And It's Goodnight from Him . . .

by Ronnie Corbett; David Mattingly

  13

  The making of a series of The Two Ronnies involved about a month of location filming, another month of preparation, and then eight weekly studio recordings, so altogether it took up a third of our year. The filming would be done in the summer, when the weather was good and the days long, and the studio recordings would be in the autumn, finishing in time for me to do a pantomime. During those four months Ronnie and I would be in each other’s pockets. In the rest of the year we didn’t see a great deal of each other.

  We didn’t make a conscious decision about that. Neither of us said, ‘Look, old chum, let’s not see too much of each other till the next series begins, in case we get tired of each other’! I’m sure that most of you have friends, lifelong friends, really good friends, whom you only see about once a year. We were like that. We both understood, I think, that, in our very British friendship, we needed to preserve our own individual space.

  Apart from the normal fact that good friends don’t live in each other’s pockets, there were three reasons why we didn’t meet all that often.

  The first reason was that we lived a long way from each other, as I’ve already described. Pinner to Addington both ways is not an undertaking to be entered into lightly.

  A second reason was that in the time between series of The Two Ronnies we were both extremely busy with our individual careers. It’s the right moment, perhaps, to consider those separate careers.

  Ronnie’s aim after the success of the first series of The Two Ronnies was to find a really good situation comedy for himself. His first effort was a return to one of his old characters, Lord Rustless. But it wasn’t a second series of Hark at Barker. It was called His Lordship Entertains, and it featured an entirely new situation for His Lordship, even though once again Ron was supported by Josephine Tewson and David Jason. Ronnie and David had struck up an instant rapport from the start. In the BAFTA tribute to Ronnie, many years later, Ronnie stood flanked by me and by David and called us his two greatest friends.

  In His Lordship Entertains, Lord Rustless was running a luxury hotel, Chrome Hall. It wasn’t a very good hotel, and Ronnie later referred to the series, jokingly, as ‘Fawlty Towers, Mark 1’. The series was fine, but it is very difficult for an aristocrat to win the hearts of the television public. I think people admired the series rather than identified with it, and both Ronnie and the BBC felt that it was not the vehicle for which he was searching.

  Ronnie now repeated his tried and trusty formula of doing a series of one-off programmes, partly in celebration of his versatility and partly for the more practical reason of trying to find a hit situation comedy for him. His intention was to do two series, called, in true Ronnie style, Six of One and Halfa Dozen of the Other. This was scuppered when the BBC decided to do seven shows in the first series, not six. They went out, therefore, under the meaningless umbrella title of Seven of One. In fact there never was a second series. There didn’t need to be. In the first series Ronnie found not one, but two superb vehicles for his talents.

  The seven shows featured a fanatical football fan named Albert Spanner, who struggled to bring his local football team up to scratch; an old man who refuses to leave his soon-to-be-demolished house; a criminal who takes a train to prison, accompanied by two prison officers; a man forced to go on a crash diet when his wife hides his clothes so that he can’t leave the house for food (I wonder which overweight writer/actor penned that one?); the penny-pinching owner of a northern c-c-c-c-corner shop; a story about a family of compulsive Welsh gamblers; and a story in which Ronnie and Roy Castle became Ronnie’s beloved Laurel and Hardy (what perfect casting). Two of the shows became series.

  Porridge turned out to be one of the greatest of all our television sitcoms. It was written by those fine writers Dick Clement and Ian La Fresnais. Ronnie’s performance as Norman Stanley Fletcher was magnificent. While making Fletcher a very individual character, Ronnie also turned him into a universal prisoner. There is something in the nation’s temperament – I say that, but I don’t really know much about other nations’ temperaments, maybe it occurs in all nations, maybe it’s in the human temperament the world over – that identifies easily with petty crooks. So many of the famous Ealing comedies featured petty crooks. We’d be really indignant if Norman Stanley Fletcher burgled our home, but put him on the screen and we call him the underdog and identify with him against the very authorities of whom we complain in real life that they aren’t doing enough to protect us.

  Ronnie was brilliantly supported by Fulton Mackay and Brian Wilde as warders, and by Richard Beckinsale as his cellmate, Godber. There was also, at one stage, a superb cameo role for David Jason as a very old man. The series was filmed at Ealing Studios, with Slade Prison built in a drained water tank.

  It was a huge success. Ronnie was amazed, at a royal film premiere, when the Queen Mother said, ‘Oh, they’ve let you out, then.’

  Ronnie once appeared with Fulton Mackay at a big charity do in a vast tent, early on in Porridge’s history. Being Ronnie, he couldn’t, of course, talk directly to the audience, so a little incident was arranged. It was announced, between acts, that Fletcher had escaped, and later Ronnie appeared on a bicycle, riding furiously round and round the tent, a job that he didn’t enjoy, as Fletcher didn’t wear glasses and he could hardly see a thing. Then there was the sound of a police siren, and a van with flashing blue lights appeared, Fulton Mackay jumped out and barked, ‘Nobody move!’ The audience erupted, and Ronnie said that in that one moment Fulton realized for the first time just how popular he had become.

  Ronnie believed Fletcher to be his finest character, and I’d go along with that. There is a view held by a few people… well, quite a lot of people… damn it, almost everybody, except perhaps my mum… well, and perhaps my dad… that Ronnie was more gifted than me, and I have no worry at all about that. In some ways, our relationship was a bit like an open marriage. What I mean is that, whatever Ron did separately, I knew that he would come back to The Two Ronnies, and come back yet more loved than he had been before.

  I can’t leave Porridge without mentioning, very briefly, a stunt that went wrong, when Ronnie and Fulton Mackay enacted another little scene together, on the occasion of the Water Rats, that great showbiz fraternity, making Ronnie their personality of the year. Unable to be himself, he came handcuffed to Fulton. Ronnie was staying for the dinner, but Fulton Mackay was going off to another engagement, They couldn’t get the handcuffs undone. Well, you’d think if you were going to be trapped in handcuffs, the Water Rats might be one of the best places to be, and, sure enough, a Water Rat said, ‘Don’t worry. I’m a member of the Magic Circle. You just have to know where to tap them.’ Alas, the man’s magichad deserted him. They were unlocked in the end, but it took forty minutes, and poor Fulton was late for his next appointment.

  There were only three series of Porridge. Ronnie didn’t want to do any more, because he didn’t want to get typecast. He didn’t want to hear cries of ‘Oh, look, there’s that man who plays that prisoner.’ Also, he was deeply affected by the tragic death of Richard Beckinsale, loved not only for Porridge, but also for Rising Damp, perhaps the best situation comedy that ITV ever made.

  Ronnie and I saw Richard on the evening before he died. We had done a stage version of The Two Ronnies at the Palladium, and we were taking it to Australia. There was a farewell party at Langan’s Brasserie. Richard left early, to go to another function, saying cheerfully to Ronnie, ‘Cheerio – see you in a year’s time.’

  Ronnie did not see him in a year’s time. He never saw him again. Richard died in his sleep that night. The cause was believed to be sky-high cholesterol. He was thirty-one.

  Ronnie did do one series of Fletcher that wasn’t set in the prison. He was back in civvy street. It was called Going Straight. If Porridge had never happened it might have been considered quite a success, but without the authority figures against whom Fletcher had schemed, it just wasn’t the same.

  The other series f
rom Seven of One, the one with the stuttering owner of a corner shop, was of course Open All Hours. It was written by another of TV’s great sitcom writers, Roy Clarke. It starred Ronnie as Arkwright, the shop’s proprietor, David Jason as his nephew Granville, and Lynda Baron as the trusty, not to mention busty, Nurse Gladys Emmanuel.

  It was almost as successful as Porridge, and almost as loved by Ronnie. The clock moves on, and Ronnie is meeting HRH the Queen Mother again, this time at a royal gala at the Palladium. He is dressed in flunkey’s uniform (so that he doesn’t have to be himself) and is handing out programmes.

  ‘Your puh-puh-programme, Your Majesty,’ he says.

  ‘Lovely, Mr Arkwright,’ she replies.

  ‘That’ll be two guineas, please,’ he jokes.

  The Queen Mother looks at her pretty evening bag and says, ‘I don’t think I have any money on me.’

  ‘I’ll send you the bill,’ says Ronnie/Arkwright. ‘VAT added.’

  I do feel that there was one other person in Ronnie’s life whom I must mention, that if Ronnie was looking down on me, he would whisper, ‘Don’t forget Glenn.’

  Glenn was Glenn Melvyn, and Ronnie never forgot him, as you will see. Glenn was the company’s leading man at Bramhall in the early days of Ron’s career in rep, and Ron said of him, ‘He was to teach me everything I ever knew about comedy.’ Glenn became far more than Ron’s mentor. He became a close friend. Ron was not a particularly social person. I don’t mean that he wasn’t sociable, but that he didn’t much like parties and large gatherings. He was at his happiest, I suspect, apart from with his family, in the two-handers of life, just he and a friend, having a pint or two, or a bottle of red wine, and chatting, chatting about the business, the craft, and about everything under the sun. His friendships were few, but deep, and his friendship with Glenn was as deep as any.

  The relevance of mentioning Glenn at this point in our story is that it was from Glenn that the famous Arkwright stutter derived. It wasn’t in Roy’s script. It was the stutter that Glenn Melvyn created for a character in a play wot he

  Enjoying a pint, in character of course…

  wrote, called Hot Water. The part was written for Arthur Askey, but he couldn’t go on tour with it, and Glenn Melvyn played the part, complete with stutter, and Ronnie played the other main male part and watched the stutter closely every night. It was, it has to be said, a comedy stutter, but done so brilliantly, and so consistently, that it developed that quality of truthfulness without which comedy just doesn’t work for any length of time.

  Ronnie’s career was full of highlights, but nobody can avoid a few disappointments along the way. Ronnie did work in films, but it never quite happened for him on the big screen. Actually I don’t believe this worried him much. He felt that television was his natural home. However, he was excited at the prospect of being directed by Dick Lester in Robin and Marian.

  He played the role of Friar Tuck, with Sean Connery as Robin Hood and Audrey Hepburn as Maid Marian. According to the script, Friar Tuck was to ride a horse. Ronnie freely admitted to being terrified of riding horses. He was told there would be no need to ride a horse, a double could do it. He demanded, even so, that it be written into the contract that he would not be asked to ride a horse. It was. But this was the film industry, and, in the end, Ronnie had to sit on a horse, terrified. The horse wasn’t too thrilled either. Ronnie did not have a jockey’s build.

  More serious was that he just wasn’t happy working with Dick Lester. Ronnie needed everything carefully prepared and structured. Dick would say, ‘Do something funny.’ Ronnie couldn’t be any good working like that.

  Another disappointment was a sitcom called The Magnificent Evans. Ronnie played a Welsh photographer whose eye roved more than his camera. It was written by Roy Clarke again. I suspect that the Welsh character is even harder to capture than the Scottish character if one is a Sassenach (if there is an equivalent Welsh word for an English person, I don’t know it), and this may be why the show didn’t really catch on. And so it is forgotten, and the good ones are remembered.

  But Ronnie’s greatest disappointment was that he was pipped by Michael Hordern for the role of narrator for the children’s television series of Paddington Bear.

  And what was I doing? Well, a lot of my time between series was taken up with pantomimes. They were hard work, but I enjoyed them when I was younger. I’ve done a trapeze act on a Kirby wire – that takes courage – with a wonderfully funny double act called the Patton Brothers. They had a great routine on the trapeze and they started throwing me around. I was on a wire, of course, and the climax of the act was when they sent me flying across the stage to land sitting on a platform that they were holding up for me. Of course they got it upside down and I landed on my backside on the handle of the thing. I did that piles of times.

  Stanley Baxter and I developed an extraordinarily messy whitewash act. The traditional pantomime slosh is created by grating sticks of shaving soap and whisking them in a bucket. The water has to be at a particular temperature or the stuff doesn’t really slosh. It’s not very nice even when it does. The stuff gets in your eyes and makes them sore. During the run you are sloshed twice daily. In the interval, while you are wishing you’d ordered your drink before the show, we are removing our costumes and make-up, having a shower, putting on our costumes again and doing our full make-up again. It’s hard work. So why do we do it? The answer is in the laughter of the children. To hear that laughter is to experience true joy.

  A much less messy routine was a pastiche… well, more a travesty really… of Swan Lake. I had great fun doing this with Stanley, he was so very funny, and then I adapted it to do on my own. I was the cygnet at the end of the line, on my teetering points and in white tulle, getting into a worse and worse mess. The laughter was tremendous.

  But I was still looking for a television vehicle, and didn’t in fact find my ideal one until a long while later, in the mid-eighties, I did a pilot of a sitcom about a married couple, just divorced and getting together again. Or were they just married again and getting away from each other? To be honest, I can’t remember, because in the end this sitcom wasn’t the one that we developed.

  I was carrying another script of a possible sitcom vehicle around with me. It was called Sorry and it was written by Ian Davidson and Peter Vincent, writers and script editors for The Two Ronnies. I didn’t look at the script until we’d finished the pilot, as I didn’t want to be distracted, but a BBC executive saw me with it and commented, rather disparagingly, ‘I don’t think you need bother to read that.’

  How lucky his comment was. If he’d said, ‘That’s the one you should be doing,’ I might not have found the time to read it. After all, the pilot of the show I can barely remember had really gone rather well. But I was a bit irritated by the executive’s dismissive tone, and I decided I jolly well would read it and make my own mind up, and when I read it I liked it immediately. I thought it was a very good idea.

  Judging the potential in a comedy is not easy, and, as I had such great respect for Ronnie’s judgement, I gave it to him to read. He read it straightaway. He was always very punctilious about giving me help if I asked for it, and he agreed that it was the perfect script for me.

  I played a character called Timothy Lumsden, a sad 41-year-old anorak, totally dominated by his mother, who was a monster, a domineering control freak. The father was also bullied, and they were in timid rebellion against the mother. The mother was played by Barbara Lott, and the father by William Moore. It was all exaggerated, of course, but it was an exaggeration based on truth, and in any case it may not have been as exaggerated as we thought, because I got many letters from viewers who said that there was a Timothy at their work.

  Timothy was pathetic, but he wasn’t a complete wimp. If he had been, there would have been no pleasure in playing him. He could be almost brave on occasion, although, ultimately, that ‘almost’ would be the defining word. But he was capable of being, at times, cheeky and humo
rous and resilient.

  I thoroughly enjoyed making Sorry, which vindicated Ronnie’s judgement of its potential by running for five years. We rehearsed in a church hall in Kensington, in an area with antique shops and good sandwich bars. What a paradise it would have been for Ronnie, far nicer than the Acton Hilton. The sandwich bars used nice multigrain bread. Well, once a baker’s son, always a baker’s son. There was also a superb cake shop in Church Street (halfway down on the right – I hope it’s still there). Dave Allen lived near by, and he thoughtfully left me a little present in the cake shop. It was an apple charlotte, tied up with a bow and with a message on it, saying, ‘Welcome to the district, happy rehearsals – Dave Allen.’

  Timothy had elements of Walter Mitty in him. (Did you know that Walter Mitty was created by the American humorous writer James Thurber in a short story that was just six pages long? What brilliance, to create in six pages a character who would become a comic reference point for more than half a century.)

  Timothy worked as a librarian, and we got into trouble for that. I got lots of letters from librarians saying that they were trying to improve the image of libraries and I wasn’t helping. This sort of thing is always a problem. One of our writers in The Two Ronnies wrote a sketch about a dentist who blackmailed his characters in the chair, when they were terrified that he wouldn’t give them injections. When the writer went for his next check-up, his dentist snarled, ‘You’ve set back our public image ten years.’

  It’s always said that the key to audience appreciation is that the audience must be able to identify with the character. Well, in the late eighties I met one fan of Sorry who, it seemed to me, might have difficulty in identifying with poor put-upon librarian Timothy. He was the Prime Minister of Bahrain. I had been doing a turn at the opening of a golf course near the new airport in Hong Kong, and Anne and I had a stop-over between Dubai and Abu Dhabi. We were lolling by the pool when a friend of ours, who used to run the Bahraini royal family’s flying squadron, told me that I had a fan who was longing to see me.