And It's Goodnight from Him . . .

by Ronnie Corbett; David Mattingly

  ‘Oh, hose. I thought you meant “hoes”.’

  I got a roll of garden hose.

  ‘No. Hose.’

  ‘What hose?’ I got a packet of ladies’ tights from a display stand. ‘Pantie-hose, you mean?’

  ‘No. “O”s. Letter “O”s. Letters for the gate. “Mon Repos”.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say so?’ I climbed up a ladder to a cupboard high up on the wall, and got down a box of letters. ‘Now, “O”s. ’ I hunted through the box. ‘Here we are. Two?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Right.’ I took the box back up the ladder, and descended. ‘Next?’

  ‘Got any “P”s’

  ‘Oh my gawd. Why didn’t you bleedin’ say while I’d got the box of letters down here?’ I set off again on my long journey to the top of the ladder, grumbling as I went. ‘I’m working my guts out here climbing about all over the shop, putting things back and then getting them out again.’ My lines weren’t funny. They didn’t need to be. The situation was funny. Everybody knew that what I was coming back with would be wrong. Only Ronnie and I didn’t know that. By this time I was back. I opened the box. ‘How many? Two?’

  I plonked two letter ‘P’s on the counter. Ronnie just stared at them.

  ‘No. Peas. Three tins of peas.’

  The misunderstandings continued through foot pumps, which turned out not to be pumps that you worked with your feet but brown pumps, size nine, and washers. By now I was thoroughly exasperated.

  ‘Windscreen washers? Car washers? Dishwashers? Hair washers? Back scrubbers? Lavatory cleaners? Floor washers?’

  ‘Half-inch washers.’

  ‘Tap washers!’ My self-control snapped, I grabbed the list, said, ‘I’m not serving you any more,’ and thrust the list into the hands of an assistant.

  He looked through the list, calm and unruffled, and said, ‘What sort of billhooks did you want?’

  This tag was unworthy of the sketch, and Gerald/Ronnie knew it. The double entendre was too contrived. It was lame. Later, when we did the sketch in our stage show, Ronnie adapted it, turning the new assistant into a young lady with a spectacular figure, who read through the list and said, ‘Yes, sir, what sort of knockers were you looking for?’ It was still a get-out rather than a classic tag, but it was less contrived. We did come in for criticism from certain quarters for our reliance on jokes of that kind, but to Ronnie they were an embodiment of a great British tradition, a robust tradition if I may be permitted to use a word with ‘bust’ in it. The Gerald Wiley who loved such jokes was the Ronnie Barker who collected seaside postcards, and I think that the level of criticism that we sometimes received is a bit strange when we are also praised for having created something that is almost impossible to find these days – a comedy show that the whole family can happily watch together.

  So, the letter from the hardware store in Hayes was the seed from which our most famous sketch sprang. There was still a lot of work to be done before the finished article emerged. Ronnie/Gerald had to think up a whole lot of misunderstandings, then he had to add the little touches of business, the ladder in particular adding enormously to it all, as I went on long, frustrating journeys. Also important was the utter seriousness of our performances. This was a playlet about the anger and frustration of two not very bright men for whom the simplest acts in life were fraught with difficulty. It was an occasion when one twinkle, one hint of corpsing, would have sent the whole edifice tumbling down.

  Pace is very important in comedy, and it is not to be confused with speed. Sometimes speed is necessary, and we’ve seen that Ronnie felt that our serials were sometimes too slow. Nobody could say that about ‘Fork Handles’. Its slow speed was of the essence, it whetted the appetite of an audience happily awaiting the next misunderstanding.

  On 1 January 1978, in the New Year’s Honours, Ron and I were awarded the OBE (one each).

  On 31 December 1977, I was extremely glad to know that, in the news the next day, it would be announced that we had been awarded the OBE.

  I was in Bahrain, entertaining an audience of 500 Saudis. I use the word ‘entertaining’ in its loosest sense. I was standing in front of them, and I was being paid to tell them jokes.

  I imagine that, every time a comedian walks on stage, he has, somewhere, even if he doesn’t admit it, the fear of a nightmare in which, suddenly, he gets no laughs at all. The nightmare became real for me that night in Bahrain. It wasn’t entirely my fault. I shouldn’t have felt bad about it. The audience of 500 Saudis could not have been expected to be interested in my gags. The wit of that very funny writer Spike Mullins didn’t seem to travel. I’m not sure if that audience would have laughed at ‘The Captain did confide in me that it was really his ship and not an iceberg that sank the Titanic, but he didn’t say anything at the time because he didn’t want to lose his no-claim bonus’ even if they had understood a word of English. The fact was that they had only come over to Bahrain because they could get a drink there.

  I told myself that it wasn’t my fault. The audience were drunk and they didn’t speak English. It was the fault of the people who had booked me. Wasn’t there a Saudi act called the Two Mustaphas that they could have booked?

  I told myself that it didn’t matter. I would very probably – in fact, almost certainly – never see any of these people again. What did it matter if they didn’t laugh?

  None of this helped. Nothing much does help when you’re dying on your feet. But one thing really did help on that occasion. One thing got me through that evening with my spirits intact – the knowledge that the next morning, in Britain, it would be announced that Ronnie and I had both been given the OBE, the fact that I must, at some stage in my life, have been funny, or I wouldn’t be being honoured in that way.

  Ron and I were both thrilled to get the award. It felt, coming so relatively early in our careers, as if it was a reward for genuine achievement, not just for survival.

  We received our OBEs from Her Majesty at Buckingham Palace in the following February (1978). I was determined to do the whole thing properly. An investiture at Buckingham Palace demands something a bit better than Moss Bros, I decided, so I went to get my top hat from a shop called Patey’s, near Newington Butts, in South London. They put a metal gadget on my head to measure it. I hoped that my head hadn’t swollen, but unfortunately nobody had measured it when I started out in the business, probably because nobody ever invited me to anything that required a top hat, so there was no way of telling. I loved Patey’s, the smell of the lacquer and the glue, and the wooden blocks on which they made the hats. There was that same sense of exact craftsmanship that I knew from my father and his cakes and that I felt Ron and I had in our very different world.

  The actual investiture was a lovely occasion. I think the public were touched to see us getting our joint award, and I

  know that this meant a lot to us. It was like getting an OBE for our relationship. So joint was it that the normal strict protocol of alphabetical order was dispensed with, and the Queen gave us our medals together.

  She asked us what we were doing now, and Ronnie replied, ‘We’re at the Palladium, Your Majesty. You ought to come and see us.’

  ‘I very well might,’ she replied.

  But she didn’t. One can hardly blame her. She does have rather a lot to do.

  Afterwards, we celebrated with our families at Walton’s restaurant, in Walton Street. The whole day was delightful, and I think Ron and I both had to pinch ourselves to believe that it was true, that our two stuttering careers had led us all the way to this.

  I never flaunted my medal. I never said, ‘Hello, I’m Ronnie Corbett OBE, let’s not be formal.’ In any case there aren’t many events in the comedy world at which medals are worn. But I was proud of it, and still am. There wouldn’t have been much point in accepting it if I wasn’t. And I did put it on

  some of my letterheads, which had an unexpected effect earlier this year.

  I had a cable asking me to send a m
essage to a charity golf day in Sydney, and I sent the message, unthinkingly, handwritten on a bit of notepaper that happened to be headed Ronnie Corbett OBE. Soon I had the message back, ‘Congratulations on your OBE, long overdue,’ and I had to write back to say that I’d actually been awarded it twenty-eight years before.

  15

  I mentioned, at the end of the last chapter, that Ronnie told Her Majesty that we were at the London Palladium. The impresario Harold Fielding had been attempting to persuade us to do this for a few years, and eventually by 1978 the prospect seemed irresistible.

  Ronnie was very nervous about the show. I was a bit nervous too, of course, but I had done lots of variety in night clubs and in my summer shows in Margate and Yarmouth and the like. For Ronnie, brought up in straight theatre, live variety was a new departure.

  ‘I’m very proud to say that I’m the only person who’s ever started their variety career by topping the bill at the London Palladium,’ he once said.

  I should imagine that every performer suffers from nerves, and we all evolve our own ways of dealing with the problem. I know that before every episode of Porridge, for instance, Ronnie used to lie down for half an hour in a darkened room, to get his brain going and calm his nerves.

  Terry Hughes, the director of our first few series of The Two Ronnies on TV, was overseeing the show. We made our entrance through two doors, one large, one small. Of course I came through the large door, and Ronnie through the small door. Such a simple gag, but one that set the tone for the show perfectly. Then we descended a huge staircase, and began the show, which followed the format of the television show pretty closely, though with more in the way of variety acts to support us.

  The wall of noise that greeted us as we made our first appearance was astonishing. I think it surprised us anew every night.

  The show began with our usual very untopical news items, and thus thrust us straight into the middle of Ronnie’s problems and the main reason why he was so nervous. He couldn’t come on to the stage as a newsreader. It wasn’t like being seen already sitting at the desk. He had to make an entry as himself, as Ronnie B., and begin the show as himself, and this was what he just couldn’t do.

  In the end I made a suggestion – that he should play himself as a character. It’s what I do in the chair. All right, my intonations and throwaways and controlled waffling are a bit like the real me, but I keep making jokes as if Anne is a gorgon, and our children horrid, and our home a tip, and nothing could be further from the truth. It is a fictional version of me. So I suggested that Ronnie play a fictional version of himself. It had to be just a little bit more removed from the reality than my performance, just a bit more of a performance, in fact. So he developed a more chummy, more outgoing, more avuncular version of himself. Uncle Ronnie, in fact. It wasn’t easy; it still took about a month before he was completely at ease with it, but he got there in the end. Being so close to him, I could tell that it wasn’t quite natural for him, because his gestures were exactly the same every night, every movement of the hands precise and controlled and worked out. I mentioned that he hadn’t known what to do with his hands in his early days on the stage. By now, of course, he had learnt, but his use of his hands had never become entirely instinctive.

  Our main fear had to be that we would forget our words. There was no autocue here. There were no retakes if anything went wrong. And we hadn’t done theatre work for such a long time. Probably television does make you a little bit soft. In our defence I would have to say that some of our words were a bit complicated to remember, to say the least.

  We did a delightful musical item in which we were two Chelsea pensioners reminiscing about our romantic conquests. It began with Ronnie B. wheeling me in, and as we became excited by our memories, the sketch began to turn into one of our musical items. We sang parodies of ‘Mademoiselle from Armentières’, ‘Daisy, Daisy’, ‘K-K-K-Katie’ (did Arkwright ever sing that?), ‘Just Like the Ivy’, ‘Mary from the Dairy’ and ‘Phil the Fluter’s Ball’. I had quite a lot of words, but the parody on ‘Phil the Fluter’s Ball’ became a solo for Ronnie, during which he did a little dance and got so excited that by the end he was saying, ‘Here, Albert, my turn in the pram,’ and it all finished with my wheeling him off. The sketch was full of typical Ronnie naughtiness, softened by its warmth and humanity. But in the song, Ron had to sing three verses giving the names of his conquests, all done very quickly, and while doing his little dance. If I just give you one of those verses you will see how complex it was and why he was worried about forgetting the words, which of course he never did.

  There was Clare, there was Chris

  There was Connie and Clarissa

  And Cecilia and Charity and Caroline and Kate.

  There was shrinking little Violet

  Who doesn’t want to marry yet

  And bulging little Harriet

  Who can’t afford to wait.

  Clarissa you could kiss her

  You could meddle with Melissa and

  Vanessa you could press her and

  Caress against the wall.

  You could have your fun with Nicola

  But if you tried to tickle her

  You’d end up with Virginia

  Who wouldn’t do at all.

  The writer had given Ronnie a pretty difficult task, but he could hardly complain. The writer was Gerald Wiley.

  The show contained some of our favourite sketches from the TV series, plus one or two new items to give it more variety. I donned my tutu and did my ballet performance from pantomime. Dick Clement and Ian La Fresnais wrote a Porridge sketch for Ronnie as Fletcher, and with a good supporting role for that very funny character actor, Sam Kelly. I suppose it was about ten minutes long, and it worked pretty well without touching the heights of the TV series, which existed on a rather more realistic plane than you could get in a variety show.

  Among our supporting acts at the Palladium were an illusionist called Omar Pasha, who seemed to be able to take people’s heads off and throw them in the air – no mean feat; a spectacular acrobatic act, the Kosiaks, from Poland; and a group of eight very tall, very glamorous black girls in white kid thigh boots, who did very exotic things and were called the Love Machine.

  I can’t help wondering what has happened to the world’s speciality acts. There are still the circuses, of course, but at one time, in addition to circuses, there would be variety shows in every town and city, and indeed there were plenty of them in the early days of television, and there were ice shows everywhere, and in these shows there would be illusionists, mind readers, acrobats, trapeze artists, knife throwers, unicyclists, unicycling trapeze artists, knife-throwing skaters,

  A couple of Cossacks, at the Palladium.

  acrobatic unicycle throwers, skating trapeze artists, comedy dog acts, comedy skating dog acts. Where are they now? Performing their tricks, very slowly, in old people’s homes?

  Some of the critics were not very kind about the show. I don’t think we could have expected them to be. They complained that it was little more than the television show on the stage, and of course that was only slightly unfair, though perhaps a bit of a harsh verdict on a show playing the Palladium, which is essentially a variety venue. Anyway, our audiences didn’t worry, and they flocked to see us. The original seven-week run was extended to three months.

  In the end, Dick Clement and Ian La Fresnais contributed much more to our stage show than their Porridge sketch. They gave us an amazing piece of information about income tax. They told Ronnie something that, frankly, seemed too good to be true – that if you went abroad for a whole tax year, resigned from your clubs, etc., didn’t come back to this country at all during that time, the Inland Revenue couldn’t raise an assessment on you for the previous year.

  Nobody enjoys paying tax. Apart from anything else, so much of one’s money goes on things of which one just doesn’t approve. And we had already paid so much tax that we didn’t have any qualms about evading it, legally, on th
is one occasion. Well, would you? In fact, Ron once wrote a little song called ‘The Laughing Taxman’. The first verse went:

  I am a tax inspector,

  A jolly chap, that’s me.

  I deal with your assessments

  And drink a lot of tea.

  You’ll always find me laughing,

  You’ll never see me cry.

  I find out what you’re earning

  And then I bleed you dry.

  It was nice to feel that it was our turn to laugh.

  But before committing ourselves, we obviously needed to check up on the facts. Things do tend to change. It’s in the nature of loopholes that they get closed. So we decided to go and consult a tax QC. We went to see a man called Mr Andrew Park.

  On the way to see him we were busy casting the man, wondering what he’d be like. That’s typical of the sort of gentle fun we would have together. We both decided that he’d be a John Le Mesurier type, a far-back Englishman, with perhaps a touch of the Alastair Sim, who had featured in both our younger lives. How wrong can you be? He was rather like a younger version of Alan Bennett, with the same accent, as flat as a cap.

  He told us, quickly and simply, that our plan was indeed watertight and that he wished he was coming with us. How splendid and direct. It came as no surprise to either of us that he was knighted soon afterwards, although somewhat to our surprise the citation did not mention ‘for his services to Ronnies’.

  Well, we were already having a good financial year, in no small measure due to the stage show, so the obvious thing to do was go to Australia the following year, and take the stage show with us.

  We spent the rest of the year trying to earn as much money as we could, knowing that this would be the last tax-free money either of us would ever see, and making plans for the move. We were going as families, of course, so we would have to find homes and schools for the children. It was a busy time.