The Two Ronnies at 50: why comedy’s happiest, funniest marriage was too good to last

Ronnie Corbett said “there was never a cross word” with Ronnie Barker, during four decades of what he called a close and “very British friendship”. Barker described their partnership as “even more amicable than a marriage – wedlock without the bad patches”. During the heyday of The Two Ronnies, which was first transmitted on April 10 1971, more than 20 million viewers regularly tuned in every Saturday night; it was more national institution than television show.

The two men, both christened Ronald, met in London in 1963, when Corbett was a part-time barman at the Buckstone Club in Suffolk Street, near the Haymarket Theatre, a basement drinking hole where stars such as Sean Connery and John Gielgud would hang out. Corbett, who had previously worked with Barker’s stage manager wife Joy Tubb, was in the process of seeking new acting roles at the time he served Barker, then playing a roly-poly French gangster in the musical Irma La Douce, a lunchtime drink.

The pair first worked together in 1966, as part of the BBC ensemble cast of The Frost Report. Edinburgh-born Corbett was 5’ 1”and used to joke that if he wore too much tartan he “tended to look like a Thermos flask”. Their satirical ‘Class Sketch’, co-written by Marty Feldman, cast the diminutive Corbett as the cloth-capped worker who looks up to middle class Barker and upper class John Cleese.

It quickly became a comedy classic. Corbett and Bedford-born Barker, two grammar school boys who had not been to university, were brought closer by being surrounded by writers and actors who were mostly Oxbridge graduates.

Corbett, the son of a baker, was always regarded within the showbusiness industry as a decent, kind and amiable man, and Frost producer Bill Cotton Jr could recall only one occasion when he saw him lose his cool. Corbett was upset that he and Barker were booked on Swiss Air economy seats when the television executives on the same promotional trip were all enjoying first class travel.

When Corbett was later informed that he and Barker needed to chip in and help pay for a meal with the travelling BBC producers and members of the press, the little Scot blew a fuse and created an “embarrassing” scene. “I had this whip round and that did Ronnie Corbett in absolutely, and he said ‘what is going on here?’”, Cotton told the British Entertainment History Project. “He really got very indignant and he cleared the room.”

In 1968, Corbett and Barker followed David Frost to London Weekend Television and continued to perform sketches together for his current affairs shows. The duo’s big break came at the 1970 Bafta Awards ceremony, when a technical hitch at the London Palladium meant they were forced to fill in with 11 minutes of unscripted comedy, part of which included Barker playing Henry VIII and Corbett ad-libbing as Cardinal Wolsey.

Cotton, then Head of BBC Light Entertainment, was so impressed with their impromptu act that he turned to Paul Fox, Controller of BBC1, and asked, “How would you like those two on your network?”. It was the start of a collaboration between the BBC and the two performers that lasted for 93 episodes, over 12 series.

Barker was a tremendously talented stage performer. He was highly praised by Alec Guinness and hailed by Peter Hall – who wanted him to play Falstaff at the National Theatre – as “the great actor we lost”. Barker also had a passion for writing his own material. Right from the start of their BBC series, he contributed scripts for The Two Ronnies, submitted through his agent under the pseudonym Gerald Wiley. He used the pen names Jonathan Cobbold, Jack Goetz, Bob Ferris and David Huggett for his other writing projects.

The story goes that he used the Wiley nom de plume because he wanted his writing for The Two Ronnies to be accepted on its own merits. Corbett added to this myth by claiming that no one at the BBC knew that the scripts came from Barker, telling Desert Island Discs that “Tom Stoppard’s name was even mentioned as being the real Wiley.”

In April 2016, shortly after Corbett’s death, Ian Davidson, a former script editor for Frost on Saturday, set the record straight with a letter to the Guardian, in which he dismissed the idea that Wiley’s identity was a mystery by the time of The Two Ronnies. “Not so. Gerald Wiley’s identity was revealed to all when this new and successful but strangely uncontactable writer invited David Frost, Corbett and the madly intrigued production staff of Frost on Saturday to a Chinese meal. Ronnie Barker stepped forward to fill the empty chair. That was in 1968. The Two Ronnies began in 1971,” Davidson wrote.

The Two Ronnies employed a large team of script and joke writers, and not all of them were happy with Barker’s dominance (it was estimated that three-quarters of the screened material was his). “Ronnie Barker, the actor, was great and we thought how wonderful he was, but Ronnie Barker, the writer, did slightly step on our toes,” recalled David Nobbs in 2015. Nobbs, who went on to write the brilliant The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, said Barker “took advantage” of his status and sometimes “pinched” other people’s ideas.

It was Nobbs, for example, who originally wrote a monologue sketch called “Pispronunciation” about a man who could not pronounce his “worms” correctly – an idea Barker later appropriated for himself. Writer Dick Vosburgh claimed that Barker did the same with his Dr Spooner sketch, ignoring copyright claims. Vosburgh’s widow, Beryl, revealed that when Barker starting using his own Dr Spooner sketches, her husband sent him a postcard saying, “Ronnie Parker, you’re a brick.”

Viewers loved the comedy writing on The Two Ronnies – the handwritten script for the famous 1976 ‘Four Candles’ skit sold for £28,000 at an auction in 2007 – and the show’s distinguished writers over 16 years included Barry Cryer, Andy Hamilton, Spike Milligan, David Renwick, John Sullivan and the Monty Python legends Cleese, Graham Chapman, Michael Palin and Eric Idle. “If you had a sketch, and the Pythons laughed, you knew it was funny,” Idle told Time Out in 2014. “That’s always been the whistle test for us: read it, does it make us laugh? If it does it’s in; if it doesn’t, we sell it to the Two Ronnies.”

Barker and Corbett, who had a genuine chemistry, used their prodigious skill as actors to make their brand of humour tick. “I can’t think of anyone who knew how to play comedy better than Ronnie Barker,” said Palin. “The Two Ronnies could both be the straight man one minute, and not the next. They weren’t in the same mould as Morecambe and Wise,” said Cryer.

Their gift for delivering puns and double-entendres, which were full of endearing silliness, made the news-desk sketches that opened and closed each episode extremely popular:

A cement mixer collided with a prison van on the Kingston Bypass. Motorists are asked to be on the look-out for 16 hardened criminals.

We’ll be talking to an out-of-work contortionist who says he can no longer make ends meet.

We’ll be talking to a car designer who has crossed a Toyota with Quasimodo and came up with the Hatchback of Notre Dame.

We’ll be discussing the bread shortage with a woman who has been throwing IOUs to the ducks.

The toilets at a local police station have been stolen. Police say they have nothing to go on.

Renwick, who went on to create One Foot in the Grave, was responsible for some of the show’s best moments, including the Mastermind sketch, in which Corbett specialises in answering the question before last. Renwick said that Barker’s desire for word games was relentless. “Ronnie B in conversation could barely let a sentence go by without turning it into a joke. His instinct for wordplay was a tap that he couldn’t turn off,” the writer recalled in 2017.

It is no surprise that Barker was an avid collector of the “saucy seaside” Edwardian and Victorian picture postcards, especially by artist Donald McGill. He owned more than 70,000 at one point and published the books Ronnie Barker’s Book of Bathing Beauties (1974), Ronnie Barker’s Book of Boudoir Beauties (1975) and Sauce (1977).

Comedian Ben Elton was such a fan that he bounded up to Barker at a BBC staff party and told him how much he liked him. “Don’t like you much, I’m afraid,” Barker replied, deadpan.

Not everyone matched Elton’s enthusiasm, however, especially Liverpool-born comedian Alexei Sayle, who described The Two Ronnies as an “appalling” show. “Ben Elton was on one of those hagiographic things about The Two Ronnies and Ben was saying, ‘There’s a myth that our generation hated people like The Two Ronnies. That’s not true.’ Well, it was f------ true for me. I hated them,” he told Scottish newspaper The Herald in 2016.

Barker was renowned for his dogged, studious approach to crafting each episode. In 1976, when The Two Ronnies introduced a weekly serial called The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town –an idea from Spike Milligan – it featured a Jack the Ripper-style criminal who attacks his victims by blowing them a raspberry. The villain was pursued by the bumbling detectives Charley Farley and Piggy Malone.

David Jason, who provided the raspberries for the soundtrack, said that when Barker hired him for the task, he earnestly showed him the exact sound he wanted by delivering an entirely blown-raspberry version of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. “Ronnie was never grand or starry, unlike Terry Scott, who was a fairly sizeable pain in the ----,” Jason later commented.

Renwick described the comedy of The Two Ronnies as “often shamelessly broad and saucy”, admitting that it “might now be considered politically dubious”. The offensive 1974 sketch ‘The Short and Fat Minstrel Show Reprise’, in which both Corbett and Barker appear in blackface makeup, was recognised as a bizarre anachronism by Corbett himself, who commented in 2001 on “how out of date that seems now”. In one particularly crass episode of The Phantom Raspberry Blower, Barker played a blacked-up society lady who screams for a witch-doctor.

Among their most embarrassingly racist sketches was ‘The Sheikh in the Grocery Store’, in which Corbett, wearing dark make-up and an Arabic keffiyeh, mispronounces the names of items on his shopping list. As he enters the store, Barker’s shopkeeper says: “Old Ali Baba’s a bit off course. Morning Abdul.” In 2018, the headteacher of a secondary school in Stroud, Gloucestershire, had to apologise after the sketch was played at a parents evening presentation about communication.

The legacy of Britain’s beloved comedy double-act is hardly strengthened by the execrable sketch ‘The Pink Rupee Rap’, in which both men are wearing brown makeup and talking in fake Indian accents as they play staff in a curry house. Equally appalling is Barker’s skit ‘Quick Indian Cooking’, in which he wears a turban while playing chef Ringo Chutney. In addition, there were anti-Semitic tropes in the sketch in which Barker plays an Anglo-Orthodox Jew trying to get a good insurance deal. Barker even put on a fake large nose for his offensive depiction of Jewish prime minister Benjamin Disraeli during a Phantom Raspberry Blower episode.

At their best, the Two Ronnies delivered masterful performances of sharp, witty scripts – one of their cleverest was the London Underground sketch from 1982, written by Kit Galer, in which the pair talk almost entirely in the names of tube stations – but the less said about the tedious Corbett armchair shaggy-dog stories the better. Their unfunny, sexist mini-series The Worm That Turned imagined a futuristic 2012 that was “guaranteed to strike fear into the hearts of all men”; a time when England was run by women (the military commander was played by a hot pants-wearing Diana Dors) who had “turned The Union Jack into The Union Jill”, forcing all men to dress as women.

Corbett and Barker’s characters (Janet and Betty) were dressed as women, although putting on dresses seemed to be a regular part of the show for them. Corbett later admitted that “Ronnie B hated drag and said it made his wife Joy sick to watch him”, and Barker’s late wife eventually persuaded him to put away the frocks and skirts. In 2011, Corbett reflected on how their comedy was the product of different times. “There’s a Two Ronnies sketch about an optician and his patient, both virtually blind, with the patient ‘reading’ the furniture. Would that be regarded as insulting to the visually impaired? I don’t know,” he told The Radio Times.

In 1979, at the height of their success, Barker and Corbett moved their families to Australia for a year to exploit a loophole that allowed them to avoid paying the year’s income tax. Their families lived near each other in Sydney and their children attended school together, cementing their friendship. “Our wives got on, and our work never took us over, never drove us mad, never turned us to drink or drugs. We were very calm, very measured. We loved and enjoyed our families. Ron and I were both the same,” Corbett said. He spent a lot of time in Australia playing golf, enjoying living in an apartment that looked out over Sydney Harbour.

When they returned to Britain in 1980, they resumed making The Two Ronnies for the BBC (putting together five more seasons of the show and a Christmas Special) under the direction of new producer Michael Hurll. He later admitted that he granted Barker complete creative control at the time, saying the perfectionist “taught me everything”. By this time, both stars were also focussed on their own solo television careers: Barker had won widespread acclaim for his roles in Porridge and Open All Hours, while Corbett achieved his own success story with Sorry!.

While they’d been abroad, the BBC launched a new comedy series called Not the Nine O’clock News, featuring Rowan Atkinson, Pamela Stephenson, Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones. Barker let it be known that he considered some of their material to be “smut”, prompting retaliation in the form of a cutting sketch called ‘The Two Ninnies’. Smith (as Barker) and Jones (as Corbett) aped the ‘predictable’ format of The Two Ronnies, mocking their reliance on innuendo.

Smith began the skit by saying, “In a packed programme tonight you will be reassured to know that we will be using exactly the same sort of material as we’ve used for the past 20 years. I shall be talking incredibly quickly and making spousands of thoonerisms and dressing up in women’s clothing,” before Jones added, “and I shan’t be getting any laughs, because he writes most of the scripts and makes sure I get all the crappy bits”.

In his 2007 memoir And it’s Goodnight from Him: The Autobiography of the Two Ronnies – the title of which tipped a nod to their famous show-ending joint catchphrase, “so it’s ‘goodnight’ from me. And it's ‘goodnight’ from him” – Corbett said that what particularly upset them about the Not the Nine O’clock News parody was “that it was on the BBC, and they were our employers, and… that they were fellow comedians, not critics”.

In December 1987, when he was 58, Barker decided to retire from television, explaining cryptically that “I refuse to be one of the still-with-us brigade” and saying he had no ambition left. He was more forthcoming to the Oxford Mail a few years later, admitting that, “I’d run out of ideas, and to be honest, I’d done everything I wanted to do. And I’m sorry to say the material coming through wasn’t such good quality.”

Corbett said that after recording their final show together just before Christmas, they stuck to their usual habit of taking their wives for a meal at an Indian restaurant in Westbourne Grove in London.

Life after The Two Ronnies could not have been more different for the two friends. Corbett continued to appear regularly on television – including hosting his own game show called Small Talk – while Barker settled in the small Oxfordshire village of Dean and opened an antiques shop in Chipping Norton High Street, naming it The Emporium. Barker, who started his working life as a bank clerk, loved trading in Victorian memorabilia and, for a time, enjoyed running the shop with Joy.

Problems began to mount, however. In the biography Remembering Ronnie Barker, Richard Webber recalled the painful time that Barker made the front page of a tabloid newspaper. “On December 15th 1988, The Sun newspaper ran a story, written by journalists Sue Evison and Mark Chadbourn, informing its readers that Evison, posing as a member of the public, had taken a silver salver – which a leading auction house had valued at around £1,000 – into Ronnie’s shop enquiring if he wanted to buy it. When he offered £20, they ran a story highlighting the difference between its value and Barker’s low offer.”

In 1999, Barker sold the shop, which was now losing £500 a week. Martin Lambert, the agent handling the sale, said: “Mr Barker was annoyed about car parking arrangements in the town which he felt were doing nothing for his business.”

During the final period as owner of The Emporium, Barker picked up his pen again to write a play called Mum as a showcase for his actress daughter Charlotte. The production, about a lonely office-cleaner who talked constantly to her dead mother, had a short run at the King’s Head pub theatre in Islington. Barker also wrote his memoir, Dancing in the Moonlight: My Early Years on Stage.

Barker’s final years were tough. He’d suffered from high blood pressure since 1976 and his stress levels went through the roof when his son Adam went on the run after being arrested in 2003. His son was still a fugitive when Barker died on October 3 2005, at the age of 76, after a long period of heart problems. His final entertainment job was on The Two Ronnies Sketchbook, a retrospective of the show with new introductions by the two stars, the last episode of which was shown on Christmas Day that year, 11 weeks after Barker’s death. It attracted nearly eight million viewers.

Barker never spoke publicly about his son’s disappearance, but in a 2006 interview with the Evening Standard, Corbett revealed: “Ron did say to me: ‘It’s just so awful. It is like a bereavement. I’ve lost him, really. I don’t know what he’s done. What can he possibly have done? How do you hide yourself?’” Adam Barker remained on the run for eight years and was finally jailed for 12 months in 2012, convicted of making indecent images of children.

Corbett, who was 85 when he died on March 31 2016, lamented towards the end that modern comedy was “grosser” than the type he and Barker had perfected. He showed he was willing to send himself up with a 2006 appearance in Extras, alongside Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, which included a scene in which he was caught snorting cocaine in a toilet, prompting the head of security to say, “Corbett! It’s always bloody Corbett.”

The Scot was universally lauded as “a national treasure” and he remained intensely proud of The Two Ronnies. “Our comedy was light-hearted amusement that seemingly tripped naturally off the tongue,” he told The Telegraph a couple of years before his death. “That’s why I don’t think it will date.” When his memorial service was held at Westminster Abbey it was supremely appropriate that fork ’andles – sorry, four candles – were lit for his service.