About fifteen feet an hour.
It was a chain-gang song.
Oh I crouched all night laying track down,
And the wind on my back made me choke,
And I felt that the bottom had fell out of my life,
Till I found that my braces had broke, oh Lord,
I found that my braces had broke.
We filmed that up in the Blue Mountains, on the railroad.
Someone had stolen my hammer,
But I still got to earn my bread
And life ain’t so grand, when you’re standing on your hands
And driving in the rivets with your head, oh Lord,
Driving in the rivets with your head.
It was very picturesque, recording up there, and gave us another of our memorable Australian experiences.
There’s a curve in the track up yonder,
I think it’s the beginning of the end;
I’ve tried going straight, but sad to relate
I think I’m a’going round the bend, oh Lord,
I think I’m a’going round the bend.
That evening, after we’d recorded the song, we were all having dinner up in the mountains, and it began to snow, turning the Blue Mountains white. We had dancers up there, eighteen-and nineteen-year-old girls, and they had never seen snow before. They rushed out excitedly, and started to play in it, suddenly turned back into children, which was very sweet. The two of us had seen enough snow to last us a lifetime, and preferred to stay inside with a nice bottle of full-flavoured, robust Australian wine.
It beat Shepherd’s Bush hands down.
The studio recordings were also extremely pleasant. The studio was quite near Sydney. It was a small studio, beautifully run, intimately run, with lovely food (are you reading this, BBC?), the same dressing rooms each week, beautifully furnished, with a bathroom, a relaxing lounge and a little reception room. We were spoilt in Australia, whereas the BBC didn’t spoil us; the BBC dressing rooms were, for most of our time there, appalling. Only now have they cheered up six of them.
In fact we had a head-to-head conflict with the Controller of the BBC at the time, Alastair Milne, who came out to visit Australia while we were there, and we said to him, ‘Really, just look at this dressing room, Alastair. How can you let people like Margot Fonteyn or Rudolf Nureyev go into those awful, lavatorial rooms you’ve got at the BBC?’ Since then they have improved them, and the Television Centre is much better now; they’ve got these cafeterias, rather trendy little coffee shops and newsagents, proper things. I’m not actually suggesting that our meeting with Alastair Milne had anything to do with all this, but then again, who knows?
Back in England, we resumed the even tenor of our lives, and in 1983 we did our second stage show of The Two Ronnies at the London Palladium. Now it was my turn to have a problem. It was actually a very serious problem, a really traumatic experience.
We were seven weeks into the three-month run, and everything was going swimmingly. We were in the middle of a Saturday matinee, and we were doing a big musical number called ‘Hello, Sailor’, a typical Ron/Gerald romp. Ron and I were dressed as Wrens, and we were accompanied by a troupe dressed as naval ratings, who, I must say, were excellent – well, our shows always had very good ratings. See how I try to take refuge in a joke, because, even now, more than twenty years later, this is a difficult subject for me to talk about.
We were singing Ronnie’s words to the tunes of ‘A Life on the Ocean Wave’, ‘Hearts of Oak’, ‘Drunken Sailor’, ‘Bobby Shafto’ and ‘Rule Britannia’. It was one of those medleys that he so adored writing new words for, and it was swinging along merrily, but almost from the beginning I began to feel odd. The lights were affecting me. I could hardly stand the brightness and the heat. I began to feel very giddy. I carried on, of course:
Heigh ho, and up she rises,
She’s got knees of different sizes,
One’s very small, but the other wins prizes
Early in the morning.
A word of advice. If ever you have a tendency to giddiness, don’t wear Wrens’ high-heeled shoes. I was feeling very wobbly indeed. I was really alarmed. I could hear myself still singing as if from far away:
Heigh ho, and up she rises,
They have suits of different sizes,
The pockets are full of little surprises
Early in the morning.
By this time I felt that I was going to fall into the orchestra pit. It was all so sudden, and so terrifying, and still I ploughed on:
Bobby Shafto’s gone to sea,
He’ll be back in time for tea.
He’s in charge of the WC
On the Channel ferry.
At last it was over, I had the interval in which to recover. I recovered a bit. I was able to go on and do the second half of the show. But I don’t know how I got through it. The stage was spinning, the auditorium was swaying, the lights were lurching towards me and then pulling back, teasing me. I felt more and more panicky, and my hands were running with sweat.
At last the show was over. But that was only the matinee. There was an evening show still to do. Harold Fielding, the producer, called in a doctor, named Martin Scurr, and he put me on a tranquillizer called Ativan. Half an Ativan. Then a second half if the first half didn’t work. If the first half didn’t work during the first half of the show, I would take the second half before the second half – no, stop it, this wasn’t funny. This was really serious. It was getting worse, not better.
I was sent to a neurologist called Nigel Legg, and his diagnosis was that I was suffering from labyrinthitis, a benign infection of the inner ear which affects the sense of balance. The only cure was rest. He told Harold Fielding that they would have to close the show for a fortnight, which of course they did. Harold Fielding was insured and, luckily, for the first time in my life, I was insured too.
I went back to our lovely home, and I rested, and I continued to take my Ativan. Now if you’re told to rest, you aren’t supposed to do very much, but I took this to extremes. I did nothing at all. I just sat in my chair for hours on end, staring out into the garden. Anne was really worried by my behaviour. I was utterly unconscious of it at the time, but I think I must have been going through some kind of breakdown.
During my second week of Ronnie Corbett in the chair but definitely not telling gags, Martin Scurr came to see me, and told me to relax and forget about the show. ‘Go out on Saturday night, have a lovely dinner and a glass of wine, enjoy yourself, then spend a quiet Sunday at home and start again refreshed at the Palladium on Monday.’
So, on the Saturday night, Anne and I went to a very nice place, the Old Lodge, in Limpsfield. I had more than one glass of wine, and I began to talk about Martin Scurr in rather extravagant terms. In fact I called him ‘the Messiah’ and said that he had saved my life. Both these statements were
Harold Fielding’s stage production of The Two Ronnies at the London Palladium.
exaggerations. I hadn’t been in danger of dying and I have it on good authority that Martin Scurr, excellent doctor though he was, was not ‘the Messiah’ and had never claimed to be.
I carried my mood of exaggeration into my choice of desserts. I ordered four puddings. Now I very often don’t have one pudding, let alone four. What was going on?
Well, I did rest on the Sunday and I did go back to the Palladium on the Monday and I did complete the three weeks that remained of the run, but I wasn’t really fit to go back, it was too soon, and I struggled through those interminable three weeks, no longer enjoying anything about the show or its comedy. I was so affected that I could no longer face making my entry through the large door at the top of the stairs and walking down that huge, steep staircase. I had to come on from the side, destroying the opening gag. I was very far from being my usual self. However, many years later, when I could bring myself to talk about it, I asked Ron if there had been any difference that he could see in my performances, and he said, ‘None whatsoever.’ I must emphas
ize, too, how wonderfully supportive and patient he was with me. It must have been frustrating and irritating for him, but he never showed it. He was as cool as a cucumber, a rock of support, never made me feel as if I was being a nuisance, just rode it all.
It’s hard to sort it all out now. How much of a breakdown was I having? Why did I behave so oddly? I mean, I did have labyrinthitis. That wasn’t an illusion. But why should it make me behave so strangely? Why did I order four puddings? Could the disease affect the balance of the mind as well as the body?
I think that perhaps it’s part of the price we pay. It’s a marvellously fortunate way to earn a living, but there is a price. When you read performers’ books or look through their lives, I think you find it is part of the price, because it’s such an unnatural way to live, such an unnatural way to behave, performing in front of a lot of people all your life, I think that it causes stress. Olivier had a period, when he was at the National Theatre, when he told everybody, ‘When you’re acting with me, you mustn’t look at me.’ They had to act away from him, slightly upstage of him, never looking at him. The moment he was looked at, his bottle went.
I’ve gone into this at some length, because it had such an effect on my life. The scars lasted, certainly for the next ten years, but only in the context of theatre. I had no problem at all with television. But in the theatre, if I did anything remotely resembling a long run, the balance would begin to go as I tired, and the fear of it happening was never far away. Was I really suffering from labyrinthitis again, did I have a latent condition which only affected me when I was exhausted, or was this psychological? I couldn’t be quite sure, but at times it got so bad that it even affected me when I went to see a show and was sitting in the audience. I would see an actor up there on the stage, with nothing to lean on, nothing to support him, and I would get quite distressed on his behalf. I’ve heard of stage fright, but audience fright…?
I used to have to time it carefully so that I got to the theatre for my performances only just on time, and had no time to think as I prepared for my first entrance. And I needed to be sure that there was something around to lean on, should my balance begin to go.
Anyway, I struggled through, and I did another tour of Australia, but then I had another crisis. I was booked to do twenty-one cabaret shows, and I was sitting by the pool in this lovely house in Rose Bay, on a golden, sunny afternoon, before the first show, and I said to Anne, ‘I cannot do these twenty-one shows. I just can’t face them.’
We got on to the phone to a man called Ken Dyball, who was a psychiatrist to the Sydney police. His wife Karen answered – we knew them both quite well – and she said, ‘Well, I’m afraid he’s playing tennis down at the Royal Sydney Golf Club at the moment, but if you want you can see him down there after he’s finished, if it’s urgent.’ And Anne said, ‘It is urgent,’ so we went down there, and it was like a Woody Allen film – we were standing outside the wire netting, behind a bush, waiting for an appropriate moment in the match, and when he came over to collect a ball, with his sweat bands and his knee bandages and ankle bandages (he played too much tennis and was always injuring himself), Anne went over to the netting, and he said, ‘Oh hello, Anne,’ not seeming at all surprised to see her there, and Anne said, ‘Ron would like to have a word with you,’ and he said, ‘Well, right, I’ll have finished this set in a minute.’
He came out, and we explained what the position was, and he asked me what I’d been on, and I told him I’d been taking half a milligram of Ativan, and he said, ‘Go back and take one and a half.’ I did, and three hours later the fear and anxiety left me, and with the aid of Ativan I did the twenty-one shows, although I did always make sure that there was a chair handy in case my balance did go.
Even in 1992, almost ten years after the initial attack, I still had a fear that the problem would return. I was in Australia with Donald Sinden, doing Ray Cooney’s very funny farce Out of Order. I would wonder if I was going to be able to go on, and if there would be something I could lean on if necessary. The audience reaction was amazing, and I enjoyed it despite my fears, but fighting the fear was an exhausting business, and by the end of the tour, when I was really pretty tired, it got so bad that during the day I couldn’t even bend down in a bookshop to look at the books on the lowest shelf, for fear of toppling over, and by the time I got back to England I couldn’t even stand over a putt.
But I didn’t have another attack on the stage, and in the end the fear did leave me, and I got to a point where I didn’t need to take the pills any more, though I must admit that to this day I do carry a couple of them in my shaving bag, just in case. But I haven’t needed them for more than ten years, and it does seem, touch wood, that the fear has left me at last.
16
Back in England, four months of each year was taken up with The Two Ronnies, and both of us continued to develop our own separate careers. Ron and his family were back in Pinner, Anne and I and family in Addington, and all London between us. Now, though, after Australia, I think we each missed the other’s company, and we met more often.
We came back from Australia to a very different political landscape, the Conservatives under Mrs Thatcher having come to power while we were away. Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer, Ken Livingstone banned the giving of goldfish as prizes at fairs in Greater London, and there was a long, bitter, violent, divisive miners’ strike. Throughout it all The Two Ronnies went on and on, four months every year, from success to success.
Ronnie and I received a lot of praise over the years, but occasionally we came in for some brickbats. There was only one instance that really upset us, and that was an attack on us, a parody of us, by Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones, in the BBC’s own Not the Nine O’Clock News. Ronnie was even more upset than I was, but we both felt that it was very unfair. One of the accusations was that we used bad language. How strange that seems today. It seemed pretty strange then. We worked out that we had used the word ‘bloody’ three times, and that was the extent of it. One ‘bloody’ every 32.66 programmes. What an example to children! Of course, we used words that may have sounded like swear words, but that was in the great British tradition, and we made no bones about being in that tradition.
Someone said that Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones were going to be The Two Ronnies of the eighties, and Ronnie wasn’t prepared to let this go. After all, it was already 1983 and we were still on top of our game. So Ronnie wrote to the newspaper in question and said, ‘No, The Two Ronnies are going to be The Two Ronnies of the eighties; Smith and Jones may well be The Two Ronnies of the nineties.’
You may think that we were being a bit prickly and would have been wiser to let the attack on us pass, and maybe we would have been, but I think two things particularly upset us, and especially Ronnie. One was that it was on the BBC, and they were our employers, and the other was that they were fellow comedians, not critics. We had a great respect for and love of the comics of the past, Ronnie especially, with his fondness for all things old. We felt proud to be a part of that tradition and wouldn’t have dreamt of criticizing our peers, even had we not liked them. We felt that respect for fellow comedians should still be observed, and it usually is. Honesty compels me to admit that Ron himself uncharacteristically failed to do so himself on one occasion, albeit in private, of which more later.
Another criticism came from a much more unexpected source – Mrs Mary Whitehouse no less. For younger readers I should explain that she was a retired schoolteacher who appointed herself as an arbiter of taste on television, which she felt to be riddled with sex and violence. If she thought that then, what would she think now? If she was still alive, she’d be turning in her grave.
It wasn’t sex that she was complaining of, it was violence, and it wasn’t actually about The Two Ronnies. It was about a silent film we had made, called By the Sea.
This was the second of two silent films that we made. Well, perhaps it would be more accurate to call them almost silent films. There were gru
nts and mutterings in them, used almost as impressions of words. Not content with being a part of Anthony Burgess’s paradigm, Ronnie was also a bit of a paradox. His greatest strength was his verbal dexterity and versatility, but he delighted in forgoing this (delighted except when he had to perform mime in Welsh schools) in favour of visual comedy.
The Picnic featured the characters, mainly aristocrats, that Ronnie had created in Hark at Barker, in which he played the bumbling aristocrat Lord Rustless. He had also made, a long while before – in 1970, in fact – a silent film called Futtock’s End, featuring a character called General Futtock, who was really Lord Rustless in uniform.
By the Sea was more ambitious than The Picnic: harder, glossier, longer. It ran, originally, after Ronnie and the editor had worked on it, for an hour and forty minutes. Jimmy Gilbert felt that this was far too long, and wanted to reduce it to fifty minutes. This horrified Ronnie, but I think it was probably necessary. This was a bit of a special production for Ronnie. It was the seaside postcard brought to life, his tribute to the world of McGill, which had always so fascinated him for so many years. It was probably, therefore, his most personal work of all, and I think for this reason he had probably been a bit self-indulgent.
Jimmy was adamant, and fifty minutes it became. Then Jimmy suggested cutting it to forty, and Ronnie said, ‘That’s not cutting, it’s murdering.’ After much debate it remained at fifty.
The BBC produced a book of comic postcards to publicize the film, and in the end both Jimmy and Ronnie were very happy with the finished product.
Mrs Whitehouse wasn’t, however. Two scenes upset her.
In By the Sea with Debbie Blythe.
In one, I got stuck in a revolving door, the lovely Rikki Howard went wiggling past in a bikini, Ronnie trundled round in the door to get another look at her, and I shot out like a cork. In the other, the delightful Madge Hindle, acting as companion to a rather grand lady played by Barbara New, lingered rather too long over a rack of postcards on the pier, and got a sharp prod from the grand lady’s parasol for her pains. Prodding parasols and dangerous doors. Quelle horreur. Mrs Whitehouse said that these scenes were ‘encouraging violence’.
And It's Goodnight from Him . . . Page 18
