Although there was no audience there on the Saturday, we would still feel an inextricable mixture of excitement and nerves as we began the show. Seeing the set that had been built in some warehouse by unknown people, we suddenly thought, ‘My goodness. All this stuff we’ve had in our heads, it’s real.’ Of course we grew less nervous as series succeeded series, but we never lost that feeling entirely. You can’t perform successfully without it. It’s what keeps you up to the mark.
Dick Vosburgh created quite a few of our musical finales over the years. Among the earliest was a follow-up to his Sousa marches sketch. This time it featured Julius Caesar to the music of Strauss. He also wrote, with Bill Solly, a parody of Gilbert and Sullivan and a piece entitled ‘The Short and Fat Minstrel Show’. Dick and Bill had intended them to be short and fat instead of blacked up, but we did it blacked up, so if we did it now we’d upset societies for the short, the fat and the black, though I have no doubt that most short, fat blacks would still find it funny.
Many of our musical items involved us being members of a chorus, backed by quite a large group of singers and dancers, usually including several attractive young ladies. There was a sense of opulence about these items.
One week we were two members of a pipe band, singing to the tunes of ‘Amazing Grace’, ‘The Bonnie Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond’, ‘Blue Bells of Scotland’, ‘Over the Sea to Skye’ and the ‘Ball of Kirriemuir’.
Another time we were an Irish folk group, Peter Cutter and the Boggers. Ronnie was the violinist. I was the guitarist and clog dancer.
’Twas on a Monday morning, in the middle of the night
I dreamt that I had woken up, it gave me such a fright.
I thought I’d got insomnia, it nearly made me weep.
But luckily, when I woke up, I found I was asleep.
Etc.
If you haven’t seen me clog dancing, I’m sorry to say that you just haven’t really lived.
We couldn’t leave the Welsh out: they’re very sensitive, always on the lookout for a sight of the slightest slight. This time we sang to ‘Sospan Fach’, ‘All Through the Night’, ‘The Ash Grove’, ‘Men of Harlech’ and ‘Land of my Fathers’.
As a couple of Welsh miners.
Marvellous. Enough emotion to raise the roof of a Millennium Stadium.
We were rarely impressionists, although Ronnie did think highly of his Patrick Moore, but then Patrick Moore always looks like a man doing an impression of someone even more eccentric than him and slightly overdoing it. And when we played two burglars once, we played them, just for the hell of it, as John Gielgud and Noël Coward. Nobody noticed, which may be why we only did it once.
We did occasionally, though, venture into caricature, and that gave rise to one of our funniest finales, with Ronnie as
Nana Moussaka and me as Charles Azenough. You see what I mean about drag. He was Nana and I was Charles.
Then there was the women’s guild choir, all fa la la and including the following lovely lines, to the tune of ‘Nymphs and Shepherds’:
Cynthia Shepherd’s gone away.
Where’s she gone?
Her mother won’t say.
Particularly popular was Ronnie’s take on ‘Bold Sir John’, sung by the two of us with quite a large chorus and a tenor soloist with a high-pitched voice. We were all dressed as folk singers who took ourselves terribly seriously. It contained some classic Barker word play. One verse will give you the feel of the thing.
ALL: Now bold Sir John he met a maid
As on her back she lay.
SOLOIST: Please show respect, and come not near
For I’ve seen many a maiden here
Get lost among the new-mown hay
So doff your hat, I pray.
RC: Get lost
RB: Get lost
ALL: Get lost
Get lost
Get lost among the new-mown hay:
RC: Sod off
RB: Sod off
ALL: Sod off
Sod off
Sod off your hat, I pray.
Throw in a brass band, a pinch of Hinge and Bracket, add some pearly kings and a load of Cossacks and you’ve got a picture of some of the variety of cheery parodies that regularly brought our ninety-seven shows to what I hope was a rousing finale. Recording them certainly cheered up our Saturday nights.
After the recording, we might go to the BBC Club for a drink and a chat. After all, the Television Centre was becoming a kind of second home for us. The club was on the second floor, probably still is, and it was a large, airy place to which all the staff belonged. Members could sign guests in, and it was a pleasant way to unwind.
However, it is not for nothing that some people dub the
Me and Ron about to burst into song in a sketch called ‘Ball and Socket’ (our version of Hinge and Bracket), from the Saturday night show.
BBC the British Bureaucracy Cock-up, and poor Ronnie B. fell foul of this. He was refused membership of the club. Why was he refused membership? Goodness knows.
Was Ronnie downhearted? Not in the least. He just gate-crashed. But, being Ronnie, he didn’t leave it there. He added a flourish. He took guests along and signed them in. ‘Just signing my guests in,’ he’d say, and it would all be written down in a book. Nobody ever refused him. In fact he even got to the stage of signing in people who worked full-time for the BBC. Ronnie loved to get away with harmless deceptions like that. It was rather like a minor version of the Gerald Wiley story.
By the time we arrived on the Sunday morning, the sets were just about up, and there was anticipation and a touch of tension in the air, even more so than on the previous day. The realization that people had been working through the night, bringing in through the huge doors of the studio all the sets and scenery that people had been building for days in some workshop, gave us a sudden feeling of responsibility, a sense that this wasn’t just comedy, it was a grown-up commercial enterprise.
When we arrived on the Sunday morning the sets would usually still be looking rather bare, but steadily throughout the day they would be dressed with all the fine detail that can make all the difference. I always felt it to be important that the set looked absolutely real. If it was a sketch set in a doctor’s surgery, it needed to look exactly like a doctor’s surgery in real life.
A man called Bobby Warans was the buyer for all our Two Ronnies series, and he was brilliant. I mentioned the spectacular rubber crocodile that we used in The Admirable Crichton. He would have had no trouble with that. He was never fazed. If you asked him for a chocolate bowler hat, he’d say, ‘Plain or milk?’ without turning a hair.
The studio rehearsal began at about half past ten, and the rest of the day till mid-afternoon would be a struggle, as the director attempted to get the best results on camera. He would have written what’s called a camera script, which stated which of the five cameras would be filming what at any given time, but these never proved easy to follow in practice, and we would stop and start in the most painful manner. You just had to be patient, go through the motions and switch off while the technicians struggled. You had to remind yourself that some of the best technicians in the world were busting a gut to get the best results for your show. There were occasional moments of difficulties with the unions, moments when there was resentment of some matter that was nothing to do with us, but in my experience they were far outweighed by all the quiet and generous support that we regularly received.
Then there would be a dress rehearsal. This is the moment to pay tribute to Mary Husband, who created all our costumes and did so with unfailing brilliance. It was quite a challenge too, with the variety of roles we played, especially in the serials and the musical finales, but she never let us down. We used to get a lot of our clothes, including all our jackets for the news items, from a tailor in Fulham called Dimi Major, who I believe was Ukrainian.
Ron and I were lucky to have the same dressers for long periods. I was dressed by Dennis Adoo for the whole of the run
of all the series, and Ronnie was dressed by Derek Sumner, an ex-actor, until his untimely death. They were two splendid men who would do all sorts of things for us, without complaint, including, as I mentioned earlier, getting our lunches on location. They were very very helpful, supportive, sweet and kind. They were great fans of the business, and they knew the business thoroughly. My Dennis had been a professional ice skater. They became good friends. They knew our foibles and what to talk about and what not to talk about. All this was invaluable, especially on recording days, when people would get tense and excited and nervous, and everything had to be done fast yet calmly. We were very lucky.
There were always a few people watching the dress rehearsal, but it didn’t do to take much notice of their laughter, as they would not be at all typical of the sort of people who would be in the audience that night. There would be an anthology of writers, or whatever the collective term should be – a gaggle, I suppose, for comedy writers – and there would often be a small group of people who didn’t crack the faintest smile even once throughout the whole rehearsal. There was no need for us to panic, however. They might well be a delegation of Bolivian lighting engineers who were being given a tour of the studios and who didn’t speak a word of English.
After the dress rehearsal, the director would come down from his control box to give us notes – usually there wouldn’t be a need for many, as it was such a well-drilled operation. There was still about an hour and a half before the show, and people would go off to relax in whatever way they found best. Ron and I both went to our rooms for a few moments of peace and quiet; it was important to us to remain focused. We would both have a light snack, mine, I suspect, being lighter than his.
Between seven and seven thirty, the audience would file into their seats, and an atmosphere of anticipation would build. We would be feeling the tension. When we did our very first show, we were probably just a bit too tense, but from that moment onwards, while we still felt that tightening of the nerves, that sinking feeling in the stomach, it was never to a destructive level. In fact you had to feel it. Once you lost that tension, you would lose all your sharpness, all your adrenalin, all your style and energy. It comes with the territory, as the Americans say. But we were helped, of course, by the fact that we had prepared so thoroughly and so professionally.
Some of you, as you read this, will be remembering your visit to a studio audience for a TV show, but the majority of you won’t. That is a certainty, because the number of people in an audience is not much more than 200, and the shows were regularly watched by audiences not far short of twenty million.
It is a very strange business, doing a show live to just over 200 people, when the real targets of the programme are the millions of viewers around the country and indeed around the world. You have to play the humour for the viewers, who will be seeing everything in relative close-up, but if you have a live audience to laugh at you, you must get their laughs, so you must do the comedy with enough vigour and panache to reach out to an audience who are quite a long way from you and are watching you through a forest of cameras and lights. And the cameras are moving around all the time, distracting them. You are helped by the fact that there are a few TV monitors situated in strategic places above the audience’s heads. (‘What did you think of the show?’ ‘It was over my head.’)
But, although the audience are getting a free show, they aren’t going to be terribly happy if they just sit and watch it on the monitors. They might think that it hadn’t been worth coming, they might as well be at home. We took great pains to make sure that they wouldn’t feel like that. We gave them a proper show.
For variety shows like ours, there isn’t much argument about having a studio audience – you need it. But Ron and I both also did our situation comedies with an audience; and I think we both felt that the knowledge that it would be played to a live audience sharpened us up, and the writers too. It had to be really funny. Smiles don’t register on a sound track.
Most people believe that a great deal of canned laughter is used in TV comedy. This is not so, in our experience, and I am quite certain that, in this country, canned laughter is used extremely rarely, if at all. Just occasionally, if a retake is needed, and if there isn’t quite as much laughter on the second take, the editors might take the laughter off the first take, but it is still a genuine laugh, at that particular joke, by that particular audience, so I don’t think that can be regarded as cheating. In fact the reason why people suspect that there is a lot of canned laughter is probably because the end of the laugh sometimes has to be removed in the editing, because it simply went on too long – if it was allowed its full course it would make the show too slow at home – so the laugh is suddenly cut off in a way that doesn’t sound quite natural.
Nor do fierce men hold up boards saying, ‘Laugh’. They will give a cue for applause, so that everybody claps at the same time, but there aren’t any dreadful devices in the seats to give the audience electric shocks if they don’t laugh.
In America it was very different. On our way to Australia, in the late seventies, Ronnie and I once stopped off to do a show in LA. It was called The Big Show, and was intended to be a huge spectacular series on three elements: ice, water and the stage. It was hosted by the great Victor Borge, creator of the wonderful line ‘My uncle was a doctor, and he was very clever. In fact he invented a cure for which there was no disease.’ Loretta Swit, Hotlips of M.A.S.H., was on the bill, and Ronnie prostrated himself and kissed her feet, much to the audience’s approval.
But that was the problem. There were very few people in the audience. They let people into the studio at seven, and by the time we went on to do our piece it was past midnight. The audience were free to come and go, slip outside for a meal, and at that late hour, not surprisingly, the place was almost deserted. There were hardly any laughs, and Ronnie and I were a bit depressed.
‘Don’t worry,’ said the producer. ‘There’ll be plenty of laughs when it’s transmitted.’
And there were. They had a machine like a synthesizer, only it played laughter and applause rather than music. The man who played it was a virtuoso, and told us that the laughter tracks were so old that half the people laughing must be dead.
If the show had caught on, things might have been very different, and we might have spent much more time in America, but it didn’t catch on, and I must say that didn’t really bother us. I don’t think either of us fancied a long stint there.
As I say, we took good care of our live audience. We took great pains over the warm-up, which precedes all studio shows and gets the audience in the right mood.
The warm-up was started by an actor called Felix Bowness, whom you’ll know best as playing the jockey in Hi-de-Hi! He was funny and sweet, and he was lovely because he was funny in an old-fashioned, kind of slightly naughty, camp way, and he mingled with the audience: he used to go up the aisles, he was sort of tactile with people, and quite confident with the audience, and he created a lovely rapport with them. I can’t resist telling you that Felix called his house Strugglin’. I haven’t seen him for a while now, so maybe he’s retired and moved to another house, Dunwarmin’.
Next, our producer would go on. Usually nowadays there are credits for the producer and director, but at that time the word ‘producer’ covered both. Our first producer was Terry Hughes. He represented the handsome face of the BBC. He was always smiling. One of our writers once described him as a smile on legs. I think sometimes people were suspicious of him, when they first met him, because of all the smiling (are you reading this, Mr Blair?), but as you grew to know him, you realized that Terry’s smile wasn’t concealing anything. He was a clever, good-looking man who was producing, and producing extremely well, a very successful television show. Why should he not smile? He had plenty to smile about. We both got on very well with Terry; we would have dinner with him frequently when we were on location. He would be involved with us in the selection of the material and he was an extremely good judge of mate
rial.
Terry would talk to the audience very pleasantly, very fluently, very charmingly, not putting a foot wrong, and, in the audience, Anne would be counting silently to herself. We would invite various friends to the show, and Anne was counting up to the moment when our guest that week, whether male or female, would turn to her and whisper, ‘Who’s that lovely man?’ They always asked the question before she had counted to ten.
After Terry, I would go on. I would do four or five minutes of patter, the same each week, I have to say, and there in the audience would be our dear wives, and Joy and Anne would laugh heartily, right to the end, at jokes they had heard eighty-eight times before. Occasionally, if there were any problems with the microphones, they would call out, ‘Can’t hear,’ and the rest of the audience would wonder who those bossy women were.
My final joke, when I introduced Ronnie, would always be, ‘Well you’ve seen me, looking like a Greek god. Now for a man who looks like a Greek restaurant.’ Latterly, I had to alter my introduction, because Ron had become so slim, but you can’t waste a good laugh, so I’d say, ‘I used to say…’ and do the Greek restaurant gag, and then I’d use a little joke that I sometimes use for myself in my act: ‘But nowadays he’s much trimmer because he’s invested in a little treadmill he’s got at home – he’s only doing widths at the moment.’
Then Ronnie would come on, and do a short routine in the manner of McGill and the postcards. He would say to the audience, ‘I’ve got three questions here. I’ll read them out to you, and then I’ll count three, two, one, and you all shout out the answer and we’ll see how it goes. What are all men who mend shoes called? Three, two, one…’
‘Cobblers,’ shouted the audience.
‘If doors don’t have bells, what will they have? Three, two, one…’
And It's Goodnight from Him . . . Page 11
