And It's Goodnight from Him . . .

by Ronnie Corbett; David Mattingly

  Henry was there, dapper as ever, and he said, ‘As a special favour, I’m going to give you the services of my caddie, Pacifico.’ Pacifico turned out to be a donkey. We just couldn’t believe it, but Henry assured us that he knew all the rules and wouldn’t walk on the greens or the tees. It turned out that the great man had rescued the donkey from a cruel farmer and spoilt him something rotten, feeding him Polo mints and all sorts of treats.

  Our golf bags were strapped to Pacifico, one on each side, like panniers, and off he ambled towards the first tee. We had selected our clubs for our opening drives when we became aware of a loud gushing noise. We looked round, and saw our caddie behaving in a way that we had never seen from a caddy before. Pacifico was having a pee on the edge of the first green, not on the green itself – this was a donkey with a feeling for golf courses. And what a pee it was. It went on for a very long time, and we watched in awe and humility.

  I prepared carefully for my first shot, rather foolishly aware that I wanted to make a good impression in front of this donkey. My shot skimmed off to the right. Did I detect just a touch of contempt in Pacifico’s attitude?

  Jimmy played his shot. His ball, like mine, did not go straight down the middle. It went to the left. I watched Pacifico carefully, and, yes, I think there was disdain in his demeanour.

  He performed his duties perfectly, though, ambling with just a hint of arrogance towards my ball, and then, when I had chosen my club for my second shot, he ambled over to Jimmy’s ball.

  I was preparing for my second shot, when Jimmy called out. Pacifico was trotting off into the woods in the distance, with our golf bags. He had caddied for the great Henry Cotton. He wasn’t going to caddy for the likes of us.

  I said that I’d end with that story, but I don’t think ending is one of my talents. Portugal reminds me that in Spain, which is quite near Portugal, I met that great actor and bon viveur Stewart Granger.

  The first time I met him was actually in Edinburgh. He was with Jean Simmons. I use the word ‘met’ rather loosely. I saw him getting out of a taxi and going into the Roxburghe Hotel. He was in Edinburgh with Jean Simmons to appear in a play, The Power of Darkness. I shouldn’t think he even saw me.

  Anyway, we’d taken a holiday house in Spain and were in a supermarket, and there he was, just next to the special offer on stuffed olives. (I remember Gerald Wiley adding three lines to a party sketch – ‘Have an olive.’ ‘Are they stuffed?’ ‘No, you eat them.’) I recognized him, of course, but… he recognized me. Yes, this time I actually met him in the sense of meeting him. Not only that, but he even invited Anne and me to dinner the next night at his hacienda. He was dressed almost as he had been in Bhowani Junction. Only Ava Gardner was missing. Two delightful Oriental girls were cooking for him. He was a superb host. He made very stylish cocktails, and we had two legs of lamb for three people, so that we could all have the choicest cuts.

  I didn’t tell you that story in order to drop names. Honestly. I told you it because it struck me as a powerful symbol of how very, very fortunate I have been in my life, to go from seeing him getting out of a taxi to being invited to dinner at his hacienda. I had to pinch myself to believe that it was true.

  14

  No decade is short of bad news, and in the seventies there was plenty, including unemployment at its highest level since 1940, and two pub bombings by the IRA in Birmingham. But there was some good news too. The Americans finally withdrew from Vietnam. Democracy returned to Greece after the rule of the colonels, to Spain after General Franco, and also to Portugal. And in Britain there were two wonderful hot summers in succession.

  The seventies were proving good news for us too. The Two Ronnies was firmly established in the ratings. The arrangement was that alternate series would begin either on BBC1 or on BBC2, and then be repeated on the other channel. Both channels paid for the series, and, as the BBC’s faith in us rose, so did our budgets. If we wanted sixteen gorgeous girls in crinolines behind us, we got them. We were able to make the show look glossier, richer, more expansive, without ever sacrificing its original feeling of homeliness.

  Our children were growing up. Ronnie had got over his health scare. The fact that we spent so much time apart meant that we were always really pleased to see each other on our occasional evenings together. The Barkers would invite us occasionally for a nice dinner, and we would do the same. Just occasionally one of us would give a party, and then of course the other would always be among the guests, and very, very occasionally we would go out for an evening together.

  When we did go out, perhaps to the theatre, Ronnie would always be a bit tense about it, asking lots of questions. ‘Where shall we go? What shall we do? What shall we have?’ as if it was all really a bit of a problem, and then, when we got wherever it was, he would suddenly be very confident, and he’d take over.

  What did we talk about? It’s hard to remember. Nothing earth-shattering. Trivia. Gossip. Showbiz. Family. Clothes. Food. We instinctively avoided the controversial issues. I don’t say that we would have found any major disagreements. I think we were both somewhere slightly to the right of centre in our political views, both more humanist than religious in our beliefs while subscribing to, and being influenced by, the moral principles of the Christian society in which we had been brought up. I do remember, though, that there was always a lot of laughter at our meetings. I’ve said that we weren’t funny men off the screen, but what I meant, I suppose, was that we weren’t gag merchants, acting up to our role as comedians. Ron, though, was a very witty man, and Joy too has a wonderful wit and humour. She and Anne can’t be together for five minutes without laughter.

  Nothing could have been more typical of Ronnie than the evening he came to see me in a Feydeau farce, The Dressmaker (you see, I didn’t just do summer shows and pantos), directed by Patrick Garland. It was quite funny, but not one of Feydeau’s best, and Ronnie said, ‘I’d quite like to have a little go at it, because I have a feeling I could improve it.’ Not many people would have the confidence to say that about a master of the medium of farce, as Feydeau is acknowledged to have been, but Ronnie thought he could, and he did. He wrote a very funny new scene which fitted perfectly into the play.

  But when he sent it, it was far more than a funny new scene. He had adorned the script with apposite little drawings and sketches, all taken out of appropriate books. He had gone to great trouble, and spent a lot of time, to help with the play but also to decorate his efforts with all these beautiful little touches. That was Ronnie. You asked for a little bit of help, and you got all that.

  But it was The Two Ronnies that dominated our lives. Even at home, in our family life, it was ever present, in a way. I always think it’s difficult for children to have parents who’re well known. There’ll always be somebody at school saying things like, ‘My mother thinks your father’s a little squirt’ and ‘You think your dad’s funny. I don’t think he’s funny at all.’ We couldn’t take Emma and Sophie to the zoo or football matches, or even have a picnic in the park. There were bonuses like nice holidays but inevitably the children were cosseted, and they would have to lead a quiet life because we didn’t go anywhere. And it wasn’t always easy for me either. They’d bring a lot of friends to the house, and they’d all want to have a look at me, and I’d be hiding away because they were daft.

  We did lots and lots of sketches over the years, but there are three that stand out for particular, and very different, reasons. One of them was called ‘The Howling Brothers of St Wilkinson’, and was written by Peter Vincent and a gentleman. Terry Hughes enthused about it, as a sketch with philosophy, but the reason for its inclusion here is that it was the only sketch that we were never able to complete, because we had uncontrollable attacks of corpsing while attempting to record it. I’ve mentioned corpsing before, but it occurs to me that you may not all know the derivation. It comes from the fact that very often in a play a person has to lie utterly still, like a corpse, and there will always be people in the audien
ce who spend all their time looking at the corpse to see if there is some movement, a sign of breathing, or, worse, of amusement. And so inappropriate laughter is known as corpsing. Well, on this occasion somehow we just couldn’t help ourselves.

  Maybe I just looked so very funny as a novice monk, or maybe it was the fat cigar in the mouth of Ronnie B. as the abbot, or maybe the sketch was just so very funny, or maybe we didn’t quite share Terry Hughes’s enthusiasm for it and were a bit embarrassed.

  I’ll quote just a bit, so that you can make your minds up over its merit. Brother Cyril (me) was very surprised when the abbot said, ‘Now you will find your cell furnished only with the bare essentials… a bed, a wooden chair, a picture of the founder and a washbasin. And a shower and a low flush toilet. And a fitted cupboard, three-piece suite, television, stereogram, and of course a cocktail cabinet.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Brother Cyril, taken aback. ‘It’s more than I expected, Father.’

  ‘We rise early here,’ continued the abbot. ‘You will arise for early devotions at the crack of eleven o’clock. After devotions, that’ll be five past eleven, you may return to your bed. Lunch is at one thirty. On Sundays, however, we all have a lie-in.’

  ‘Oh yes, I see,’ lied Brother Cyril.

  ‘On no account,’ continued the abbot, ‘may you have a woman in your cell…’

  ‘Perish the thought, Father,’ exclaimed the horrified brother.

  ‘… after midnight.’

  The philosophical bit came at the end, after the abbot had said, ‘Do finish this eclair.’

  ‘No,’ exclaimed the desperate brother. ‘I don’t want it. I mean I do want it but I don’t want to want it. I mean I want to stop wanting what I want.’

  The abbot stood and towered over the brother (not difficult) in righteous wrath (Ronnie could do a very righteous wrath) and said very sternly, ‘It isn’t as simple as that. You foolish vain little monk, what do you know of self-denial? You came here because you enjoy denying yourself those things. Therefore I tell you that at this monastery you will learn to deny yourself that pleasure of denying yourself. From now on your life will be an orgy.’

  ‘No, no,’ exclaimed the horrified Brother Cyril. ‘Not the orgy.’

  There’s more, but I’ve given you enough to judge it. Were we corpsing because it was so funny, or were we corpsing because we thought it was silly? Anyway, there it is, the one we never completed, the one that was never shown.

  The second of the three sketches was very successful, and has been shown several times. Again there was a moment in it when I couldn’t help corpsing, but that’s not why I’m mentioning it particularly. I’m mentioning this one because of what it led to in a very different context.

  It was called ‘The Complete Rook’, and it was set in a restaurant that only served rook. The restaurant was also called ‘The Complete Rook’, and it was awful, in fact it was a complete rook, but the customers felt that they couldn’t complain because, after all, it had announced this by calling itself ‘The Complete Rook’.

  The menu included roast rook, grilled rook, steamed rook, braised rook and la corneille bouillie à la mode de Toulouse (boiled rook).

  I played a character imaginatively described by the author as ‘man’. A lot to go on there. I was with a young lady, and we were described as ‘a well-heeled couple’.

  ‘This doesn’t seem to be the sort of restaurant to come to if you don’t like rook,’ I said.

  ‘It isn’t the sort of restaurant to come to if you do like rook,’ said the waiter.

  ‘Oh. Why’s that?’ I asked. (This was one of the sketches where I didn’t have the funniest lines.)

  ‘Because we use bloody tough old rooks,’ said the waiter.

  It was a very funny sketch. It wasn’t written by Gerald Wiley, but Gerald Wiley was to play a part in its success. He often claimed to be a better rewriter than a writer. Some writers may have felt that he changed too much, but he never did it for its own sake, only to attempt to make the material stronger.

  Here he made only one change. The writer had written the stage direction, ‘The waiter looks round the empty restaurant.’ The waiter’s line then, in the script was, ‘I think I can fit you in over here.’ Ronnie/Wiley came up with the much stronger line, ‘Have you booked?’ This was his perfectionism at work, his taking of pains, his determination to improve even what was working well.

  Ronnie also invented one bit of inspired business in this sketch. After he had brought us our menus, which were shaped like rooks, he sat down at our table with us. This simple bit of business was what caused me to corpse every time he did it.

  But the real point about this sketch is Ronnie’s performance. Funny though the sketch was, it was made much funnier still by his inspired performance and appearance as the slovenly, unfriendly waiter.

  This led directly to a moment at a Water Rats’ celebratory lunch, at which I was asked to say a few words. With these sort of things, the invitation always came for both of us, and it was always quite tricky, in a way, to decide how to play it, because I was up for doing something, but I didn’t want to be seeming to be much more comfortable at something when Ronnie was either not going to take part or would take part but feel ill at ease with it. It was quite a big do, and the Prince of Wales was a guest, on the top table with Tommy Trinder (it was a long time ago). Well, I talked to Ronnie, and I said, ‘I can do something, how about you?’ and he said, ‘Well, if they want me I have an idea. You can do your speech and after you’ve been doing it for about six minutes, I can shuffle on from the back, dressed like the waiter from the rook sketch, with the moustache and the terrible hair down the sides.’

  So I would be standing up and saying, ‘So the whole point was…’ and then this man, the waiter, would be going round the tables, moving glasses, and he would approach me, flicking my table plan, and even picking up my wine and sipping it.

  They had to warn the Prince of Wales and his security people, because Ronnie did look distinctly dodgy.

  At first, in fact, the audience thought there was a nutcase waiter and they were embarrassed, but then they realized, and of course it got roars.

  The Water Rats lunch.

  And at the end of it, when I had finished my speech, we both said a little poem that Ron had written.

  It was the perfect example of how determined he was not to have to make appearances as himself, and of how ingenious he was at getting round the need to do that.

  Members of the public often used to send us ideas for jokes and sketches. Very few of these ever proved of any value to us, maybe just half a dozen in the whole ninety-eight programmes, but we always made sure that one or other of us read them, and it was lucky that we did, because it was out of a letter from a member of the public that Gerald Wiley got the idea for the most famous sketch we ever did.

  A couple who ran a hardware shop in Hayes, not that far from Ronnie’s home in Pinner, wrote in and mentioned funny things that happened in their shop. People often wrote about funny things that happened in their shop, but somehow they were never quite funny enough. This was different. Gerald Wiley had itchy fingers straightaway.

  They wrote about a couple of misunderstandings that had taken place in their store. A customer had come in asking, as they thought, for four candles, and they had presented him with four candles, but what he had actually asked for were fork handles.

  Somebody else asked for what the shopkeeper thought to be garden hoes, as in utensils, but the customer actually wanted hose, as in watering.

  The possibilities rang a bell with Ronnie immediately, and he set to work on the sketch, always known as ‘Fork Handles’, the credits for which should perhaps have read ‘By Gerald Wiley and an Ironmonger’.

  As the sketch opened, I was serving a woman with a toilet roll. ‘There you go,’ I said. ‘Mind how you go.’ It’s quite important sometimes, especially in a new or unusual setting, to give the audience a beat to take in the scene before the comedy begins. On this
occasion we needed to establish that we were in an ironmonger’s shop, a very old-fashioned shop of the kind that sells virtually everything, and that I was not too bright.

  Then Ronnie entered, in workman’s clothes, and he wasn’t too bright either. It was very important that the audience should know that we were not too bright before the fun started.

  ‘Yes, sir?’ I began.

  ‘Four candles?’ began Ronnie.

  ‘Four candles? Yes, sir.’ I got four candles from a drawer, and plonked them on the counter. I use the word ‘plonked’ deliberately. It was such a definite gesture, as if all the man’s problems had been solved.

  But the workman just stared at them in bemusement, unable to believe what he saw.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Fork handles.’

  ‘Four candles,’ I said. ‘That’s four candles.’ I was utterly confused.

  ‘No, fork handles – handles for forks.’

  ‘Oh. Fork handles.’

  I got two garden fork handles from the back of the shop.

  ‘Anything else?’

  The workman consulted his list.

  ‘Got any plugs?’

  ‘What sort of plugs?’

  ‘Bathroom. Rubber ones.’

  I fetched a box of bath plugs, and held up two different sizes.

  ‘What size?’

  ‘Thirteen amp.’

  ‘Oh, electric plugs.’

  I got an electric plug from a drawer.

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Saw tips.’

  ‘Saw tips? What you want, ointment?’

  ‘No, tips to cover the saw.’

  ‘Oh. No, we ain’t got any.’

  ‘Oh. Got any hoes?’

  ‘Hoes, yeah.’

  I got a garden hoe and did a bit more plonking. Ronnie just stared at it disbelievingly.

  ‘No – hose.’