And It's Goodnight from Him . . .

by Ronnie Corbett; David Mattingly

  ‘Knockers.’

  ‘If a farmer has sheep, cows and bullocks on his farm, and the sheep and cows die, what would he have left?’

  ‘Bullocks.’

  Simple stuff, but brilliant in the context. Here was Ronnie, uneasy at making jokes to an audience, so what did he do? Gave the audience the tag. It let him off the hook and gave the audience a warm feeling of being part of the show.

  We now moved seamlessly into the show itself, and here again we were very thorough. We worked out the running order in such a way that there would be the minimum of gaps, and we had material, like a sketch from the previous week’s show, to keep the audience entertained if there should be a gap.

  Nevertheless, things sometimes did go wrong, but you could use this to keep the audience on your side. In fact, one of Britain’s most famous practitioners of situation comedy, Leonard Rossiter, always made a deliberate mistake early in his shows. He would deliberately fluff a line. Round about the third or fourth line that he had, he would make his mistake, and then he would curse, and everyone would laugh, and he’d say, ‘Now we’ve got to go right back to the beginning,’ and he would go backwards very fast as if rewinding himself, and there would be a great round of applause from an audience who believed that they were seeing a spontaneous reaction and had no idea that it was a little routine done each week. Now the audience relaxed and thought, ‘They’re human, they’re like us,’ and the laughs came much more quickly.

  With our detailed warm-up, and the fact that our first jokes were the news items, we didn’t feel that we needed anything like that, but when things went wrong, Ronnie would be very good with the audience, much better than he ever gave himself credit for – he would be very funny ad-libbing. If I said something slightly funny, by accident, he would say something funnier, as if by accident. But he wasn’t confident that he could do that, so when he went on Wogan, or something like that, he used to hate it, although he was much better equipped for it than he ever allowed himself to believe.

  I think that this was all because there is something very, very important in your early years of development in the business, in the theatre. Your early experiences are critical, and if you’ve been somebody who always had to learn the text verbatim of a Shaw play or Shakespeare or any of the classic roles in rep, you’re not comfortable leaving the text and you don’t have that sort of confidence. If you’re somebody who’s been in a sort of revue and night club like me, making little bits up every now and again, you’re a little bit more confident. If you’re somebody like Tarbuck, who’s worked in Butlins from the age of about seventeen, you’re very confident with fresh words, but not so confident with a script.

  Anyway, we got through these moments pretty well, and I think that our studio audience would have to say that they had been given non-stop entertainment.

  At the end we would take care to thank them, to make them feel that we hadn’t just forgotten them now that we’d used them, and we would end with a little joke, the same every week: ‘If you’ve enjoyed the show, tell your friends. If you haven’t, don’t forget, our names are Little and Large.’

  Everywhere, in the control box, in the dressing rooms and the make-up suite, the tension would subside. Mary Husband always had a glass of his favourite Fleurie ready for Ronnie. ‘It didn’t touch the sides,’ he would say of it.

  After the studio shows, on the Sunday evenings, we didn’t go to the club. We had a little party. We used to get three dressing rooms, one for Ronnie B., one for me, and one in the middle for Gerald Wiley. In this middle room we would host a small gathering, at which wives, guests, producers and some of the writers would chat over red and white wine, gin and tonic, beer and salted nuts.

  Another person to help us substantially over our long careers – my goodness, how we’ve been helped – was a man called Ron Waverley. It was Ron who brought in the drinks in an ‘Esky’, and it was Ron who dispensed them. Ron came from Kelso in the Borders, but it wasn’t in Scotland that I met him. I met him in pantomime in Bristol.

  One particular year, fairly early in my television career, I was offered pantomimes in Manchester and Bristol. I chose Bristol because, as I said to Anne, ‘You never know. Cary Grant might visit his mother in Bristol and pop in to see the show.’ Ha very ha. Cary Grant had been born, named Archie Leach, in Bristol, and his mother still lived there. But, lo and behold, he did see the show and he popped round afterwards in his black and white Glen Urquhart tweed and his tortoiseshell glasses, accepted a gin and tonic, said he’d enjoyed the show and told me there had once been plans for him and Fred Astaire to play the Ugly Sisters, with Mickey Rooney as Buttons. Now that would have been something.

  In our pantomime the Ugly Sisters were played by John Inman and Barry Howard. Later John Inman went for auditions for Are You Being Served?, and Barry Howard landed the part of the ballroom dancing instructor in Hi-de-Hi! So things would soon look up for both John and Barry.

  Would things look up for Ron Waverley? He was a member of the chorus in the pantomime, and very Scottish. His real name was Ron Elms, and he changed it to Waverley because of the Walter Scott novels. He had a great phrase about people who came in from the country to see the shows. He said they were ‘fresh in frae’ fair oot’. His mum had been a nanny for the Duke of Roxburghe, and he was very proud of the fact that he had sung in the choir for the Duke’s son’s christening.

  Ron’s career wasn’t really taking off, and he was contemplating giving showbiz up before it gave him up. Knowing this, and knowing that he was besotted with cars, I asked him if he would like to come and work for me, doing the mail and the driving and so on. And he did. Eventually he left, and I got somebody else, but during the run at the Palladium Ronnie B. began to think that it would be a good idea to have somebody to drive him around, and Ron came back to work for Ron. This is getting to sound like the three Ronnies. Ron was a deeply unassuming man, as opposed to a deeply unamusing man, of which I’ve met several.

  If Ron had a catchphrase, it was, ‘It’s all right. It’s only me.’ That was what he would always say when he gave his diffident little knock on the door. He became far more than a driver cum dresser cum dispenser of drinks. He was a slim, rather attractive boy, and after he worked for Ronnie we saw a lot of him – he became a great family friend, and a friend of the girls. His home was in Eastbourne. I’m pretty sure he was gay, but he married a very rich Moroccan lady who’d had a baby by a Moroccan aristocrat who wasn’t going to marry her, so Ron married her to make the baby legal, although they never lived together. They became dear friends, and she bought him a big second-hand Cadillac, so it was all rather lovely, as it benefited them both and they were very sweet to each other. He died, sadly, of cancer, much too young. When he was buried, at Eastbourne, Anne and I went down to the service. A friend of his had arranged a little table in his memory, with a picture of his Alsatian dog in Kelso and of the three cars that he’d owned in his life. It was rather a sad little memorial for a kind man.

  After the party, Ron and I, with Joy and Anne, had another final unvarying routine. The four of us went off to an Indian restaurant in Westbourne Grove. In the very early days we would invite friends to come with us, but by the end of such a long day we found that we were really too tired to have to keep up the social chit-chat, and just the four of us used to go. It was always the same restaurant. We all got on so well. Joy and Anne had become firm friends, in a friendship that underpinned my friendship with Ron. We were so relaxed together, the four of us, sitting undisturbed with our curries. It was a great way to end a great day, and if Ron and I were too exhausted to make much conversation, nobody would have noticed. Anne and Joy could talk for Britain.

  It was always the same restaurant, the Star of India. And it was a very comfortable place to be. The star in the name outside the restaurant wasn’t a word, it was a star. It wasn’t very brightly illuminated, and on our first visit Anne didn’t notice it and said, ‘“Of India”. That’s a funny name for a restaurant.�
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  It was always the same restaurant, but we didn’t always order exactly the same food, of course. What do you think we were, creatures of habit?

  12

  Fun and fear – you need a bit of both, in comedy, and we had a touch of both with The Two Ronnies in the early seventies.

  The fun came on the way back from Montreux. We had gone there because The Two Ronnies was up for the Golden Rose award. This time, unlike on Frost Over England, we were the stars of the show, and it was we who went.

  I have to say that the visit did not go quite as we had anticipated in our dreams.

  In the first place, we travelled out there economy class. I hope that our relatively humble beginnings and the fundamental decency of our families had ensured that we never became utterly spoilt, but we were pulling in audiences not far short of twenty million, we were up for a prestigious award and we did think the BBC just might have managed to be a bit more generous.

  Never mind, we thought. They’re sure to upgrade us when we win.

  That was the second disappointment. We didn’t win. We came second. I’m not a petty man, but, honestly, who were those judges? I jest. We were beaten not by some German sketch show or arty compilation by men of French letters, but by our very own Stanley Baxter, with whom we had both worked, I in pantomime in Glasgow, Ronnie in the revue On the Brighter Side. Stanley was brilliant, and we couldn’t possibly resent his success. Besides, it was a great one and two for Britain, confirming that comedy was one of the increasingly few things in which Britain still led the rest of Europe.

  In the evening the BBC took us up to a little restaurant in the mountains for dinner with some of Britain’s best-known television journalists. Surely if you do that you are embarking on a good-will public-relations mission? We couldn’t believe what happened at the end of the meal. The BBC asked the journalists to chip in for their share of the bill. It was one of the most embarrassing moments of my life. We joke about the meanness of the BBC, the awfulness of the canteen, etc., but that is really just a joke, an abiding tradition of BBC comedy. Only this wasn’t a joke, it was real. It angered me, and I had a right old go at them later – not in front of the journalists, of course.

  We were in economy class again on the way home, though Stanley was in first class. We were, I admit, in the first row behind the curtain, so I suppose we were spoilt a little bit, but still. Michael Grade and Cyril Bennett were in first class, and we were sitting there, good boys, not complaining, taking our punishment for only getting the silver, when a note was brought from Michael Grade in first class, and the little note said, ‘Out front and loving it.’ We had to laugh.

  I’ve mentioned that we weren’t the sort of comic actors who had everybody in stitches all the time. In fact I can only remember one occasion when we did, and it was at the end of this same trip. We arrived at the airport and filed down the gangway on to the tarmac, where one of those long, bendy airport buses was waiting to take us on the five-and-a-half-mile journey to the terminal. The bus was filling up as we approached with our hand luggage. Ronnie just managed to step on, but just as I was about to step on the doors closed right in my face, practically slicing off my nose and, incidentally, curing my deviated septum. Well, everybody fell about. The timing was absolutely perfect, and the 120 or so people on the bus thought they’d seen the best comic moment of their lives; they thought we’d done it deliberately, with brilliant, split-second timing. They must have thought we did that sort of thing all the time. We often thought of everyone going off to their homes all over the country saying, ‘Well, dearie me, we saw the Two Ronnies at the airport, oh dear, it was so funny. Big Ron got on the bus and just as Wee Ron was about to get on, the doors closed. Oh dear, we did have a laugh. They timed it absolutely perfectly. They must do things like that all the time.’

  And none of them ever knew – well, maybe some of them will read this and find out – that it was the only time in forty years that anything remotely like that happened to us.

  I have to admit too that, even in an accident, the casting was perfect. It would have been funny if Ron had been left on the tarmac and I had been in the bus, but it wouldn’t have been as funny.

  The fear, and it was a very real fear, came early in 1972, when we were still basking in the favourable reaction to the first series of The Two Ronnies. We had a great shock. Far, far greater for Ronnie than for me, but still a shock for me. Ronnie had an enormous health scare.

  We were still carrying on our policy of maintaining our separate careers alongside our joint ones, and Ronnie was offered the part of Falstaff in a musical adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor. The weekly theatrical newspaper The Stage, with its usual stunning accuracy, reported that the part of Falstaff would be played by Ronnie Corbett. Now that would have been a challenge. It could have been rather like a joke we once did. ‘Ronnie Corbett will play the very important part of Henry VIII, and Ronnie Barker will play the rest of him.’

  Jimmy Gilbert, our trusted producer, had teamed up with Julian More, who’d helped write Irma La Douce, to create the show. It was a very free adaptation indeed, set just after the turn of the century. Falstaff would be known as Good Time Johnny, and that would also be the name of the musical. Joan Sims, whom Ronnie knew well from radio, would play Mistress Ford. The plan was to open at Birmingham rep and hope to take it into the West End when it had bedded down.

  After about three weeks Ronnie’s voice began to go. It seemed like no more than an irritation. He’d sung in our show, but he’d never sung every day for three weeks or with such intensity. He assumed that he was misusing his voice. One of the actors in the show had a brother who was a doctor, and this gentleman had a look at Ronnie’s throat the next day and said he would like a friend of his to look at it the following day. Ronnie was still fairly relaxed about the whole business, but then the second doctor looked down Ronnie’s throat for a worryingly long time, and said, ‘Sister, come and take a look at this.’

  Sister went and took a look at… what? Suddenly Ronnie was worried. Suddenly he knew that it was serious.

  ‘Interesting,’ said the Sister, in a carefully non-committal tone.

  This second doctor turned out to be a specialist, and he told Ronnie that there was a growth which might be precancerous. It wasn’t too bad at the moment, but when the Birmingham run of the show ended he would trim a little piece off Ron’s vocal cords and have it tested.

  Just to be on the safe side, he asked Ron to go back to see him the following week.

  By the following week it had got worse, and the specialist decided that it couldn’t wait. Someone else would have to play the part of Falstaff, and Ronnie was whipped into the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, to have a microscopic slice taken off his vocal cords. There was a risk, said the doctor, that it might affect his voice. Ronnie was frightened. Cancer held such a special fear in our hearts then. It was the disease you didn’t mention, the Macbeth of the body. It’s still dreadful, but today it is talked about, and that very special, deep, communal, secret fear has gone.

  The doctor asked Ronnie if he smoked. He did, heavily. He’d smoked twenty a day for a long time, but he had found that it helped his concentration, and in the last few years, the years of increasing success, it had gone up to sixty. That really did seem to add up to quite a heavy addiction. At that time he would have packs of 200 in his briefcase.

  The doctor told him that he was to have an operation the next day, and a nurse advised him to have a hot bath to relax him, so that he could get a night’s natural sleep before they started sedating him the next morning.

  As Ronnie ran his bath, feeling pretty scared about things, he remembered that for some months his agent, Peter Eade, had asked, when he rang him, if he was suffering from a cold. The telephone, which exaggerates voices – don’t you hate hearing your own voice on the answering machine? – had picked up a slight roughening of his tone.

  I don’t think Ronnie feared that he was going to die, although it mus
t cross your mind that if the biopsy is positive, it might be the beginning of the end. What he really feared, though, was that he’d never be able to sing again.

  So, as he lay in the bath, he began to sing. He sang all his favourite songs, then any song he could think of. He sang for an hour and half in that hospital bath, lying in the soapy, increasingly tepid water, just in case he could never sing again. I’m sure that, if there were any flies on the wall, Ronnie put a few moments of pleasure into their rotten, monotonous lives.

  Well, the operation was a success, but Ronnie still had to wait a few horrible hours while the tissue was tested. Good news. They had got it in time. But Ronnie claimed that his singing voice had changed. It had improved!

  When the surgeon made his round after Ronnie’s operation, he chucked Ronnie’s remaining cigarettes out of the window, plus a lighter and a good-quality cigarette case which had been a present from Joy. Ron never smoked again. He used to chew dummy cigarettes instead.

  When Ronnie told the surgeon that giving up smoking was making it difficult for him to go to sleep, the surgeon advised him to drink a bottle of wine a night. Years later, when he was opening a bottle, Ronnie suddenly smiled. He had remembered the words of that surgeon, and he had realized something. The man was an ear, nose and throat specialist. He didn’t mind what happened below the neck, it would never be his department’s responsibility.

  For at least a year, Ronnie found that he couldn’t concentrate well enough to write, and he was a bit irritable at times. Once he suddenly stormed out of the rehearsals and went home, but on the whole he was very good about it.

  The incident had scared me too, and not long afterwards I gave up. I too found it very difficult. In fact I became very short-tempered. I think my personality changed for six or seven months.

  We got through it. We remained friends. A happy and smokeless future lay before us.