And It's Goodnight from Him . . .

by Ronnie Corbett; David Mattingly

  Ronnie B., on the other hand, had a great many writers, and a great many characters. He would play spokespersons, government officials and newsreaders. Very often he would be appealing on behalf of people with some very strange complaint, usually speech-related. He would deliver them irresistibly, in an unstoppable tide of words. Sometimes these words were extremely complex. I don’t think I’m giving away any secrets when I reveal that we had a device called an autocue, so that we could read the words, but this was more to save us from learning them than to make it easy. Reading aloud can actually be harder than speaking what one has learnt.

  I’m going to try to recall a few of these monologues, in the hope that they will bring back memories of the shows.

  One week Ronnie was appealing on behalf of the very clumsy, courtesy of scriptwriter Peter Vincent. ‘Our society was founded in the sixteenth century by the executioner who beheaded Sir Thomas More… although he was actually aiming at Anne Boleyn.’

  Another week, Barry Cryer and Peter Vincent wrote a parody of the news in which the newsreader discovers that his new electronic typewriter has developed a minor fault and has been typing ‘o’s instead of ‘e’s. Ronnie’s performance as a lumbering, puzzled newsreader was inspired. Just one paragraph will give you the feel of it. ‘Hor Majosty tho Quoon was at Homol Hompstoad today to unvoil a momorial to sovoral groat Onglish mon of lottors and poots, including Anthony Trollopo, H. G. Wolls and Hilairo Bolloc.’ And to think that we were both given OBOs after that!

  Barry knew a good thing when he saw one, and came up with another monologue in which the problem was that the letter ‘G’ was missing on a typewriter. To be successful this had to be brilliantly written, and of course it was. It contained the marvellous line, ‘I met film stars like Reta Arbo, Rear Arson and Edward Robinson.’ ‘Rear Arson’ was brilliant (Greer Garson in case you don’t remember her) but Edward Robinson was inspired. Suddenly, shorn of his ‘G’, he seemed terribly ordinary. Enius. Sheer enius.

  Ronnie’s spokesmen were wonderfully self-assured, complacent and arrogant, as they came out with great streams of nonsense.

  ‘Good evening. I want to speak to you tonight about the water shortage. Now, there have been rumours that the government are washing their hands of the whole problem. But we’re not – because there isn’t any water. But there has been this ridiculous rumour that the cows in the north-east are giving dried milk. Let me deal with that one straight away. It’s true.’

  ‘Good evening. I’m from the Ministry of Pollution. Now, a lot of people say to me, “You’re not doing enough about pollution,” and I say, “Rubbish,” and they say, “You’re not doing enough about rubbish,” and I say, “Pollution.”’

  ‘Good evening. Equality. The government White Paper on the Equal Society was published today. Its main provisions were as follows: from April 1st, 1981, everyone must be of equal height.’

  Bad news for John Cleese and me and the class sketch.

  There was one monologue about statistics, written by Eric Idle. I haven’t a script of that, but one gag comes back to me across the decades. ‘This was the result of a statistical freak. He works in our Reading office.’ Spike could have written that.

  Spike, though, would never have written ‘An Ear in Your Word’, which was another vehicle for Ronnie’s mastery of word play, written by a writer who understood him well, Gerald Wiley.

  ‘A very good one to you all and evening. My name is Willie Cope. I am the president of the Getting your Wrongs in the Word Order Society, and I’ve been asked by the BCB to come a night too long to aim the society’s explains, and picture you firmly in the put.’

  One piece with a more topical theme was Peter Vincent’s ‘Doctors Anonymous’. There had been a controversy about doctors advertising themselves when appearing as spokespeople.

  ‘Good evening,’ began Ronnie. ‘I’m a doctor. Now, I’m not allowed to reveal my name for reasons of professional etiquette. I fully agree with this, and so does my wife, Mrs Poncett-Wilberforce. And of course I am not allowed to reveal my address, but here is an eye test:

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  I mentioned earlier that Ronnie did a rather good Patrick Moore. However, he wouldn’t have claimed to be in the Rory Bremner class, and so he had the bright idea of being Patrick Moore’s brother, so that he couldn’t be criticized if it wasn’t quite accurate. He made all sorts of weird drawings, explaining, ‘Here is the famous Sea of Tranquillity, here’s a mountain known as the Height of Absurdity, and here are two craters known as the Depths of Depravity.’ That doesn’t look particularly hilarious in print, does it, but imagine Ronnie as Patrick Moore, and it comes to life. That was one of the many things I admired about Ron. His energy. He gave his monologues tremendous energy, while I sat there in my chair being laid-back.

  No wonder he needed to retire before I did.

  17

  Lulworth Cove, in the fair county of Dorset, is a renowned beauty spot. In fact it’s a world-famous example of… well, of a cove. It has a very narrow entrance, but inside it is huge and perfectly round, as if a giant had taken a vast bite out of the cliffs for his breakfast.

  Ron and I were having breakfast at the time, actually, in our caravan, on location. It was the summer of 1986. He was waiting for his two fried eggs and rashers and fried bread, I was waiting for something small and perfectly formed. We were both dressed as Vikings, and not even very nice Vikings at that. I mean, there must have been some nice Vikings, saying, ‘Steady on, chaps. These people don’t look too bad. It seems a bit of a shame to pillage them, on the whole.’ But we weren’t that sort of Viking. We were hairy and disgusting and not over-endowed with intelligence. We had huge horned helmets, not that we were actually wearing them at that moment. You don’t eat breakfast in your helmet, even if you’re a rather disgusting Viking. But if I tell you that our names were Mudguard the Mighty and Pith the Pathetic you’ll realize what sort of Vikings we were. Not natty dressers.

  Do I need to tell you which part I played? Yes, I think I do. For this sketch, we reversed the expected casting. I was Mudguard the Mighty, and Ron was Pith the Pathetic, and wonderfully funny he was being pathetic, really big and pathetic. The unexpected casting made this a very funny sketch.

  I’ve often wondered why Ronnie chose that moment to

  The Vikings at Lulworth Cove. Ron played Pith the Pathetic, and I played Mudguard the Mighty.

  tell me. Was it his innate sense of the ludicrous and the incongruous, which is at the heart of almost all comedy? Or was it just so that it wouldn’t seem too serious, it wouldn’t seem too momentous an announcement, we could pass it off, finish our breakfast, trot down to the cove and give our wonderful, spellbinding performances as Mudguard and Pith? (Mudguard and Pith – that could even be the title for yet another new detective series.) Anyway, he did choose that moment. He suddenly looked serious. I had an intimation that he was going to say something important.

  ‘Ron,’ he said, in the low voice of a newsreader moving on to something sad, ‘I think I ought to tell you that the Christmas after next…’ that was how far ahead we were talking about ‘… after the Christmas special, I am going to retire.’

  I can’t remember what I said. Nothing very much, probably. There wasn’t much to say. I certainly wasn’t upset with him. He had every right to make the decision, and I was grateful to him for giving me a year and a half of warning.

  ‘I’m not telling anybody else,’ he said, ‘so please don’t you tell anybody else yourself.’ It would be a secret between us and our wives. He said that he would let the BBC know some time in the following year.

  I knew, though he hadn’t told me in any graphicway, that he had suffered one or two heart scares, first of all in a tiny way in Australia, as I’ve mentioned, and then a somewhat bigger scare later. He had told me that he had a problem, and he had told it to me in confidence. When Eric Morecambe went, and Tommy Cooper died on stage, I thought that he f
elt that, if his health was still suspect, what was the point of going on?

  For a long time Ron actually denied that worries over health had played any part in his decision. He gave other reasons, more complex reasons, and I think now that all of them contributed.

  He said later that he had actually decided to retire in the previous year, 1985, and that Peter Hall had been partly responsible. There was a kind of satisfying dramaticshape to that. Peter Hall had been the person who had brought Ron to London from Oxford, and now he was unwittingly persuading him to retire from London and go and live near Oxford!

  What happened was that Peter Hall asked Ron to play the part of Falstaff (this time The Stage didn’t get it wrong and say that it was me), and Ron started thinking about commuting to the National and back, and how long it would take with all the traffic, and whether he would be able to avoid the rush hour, and he thought that perhaps these were not the considerations that ought to come first to one’s mind when offered a great Shakespearean role, and in that moment he realized that he was no longer hungry enough, he was no longer ambitious enough.

  Peter Hall said later, ‘He would have been a wonderful Falstaff, a wonderful Toby Belch; there are about fifteen parts in Shakespeare he could have done. And the parts that Molière wrote for himself – School for Wives, Tartuffe, The Misanthrope – he would have been wonderful in any of those. During my fifteen years at the National, I’d kept on asking him, offering him all these roles. But it never worked out because of the scheduling. I do think he’s the great actor we lost. I really do think that.’

  Well, Ron simply didn’t have any burning ambition to do these things, because he did other things which he loved, and they filled his life. The important thing, to me, about his career, is that he never for one moment thought that he was dumbing down, or selling out, in pursuing a life in comedy. He always believed that comedy was as good and as important as serious work, and that making millions laugh on television was just as good as moving much smaller numbers of people to tears in the theatre.

  The Falstaff offer, and his reaction to it, was just one of the factors that led Ronnie to plan his retirement at such an unusually young age for an actor. He was just fifty-seven when he told me that morning in Dorset. Come to think of it, it’s unusual for an actor at any age. Retirement doesn’t usually come into the equation. Old soldiers never die, they just fade away. Old actors never retire, they just forget their lines.

  Another window on Ronnie’s thinking was opened by Jo Tewson, the leading lady in so many of our sketches. Long before The Two Ronnies even began, Jo and Ron were both in Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound. They were going to the theatre together, and Jo was worried because the train was late. Ronnie asked her why she was worried. ‘Because the show must go on,’ she said. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Why must the show go on? Nobody’s going to bother if we’re not there. The world isn’t going to come to an end if we don’t do the show tonight.’ Sometimes Ron was too sensible, too ordinary even, to be a star. In the days of Frost on Sunday, right back then at the beginning of our work together, he turned down a good Shakespearean part because it would interfere with the school holidays, and he was, first and foremost, a family man. That might have been an excuse, because he did seem extremely reluctant to do Shakespeare, but I think there was truth in it. He was at heart, from the time when he fell in love with Joy, a family man even before he was an actor. So, deep down, his decision wasn’t a total surprise to me.

  There was another reason, I think, a more particular reason, and that was to do with The Two Ronnies. He had finished doing Porridge after just eighteen episodes, well before it ran out of steam. He had finished doing Open All Hours after nineteen episodes, again ensuring that it wouldn’t run out of steam. We had already done about ninety episodes of The Two Ronnies. Ronnie didn’t believe that we could keep up the standard. In fact he believed that the standard had already, imperceptibly, begun to slip. The main reason for this was that it was becoming harder and harder to get material. Gerald Wiley’s well was beginning to run dry. The flood of good ideas had become a trickle. Some of our other writers had moved on to pastures new, to developing their own work, and were now simply too busy to continue writing for us. For all the writers, it was difficult not to run out of ideas after as many series as we had done. We must have done almost every party sketch that it is possible to conceive. Musical finales, serials, we’d done so many. David Renwick was coming up to fifty monologues for me in the chair. He was coming up to the point at which mental fatigue had set in for Spike Mullins. There are only so many jokes that you can make on my size and the producer’s meanness. In Ronnie’s monologues, too, every kind of verbal problem had been exploited.

  It might not have been time to stop, but what was certain was that very soon it would be time to stop. One day, perhaps next year, perhaps the year after, the BBC would have said to us, ‘Sorry, chaps. You’ve had your day. It’s run its course.’ Wasn’t it better to tell them first?

  Ron and I had discussed the possibility of giving the show a break, perhaps an extended break, but always in the context of our doing something else together for a while. We’d talked of doing a sitcom together, something on the lines of The Odd Couple, perhaps. That might have been interesting, but now it was not to be. We had also been looking, though not in an urgent way, for an idea strong enough for a film. It hadn’t materialized.

  I’ve talked, in the context of my illness, about the stress involved in regularly appearing in front of large numbers of people. Perhaps Ronnie’s well of energy as a performer was drying up, just as his well of ideas was. With him there was an added stress in the claims of fame. I’ve emphasized how he never really became comfortable with the idea of performing as himself, but he was just as uncomfortable being seen in public as himself.

  He recalled an August Bank Holiday in Littlehampton – why did he choose Littlehampton? Was he drawn there unconsciously because of its name, which had given rise to more than one double entendre in his career? The resort was crowded. It just wouldn’t have been sensible for him to show his face outdoors. By midnight, he was desperate for a breath of air and set off for a stroll on the beach. Before he’d even closed the front door, a car had braked to a halt and four young people had exclaimed, ‘Oooh, it’s Ronnie Barker.’

  He also recalled a visit to the Louvre, to see the Mona Lisa, on his very first visit to Paris. There was a big crowd in front of it, naturally (and, if you haven’t seen it, it is surprisingly small. I like it. We have a lot in common), but the crowd happened to be a party of British tourists, and Joy nudged him, and pointed out that they were all studying him studying the Mona Lisa. Gratifying, perhaps, but nevertheless it wouldn’t have pleased him. I don’t think Leonardo da Vinci would have been too thrilled either.

  All these considerations may have contributed to Ronnie’s decision, but at the heart of it was the fact that he loved life at his mill and wanted to enjoy at least a few happy years there. The mill is a delightful place, tucked away off a leafy lane, a mellow stone old Cotswold building, unpretentious and private like Ron himself. Streams murmur peacefully through the lawns. Trees provide shade and secrecy. He and Joy bought it originally as a weekend cottage, but loved it so much that they sold the house in Pinner, and it became a true home, where the family enjoyed traditional Christmases and great firework parties on Guy Fawkes night. It was quite an extended family, too, at such times, with Ronnie’s sisters and Joy’s sister and their children, and Joy’s cousin and their children. In Joy’s words, ‘He had no desire to do a Tommy Cooper and die on stage. He wanted a bit of life off stage.’ In any other profession this would cause no surprise.

  Ronnie’s announcement to me, so inappropriately made in the guise of Pith the Pathetic, was a bit of a shock at the time, but I took it calmly. We did the sketch just as if nothing had happened. And of course, from everyone else’s point of view, nothing had happened.

  I don’t think the act of telling me was an ea
sy one for Ron, but I tried not to make it difficult. He said that I was wonderful about it, but I honestly don’t think there was really anything wonderful in my reaction. I had no choice. In a comedy partnership, as in sex, the one who says ‘no’ has to win.

  We continued to make the series, nursing our great secret. I made certain that I enjoyed it all the more because I knew that time was running out, and I think that our sense that there wasn’t long to go kept us on our toes, made us work all the harder to maintain the standards we had set ourselves.

  The following year Ronnie told Michael Grade and our departmental heads at the Television Centre, Gareth Gwenlan and Jim Moir. None of them wanted to lose Ron, but they could see that he was serious and they didn’t try to dissuade him. Michael Grade wrote to him a couple of days later and used a phrase that Ron loved. ‘I know what it is,’ he wrote. ‘You just want to stop and smell the roses.’ They too were sworn to secrecy, and the press never got a whiff of it.

  We paid another visit to Australia in 1986, to do our second series of The Two Ronnies there. Once again it was an entirely happy experience. We still had a Christmas special to do in England, but this marked the end of our series together. Nobody knew, of course. Ronnie and I shook hands, and he said, ‘That’s it, then.’ That was all. So very British, even in Australia.

  While we were in Australia, Ron was writing the scripts for his new sitcom, which was called Clarence. This had been commissioned, of course, and put into the production schedules, before he announced his retirement to anyone at the BBC. The show had its roots in one of a series of programmes called Six Dates with Barker that he had recorded in 1971. It had been called Fred, The Removals Person and had been written by a very fine Irish writer named Hugh Leonard. As in the original, Ron was supported by Jo Tewson and Phyllida Law (Emma Thompson’s mother). No doubt everyone concerned with it hoped that they would be in a long-running series. Ron couldn’t tell them that they wouldn’t be. The secret must go on.