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Ronnie Corbett
Sipping coffee from elegant china crockery in a hotel-lounge overlooking a Surrey golfcourse - an appropriate setting for a man with a handicap of 15. Ronnie Corbett looks back to a moment when he was first bitten by the show-biz bug. Aged 15, he played The Wicked Aunt in a Panto at his local church youth club in Edinburgh. The minister rang my mother, Ronnie recalls, and said, I really feel you should come up and see the rehearsals of this show because Ronald is quite remarkable. That was it, the turning point. I had found something with a spark, I had touched a chord in myself and in others. It was very welcome because I hadnt touched any chords at school. He flashes one of his trademark winning smiles. After a couple of years overseeing animal-feed rationing at the Ministry of Agriculture in Edinburgh and National Service with the RAF, Ronnie took a bed-sit in St. Johns Wood, North London. Following periods of doing Summer Seasons, intimate revues and running the bar at the Buckstone Club off Haymarket, where he first met Ronnie Barker, during the late 1950s Ronnie started working in the late-night revues at Danny La Rues Club at Hanover Square. Here he met his wife Anne Hart, the actress and singer, and honed his cabaret skills as an all-singing, all dancing, all-joke-telling performer. It was one of the big successes of the West End, Ronnie remembers. It was packed, you couldnt get in. Every night there was a Coward or a Nureyev or a Taylor or a Streisand in. Also lurking in the audience was a certain David Frost who invited Ronnie to join John Cleese and Ronnie Barker on the FROST REPORT, which was to become one of the most influential television shows of the 1960s. David turned my life around, is Ronnies assessment. The I know my place sketch in which Cleese and the two Ronnies stood in a line representing the British Class system is still revered as a comedy classic. After subsequent television successes with FROST ON SUNDAY, CORBETTS FOLLIES a variety show, and NO, THATS ME OVER HERE - a sitcom with Rosemary Leach, Ronnie got perhaps his biggest break - thanks to, of all things, a cock-up at the Bafta Awards. The diminutive Ronnie C and the well-built Ronnie B, then the resident comedians on LWTs Frost On Sunday, were hosting the live ceremony when a technical hitch meant they had to fill in, unscripted, for several minutes. We managed to hold it together, says Ronnie, and Paul Fox (a high ranking executive at the BBC) is reputed to have turned to Bill Cotton (BBCs Head of Light Entertainment) and said, what about these two for the BBC? Wed never have thought of it ourselves, but The Two Ronnies was not a difficult title to come by. And so a comic legend was born. The Two Ronnies won the Best Entertainment Show Award of 1972, ran for sixteen highly popular years on the BBC and for a record-breaking spell at the London Palladium in 1978. Ronnie puts the success of the partnership down to the fact that we got on. We were similar in what we thought was amusing. And we complemented each other. He has this hugely-wonderful character-acting skill which I didnt. And, I had a theatrical, vaudeville twinkle which he didnt. So I brought him on in that way and he brought me on in the other. We had a certain kind of material, Ronnie continues, that was not dangerously esoteric. Its difficult to be clean and clever at the same time, but a lot of our stuff was. Sketches like the one set in the hardware shop were dexterous without being above peoples heads. It was obvious that wed taken a lot of trouble. We didnt quite realise, perhaps you dont when its all going very well, just how potent we were, he goes on. Such was the effect of it that even though it hasnt been on for eight or nine years, folk still have the strongest memories of the Two Ronnies. The news items, Ronnie Cs celebrated chair spots and Ronnie Bs spokesmen word-plays are certainly fondly recalled, not just in Britain but throughout the world. Since Barkers retirement in the mid-1980s, Ronnie has had many starring roles in the Theatre, (SEVEN YEAR ITCH, OUT OF ORDER, THE DRESSMAKER), and on television (notably in Ian and Peter Vincents well-regarded sitcom, SORRY). His most recent success has been presenting 3 series of SMALL TALK, a captivating BBC1 programme in which contestants try to guess how children will respond to set questions. It plays to Ronnies strong suit: his twinkley charm. Phil Harris, who worked with Jack Benny, used to say, you must never forget what the audience first liked you for, Ronnie muses. Thats true. You must never relinquish that. In 1996 Ronnie appeared in John Cleeses follow-up to A Fish Called Wanda, Fierce Creatures. Ronnie played a sealion-keeper at a zoo, but his worst experience on the film was when I had to carry a very smelly baby ostrich. In 1997 Ronnie recorded An Audience With... for ITV which transmitted in October. 1998 saw Ronnie returning to his famous and much loved arm-chair, in the new Ben Elton series for BBC1 and starred in the new Pizza Hut commercial campaign. A naturally modest man, Ronnie has to be cajoled into pinpointing the reasons for his enduring popularity. You have just got to hang on in there and keep pottering away in order to be a name that people dont forget, to become part of the folklore. If I said to someone, could you describe Ronnie Corbett?, Id be hard pushed to find somebody, wherever I went, who could not describe him. That goes not just for Britain, but for the whole of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa. People laugh when I arrive, without my even having to say a funny joke, there is something, I suppose, essentially comic in the marriage of the way I speak and move, he observes. I can see that peoples faces want to smile when I come in the room. People expect to be uplifted if not amused. This is coupled with the fact that they seem to like me which is perhaps something that some younger performers dont, perhaps, value so much. Groucho Marx said that if you wanted a long period at the top it was more important for a comedian to be liked than to be funny. That is the secret of Ronnies success - Hes eminently likable. And its good night from him. |
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