How the Two Ronnies came hello from us’ to say ‘It’s
Fifty years on, the team behind the legendary show reveals how it was put together… with a strict format, brilliant writers and sausage, egg and chips
THEIR shows still rank among the most-watched comedy programmes of all time even 50 years on, an iconic double-act who could make the whole family laugh without resorting to insults, controversy or bad language. Incredibly, The Two Ronnies – regarded by many as one of the BBC’s comedy crown jewels – ran for 16 years over 90 episodes with more than a quarter of the UK population tuning in for its debut in April, 1971.
The evergreen sketch show, starring Ronnie Corbett and Ronnie Barker, still retains a huge audience today, decades after it was first broadcast and despite the death of its stars.
With its blend of sketches, monologues and musical numbers, each programme followed a strict format devised over two mornings in the office of Jimmy Gilbert, then head of BBC Comedy. Holed up together, Ronnie Barker and Gilbert sketched out the plan, partially influenced by The Frost Report, in which both Ronnies had appeared.
The opening episode went down a storm. One viewer told the BBC: “Either Ronnie is good, but together they’re absolutely marvellous.” But it wasn’t just the public who enjoyed The Two Ronnies – it was respected by the industry, too, and won a BAFTA in 1975.
The show’s longest-serving director, Terry Hughes, who now lives in America, told the Daily Express: “Ronnie C was the performer, the song and dance man. Having said that, he was very much a thinking man’s song and dance man. He had great instincts, good taste and would see a lot of theatre. Ronnie B, meanwhile, led a much less showbiz life.
“When he wasn’t in the studio, he’d be home with his collections of postcards and books, doing the lonely work of writing. It gave him confidence that the right material would be there for the programme.”
Hughes remembers eating in the BBC canteen prior to a recording. Every week, Ronnie Barker, who died aged 76 in October 2005, ordered what would become his regular pre-show meal – sausage, egg and chips.
“There were lots of rituals and this was one,” recalls Hughes. “Every week, without fail, he’d have this meal – it was like a superstition. I’m sure he thought that if he didn’t have it, it wasn’t going to be a good programme. He’d make a joke of it but it was ritualistic.”
Standing alongside Barker in the queue occasionally was One Foot In The Grave and Jonathan Creek writer David Renwick, who became a regular writer on the series.
“In those days, I was a junior member of the team, content to remain a hanger-on when the Ronnies and some of the others adjourned to the canteen,” he recalls. “There was something unreal about standing next to this towering celebrity as we slid our trays along the rail, while he ordered his egg, sausages and chips.”
While Corbett – who outlived his comedy partner by a decade, dying aged 85 in 2016 – delighted in walking out in front of the studio audience, Barker found entertaining as himself difficult. But if he grabbed a pair of glasses, slapped a moustache on and called himself John Smith, he was fine. Once in disguise and adopting the persona of a fictitious character, Ronnie B was in his element.
Even for each episode’s closing scene where, sitting behind a desk alongside Ronnie Corbett, he said goodbye, Barker couldn’t be himself.
The late David Nobbs, employed as script editor for the first series, was responsible for deciding how to close the show. He suggested the Ronnies simply said, “Goodnight”. But Barker – a shy, private man – couldn’t face it, because that would mean appearing as himself. So the famous joke of using the “Goodnight from him” comment was devised.
RENWICK got to know the two Rons well. “Ronnie Barker was essentially an actor, with a chameleon-like versatility, who learnt how to make people laugh. Ronnie Corbett adapted his own very physical, Vaudevillian skills to master the art of acting. In conversation, he could barely let a sentence go by without turning it into a joke.”
When it came to supplying sketches, many aspiring writers in addition to Renwick were commissioned, some just beginning their TV careers.The series proved to be a launch pad for many.
David Nobbs went on to write Reggie Perrin, John Sullivan gave us Only Fools And Horses while Ian Davidson and PeterVincent wrote Corbett’s later sitcom Sorry!
The selection process was exhaustive. “For the news items at the beginning of each episode, we’d usually receive 60 or 70 a week and cull them down to 18 or so,” recalls director Terry Hughes.
“Sitting around a table, the two Ronnies and I would read them.All three of us had to agree before any were accepted.
“Whoever read the item at the meeting, read it on the show.”
Longer sketches were submitted by a string of writers and these were directed to Hughes’ desk, who would weed out any that failed to hit the spot before passing them on for the Ronnies to read.
Barker and Corbett were extremely quick learning lines.
Writer Ian Davidson recalls a party sketch he wrote with Paul MacDowell where the Ronnies’ characters spoke in unison.
“It was about two men being introduced to each other at a party. They couldn’t stop speaking in unison and, at the end, as they turned and walked away in opposite directions, they said, again in unison, ‘boring bugger’.
“They did it beautifully and got it to work by Ronnie B having his foot on Ronnie C’s and pressing when he was just about to talk, allowing them to synchronise their speech. It was an absolute joy.”
Another regular contributor was Monty Python star Michael Palin. “Both were supreme deliverers of a funny line,” he says. “While Ronnie C had this engaging Scottishness about him, Ronnie B was always slightly cooler. He might be doing a character brilliantly, but it was almost like a piece of science he’d developed in the lab.”
While Corbett was happy working with others’ scripts and rarely got involved with the production, Barker was a perfectionist. He wrote an increasing number of sketches,
something which irked other writers. “There was a high rejection rate and this upset some writers because they started thinking Ronnie B’s material was favoured,” admits Terry Hughes.
“I don’t think that was true, we chose the best available. We’d have been crazy to turn down something wonderful just to do a Ronnie Barker sketch – he wouldn’t have wanted that, either.”
DAVID Renwick says it would be “disingenuous” to pretend that resentment didn’t exist occasionally among members of the writing team regarding Gerald Wiley – Barker’s pen name – taking the lion’s share of script credits.
“There would be occasional rumblings in the BBC bar. There were a few of my own sketches I thought were certs which never made it. But that’s how it normally is on sketch shows.” Arguably, the Mastermind sketch is Renwick’s most famous, although it was almost never recorded.
“Having sat down and written the sketch, I tore it up,” he admits. “The following day, because I had no better ideas and needed to deliver, I fished the pieces from the waste bin and Sellotaped them together.”
Renwick was surprised when the sketch – in which Corbett’s specialist subject is answering the question before last each time – was given the green light.
“The set-up seemed too contrived.When it was recorded there was a plan to perform it twice so the audience would get a second chance to make sense of all the connections.
“But it played so well the first time that Ronnie B just got up from the quizmaster’s desk and muttered to the producer, ‘We’re not going to do that again’.”
Perhaps the best-known sketch of the entire series is Four Candles. Written by Barker, his original handwritten script sold at auction in 2007 for £48,500.
“It’s a glorious study in mutual inertia,” explains Renwick. “Ronnie B, as a kind of Benny from Crossroads on Valium, barely interacts at all with Ronnie C, who also appears to be in a vacant world of his own, until his patience is gradually shredded by all these increasingly ambiguous requests.”
The curtain finally came down on The Two Ronnies after 16 years of entertaining millions. Although never cutting edge, it was perfectly executed, subtly produced and contained some wonderful material from a host of top-drawer writers.
Reflecting on the show’s demise, writer Renwick says: “Towards the end, the comedy climate was slowly changing. Anything that smacked of Benny Hill – and there were resonances of Benny’s stuff throughout the Ronnies’ run – was starting to become unfashionable within the TV industry.
“Not the Nine O’Clock News had savaged them with their ‘Two Ninnies’ parody, which I know had deeply offended Ronnie B, and I’m not surprised. So, on Christmas Day 1987, the two Rons marked the end of an era with their trademark lines: “It’s goodnight from me… and it’s goodnight from him”.