Barker Ronnie - And its goodnight from him---: the autobiography of the Two Ronnies

The Autobiography of the Two Ronnies

RONNIE CORBETT with DAVID NOBBS

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

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First published by Michael Joseph 2006
Published in Penguin Books 2007
1

Copyright Ronnie Corbett, 2006
All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-190152-7

For dear Ron, a great friend and colleague who is deeply missed,
and for Joy, who has borne her loss so bravely and supported
this book so thoroughly

I would, personally, like to thank David Nobbs for
lending this book his truly light touch and splendid
way with words.

Ronnie Corbett

Same again, please.

Those were almost the first words that Ronnie Barker ever said to me. Not quite, obviously, because if he hadnt ordered a drink from me already, I could hardly have known what he meant by Same again, please. But, sadly, I cant remember his very first words to me as I cant remember what he was drinking at that first meeting. It was a very long time ago.

It was 1963, in fact, the year of the Profumo Affair, in which John Profumo, Secretary of State for War in the Conservative government, confessed that he had lied to the House of Commons and had had an affair with Christine Keeler, call girl and model. Profumo resigned and, later in the year, largely as a result of this scandal, his Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, was also forced to resign. It was the year of the Great Train Robbery, when the Scotland to London Post Office express was ambushed near Cheddington and robbed of 2.5 million. It was also the year in which President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. It was a momentous year in the world.

Ronnie was thirty-three, and I was a year younger. He was beginning to establish himself as a character actor in the West End and on radio, and I was working as a barman between jobs. Somehow, that seems an appropriate beginning. If wed done a sketch about our first meeting, that was the way it would have been cast.

My life at that time was very busy. During the day I was running the stores at the Victory Club in Edgware Road, which was owned by Mecca Ballrooms. I had my lunch and tea there, and at five thirty I drove my little bullnose Morris to the Buckstone Club, where I had my supper and ran the bar until after midnight. And the theatrical term for that is resting! Sometimes I was resting almost to the point of exhaustion.

The Buckstone Club was in a basement in Suffolk Street, right behind the stage door of the Haymarket Theatre, and was frequented by all sorts of theatrical luminaries Sean Connery, Stanley Baker, John Gielgud, Edith Evans and many others. They felt safe from the public there, though not necessarily from the critics. The famous critic Kenneth Tynan the first man to use a certain four-letter word on television, a word banned then and almost compulsory now was a regular, in his velvet jacket, holding his cigarette artily between the wrong fingers. Its strange what one remembers.

Ronnie B. struck me at those early meetings as a very pleasant, easy person, very comfortable with himself. I realized later, when I got to know him better, that he sometimes found it difficult to be comfortable with every Tom, Dick or Harry. In fact he was quite shy. But in the Buckstone Club, in the company of his peers, he felt quite easy and at home. He was always quite smartly dressed, often in a Glen Urquhart suit, but I dont think he was actually particularly interested in clothes, certainly not as interested as I am. He didnt share my feeling for colours and textures of materials. His style was a bit conservative.

Ronnie was playing a French gangster in the long-running musical Irma La Douce too long-running for his liking. He was trapped in it for two years and came to hate it and felt guilty about hating it when he was in regular work in such a precarious profession. He used to come in occasionally in the evenings, but our first meeting was at lunchtime. I did sometimes work the lunchtime shift. Ronnie was recording the very popular radio comedy The Navy Lark round the corner at the Paris Theatre and used to come in for a light lunch with his wife, Joy, who always accompanied him when he was doing shows with an audience.

One of the many coincidences that seemed to stalk our lives was that I already knew Joy, who was a stage manager. She had stage-managed a pantomime I had done in Bromley. So Ronnie knew about my career, just as I knew about his, and there was plenty to chat about as I served him his drinks. Was there anything more than that, some intimation about future happenings, some feeling that our first meeting was, for us at least, one more momentous event in that year of momentous events? None whatsoever.

Ronnie and I actually had only one remotely serious argument in our lives, and very few disagreements, but, ironically, one of the disagreements involves this very first meeting. He always claimed that I was standing on a box in order to see over the bar. Later he embroidered the story and said I had two boxes, one marked AGNES and the other CHAMP. It took him a while to work out that they were a champagne box cut in half. That sounds to me like a bit of typical Ronnie B. word play. Possibly he came to believe that Id been standing on a box, but I promise you, I swear to you, hand on knee, that I wasnt. I didnt need to. It was a very low bar. Besides, I would have needed a whole row of boxes running the length of the bar, otherwise I would have been disappearing from view and popping up again all over the place. What did he think I was, a comedian?