Clarence was the most working-class of all Ronnie’s characters, a rung or two down the social scale even from Fletcher. The main joke was that he was very short-sighted. What appealed to Ronnie most about the project was that he could film the exterior shots in his beloved Oxfordshire, not too far from the mill.
And so the year moved on, and we came to our very last show together, the Christmas special, an event steeped in emotion for us both, but an emotion that had to be completely hidden, because Ron was keeping his secret right to the end. He would have hated a long, lingering goodbye, a huge, sentimental farewell with all the crew. He was too private for that.
He did, however, as I learnt later, teeter on the edge of giving away the secret. He considered ending the show, after I’d said, ‘Goodnight from me’ with the words, ‘And it’s goodbye from him.’ He knew it would be unwise, after keeping the secret for so long, to open the floodgates of speculation, which it surely would have done. But he was tempted. It was, after all, a very special moment.
Ron and I didn’t talk about our feelings on that night. We couldn’t. I know that I felt sad and had to work at keeping up the energy level without which comedy just doesn’t work. Our eyes had to twinkle with humour, not glisten with tears. We had to make this a really good show.
In the show, playing a small part, was a childhood pal of Ronnie’s, Ivor Humphris. In those far-off days he too had dreamt of becoming an actor, but in his case the dream hadn’t worked, and he’d become a teacher instead. But he still had his Equity card, and so Ron had this idea of having him in his very last show. But he couldn’t tell him that the reason that he was in it was that it was his very last show. How very Ron. A truly sentimental but very private gesture.
So we recorded all the usual items – our last sketches, Ron’s last spokesperson, my last chat in the chair.
There was a particularly big set for our final item, called ‘Pinocchio II – Killer Doll’.
‘I was at one end of it,’ Ron recalled, ‘and I walked from one side to the other, through a glade and up over a little rustic bridge, and I was thinking then that this was the last time I was going to be on a set. I was very emotional. But all on my own. It was lovely, there was no one about. So I just lingered about a bit and said goodbye to it.’
And so to the final item at the news desk, and Ron’s temptation, about which I knew nothing.
He resisted it, of course.
‘So it’s goodnight from me,’ I said.
‘And it’s goodnight from him,’ he said.
And it was.
So we held the usual party, with the usual drinks and nibbles, in the dressing room for Gerald Wiley, between our
In our last show, ‘Pinocchio II – Killer Doll’. Ron as Geppetto and me as
Pinocchio. Christmas Night with the Two Ronnies, 1987.
two dressing rooms. And we went off to our usual Indian restaurant in Westbourne Grove, Anne and me and Joy and Ronnie, and had our usual curry. I found it touching that we did it like that, so quietly, just the four of us, our usual routine, no histrionics.
We left the restaurant, and went to our cars. Then it really was goodnight from us, and goodnight from them.
18
For many years Ronnie had acted as his own agent, with a second telephone line, strictly for business only, at his country home in Oxfordshire. If you rang the line to discuss business, you were told that you were through to Dean Miller Associates, named after their home, Dean Mill. But you would never have got through to anybody. The line was permanently on answerphone. They would listen to the messages, and Joy would phone back as and when required.
On New Year’s Eve 1986, just a few days after our final seasonal special had dominated the Christmas ratings, Ronnie decided to record a new message. Anyone who phoned after that evening was told, ‘As of 1st January I am retiring from public and professional life so I am unable to undertake any more commitments. To those people with whom I have worked, I would like to express my gratitude and good wishes. So it’s a big thank you from me and it’s goodbye from him. Goodbye.’
People thought it odd that Ron announced his retirement in such a way, but I thought it was very Ron. Impersonal, yet not ungracious. Unemotional, yet rather touching. What else could he have done? He himself said that he didn’t think he was important enough, or that the event was important enough, for him to make an official announcement. He was a comic actor, not a world leader.
One of the first people to hear this message was a representative of the Daily Mail. The secret was out. The speculation about Ronnie’s true reasons began. Our life after The Two Ronnies began.
The BBC marked the retirement by bringing Ronnie back to do a one-off programme, recorded in front of an audience, to tell the story of our shows together. It was a discussion programme, hosted by Barry Cryer, with Ron and me answering his questions, and Ian Davidson, Terry Hughes, David Nobbs, David Renwick, Peter Vincent and Dick Vosburgh also chipping in. The set felt very cumbersome, with all the participants seeming to be a long way away from each other, as if it was a BO clinic, and to the participants there was a slightly stilted feel to it. Here there was no escape for Ronnie from being himself, there was no character role to hide behind, and I could tell that he was a bit uneasy, but I don’t think the audience would have noticed, because he did this kind of thing so much better than he thought he did.
In the event, although we may have felt that it was stilted, the audience in the studio and the audience at home enjoyed this last look at the history of the ninety-eight shows. The discussions were intercut with scenes from our shows, a last nostalgic view before the realities of retirement.
There were a couple of typical news items.
‘The pound had a good day today. It rose sharply at ten o’clock, had a light breakfast and went for a stroll in the park.’ How silly is that, and yet there was a big laugh that went on and on. How would an analyst of humour try to explain the joke to somebody who didn’t think it funny?
‘We’ve just heard that there’s a new rail service specially for people travelling to Brighton. It’s the Have It Away Day.’
There were extracts from a couple of sketches. ‘Sid and George’, from 1979, was written by John Sullivan and Freddie Usher. The setting is a pub. Sid and George are discussing women over their pints.
Sid and George.
‘They have these… er… they have these places, don’t they?’ says Ronnie, not without embarrassment.
‘Places?’
‘Yeah. You know. You’ve heard of the erosive zones, haven’t you?’
‘Well, I’ve seen pictures of them in holiday brochures.’
‘No, erosive zone, that’s the medical term for a place a woman’s got, you see, where if you touch it she goes mad. Well, your Lil’s got one of them.’
‘Yeah. Her wallet.’
Another sketch set in a pub featured the man who finished all his friend’s sentences. What I liked about this was that my character, and of course it was me who was interrupted, never ever seemed the slightest bit annoyed by this.
‘They wanted me to change my… er…’
‘What? Change your hours?’
‘No. Change my…’
‘Change your habits?’
‘No… er…’
‘Change your socks more often?’
‘No. Change my duties. Of course I always worked with… er…’
‘Pride?’
‘No, with… er…’
‘Within reason?’
‘No, with…’
‘With your overcoat on?’
‘No. With Harry Hawkins. I always worked with Harry Hawkins. He used to give me…’
‘His wholehearted support?’
‘No, his…’
‘His athletic support?’
‘No. His ginger nuts.’
(And so on.)
The third sketch they chose to show a snippet from was called ‘The Chute’, and was written by Barry Cryer a
nd David Nobbs. Ronnie was laundryman in a big hotel and I was an under-manager who kept coming down the laundry chute, because I was being shoved down it, a fact which I was attempting to hide. It was a very well-judged chute. I came down at exactly the right speed for comedy, quite fast but not ridiculously fast, and I attempted to preserve my dignity throughout.
‘Well, the chute’s certainly working all right.’
‘Course it is. It’s a chute, ain’t it? That’s why it’s called a chute – you shove stuff in the top, it shoots down, that’s why it’s called a chute.’
‘Well, I realize that, yes, but I’m just checking it, you see. I don’t want you to think I’m being thrown down it.’
Whereupon I walked off with every shred of dignity I could muster, only to reappear down the chute a moment later.
They showed extracts from three of Ronnie’s monologues. There was ‘Tomorrow’s Kitchen’, by Peter Vincent and Ian Davidson. ‘But what about the pests of the future? Here is the mousetrap of the future. It consists of a piece of cheese, a Jimmy Young record and a brick. When the mouse smells the cheese he comes out of his hole. Play the Jimmy Young record, and when the poor little so and so puts his paws over his ears, you creep up behind him and clobber him with the brick. Simple really.’
‘Guru’ was also by Peter Vincent and showed Ronnie blacked up as an Indian guru. ‘What is my message to you? Oh my God, the cocoa’s coming off. Some of you are saying, this man is not a genuine Indian Indian, he is from Basildon New Town with Irish father and mother from Arbroath who travels in cocoa. No, no, no. To these sceptics, I say, josssticks to you.’ This was a portrayal not of a man who was an Indian guru, but of a man pretending to be an Indian guru. Despite this, in today’s climate it would probably be considered politically incorrect.
The third extract from Ronnie’s monologues was the original ‘Pispronunciation’ sketch, appealing on behalf of those who couldn’t say their worms correctly. ‘I remember twice a dong lime ago, an old angler exploded to me, “I haven’t fought a king all day.” Of course he meant, I haven’t caught a ding all fay.’
There was also an extract from one of my monologues in the chair, and having quoted one of Spike Mullins’s in full, I’d like to quote this one of David Renwick’s in full also, in thanks for the fifty or so of these pieces that he wrote for me.
‘Tonight I’d like to tell you a very, very funny joke. This is the sort of joke that will still be loved and enjoyed even when it’s a hundred years old. A week next Tuesday. Why do I bother? Why do I carry on every week when you consider that for three times the money I could go and work for British Rail? Who says crime doesn’t pay? If I’d gone into films, by now I could have matured into a huge, international sex symbol. You can laugh. Did they explain that to you when you came in? No, but for a strange quirk of fate I could have been the new Charles Bronson. If the old one had been a pint-sized comedian who wore glasses.
‘Actually I’m being unfair to myself there – all these stories I keep putting around about being small. Like when I say that for three months I served as a shop steward on a silicon chip. That’s all just part of my professional repertoire. The truth is, I’ve always been very sensitive about my physique, since that time I went into hospital. I took off all my clothes, and the doctor rushed over and gave me the kiss of life. I suppose really I should never have got undressed in the first place – strictly speaking, my wife wasn’t even allowed visitors.
‘As it happens I was admitted myself, shortly afterwards. I’d been feeling very weak and tired, and nothing the doctors did seemed to help. In the end they put me on a course of iron tablets, and I collapsed with metal fatigue.
‘You see, people never take me seriously. Like the dressing rooms they gave me here at the BBC. You won’t believe this, but until a month ago I was still classified as a glove puppet. Until the start of each show I was kept folded up in a biscuit tin with Basil Brush. Worst of all must be this set – a box with a chair on it. Well, this week my pride got the better of me, and I complained to the Managing Director of Television. He said, “Don’t worry about a thing. As from this week I’m giving the whole set a face lift. More sparkle, more glitter, more razzamatazz,” he said. “You won’t even recognize it.”’
…at which point I pulled down a solitary pink balloon and sat there, holding it.
‘Isn’t it pathetic? Little things please little minds, I suppose.’
…as I took out a long knitting needle.
‘Shall I? If only it were that simple. Do you realize that one stab with this and I could cause a national walk-out by the National Federation of Balloon-Popping Operatives? Which could seriously disrupt Diana Dors’s acupuncture course. So I won’t bother. Why should I descend to their level? Minds like children, all of them. Oh, that reminds me, a little wave to my own children.’
I waved.
‘Only things have been a bit iffy at home again lately. The riots in the hamster’s cage are just entering their fifth week, and on Monday afternoon our little boy became very distraught when his piggy bank contracted swine fever. Added to which, last weekend our young puppy dog was sniffing around the front room and accidentally swallowed the remote control gadget for the TV. A bit unfortunate – now we have to twiddle his tummy to get BBC1. If we want ITV we have to twiddle the top of his left leg. Thank God we never watch BBC2.
‘Anyway, on to the joke, which concerns this rather posh, well-to-do lady from Belgravia, who one day takes her young son for a day out to the local cattle market. And the son is all agog because he’s never seen a cow close up before. Well, he’s seen bits of them, you know, nestling by the Yorkshire pudding. But he’s never seen what they look like all put together. And as they’re standing there looking at one particular cow, an old farmer comes up and starts feeling the animal all along its flank, pressing the skin and kneading its muscles… I think he was trying to get BBC2, actually. And the boy turns to his mummy, and says, “Mummy”. Because he knows her quite well. “Mummy,” he says, “What’s that man doing that for?”
‘His mother says, “Well, he’s got to do that, that tells him how much meat there is on the cow, and if he thinks there’s enough he’ll buy it, you see.” It’s quite educational this joke, isn’t it? That’s about all it is.
‘So a couple of days later the boy is sitting at the breakfast table in the family’s plush mansion, tucking into his quadraphonic Rice Krispies, and wearing a bit of a frown, so his mother asks him what’s on his mind.
‘He says, “Well, you know what you told me the other day about that farmer and the cow at the cattle market?” She says, “Yes?” He says, “Well, I was just walking past the kitchen a few minutes ago, and I think Daddy wants to buy the cook.”’
The same programme showed brief extracts from two delightful film pieces that David Renwick wrote, one called ‘Raiders of the Lost Auk’, a skit on the Harrison Ford classic, and the other, written with David Marshall, a stylish parody of Poirot. This contained a marvellous sequence in which I fell into an ornamental fountain. It really was very funny. To watch. It wasn’t funny to do. It was just wet. The key to it was that I behaved as if I had meant to fall in. I lolled there elegantly, attempting unsuccessfully to stem a flow of water which looked as if I was relieving myself as prodigiously as Henry Cotton’s donkey in far-off Portugal. So it managed to be a lavatory joke and an elegant joke at the same time – no mean feat.
The last word on the programme should come from Ronnie himself. Barry questioned him on why he had retired, and he said, ‘I’d done everything I wanted to do. I had no ambitions left, and I began to hate London more and more, so, off to the Cotswolds and my water mill.’
Our lives were now very different. I was still a working actor, and Ron was retired. But one factor that was similar in both of our lives was that our mothers lived on to a much greater age than our fathers. Ron didn’t speak much about his family, he was very private in that regard, but I do know that his father left his mother fo
r a German lady, coming back when that didn’t work out, but only to be given rather a hard time, not entirely unnaturally, by Ron’s mother. He died in 1972. Ron’s mother lived in Cambridge for many years, but eventually Ron bought a house in Chipping Norton, with a ground-floor flat for her, and, at the age of ninety, after several happy years there, she moved in with Ron and Joy at the mill, where she died in 1994 at the age of ninety-four.
My mother continued to live in Edinburgh, and eventually moved into sheltered housing, where she lived a reasonably happy if rather lonely life for many years. We did think of bringing her south to live with us, but her whole life had been based in Edinburgh, her surviving friends were there, as were my brother and my sister-in-law, and so in the end we didn’t. Then she started wandering out to post letters at three in the morning, so really she was suffering from dementia. My brother got her into a very nice, high-quality home, where she was well looked after. We visited her frequently, and she died there at the age of ninety-three. By that time she was seeing all sorts of visions. An hour or so before she died, I was lying on her bed beside her. I remember that for some reason I still had my cap on. Tears were streaming down my cheeks, and beside me she was sleeping peacefully.
Both Ron and I were to suffer an early disappointment in our new life. Ronnie was disappointed by the public reaction to Clarence. It wasn’t a serious matter, as there could now never be a second series, but the character was rather close to his heart, and he would have liked to have gone out with a bang. It wasn’t exactly a whimper, but the public reaction was a bit lukewarm.
I think there was more than one reason for this. Partly it was due to the fact that, by Ronnie’s very highest standards, it wasn’t as rich a piece as Porridge or Open All Hours. It was too reliant on the one joke, Clarence’s short-sightedness. That on its own would not necessarily have been serious – after all, the fact that Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em was entirely dependent on the clumsiness and physical ineptitude of the character so memorably played by Michael Crawford didn’t stop it being a major success. But the public knew that Ronnie had retired. It was not in their best interests to become too fond of this new character, as there would never be another series. Also, Ronnie had consigned himself to history. He was in the past. Later, nostalgia would set in, but it was too soon for that.
And It's Goodnight from Him . . . Page 21
