketches and had fewer guest stars. We dropped the speciality acts fairly early on (well, where would we have found ninety-eight acts as eccentric as Alfredo’s?) and in the end we had just the one musical guest. We were beginning to realize, to our joy, that it was us above all that people were tuning in to see.
Ron and family had moved into a very nice, comfortable, roomy house in Church Lane in Pinner, in north-west London, near Harrow. It was called New House but in fact had quite a history. Lord Nelson’s illegitimate daughter Horatia had lived there in her old age, and George Black, a well-known impresario, had owned it with his brother Alfred. In fact Ron and Joy weren’t even the first Barkers to live there. It was once occupied by Sir Herbert Barker, a celebrated bone-setter, and no relation. Ron also recalled that Elton John used to deliver the papers there when he was still Reg Dwight. I can’t help wondering how far his career would have gone if he’d remained Reg Dwight.
Anne and I also fell in love with a house, and during this year of the first series of The Two Ronnies I felt secure enough to buy it. It backed on to the golf course, in Addington, in lovely country within a stone’s throw of unlovely Croydon. It wasn’t an old house, it was built between the wars, but it was rambling and rather spectacular. It had turrets at either side of the front door, and gables at each end. There were eight bedrooms, and one and a half acres of garden. It cost £31,000. In front of the house there were handsome woods. We were in, yet not in, London. It was a dream.
Our life was a bit of a dream now, really. From 1971 until 1986 it was dominated by The Two Ronnies. Ronnie and I both did shows on our own, but every year, except the one we spent in Australia, we spent four months making The Two Ronnies. You’ve seen the shows. Now’s the time to give you a bit of an insight into how we put them together.
9
Before we went into the studio to record the weekly episodes of The Two Ronnies, we would go on location to do all the items for them that needed to be filmed. The main one was the weekly serial, and since this would last for not much short of ten minutes each week, we would really be doing at least two-thirds of a feature film in the course of the series, and incidentally at a fraction of the time and cost.
We would be away for several weeks, sometimes staying in the same hotel. Anne never came to the filming, and Joy only very, very rarely. They both had families to run, children to get to school. Besides which, although filming can be very stimulating for those involved, the hours are very, very long, and the process can be extremely laborious, with a scene being shot over and over again from different angles. It is not a spectator sport, as any of you who have ever stood and watched the process will know.
So, during the filming, Ron and I reverted to a kind of bachelor life. Not that we were burning the candle at both ends. The work was far too hard and tiring to leave us with the time or the energy to do that. It’s important on location to stay somewhere where one is comfortable. Ron and I usually stayed in the same hotel, and we would almost always eat together in the evening, often with the director.
I was always happy if we could find somewhere that was near a golf course, or even had a golf course of its own, so that I could nip off there when there was a break in my schedule. I didn’t necessarily need to have time to play a round. A short walk on a golf course in the evening sunshine, enjoying the smells that came from the cutting of the grass and the watering of the greens, was a very special way of unwinding for me.
I have particularly happy memories of the Green Man, at Shurdington, near Cheltenham, of leaving my shoes outside the door to be cleaned, of luxuriating in the bath – they can’t touch you for it – changing into crisp, clean clothes and sitting outside on the lawn with a tincture and settling down to a serious study of – no, not the next day’s script – the menu. The script could wait, because I was a very quick study, we both were.
On another occasion we filmed around Chagford, in the beautiful Devon countryside on the edge of Dartmoor, a land of deep valleys, rolling woods and thatched cottages. On this occasion, unusually, we didn’t stay in the same hotel. I went to the Manor in Moretonhampstead, because it had its own nine-hole golf course, while Ron chose to stay in Chagford. The Manor was a rather handsome house which had once been the home of W. H. Smith, the famous stationer, who later became Lord… er… Lord something or other. I think the fact that we could stay equally happily in the same hotel or in separate hotels shows the stability of our friendship.
The days were long. We would usually start work at about seven. But the unions were still quite strong in those days, and we would usually ‘wrap’ at about five or half past. Nowadays money is the god, and filming can go on from six in the morning till eight or nine at night, seven days a week, which is terrible. Nobody can do first-class work under that pressure.
Ron would unwind, when he had time, by wandering round antique shops and bric-à-brac shops, looking for items to add to his collections. And actually I think he had a lot more unwinding to do, because he involved himself in every aspect of the filming. In fact these moments on location were his favourite part of the whole process of making the show.
The serials were the part of the show that Ronnie involved himself
in most closely. He wrote many of them. For one of them, ‘The Phantom Raspberry-blower of Old London Town’, the writing credits were ‘By Spike Milligan and a Gentleman’. This was based on a script that Spike had written for an earlier one-off show of Ronnie’s. I’m afraid we can offer no prizes for the first three correct answers as to the identity of the Gentleman. Gerald Wiley brought his sense of structure and discipline to the wilder creations of Milligan’s comic genius. There were shades of Jack the Ripper and the Keystone Cops in this piece. It was full of thunder and lightning and loud music and over-acting. There were some very rewarding roles for Ron and me. My main role was as the splendidly named Scotland Yard detective Corner of the Yard, with his mutton-chop whiskers and bemused expression, as he failed like all Scotland Yard detectives in period fiction to make any headway whatsoever with the case, which reminds me of an ad-lib by John Cleese that I was told about during The Frost Report. All the writers were gathered round a table, thinking up ideas, when somebody said, ‘The police are working on the theory…’ and John butted in with ‘… that they have been completely outwitted by the criminals.’ The police get a hard time in comedy, almost as much as accountants.
This was one of the very few serials that we filmed around London and it was also one of the very few to involve shooting at night. I remember one very creepy night shoot in Highgate Cemetery, which is full of ornate graves and the graves of many famous people, notably Karl Marx. It felt like a bit of a desecration to be filming there, and I think we were all glad when morning came.
Rumour had it that Spike Milligan had given us the rights to the serial free on condition that he be allowed to blow all the raspberries. I have to say that they were magnificent, loud, ripe and squelchy, the work of a master. But nobody seems to have seen Spike around the studios in his raspberry-recording gear, and Corner of the Yard was convinced that we could add raspberry blowing to the list of Ron’s talents.
And It's Goodnight from Him . . . Page 8
