It was far and away the shortest monologue that Ron ever wrote or performed, but a perfect little piece, I think, gentle and stylish.
We recorded the Christmas show in July, just three months before he died, so that when it went out it was very much a tribute, a tribute which received the third-highest rating for the Christmas and New Year period.
I knew when we did the Christmas show that he would never be able to work again. He looked so frail. He had a walking stick with him all day. He pretended that he’d pulled something in his ankle and had twisted his foot, but I think he felt shaky on his legs and, rather than worry us all, he made out that he’d hurt himself. He did look very weak and he couldn’t even get the voice. Even on the recording you could see the weakness of the delivery, you could hear him pushing the voice out. This time there was no chance of concealing from the viewing public that he was ill, although such was his pride and professionalism that I don’t think you would have realized just how ill he was.
When he stood with me and hugged me at the end, tears ran down his cheeks. I didn’t dare start myself, otherwise we would both have been blubbing, but he was very emotional. I don’t know why he had the strength to be bothered to do it at all, really, but it was marvellous that he did. He knew he would never ever stand there again, or do anything again.
Immediately after the show the BBC gave us a sweet little party. Ron was able to come to it, but by now he was so enfeebled by the day’s activities that he had to make straight for a chair and sit down throughout it.
The BBC gave us a most lovely little gift, a book of the photographs of us that there had been in the Radio Times over the years, some absolutely splendid photographs, and most beautifully and carefully presented. It was very touching.
This was such a British scene, I think. Everybody knew that it was farewell, the end, goodbye from me and goodbye from him and goodbye from us, but nobody said so. The room was full of emotion, but none of it was expressed. It didn’t need to be.
And that was the last time I saw Ron. He began to go downhill very fast after making that supreme effort to do the Christmas show. In fact I later found out that he had told Joy and his daughter Charlotte that he would go downhill fast after the recording. He was living to make this last great professional effort. I think he was ready to go after that. He couldn’t enjoy his food. He couldn’t sleep. It was time.
I hoped I would see him again. Anne and I wanted to go down and visit him at the mill, but he didn’t want us to do that. He thought he looked so tragic and pathetic, which he probably did. He just did not want us to see him in his final frailty.
On Sunday, 22 September 2005, ITV celebrated its fiftieth birthday with a huge three-hour extravaganza. At its centre was the establishment of a British Avenue of the Stars, like the famous American one on Hollywood Boulevard. The British Avenue was the pavement in front of St Paul’s Church in Covent Garden, right in the heart of London. This church is always known as the Actors’ Church, so it was a suitable location.
One hundred stars were to have themselves immortalized that night. They were chosen, we were told, by ‘an independent panel of experts’, which didn’t leave us much the wiser. Among them were Ronnie and me. I’m glad to say that we didn’t have to share a star. We got one each. Thank you, independent panel of experts, whoever you were.
Sadly, Ronnie was by now too ill to attend. His and my stars were to be presented to me, on behalf of both of us, by Richard Briers. He thought this was the only reason for his attendance, but found that he was getting a star himself. Chris Tarrant told the audience that Ricky Gervais had described Richard as ‘the greatest living British sitcom actor’.
Dickie seemed almost embarrassingly eager to get off the subject of his star and on to presenting ours. He was a great friend of Ronnie’s, and had been ever since they had starred in Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound together.
They showed one or two extracts from our work, including our take-off of Moira Anderson and Kenneth McKellar, which I must say I thought rather good, though it was probably a bit puzzling to the younger members of the audience, and then it was my turn to walk down the huge staircase, grateful that I was long cured of my labyrinthitis.
Dickie Briers read out a letter from Ron, in which he said, ‘I’m so sorry not to be with you today for this enormous extravaganza with some of the biggest stars in show business, and also one of the smallest but the best, my dear dear friend Ronnie Corbett. I shall have to ask him to represent us both.’
There was no hint of why Ron wasn’t there, and I did a bit of my patter, including those old friends, the Greek restaurant joke and the treadmill only doing widths joke, and I said, ‘Thank you. Both Ron and I deeply appreciate this honour and being part of the avenue, so God bless you all who have put us there.’ And all the time, in my heart, I was thinking of Ron so ill at home.
Later in the show Sir Richard Attenborough thanked the unknown independent panel of experts for not confining the Avenue of the Stars to the living, and for commemorating so many of the dead. This remark touched a nerve in the audience. There was loud applause.
Nobody there that night could have had any idea how soon Ron would be among that number. Within eight days, to be precise.
The night following that ceremony, I spoke to Ronnie for the last time. James, who works as my chauffeur when I need him these days, was driving me along Ryder Street, which is a side street halfway up St James’s, when I got a phone call from home on my mobile, saying that Ron had rung and wanted to speak to me.
We pulled up at a meter and I rang him up, and he said, in a weak voice, ‘I just wanted to thank you very much for the way you accepted on my behalf,’ and I said, ‘How are you?’ and he said, ‘I’m not well. I’m going. I’m just fading away, and I feel terrible. I am going.’
Those were the last words he ever spoke to me, and I can hear them still. In fact I can never pass Ryder Street, and I shall never pass Ryder Street, I shall never pass that parking meter, without thinking of that last conversation.
On the following Monday morning, not long before lunchtime, I was seated at a table of the little house that I suppose I have to call our retirement bungalow. It’s a few hundred yards from our old house, and backs on to the same golf course. It’s cosy and intimate and private, and has a sensible-sized garden, beautifully laid out with a wonderful orchestration of different shades of green. People love bright flowers, but green is always the favourite colour of gardeners. Anne and I couldn’t believe our luck when it came on the market, and we snapped it up, even though we felt that the move was just a bit premature. Anyway, there we live, with our two miniature Schnauzers and a very old cat, and there I was that morning, busy signing my name opposite Ronnie’s.
We had recently done an arrangement with a company that produced a huge, beautiful picture of Ron and me in the ‘Four Candles’ hardware store, with a quote from the sketch underneath. There were 500 of them, all beautifully mounted, and we were both to sign them all, really sign them with a proper signature. Ron had already signed them all, and I was working my way steadily through them, when the phone rang. It was Charlotte, Ron’s daughter, and she said, ‘Dad’s gone.’ He had been in a hospice for the past two days, and there he had just quietly faded away, peacefully. All that energy, gone to nothing.
It wasn’t a shock, in itself, but it was a shock that it should happen at that very moment. It was quite uncanny. I thought about Ron, and about Joy, and about his family, and about our times together, and then I picked up my pen. There was a job to do.
I signed, and signed, and signed, and signed, and signed, and each time I signed I saw Ron’s signature there beside mine, and I thought, ‘He’ll never sign anything again. Those people will never be able to get a picture of us together again.’
I still can’t get over how strange it was that I should get the news at that very moment. In fact it was a strange day altogether. I had this momentous news, not sad in itself, because I knew
that Ron had been ready to go, but very distressing and touching none the less, and Anne and I couldn’t share it with anybody, because the news had not yet broken. It wasn’t made public knowledge until the following morning, first on the radio and then, shortly afterwards, on breakfast television. I imagine that the family had decided to tell, in private, all those closest to Ron so that they heard it in person, before the news was broken to the media. That was thoughtful.
Despite all the evidence over the years of Ron’s great popularity, I must say that I was amazed at the coverage of his death. I was absolutely surprised at the grief of the nation. The impact was enormous. It was the main item on news bulletins and the front-page lead in newspapers. The whole nation seemed to mourn. The Daily Mail used the whole of its front page, the whole of page 2, and two other complete pages. The Daily Telegraph had a big picture on the front page, a large article on page 2, almost the whole of page 3, an article about him by Jim White on page 26, and a full-page obituary on page 29. Paper after paper used the catchphrase ‘It’s Goodnight From Him.’
There were only four words on the front page of the Sun, and yes, they were those same four words, but the whole of the rest of the page was a giant picture of the glasses Ron wore. Just that. It was amazingly imaginative and moving. And inside was a leading article, which ended, ‘We’ll light a candle for you, Ronnie. Hang on, m-m-m-make that f-f-f-four candles.’
Other famous comedians and actors had died, and it had been a major news story, but I don’t think it had ever been like this. Why did it affect people so deeply?
Doctor Ronald Corbett, Professor of Mass Psychology at the University of Life, has two theories.
The first is that there was something in Ron’s personality that made you think he was speaking directly to you, that you knew him, that you were part of his family, and he part of yours. Television is very intimate, and I think people felt that they knew him intimately, which is quite ironic, since he had such difficulty in revealing his real self. But perhaps that very difficulty made people understand him better, and gave him a vulnerability that touched them. I think in the end he was like everybody’s favourite uncle.
The other theory is that the more mature generations in Britain are feeling a little starved of subtlety in comedy, and that in a world of increasing violence, rapid climate change and social change, and so many other problems that I won’t mention because I don’t want to depress you, there is a great hunger for laughter, especially what I would call life-enhancing laughter. In his three great successes, Porridge, Open All Hours and The Two Ronnies, Ron enhanced our lives all right. His funeral was appropriate for the man. It was strictly private, and very modest. It was held deep in the Oxfordshire countryside that he loved, and it was for family only. In fact, since neither Ron nor Joy was religious, it was a humanist funeral. I gather that Ron’s son Larry gave a moving and funny picture of the Ron that only his family knew, a man bubbling over, in private, with fun and mischief and affection.
I still had to carry on working. I had commitments. But I found it quite difficult to go out into the streets because everybody knew what was probably going on in my heart, and they didn’t know whether to speak, or just to touch me, which was touching Ron really.
But what moved me most, more than all the glowing tributes in the papers and on television, was the taxi drivers in the West End. Normally they’d toot at me and say things like ‘How are you, Ron?’ very cheerily, and all they were doing now, when they saw me waiting to cross the road or walking along the pavement, was lowering their windows and holding up their hands in a gesture of peace. It was very, very, very moving.
21
On a crisp, late-winter’s day in March, with pale sunshine gently lighting up the ancient buildings of Westminster, the great and the good, not to mention the not so great and the not so good, all wrapped up against the chill air, walked slowly and solemnly and with dignity towards the Gothic fifteenth-century west front of Westminster Abbey. Above them, there were ten Christian martyrs, preserved for ever in stone. To either side of them there were at least fifty photographers, taking pictures of the great and ignoring the not so great, to their chagrin. 2,500 people walked into the Abbey that morning, to give thanks for the life of – not another Christian martyr – but a comic actor. Was this appropriate? Oh, I hope so.
The idea of holding the memorial service for Ron in Westminster Abbey was the BBC’s. What a contrast to his funeral. But I see nothing inappropriate or hypocritical about it. How I see it is that Ron had been buried in the way he wanted. Now he was being remembered in the way we, the nation, wanted.
Some of the huge congregation that day might never have been into the abbey before. Most would not have been for a long time. But for me, it was my second visit of the morning.
I was to give the final tribute to my great, good friend Ronnie Barker. I’d played Winston’s and Danny La Rue’s and Margate and Yarmouth. I had never played Westminster Abbey and I was nervous. I had been nervous for quite a long time, waking up in the nights, agonizing over my speech. It was a celebration, but it was also a service. I didn’t want to be too cheeky, in the pulpit of Westminster Abbey, but I did rather hope to be funny. And I intended to start with a little visual joke, a joke that would take me back to my very first meeting with Ron, and to the very first chapter of this book. I intended to enter the pulpit, over whose bottom edge I would just be able to see, and then jump on to a hidden box, thoughtfully placed there by the helpful clergy for just such a purpose.
That was why I had gone to the abbey earlier that morning – to check that my prop was in place in the pulpit. It’s lucky I did. There was a box, but it covered the complete floor of the pulpit. I could not therefore enter the pulpit and suddenly rise up. The gag wouldn’t work.
A box of the right size was found. I tested out my gag. I felt not a little foolish doing this in the haughty silence of the deserted abbey, looking down the Quire to the great nave beyond. The building of the nave had begun in 1376 and had taken 150 years to complete. It made our fifteen years of The Two Ronnies seem small and insignificant.
But they didn’t seem small and insignificant as the doors opened and the public streamed in. Anybody who was anybody in British entertainment was there, and so were many people from the great British public, who wanted to give thanks for the amount of humour and joy that Ron had brought into their lives.
Of course I was nervous. I wanted to do well by my old friend on this, the very last moment of our lives together. I thought all sorts of thoughts, to take my mind off it.
I wondered if the nave was supposed to have taken 150 years, or had the builders been due to finish in sixty-three years and seven months. What would have been the penalties if they had been eighty-six years and five months late? Was it the Wembley Stadium of the fourteenth century?
I thought about the fact that this was the final resting place of Lord Olivier, whom we had both known just a bit, and of David Garrick, whom we hadn’t met, advanced in years though we had become.
I thought about Poets’ Corner, where Geoffrey Chaucer, John Dryden, Tennyson and John Masefield lay. So this was an appropriate place for Ron’s memorial. After all, he was a poet too.
Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound
She played upon a whistle –
To show you how, she charged a pound
Behind the ‘Dog and Thistle’.
You think I am being irreverent and irrelevant? Irreverent, yes. I’m trying to reflect the mood of that service. Irrelevant? No. I’m getting you into the mood of that service, which was an extraordinary mixture of the reverent and the irreverent.
Here, the full pomp of the church at its most formal mingled with the natural irreverence of humour.
All through the abbey, as the crowds massed, old friends were waving and smiling and reminiscing. Then total silence fell, and everybody stood. The Lord Mayor of Westminster was being met at the Great West Door by the Dean and Chapter of Westminster, and c
onducted to his stall in the Quire. He sat down, and so did everybody else. Conversation broke out again, as people commented on how much old colleagues had aged.
The service began. We all stood and sang the first hymn:
For all the Saints who from their labours rest,
Who thee by faith before the world confest,
Thy name, O Jesu, be for ever blest. Alleluya! Alleluya!
I cannot better describe what happened during the singing than by quoting the words printed in the Order of Service handed to every member of the congregation: ‘THE HYMN, during which the Choir, led by the Beadle, and the Abbey Clergy preceded by the Cross of Westminster and Four Candles, move to places in the Quire and Sacrarium.’
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, four candles. In the midst of all this pomp, a clerical joke, a tribute to the most famous of all our sketches. With that one superb gesture, the mood was set.
There was an address by the Reverend Robert Wright, Sub-Dean of Westminster. There were hymns and prayers, and the choir sang beautifully. There were readings from Richard Briers and Jo Tewson. There were humorous contributions from Michael Grade and Peter Kay. There was a recording of a sermon in rhyming slang by Ron himself. And then it was my turn.
I felt dwarfed by the rather magnificent pulpit as I climbed the steps. I peered over the edge and then rose on to the box. It worked perfectly. I appeared suddenly to be lifted by unseen forces. As with all our ninety-eight shows, the thoroughness had paid off.
And It's Goodnight from Him . . . Page 25