And It's Goodnight from Him . . .

by Ronnie Corbett; David Mattingly

  Ronnie would get up in the morning earlier than me. He would sniff out the weather, consider the possibility of changing the order of the filming because of the weather, or how he could alter a line because of the weather, or how he might be able to use the weather for an extra sight gag. All this while I was still enjoying my beauty sleep.

  He knew what he wanted, and he wasn’t shy of saying so. I don’t think this was arrogance, and I don’t think our directors ever felt it to be so. As he wrote it Ronnie knew how he wanted every shot to look, and even after it had been shot, he would go to the editing suites in the bowels of the Television Centre, where unsung, dedicated men who rarely see the sun work long and hard with electronic equipment to cut the film rushes into their final shape. Ronnie was a perfectionist. These serials were his babies, and he would never leave them at home alone. In this context I must give credit to a marvellous technician named Jim Franklin. He was far more than an editor. He was creative and constructive and inventive and could transform a script in post-production. We were so fortunate to have such people helping us.

  I left Ron to get on with all this sort of thing. I trusted him utterly, and he knew that I trusted him utterly, which in a way was a kind of trust in me. Trust was the cornerstone of our relationship. It’s an underrated quality. There are lots of songs about love, not many about trust. There was also, incidentally, complete trust between me and Anne and between Ron and Joy. If any of this trust had ever been eroded, I don’t think we could have done fifteen happy years of intense work together.

  The two of us always shared a caravan on location. We’d have our breakfast there and our lunch there and we’d blether away about anything and everybody; we were quite gossipy and chatty.

  That reminds me of something which I always used to say: ‘When we were filming, the principle would be that Ronnie would write a sketch, and I would queue for his lunch… simple really… a very simple formula.’ That was me being British, avoiding being sentimental and seeking refuge in a joke.

  In fact I didn’t queue for Ronnie’s lunch at all. We were very lucky. We had our individual dressers and they would very kindly queue for our lunch. Ronnie’s used to come in relays: anything with sauté potatoes, or pilaff, or rice with sauté potatoes, and sponge with custard on it, all the really fattening stuff, he used to eat. And I’d have a little delicate salad, with a bit of Emmenthal cheese on the side, and a water biscuit. Mine looked like a David Hockney painting on the plate, while he, to steal a phrase from an old jockey friend of mine, had a pile of food on his plate that Arkle couldn’t jump. And we would sit over our lunch and blether away about this one and that one and enjoy each other’s company in that way. These were very nice, relaxing moments in the middle of all the hard work. We were quite disciplined, however: we would never have a glass of anything at lunch on location.

  These filmed serials were wonderful for me, because in the context of the comedy I could play all sorts of roles that I would never have got otherwise. Let’s face it, if I did a film like The Shooting Party, I would never be one of the guns, shooting alongside Edward Fox and being told, ‘Damned fine shot, Carruthers.’ I’d be the gamekeeper’s assistant. Not so in our serials. I could be the Earl of Mortlake, and Ronnie could be my butler. It really all was enormous fun. Never mind if the hours were long and the starts early, we were so lucky.

  In fact Ronnie was butler to my Lord Loam in our spoof of J. M. Barrie’s play The Admirable Crichton, in which a great London family are shipwrecked and, having never had to lift a finger to help themselves, prove utterly incapable of surviving but are rescued only by the resourcefulness of their butler. Of course, when they have been saved, we find that they have learnt nothing and still don’t lift a finger to help themselves. Susannah York was Lady Loam and Koo Stark had a small part as the housemaid Lord Loam runs off with.

  I have particularly fond memories of filming The Admirable Crichton, quite apart from the fact that it’s not every day you get to run off with Koo Stark and get paid for it. Everything about it looked magnificent, from the wonderful autumnal scenery of the New Forest to the magnificent animated rubber crocodile that was built for Ronnie B. to wrestle with in a most spectacular scene. Sadly, there is no Best Animated Rubber Crocodile category in the BAFTAs. Seriously, a lot of good work by dedicated professionals goes unsung in our business.

  There were also scenes shot outside a very handsome house in Eaton Square in London. We rode around in elegant, open-top vintage Bentleys, and we wore plus fours, Argyll socks, two-tone shoes and jaunty eight-piece caps, those caps ribbed into eight sections, which are so popular with golfers, hunters and shooters. I have several of these. I love them for playing golf, when I like to look slightly tweedy, because I’m a Scotsman, I suppose. Anyway, even just filming this gracious style of living felt good.

  Mostly, however, we were in the countryside, often in deep countryside, often on private estates. Our location seekers were clever in finding places where we would be free from the attentions of a watching public, which can slow things down terribly.

  Perhaps this is as good a moment as any to mention our attitude to the fact that, more and more, we were recognized by the public, wherever we went. I’ve never minded being recognized. I’ve never resented it. In fact I’m quite pleased about it, and I try to respond in the right way, though it isn’t easy if I’m asked for my autograph when I’m in a curmudgeonly mood at the airport having lost my luggage. Ron, I think, felt much the same. I am unusual in that I am recognized in three different ways – by my height, my glasses and my voice. Other people can pass much more unnoticed in a crowd, even if they are even more well known than me.

  I remember doing a summer season in Paignton, and Val Doonican was in nearby Torquay. I was emptying my theatre, he was filling his. We used to play golf every day, and if we went to a strange course I had to introduce Val to the pro, because if he had a hat on and dark glasses, nobody would know who he was, whereas I am recognized the moment I walk in anywhere, so it’s just as well that I don’t mind.

  Anyway, on location, in the deep countryside around Chagford, there was nobody to recognize me. The serials that we filmed there, in idyllic weather, were two of the most popular ones we ever did. They were called ‘Done to Death’ and ‘Death Can Be Fatal’, and were spoofs on detective films. We played a couple of really inept detectives. I was Charley Farley and Ronnie was Piggy Malone. The first seven episodes of ‘Done to Death’ all ended with the words ‘Only one thing was certain. There would be very little sleep for anyone that night.’ For ‘Death Can Be Fatal’ the endings were more

  Me as Charley Farley and Ron as Piggy Malone.

  on exaggerated Dick Barton lines: ‘Is this the end for our two heroes? What of Madame Cocotte? Is she in some bedroom somewhere, lying in wait with a silencer? Or lying in silence with a waiter? Find out next week in another exciting episode, “Villa of Villainy”.’

  We also parodied several other series of the time – Colditz, The Regiment, Star Trek and Upstairs, Downstairs. One joke that I will never forget was in the spoof of Colditz. I am waiting outside a lavatory for Ronnie to come out. He can’t get out. There is much rattling of the door handle and banging on the door, and at last he emerges.

  ‘Hello,’ he says. ‘I’m James. I’m the escape officer.’

  The boldest of our serials was undoubtedly ‘The Worm that Turned’, set in a futuristic Britain in 2012. It was a story of a land dominated by women, with Diana Dors playing the Commander of the State Police. Men’s clubs were abolished, gentlemen’s toilets closed, creating widespread distress among thinking and drinking men everywhere. Big Ben had been renamed Big Brenda. The Tower of London was now known as Barbara Castle. The Union Jack had become the Union Jill. Men were forced to go around in dresses. I played the worm that turned. I think this was a far from safe and cosy subject even at the time. It might create an uproar now that we are so much closer to 2012.

  This is probably as good a moment a
s any to bring up the question of drag. Ronnie and I did appear in drag quite a lot, especially in ‘The Worm that Turned’, but also frequently in our musical finales. Ronnie in drag was always funny and often inspired, but he claimed to hate doing it. I can’t say I particularly enjoyed it, but I had become used to it over the years and by the time we got to The Two Ronnies I had no hang-ups about prancing around in dresses just so long as it was really funny. The moment it wasn’t funny at all, or was only slightly funny, it became an embarrassment. But you can’t create good comedy without taking risks, and it was a risk worth taking. I have to point out, though, that the vast majority of the items in which we appeared in drag were written by Ronnie – our other writers rarely touched on it, and I have the impression that he wrote more roles for himself in drag than he did for me. And then he threw himself into the roles with such abandon and skill. Did he really hate it as much as he claimed? That claim is perhaps the only thing he ever said to me that I am uncertain whether to fully believe. That’s not bad in forty years, is it?

  Joy absolutely hated seeing Ron in drag, but Anne didn’t mind seeing me in drag at all. She had appeared so much with the Crazy Gang and Max Wall and had become thoroughly used to seeing men dressed as women for laughs. She recalls, when I was playing one of the Ugly Sisters in pantomime in Glasgow, going into Marks & Spencer’s with our two daughters, Emma and Sophie, and saying to one of them, who was being naughty, ‘Will you please behave yourself? I’m trying to buy some tights for your father.’ The lady shop assistant looked shocked even in Glasgow. And it was lucky that we were in Glasgow. An Edinburgh assistant at the time would probably have fainted.

  Back to the serials. As I say, Ronnie supervised every aspect

  As Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

  Asian lovelies.

  of them, despite which, towards the end of his career, he expressed just a little dissatisfaction with them.

  ‘I always think now, seeing the serials,’ he said, ‘that they were slow. We used to wait for laughs in places, and sometimes you didn’t get them, so I look at them now and I think they could be faster. They weren’t tight enough.’

  It’s perhaps a bit sad that Ronnie was not entirely satisfied, but then that was him, the perfectionist, and I think it’s reassuring that he never lost the ability to be as critical of himself as he could be of other people. He never just accepted what he was given. Dick Vosburgh recalls that when Ronnie was in an early Ayckbourn play, Mr Whatnot, he queried quite a few things, and when he did Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound he suggested line changes. The important thing was that he was only doing it to try to make the piece work better, and his suggestions must have been constructive, because neither Ayckbourn nor Stoppard took offence.

  We didn’t do many other items on film, although at some stage Ron introduced a couple of new characters in the form of the two yokels, and their exchanges were always shot on location.

  ‘You know old Cyril Harris, the one with one eye?’

  ‘Yes. You don’t see much of him lately.’

  ‘No, well he don’t see much of us either.’

  ‘Where did you see him then?’

  ‘Up the pictures. He went up to the girl in the box office and says, “With one eye, I should think you’d let me in for half price.” But she wasn’t having it.’

  ‘Oh. Did he have to pay full price?’

  ‘He had to pay double.’

  ‘Double? Why was that then?’

  ‘She reckoned it would take him twice as long to see the picture.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Ronnie made no bones about the fact that the yokels’ gags were taken from an old joke book that he came across in his guise as a collector.

  When we were out on location, if we were staying in the same area for any length of time, we would begin to get invitations to go to dinner in people’s houses. Some of these invitations were tempting, but we never accepted them. For one reason, filming was tiring, we didn’t have the surplus energy. But the more important reason was that actually, away from the work, without our scripts, we aren’t particularly funny. I don’t mean that we can’t tell the occasional amusing anecdote, but we didn’t perform, in everyday life, like we did in our work.

  Our hosts would expect a riot of humour, we felt, with ‘it’s thank you very much from me’ and ‘it’s thank you very much from him’ at the door on the way out. We couldn’t provide this, and even to try would wear us out.

  Some comedians are naturally funny all the time. Eric Morecambe was. He was never not funny. I think it may have been what killed him. Although I have to say that when I was at a do with him, he wouldn’t even get to his feet to hand out a prize if Ernie wasn’t there, at his side. But if you got in a lift with him, he would be joking the whole time.

  Ronnie had a great example of Eric’s wit and playfulness. He and Joy invited the Morecambes to dinner. It was the first time the Morecambes had seen their very nice house in Pinner. Joy had taken great pains to be at her most glamorous. Eric entered, took in the scene, turned back to the door and mouthed an instruction to his taxi driver, just loud enough to be heard. ‘About an hour.’

  Ted Ray was another great ad-libber. Barry Cryer remembers, after the recording of an episode of Jokers Wild, sitting with Ted and the other comics in the lounge of a hotel and listening to a pianist murdering a popular song.

  ‘What would you gentlemen like me to play now?’ smarmed the pianist.

  ‘Dominoes,’ said Ted Ray.

  Frank Carson never stops either. A friend of mine told me how, after a hard day in the studio on a comedy programme, he went down to breakfast in his hotel, slightly hungover, and saw that the only person in the room was Frank. A lovely man, but not if you like a quiet breakfast. My friend went to the far end of the room, furthest from him, and buried himself behind his Daily Telegraph. He ordered his breakfast, hidden behind the sports reports. He held his newspaper in front of him till his arm ached.

  Then a crowd of suits entered. (We always call the management ‘suits’. ‘The suits won’t like it.’ ‘The suits will think it’s too expensive.’ ‘Don’t worry. The suits won’t understand it.’) These were businessmen on a conference. As they streamed in my friend could see out of the corner of his eye that they all had name tags pinned to their jackets, and that they seated themselves at a long table in the middle of the room, between him and Frank Carson. Now, he thought, I’m safe. He lowered his newspaper.

  ‘Oh hello,’ said Frank immediately. ‘Did you hear the one about the nun and the caravan?’

  And he started to lob jokes across the room, over the heads of the businessmen. Literally a bit ‘over the top’.

  We just weren’t in that mould. You wouldn’t expect Ron to have been, with his background in rep, but with my times in panto, summer seasons and night clubs you might perhaps have expected me to be more of a gag merchant. In fact I think Ron made more of a stab at being funny than I did, but it didn’t come naturally to either of us.

  In any event, we were usually too busy to accept social invitations. The filming schedule was tight, and Ron and I also had work to do in preparation for the time when we went into the studio to record the shows in front of an audience. Our regular writers would be commissioned to deliver their material well in advance, and while we were on location we would set aside two or three evenings when we would read the material and decide what we thought worked for us and what didn’t. Usually the hotel in which we were staying would be able to provide a small function room where we could sit round a table – we always liked to be round a table – and assemble running orders for the studio recordings. It’s amazing how rarely we disagreed. We truly were on the same comedy wavelength.

  Occasionally we would read a very funny sketch, but decide, reluctantly, that, while it was very good, it wasn’t for us; it was more suited to, say, Dick Emery. It was possible, we felt, once or twice, that we were being sent a sketch that had been turned down for another sho
w, or that had been written for a comedian who had died in real life before he could do the sketch.

  In fact there is a well-known instance of a writer, who shall be nameless, doing just that and getting caught out rather badly. Eric Nameless was commissioned to write some sketches for Dick Emery, accepted the commission despite being very busy and asked his secretary to send in some old Tommy Cooper sketches that hadn’t been used, changing Tommy’s name to Dick throughout. Dick was actually very easy-going, happy to come into rehearsals on a Monday morning and say, ‘Right. What have we got, then?’, but even he smelt a rat when a sketch ended: ‘Dick gives his characteristic laugh, and his fez falls off.’

  That reminds me of the writer who was very proud, in the early days of word processors, to use his ‘global search’ facility. He had decided that he wanted to change the name of his main character from David to Nigel. Easy. A few seconds typing, and the job was done. Imagine his mortification when the book came out, and he realized that the main character now took a girlfriend to Florence, where they admired Michelangelo’s Nigel in all its magnificence.

  Back to those two or three evenings, during our location

  With the great Tommy Cooper.

  filming, when we chose the items for the shows, the material that we really liked, the cream. In one evening we would assemble enough for two or three shows, so by the end of the filming, after several of these evenings, we had the eight shows ready for rehearsal.

  It’s time to go back to the Acton Hilton, pearl of the A40.

  10

  ‘The world’s untidiest man died yesterday. He is now lying in a state.’

  ‘And now a message from the police in Finchley. There’s bad news about the two rabbits stolen from Peter’s Petshop. Only fourteen have so far been recovered.’