In effect, though, we had been sacked. In effect, for the time being, we were unemployed. It was a shock.
But the Frost on Sunday team had one last role to play. David, Ronnie, Jo Tewson and I were asked to provide the entertainment for the BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) awards, which were being broadcast from the London Palladium.
We did a sketch in which Ronnie was Henry VIII, I was a camp, Jewish Cardinal Wolsey, with a large cigar and a costume with a twenty-yard train, and Jo was all six wives. It doesn’t sound like our kind of thing, more Morecambe and Wise, but it went down very well.
During the evening there was a technical breakdown, and we had to hold the fort while they sorted it out. Apparently it lasted eight or nine minutes. It is a myth to think that time goes at a constant pace. Eight or nine minutes with a beautiful woman passes in a flash, if you’ll excuse the phrase. Eight or nine minutes chatting up a celebrity audience off the cuff is an age. And it wasn’t the kind of thing we were good at, especially Ronnie.
We both must have been pretty good that night, though. Obviously there is no record of what we said, because of the breakdown, and we couldn’t remember a word of it because we were panicking throughout, but it must have been all right, because it impressed Bill Cotton, Head of Light Entertainment at the BBC, and Paul Fox, Controller of BBC1, who was sitting next to him in the Palladium audience.
On one of our award shows, Bill Cotton told what these two powerful BBC men whispered to each other than night.
‘How would you like to have Corbett and Barker on your network for the next three years?’ whispered Bill.
‘But they’re tied to London Weekend Television, to David Frost,’ whispered Paul.
‘I didn’t ask you what the problem was,’ whispered Bill. ‘I just asked whether you’d like to have them.’
‘If you say so, that’s fine by me,’ whispered Paul.
The next day Bill Cotton turned up at David Frost’s office and made an offer of a contract for six shows with Ronnie B., six shows with me, and thirteen episodes of a show featuring the two of us. He didn’t know that, in effect, we had been sacked from London Weekend Television.
We had a meeting with Bill Cotton, and he asked us if we would come over and do a show together for the BBC. Just the two of us, not David Frost. Could they entice us?
Ronnie and I looked at each other and were glad, at that moment, that we were actors. There we were, unemployed, but we nodded in an ‘I suppose we could possibly, just possibly, consider it if the fee and the whole package was right, but of course I can only speak for myself and not for Ronnie’ kind of way.
A deal was struck. Bill Cotton later commented that, when he heard that we had been sacked, ‘I thought I must have offered them too much money.’ But I don’t think in fact that he ever had cause to regret it.
So, although we were still with David Paradine Productions, we joined the BBC. We would do a primetime comedy series together. Everything was settled. Well, almost everything. What could we call the series? We just couldn’t think of a title.
7
Hindsight is an amazing thing. In hindsight it seems as if the whole of our two careers were building to this moment, the creation of our show as a double act. There we were, one of us little, the other large, having done lots of sketches together in very successful programmes, and both called Ronnie. It seems absolutely obvious that the two of us should do a variety show together. All I can say is that it didn’t seem so obvious to me at the time, or to Ronnie B., or to either of our very good, experienced and perceptive agents, or even to David Frost, who was almost as shrewd about other people’s lives as he was about his own. As we have seen, it took David’s production company having problems with London Weekend Television and a BAFTA breakdown to get us to the starting post. There is so much luck in our business. We might have got there eventually, but who knows?
It seems incredible, in hindsight, that there was any problem in finding a title for our new show. Perhaps The Two Ronnies was just too obvious. We often miss what’s staring us in the face. Time and again, throughout Frost on Sunday, people had referred to us as the two Ronnies. ‘Have we got the scripts for the two Ronnies’ sketches?’ etc. Yet still the penny didn’t drop. There were discussions and debates about the title. Eventually somebody in the office at David Paradine Productions said, ‘Why not call it The Two Ronnies?’
There is something particularly daunting about being named in the title of a show. Nobody would ever have said, of Frost on Sunday, ‘Did you see it last night? The two Ronnies weren’t very good, were they?’ But now that was exactly what they would say, and we couldn’t assume that we would be successful in the future, just because we had been successful in the past. We were there to be shot at, and we knew it, so we knew that we had to work very, very hard on the format and content of the show. We had to have it very carefully planned. Luckily, nobody was better than Ronnie B. at that.
We were both determined to continue our policy of ensuring that we had separate careers outside The Two Ronnies, and the BBC were just as keen on this as we were. It was in nobody’s interests that we should get typecast, either singly or together. In fact we both began our return to the BBC by recording a variety special, an hour-long one-off programme, before we started on The Two Ronnies, and we both made a guest appearance in each other’s show. This was actually extremely convenient, as during our rehearsals together for these specials, we were able to sit down with our director, Terry Hughes, and our executive producer, Jimmy Gilbert, and work out what the elements of the show should be. These discussions took place round a big table at the BBC rehearsal rooms in Acton, a charmless modern block on the A40, sarcastically known to everyone as the Acton Hilton. If the Hilton ever saw it, they’d sue.
Because we were both well prepared, theatrically experienced and thoughtful, and because attention to detail was our watchword, and because we had worked together so much – twenty-six editions of The Frost Report, forty-nine of Frost on Sunday – we knew what we could be and what we couldn’t be. Above all, we knew that we could never be a double act in the way that Morecambe and Wise were. Morecambe and Wise were brilliant, and to court any kind of comparison with them would have been disastrous. But it went deeper than that. Neither of us would have been happy in a traditional double act, though for very different reasons.
Ronnie was not, and never could be, a stand-up comedian. He was a very private man, a quiet man, who loved his family and his home and had the sort of hobbies that you might expect a bank manager or a schoolmaster to have. More of that later. Above all, he was an actor. He found it almost impossible to talk directly, as himself, to an audience. He had to be in character. If he was asked to open a village fête, he would be unable to do it unless he could do it in character as Arkwright or Fletcher or Lord Rustless or some other of his characters. And that, of course, was not what people wanted – they wanted a glimpse of the real man. So he didn’t do these things in order not to disappoint them.
All this meant that it would have been very difficult for Ronnie to talk to the audience directly, as himself, and it also meant that he would have found it hard to talk to me, as himself, in front of the audience. I can’t emphasize this too strongly. We would have found it very difficult to talk naturally to each other as ourselves and to the audience at the same time, even in the tiniest way, like saying goodnight at the end of the show. It would have sounded stilted. That was why we ended the show on a little joke. ‘It’s goodnight from me.’ ‘And it’s goodnight from him.’ That little ruse enabled Ronnie to say goodnight, and it gave us a much-loved little catchphrase.
I’m very different. I had an act. I did a spot. I was used to talking directly to an audience. In fact, I loved it. But I didn’t want to be a double act any more than Ronnie did. My reason was my height. I’ve shown, I hope, how I have not been deeply sensitive about my height since my RAF days. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I was completely at ease with i
t, but it wasn’t important enough to stop me leading a very happy life. It didn’t stop me courting a woman who was more than six inches taller than me. Thank goodness it didn’t.
But learning to use it as an advantage was a different matter. During our tea at the Ritz, David Frost said that he thought it could be an enormous plus, and it has been. I’ve grown into it, to use a very unsuitable phrase. I will come on and say to an audience, ‘Oh my goodness, he’s even smaller than I realized,’ and feel perfectly happy about it. But I was always careful not to over-use it, and I think that if I was in a double act I would inevitably end up on the receiving end, the relationship would be defined by height. I certainly didn’t intend to go through life being persecuted with flour and water and hit with rubber hammers and that kind of thing. Of course an act with Ronnie B. would never have been that physical, but there would have been a real danger that I would have ended up playing for sympathy.
Just about the first decision we made about the show was that, in the cause of preserving our separate identities, it would contain a solo item for both of us. It was clear, from the differing nature of our skills, that the two spots would be very different in character. Ronnie was very much more of a character actor, with numerous and varied voices at his fingertips, and I realized through Frost on Sunday and The Corbett Follies that I had a sort of ability to talk as myself, or at least as people imagined me to be, so the two solo spots would be quite different. I would be me being me as me, if you see what I mean, and Ronnie would do the character part. I would sit in a chair, as myself, and talk to the audience, and Ronnie would be playing a part, a spokesman or a mad scientist or a man who pispronounced his worms or whatever. Ronnie’s monologue would always come before mine in the show. We knew instinctively that that was right, although to this day I couldn’t say why.
But how should we front the show, how should we begin it and how should we end it? With Frost on Sunday we hadn’t faced this problem. David had done all that. Ah! Supposing we did phoney news items, like David. He, of course, had always been himself, barking out his bofferoonies, as he sometimes called them. We couldn’t, as I have shown, be ourselves. What part could we play, to read out these news items? It didn’t require a genius to suggest that we became newsreaders. As Jimmy Gilbert pointed out, the news bulletins regularly used two newsreaders sitting side by side. So there we would sit, at the beginning and the end of the show, side by side, together but separate, like our careers.
In the early shows we remained po-faced throughout the news item sequence, but in the end there were jokes that one or other of us couldn’t resist, and we began to smile and titter and giggle and be human, and perhaps, in those moments, the audience came to see glimpses of the real Ronnie B. It can look awfully smug when comedians laugh at their own jokes, but we weren’t doing that, we were laughing at each other’s jokes. I know some people found this a bit cosy, but my answer to that would be that in this harsh world of ours there are worse things to be than cosy.
At first we relied on our regular writers to provide news items. No one was better at it than Gary Chambers, who was
At the desk.
a master of the mordant one-liner. Gary’s humour, like that of Spike Mullins, was dry, as dry as a desert, but Gary’s gags were concise and miniaturist, while the essence of Spike’s humour was its rambling nature. I will return to the subject of Spike’s writing later.
The following exchange occurred between Gary and another of our regular writers, David Nobbs. It illustrates Gary’s sense of humour perfectly.
GARY: Is it true you’re moving to Barnet?
DAVID: Yes.
GARY: I’m really upset about that.
DAVID: Why?
GARY: I’m going to have to remove the board I have up in my garden.
DAVID: Why? What does it say?
GARY: Last comedy writer before the M1.
As soon as the show started to hit the screens, would-be writers from all over the country began to bombard the BBC with jokes. It was a way of beginning on the long road to a career as a writer. Many of them failed, of course, but not all. One of our hopefuls was a young man named David Renwick, from Luton. I’ll come back to him later too.
The process for selecting the jokes was unvaried, and logical. Our script editors, Ian Davidson and Peter Vincent, would come to our unlovely ‘Hilton’ in unlovely Acton armed with great piles of gags. They would have sorted through about 400 and whittled them down to about 397, and typed them all up and numbered them, and we would solemnly read them all out alternately. Ron would read the first one one week, and I would start the next week, and we would mark the gags as we read them. The gags were all anonymous, and we would never permit ourselves even the hint of a smile, for fear it would influence the final judgement.
‘A man who swallowed a barometer was admitted to Cheadle Cottage Hospital today. His condition was described as “set fair – stormy later”.’
‘Bognor Regis District Council announced a revolutionary new plan for treating its sewage today. They’ll take it to London to see a show and then for a little dinner in an Italian restaurant.’
‘An unemployed labourer appeared in court today charged with running up Downing Street shouting, “All the government is barmy.” He was fined two pounds for being drunk and disorderly, and sent to prison for ten years for revealing a state secret.’
The world was at work, sober and serious. Car makers were making cars, dentists were filling teeth, merchant bankers were banking merchants, and here were we sitting at a table reading jokes with utter solemnity. If you stopped to think about it, it was bizarre, which was probably why we never stopped to think about it.
You may have noticed that our jokes were not what you would call hotly topical. In the world of the BBC it’s a foolish man who forgets repeats. You can see our routine at the desk twenty years later, and hardly anything seems anachronistic. We tried to avoid proper names as much as possible, again in the interests of repeats, but it just wasn’t always possible. On the whole, though, we liked ‘Are there too many government ministries? We’ll be talking later to the Minister for Steak and Kidney Pudding’ more than we liked ‘In the House of Commons last night, when the heating failed, MPs had to don spare overalls to keep warm. Mr Callaghan wore four pairs while Mrs Thatcher wore three, an overall majority of one.’
Some of our gags, if told now, might fall foul of the intense sensibilities of our guardians of political correctness. ‘The West Ham Short-sighted Society held a picnic today on Clapham Common, and the East Ham Short-sighted Society held a picnic on the West Ham Short-sighted Society.’ Oh dear. Imagine the letters in 2006. If that was cruel, it was about as cruel as we ever got.
Not all our jokes at the desk were news items. We would issue the occasional warning – ‘Here is a message for seven honeymoon couples in a hotel in Peebles. Breakfast was served three days ago’ – and we would announce forthcoming events in the show under the heading ‘In a packed show tonight…’ For example: ‘In a packed show tonight we’ll interview the Romford girl who took the pill washed down with pond water and was today diagnosed as being three months stagnant.’
Another regular feature of the show was the big musical finish. The inspiration for this came from an item in my one-off special, which was called Ronnie Corbett in Bed.
Ronnie’s show was called The Ronnie Barker Yearbook, and it wasn’t a very happy experience for him. I think that, unlike me, he was actually not very keen on doing a variety special on his own. It wasn’t really his bag. Since he couldn’t present it as himself, there was a bit of a hole in the middle. The idea was to do twelve items, one for each month of the year, items suited to the nature of the month. In the end, the producer, Jimmy Gilbert, said there wasn’t room to film the first two items. The January item would have consisted of very fast shots of professional skaters falling all over the ice. Ronnie suspected that it was dropped because of the time and expense that would be involved in the filming. He pr
otested strongly, only to be told by Jimmy, very firmly, ‘Excuse me. I am making here an executive decision.’ We worked a lot with Jimmy, and owe a lot to him, and this was the only time either of us ever had what could be described as a row with him.
Frank Muir, former Head of Comedy at the BBC and London Weekend, once said, ‘God preserve me from good ideas.’ It sounds strange, but I know what he meant. A good idea can become a straitjacket for comedy, and I suspect that might have been the case with the yearbook idea. But I must say that I agree with Ron that, if you’re going to do it, you have to do it properly. I would have been a bit upset to have a yearbook without January or February, but Ron, with his fastidious nature and his almost compulsive attention to detail, must have been mortified. Anyway, it was only a one-off and it was soon forgotten.
We didn’t have these problems with Ronnie Corbett in Bed, in which I introduced the show from my bed. This may sound like an idea for an offbeat little show, but this was mainstream television. The guests included Howard Keel and Blossom Dearie. What a privilege to be able to sing and play the piano in the company of someone as accomplished as Blossom Dearie.
And It's Goodnight from Him . . . Page 7