THE SECRET OF RONNIE’S SUCCESS

RONNIE CORBETT was a lovely man: to judge from his many obituaries, the co-star of the Two Ronnies didn’t have a bad bone in his (tiny) body.

I still wondered at one of his colleagues describing his death as ‘a tragedy’. It’s never a ‘tragedy’ when someone dies at the age of 85 — unless he was about to solve the problem of how to get limitless free energy from nuclear fusion.

I did enjoy, though, the page the Mail devoted to him, under the headline One-Liners That Made A Nation Chuckle. For example: ‘There was a fire at the Inland Revenue office in London, but it was put out before any serious good was done.’ And: ‘Ron Knuckles was buried today at a service attended by the criminal underworld. As a mark of respect, the ceremony ended with two minutes’ violence.’ Yet these were not Corbett’s jokes. They were written for him by Ian Davidson and Peter Vincent, who worked with Corbett for decades. They deserve at least as much credit for making our lives merrier. He was not like Dave Allen, another greatly loved TV comic, who wrote much of his own material. Ronnie Corbett was a great performer who played the part of a comedian, with superb timing the secret of his success. That, and the fact that he was 5ft 1in.