And It's Goodnight from Him . . .

by Ronnie Corbett; David Mattingly

  My disappointment was probably the greater, since I was still a working man with a career. Ronnie’s retirement wasn’t a fatal blow for me. It wasn’t an amputation. I still had a busy career of my own. Nevertheless, The Two Ronnies was the undoubted highlight of my career, so Ronnie’s retirement had to be a difficult moment for me. The second highlight of my career, after The Two Ronnies, was my sitcom Sorry, which had actually run for longer than either Porridge or Open All Hours. However, the BBC chose this moment to say, ‘We’ve decided not to do any more Sorry. Sorry.’

  But my disappointment didn’t last long. Exciting new challenges would soon present themselves. In the meantime, instead of wallowing in a bit of self-pity, let’s think of Ron in his retirement.

  Of course I didn’t see him as much as I had when we’d been working, but the friendship continued as it had always done and was all the more relaxed now that we were no longer working together. We’d go to each other’s parties, meet in London from time to time, see the occasional show, and… well, meet at awards ceremonies and nostalgic tributes on TV more often than we could ever have dreamt.

  In actual fact Ron wasn’t strictly retired. He had retired from show business, but he and Joy bought a little shop, called the Emporium, in the rather severe little Cotswold town of Chipping Norton. It was an antique shop. He had moved from working with his greatest love (after Joy and the family), comedy, to working with his second-greatest love, antiques. It was hard work. Every two months they drove down to London and came back laden with objets d’art. One of the great attractions for Ron was that he could always take home whatever he wanted from the shop. If you own it, it isn’t shoplifting. It does, however, rather tend to hit at the profits, and after ten years, working with Ron’s younger sister Eileen and her husband, they decided that they would have to sell.

  Ron didn’t go to the local pubs or anything like that. It’s virtually impossible when you’re so well known. But in Chipping Norton itself people grew used to him, and he was able to become part of the furniture, as it were. He became a familiar sight, walking down the High Street. There was no longer any fuss. He could go into the Crown and Cushion, a smart little hotel in the square, or to a little Italian restaurant near by, and be himself.

  A fascinating picture of Ron in this environment was given by Bob McCabe, who wrote an authorized biography of him for BBC Books, sensibly entitled The Authorized Biography of Ronnie Barker, which remains the most complete description of his life and work.

  In an ‘Afterword’ at the end of the book, Bob McCabe wrote, ‘We would work in the morning and the afternoon, with a break in the hotel bar for an hour’s lunch. I was pleased to discover that Ronnie has a taste for chilli con carne – as do I – and theirs wasn’t bad. It was fascinating, though, watching him interact with the locals in the bar. He felt obliged to say something funny, and I’m sure I noticed him timing it by the moment he chose to put his hand in the pocket of one of those striped blazers he favours. It reminded me of The Two Ronnies’ run at the London Palladium, when Ronnie Corbett recalls an incident where Barker invented a stage version of himself for fear of revealing his true self. My feeling is that Ronnie B. is both the man behind the mask and the mask itself – he knows how to play the character, and he knows that his audience expect to see him as well.’

  Perhaps ‘fear’ is too strong a word, and ‘unease’ or ‘discomfort’ might be better, but it’s beautifully put and a fine picture of my dear friend in his Chipping Norton days.

  Sadly, health problems did come to mar Ron’s rural idyll, but, luckily, not to ruin it. The problem, as always, was his heart. He had regular six-monthly tests and checks for blood pressure, and in 1994 they decided that he needed to have an angiogram, in which a catheter is inserted into the groin and a dye is introduced into the bloodstream. As it circulates, they can map the arteries and detect narrowing, furring and the other ills that arteries are heir to.

  Ronnie needed a heart bypass, and this was done in 1996. The doctors told him that there was a 3 per cent risk of fatality, which is one of those statistics that somewhat alarm me, because if you do die 100 per cent of you dies, not 3 per cent, and it’s no consolation to know that 97 per cent of people haven’t died if the statistics are accurate. Anyway, the important statistic was that the doctors estimated that if he delayed until the following year, the fatality risk would be 30 per cent. Naturally, therefore, he had the operation.

  The operation was a success, and Ronnie described his coming round after it rather memorably. ‘When you wake up you think, “Who are these ghosts? What’s happening?” Because everything’s very dark. And it’s the nurses. It’s all the nurses in the night, silently walking about.’

  Nine months later, on 1 April 1997 – a suitable date for a comedian, but this was no April fool – Ron developed a pulmonary embolism, which is very often fatal. It’s a blood clot, and it can go either to the lungs or the brain. Ron’s went to the lungs, which was probably lucky. It grew harder and harder for him to breathe, and he was rushed to hospital, where he was put on a wonderful new type of drug known as a ‘clot buster’. It worked, and by that evening the specialist who had done the operation the previous year was convinced that he had turned the corner.

  Ron realized, though, when he saw all his family round the bed, how close he had been to death. It’s a difficult one, isn’t it? Your family naturally want to be with you en masse if there’s a risk if your dying, but the sight of them all there round your bed could precipitate the very event that they dread.

  Anyway, Ron soon felt fine, and his heart was certainly immeasurably better than before the bypass, although, as Joy put it, ‘He didn’t obey orders. He never did. He was supposed to walk two miles a day. He just wasn’t that sort of person. He had too much to do sitting at home,’ and before too long he was persuaded out of retirement to do a couple of films. I have heard people suggest that this rendered the integrity of his retirement suspect. What nonsense. His return to work was in 2002. He had been retired for more than fifteen years. A long time for an insincere gesture! The shop had been sold, his health was better, he was rested, he was no longer tired; one of the biggest reasons for his retiring had been removed.

  Fifteen years! Time, perhaps, to consider what I had been doing during those fifteen years.

  In the theatre I had the great privilege, as I’ve mentioned, of being in Ray Cooney’s stage play Out of Order with Donald Sinden, who is excellent company, and what a difference that makes, especially on tour. There’s a lot of unemployment in the profession, and on the whole one can take one’s pick of many excellent actors for any part, so throughout The Two Ronnies we would avoid people who were boring at rehearsals, or temperamental on the set, in favour of people who weren’t, and were just as good actors. The thing I didn’t mention about Out of Order, the thing that carried me through it despite the remnants of my fears about my labyrinthitis, was the laughter. I went to see the play at the Shaftesbury, with Michael Williams in the role I was to play, and I had never heard such a volume of laughter, especially in the second act. It beat even the laughter we got at the Palladium, and it was, I’m glad to say, the same in Australia with me in the part. What a joy it is to laugh like that, and what a joy and a privilege it is to provide laughter like that. Thank you, Ray.

  My next TV show put a smile on people’s faces too. It was called Small Talk. Yes, I know, but the title didn’t actually refer to me, it referred to children. Well, I suppose it referred to me a bit as well. In fact, maybe they gave me the job because I fitted the title. No, they didn’t. They gave it to me because I was supremely well fitted for the job, and the title was just a bit of luck, or serendipity if you’re intellectual. Anyway, it was a programme with lots of children in it, being asked all sorts of questions, and responding with delightful charm and confidence and ignorance and making everybody laugh. There were also adult contestants who had to guess what the reaction of the children would be.

  I have to admit t
hat in a way it was a bit of a cheat. Most television is. The programme gave the impression that I had the children with me, but I didn’t. They had been filmed in advance. We did three programmes in a day, and I would change my clothes to give the impression that they were all separate events.

  Despite not being with the children, I took great pains to have a rapport with them, and I’d like to think that one of the reasons why I was chosen as presenter (and nothing to do with the title) was that I would be able to have my fun with, rather than at the expense of, the children.

  What has given me particular pleasure in recent years is my involvement with some of the younger generation of comedians. This has given me enormous pleasure, as well as the reassuring feeling that I wasn’t yet a dinosaur.

  I was pleased to be invited to tea at the Ritz for a second time. It has to be flattering when this happens as often as every thirty years. I mentioned many chapters ago that the identity of the second person to invite me to break cucumber sandwiches with him was more surprising than the first. I can tell you now that it was Ben Elton. Did you have him down for a habitué of the Ritz and a lover of afternoon tea? No? Well, did you have him down for a quiet, sweet, warm human being? Wrong again. He is. The ferocity is in his act, and is an act.

  Ben wanted me to do my spot in the chair from The Two Ronnies in his new series of The Ben Elton Show. Not once, but regularly. I was thrilled. In fact he was so involved with it that he actually wrote three of my monologues, and wrote them very cleverly, pushing me into the naughty areas that might be expected by his audience without ever pushing me that bit too far for my audience.

  Both my teas at the Ritz had been productive, and if I’m still around thirty years after Ben’s invitation, I’ll be looking forward eagerly to the next one.

  Harry Hill has the confidence to be original and quirky, and it was a great pleasure to be on his radio show with him. I felt that all this was keeping me young. It was an exploration, and I’ve always been happy to do a bit of that.

  In 1999 I was asked to play an Ugly Sister in an ITV production of Cinderella. The other Ugly Sister was played by Paul Merton. Frank Skinner and Harry Hill were also in it, and Cinderella was Samantha Janus. Frank and Paul were schoolboys at the time I was doing Sorry, and to my amazement I found that they could still remember scenes from it.

  I was delighted to do this show, as I had by now decided that doing pantomimes in the theatre was too much, too tiring; twelve extremely energetic performances a week was a bit much for me in my maturity. But I loved the genre and in this final outing I would throw myself into the style of the thing with verve.

  Paul was up for doing the full ‘slosh’ routine as done by me with Stanley Baxter in Edinburgh and Glasgow more than thirty years before. I actually found a film of us doing the routine, and showed it to him.

  Paul is brilliant, but I don’t think he’ll mind my claiming that in one department of the comic arts he had a lot to learn from a master such as me. I refer, of course, to achieving the right consistency for the ‘slosh’. Imagine his surprise when I turned up to rehearsals with a plastic bowl, some sticks of Erasmic, a whisk and a kettle. Ready, Steady, Go, eat your heart out.

  Ronnie wasn’t really a party animal, but on one occasion at a party in our house he very uncharacteristically read out a poem that he’d written many years before when he’d been on tour with, among others, Frank Finlay. It was one of his double entendre poems with a naughty rhyme, and you were expecting ‘knickers’ but got something completely innocent. It was very cleverly done, and it brought the house down. Well, it didn’t quite bring it down, because we lived on in it until a couple of years ago.

  In 2001, I was chairman of the Saints and Sinners Club of London. The Saints and Sinners is a charity club. It has a hundred members, and you have to be invited to join, you can’t apply. Somebody has to approach you and say, ‘Would you be prepared to become a member?’ We have four club lunches a year at the Savoy, and a big Christmas lunch on the first Friday in December, which is a huge fund-raising event, at which we always try to invite two very good speakers. It’s a nice mixture of show business, industry and politics, and we have a very good time and raise a lot of money for good causes.

  With guests there would be about 550 of the great and the good gathered to hear the speakers, who were always people of high profile. Ronald Reagan spoke at the event on one occasion.

  I’d got John Sergeant as one of my speakers, and it was absolutely natural to ask Ron to be the other. But would he come? And what would he do if he did come? He didn’t do speeches. Well, I wrote to him… it shows how aware of each other we were even after thirty-five years, and how we respected each other’s privacy. I would never have rung him and pressurized him. In fact he wasn’t at ease on the phone, he wasn’t chatty on it, and we rarely used it… I wrote to him and told him I was chairman and said what a blessing it would be if he would just come and read the poem.

  He wrote back and said, ‘Well, I will come and do it, but I don’t want to be on the menu. I don’t want my name printed, in case at the last moment my bottle goes and I can’t face it.’

  That’s what a tender flower he was on that sort of occasion.

  Well, on the day he did come, and really I had known that he wouldn’t let me down. John Sergeant spoke and he was very funny, and then I got up and did my chairman’s remarks, and I got a few laughs – I wish I could remember them now – and then I said, ‘Gentlemen, now I’d like to introduce my dear friend Ronnie Barker.’ I think they must have suspected that something of the kind would happen, because although he wasn’t on the menu, they must have seen him on the top table.

  Anyway, Ronnie stood up, and 550 people in the room stood up as one before he’d said a word, and applauded him long and loud. It was very touching, deeply moving.

  And he paralysed them with the poem; it got roars. And then he had a cup of coffee and within ten minutes he’d put on his trenchcoat, his well-known trenchcoat, and was in his car and away home to Oxfordshire.

  That was such a typical example of what Ronnie was like, of how difficult it was for him to do it and how triumphant it was when he did. He didn’t want to be there early and he didn’t want to stay long afterwards; he just came and did his duty as far as I was concerned, and did it fantastically. But the atmosphere he created just by being there is still talked about in the Saints and Sinners.

  *

  Meanwhile, back at the water mill, in 2002, Ronald William George Barker was at last tempted to return to acting. It was an offer to play a relatively small part in a film, but what a part and what a film. It was called The Gathering Storm and it was a story about Winston Churchill in the tense times before the outbreak of World War II. Ronnie played Churchill’s butler, David Inches. Albert Finney was Churchill, and very good he was too. The story that Finney persuaded Ronnie out of retirement was printed in several of the papers, but it was all billhooks, like much of what’s in the papers. They got on very well during the filming, but they had never even met before. The man who persuaded Ronnie was the director, Richard Loncraine. Mind you, I don’t know how much persuasion you would need to do a cameo role with Albert Finney, Celia Imrie and even, in one short scene, Vanessa Redgrave, who was playing Churchill’s wife, Clementine.

  The film was very well received, and so was Ronnie’s performance, and Richard Loncraine was soon busy at his persuading again. This time Ronnie was offered a bigger role, as a general in the film My House in Umbria, an adaptation of a novel by a brilliant Irish writer, William Trevor, which was made in 2003. Here, as so often, there was a delicious irony. The film starred Maggie Smith, with whom Ronnie had acted in several plays in his Oxford Playhouse days, when he had advised her to give the theatre up because she wouldn’t be good enough to make it. Now here he was saying, ‘I thought I told you to give up this business; you’re still at it, aren’t you?’ Now she was a big star and a Dame, and big enough to greet Ronnie enthusiastically.

  My
House in Umbria was the story of an ageing English author (why did the publicity material say ‘ageing’? We’re all ageing, even babies are ageing. It was Gloria Swanson who said, ‘All this talk of age is foolish. Every time I’m one year older, so is everybody else’). Let’s start again. My House in Umbria was the story of a mature English author, played by Maggie Smith, who offered solace and shelter to a varied group of people who had survived a bombing of a train by terrorists. Apart from Ronnie and Maggie Smith, it also starred Timothy Spall and Chris Cooper.

  The story goes, and I have to say that it’s not impossible to believe, that the head of casting at Warner Brothers, having seen Ronnie in The Gathering Storm, said, ‘How can he play a general? He’s a butler.’ Hadn’t she heard of something known as acting? You can see why actors are afraid of being typecast.

  There was speculation – Ronnie had reached a level of fame at which there is speculation about your every action – that it was the fact that these two roles were serious ones that attracted him out of retirement. He denied it, and I believe him. He had never shown any preference for serious roles before, why should he now? They were simply two great roles that were sufficiently tempting to persuade him back for a while. The fact that they happened to be serious ones was irrelevant. End of story.

  But it isn’t the end of our story. Ronnie’s and my paths were still to cross several times.