5ft 1in, but the heart and talent of a giant
WERE Ronnie Corbett still with us, he would probably make a joke about the small size of his coffin. That was the Corbett way — defuse a tricky moment with a wisecrack.
In the early Sixties he was courting an impossibly leggy dancer called Anne Hart. She chided him for never saying anything romantic. Could he not tell her something sweet? Ronnie clutched his chin for a moment and replied: ‘Ambrosia Creamed Rice.’
Ever afterwards, Ronnie and Anne, who became his devoted wife for the next half century, would sign their Valentine’s cards to each other ‘ACR’. It meant ‘I love you’.
When he was invested with his OBE at Buckingham Palace in 1978 and the photographers crowded round him in his diminutive tails and top hat, he covered his embarrassment by saying: ‘Boys, I can’t hang around all day, I’ve got to be back on the wedding cake by three o’clock.’
In 2012, he returned to the Palace to receive his CBE. However, for a man who did so much to keep the nation cheerful through the dog days of the Seventies, as well as his charitable work, and given the public’s affection for him, it was deeply regrettable — and a matter of much public comment — that Corbett never received a knighthood.
‘K’ or no ‘K’, there is no denying Corbett’s mass appeal, which largely lay in his quirky innocence. He was not one for smut or ego in his jokes.
He was baffled by some of the shouty, profane stuff that passes for TV comedy these days. The nearest he got to a sex joke was perhaps the one about the rabbits: ‘ Now a message from the police in Finchley. They say that of the two rabbits stolen last week from Peter’s Petshop, only 14 have so far been recovered.’
Or there was his imaginary TV series Great Optimists Of Our Time — ‘we’ll visit the Royal Hospital for Chelsea Pensioners and talk to the man who designed the maternity wing’.
As for his idea of comic rudeness, there was the Birmingham factory worker who lost two fingers in an accident: ‘He didn’t actually notice the loss until he was saying goodnight to the foreman.’
These gags would be delivered initially with a straight face and in that trademark voice, as deep and dark as Loch Ness — such an unexpected voice for such a tiddler, but all the better for making people laugh.
Anne Hart may have wanted to pop him i n her pocket, but so did hundreds of thousands of female TV viewers. Twenty million people used to watch The Two Ronnies at Christmas. Twenty million! That was a third of the population. Not bad for a wee fella with goggle-sized spectacles and a long line of shaggy dog stories.
Ronald Balfour Corbett was born in December 1930 to William, a hardworking Edinburgh baker, and his wife Annie. The couple were both short and it was soon pretty obvious their son was one of life’s sprats.
A well-meaning aunt subscribed the teenage Ronnie to a two-guinea course called ‘How To Stretch Yourself ’ — it involved positive thinking and its motto ran ‘every day in every way I am getting taller’. Inexplicably, Ronnie remained the same height, just as he did after an approach from a professor who ran a ‘ sub-stature clinic’. Aged 15, he was the size of a child half his age, despite stretching exercises his doctor prescribed.
Just after World War II, Ronnie — already acutely self-conscious about his height — went to a dance organised by his Scout troop in Edinburgh. Plucking up all his courage, he asked a girl to dance. She gazed down at him and said: ‘If you weren’t so short you’d be quite good-looking.’
The remark crushed him. ‘I felt like I’d been cut in half,’ he said.
But much later in life he had found an enduring dance partner in the delicious Anne, she looming over him like Blackpool Tower. They were dancing at the Savoy one evening when Ronnie lost his grip and went pirouetting out of control to the edge of the dancefloor, collapsing into the table of Lord Charles Spencer-Churchill (who duly became a firm friend). Gales of laughter all round.
By this time, Corbett had come to consider himself lucky to have been born no taller. His stature contrasted not only with his voice but also with a debonair self-confidence, visible in the way he would skip on stage with a shoulder-swaying swagger, invariably dressed in vivid colours or a dreadful Lyle & Scott jumper.
He would clap his hands, throw back his head in laughter and then launch forth into a gurgling ‘goooood evening’, like the biggest character in the room. As indeed he was.
The merriment may not have been the full story — in private he was a quieter character brushed by sadness — but that was the Ronnie Corbett loved by the British public. The viewers saw the very opposite of angry- short-man syndrome. Pintsized Corbett overflowed with a quart’s worth of bonhomie.
He liked to dress up, put on a show. Not for him the unwashed look and tales of how hard his life had been. Being just over 5ft 1in made him unusual, comical, loveable and that was accentuated by his pink socks and powder-blue blazers.
William Corbett worked night shifts at a McVitie’s factory and Ronnie, very much the master baker’s son, was a connoisseur of shortcake. He would bite into biscuits and crumble them between his lips with an expert’s appreciation. He also made his own brown bread and listed cooking as one of his recreations in Who’s Who.
Bakers need to be fastidious about preparation and timing. Ronnie derived from his father some of his own perfectionism — for instance, he was fanatical about his shoes, which were handmade, partly because he took such a small size. Each pair would be stored with shoe trees and polished to a high gleam.
William Corbett gave his son a taste for walks, too. He would march ‘little Ron’ to church every week and take him on bracing Sunday afternoon strolls while Ronnie’s mother put up her feet.
Ronnie, for much of his life, walked his dogs daily on the golf course abutting his home in Surrey. He would take a couple of clubs and a bag of balls with him. He was a handy golfer. Hence those terrible jumpers!
Golf gave him a rich seam of jokes. For example: ‘My wife has this ridiculous idea that I’m playing too much golf. Actually, it came to a head at 11.30 l ast night. She suddenly shouted at me, “golf, golf, golf, all you ever think about is bloody golf ”. And to be honest, it frightened the life out of me. I mean, you don’t expect to find somebody on the 14th green at that time of night.’
Little Ron’s first taste of the stage came when he was five and won a talent show in St Andrews by singing a Bud Flanagan song. He won a cricket bat. He spent the next few years as a stage- door groupie, pestering stars at Edinburgh’s King’s Theatre for autographs and ‘escorting’ them back to their hotels, hanging on their every words.
At 16 he was cast in an amateur production of Babes In The Wood
He thought himself lucky to
be so short
as the wicked aunt. He over-acted like mad and earned himself oodles of attention. When he left school a year later he knew he wanted to perform for a living. But how could he achieve his dream?
He was employed briefly as a clerk at the Ministry of Agriculture’s offices in Edinburgh, administering rationed animal feed, before doing his National Service in the RAF. Service life, he said, gave him the confidence to succeed. But it was hardly showbiz.
In 1951, armed with savings of £97, he took the train to London to seek his fortune. It took a while coming. He had appeared as a fisherman in 1949 film Whisky Galore, landed the odd acting and cabaret gig, and occasionally played the church organ — but that was about as far as his cv stretched.
His first big break was doing stand-up on the children’s Tv show crackerjack! in the mid-Fifties, but not all his early performances were a success. A debut at the Stork club in Streatham saw him being pelted by crusty viennese rolls by an overrefreshed audience. For a baker’s son, it was the ultimate indignity.
To pay the rent he had to work as a barman and it was while serving drinks at an actors’ club called the Buckstone, off Shaftesbury Avenue, that he met Ronnie Barker. The first words Barker said to him were ‘same again, please, barman’.
David Frost, by then a big name in Tv, saw corbett at Danny la Rue’s cabaret club. corbett used to perform as camp Danny’s ‘straight man’. Frost, spotting corbett’s stage presence, offered him work in a new sketch show, The Frost Report.
It was for that programme that corbett and Barker teamed up with John cleese to make a celebrated sketch about the British class system. It worked because corbett, playing the downtrodden ‘ little man’, was so tiny. His size matched the social inequality of his character in comparison with 6ft 5in cleese’s aristocratic beanpole and Barker’s bourgeois middler.
Arch-intellectual Anthony Burgess hailed the sketch as ‘a visual epigram made out of the intellectual fact of human variety — a paradigm for conjugating social statements’. corbett telephoned his father and said, ‘I’ve made it, Dad. Not only am I an epigram. I am also a paradigm.’
He and Barker clicked because they were non-college boys in a That Was The Week That Was crowd of creative university wits. Barker was brilliant enough to have gone to any university — he wrote many sketches for Frost and later for The Two Ronnies — but the uncomplicated corbett
He never forgot the pain of losing
his baby son
was happy to let others do the pencil-chewing.
He was glad not to be burdened by the stress of the creative process. By not being part of the writing crowd, he avoided any clashes of ego about whose jokes were funniest. He and Barker never had the rows which characterise so many showbusiness partnerships.
He did not even write his Two Ronnies monologues, when he would sit in an armchair and tell stories which meandered, brilliantly, all over the place. They were scripted by a writer called Spike Mullins. But could anyone else have made them work? Corbett’s delivery was delicious, his voice drop- ping and his shoulders shrugging as he wandered off into another comical cul- de- sac, bringing himself back to the task of the central joke with a push on his vast spectacle frames and a clap of his hands.
The Two Ronnies was first commissioned in 1971 after the BBC’s head of light entertainment, Bill Cotton, saw them collaborating on stage at a Bafta awards ceremony.
Owing to a backstage technical hitch, they had to spin out their slot to twice or thrice its intended length. The longer they kept performing, the more the audience hooted. Paul Fox, controller of BBC1, was also there. Corbett and Barker’s lives were never the same after that wonderful break.
Their TV show also included weekly dramas, or melodramas, such as The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town, written by Spike Milligan and notable for some tremendously fruity noises. Every episode of their show would include, towards the end, a song and dance number, the men in extravagant costumes and, more often than not, Zeppelin-sized bosoms.
Both Ronnies were wonderfully well suited to drag. Corbett made a convincing Edwardian battleaxe while Barker’s bulk offered countless possibilities for absurdity.
Then would come the closing ‘announcements’ about the next week’s packed programme — ‘in Stars On Sunday Lester Piggott will read the sermon on the mount’ or ‘we’ll be talking to a man who’s such a puritan he won’t speak to his wife because she’s a married woman’ — before Corbett would say ‘ goodnight from me’ and Barker would say ‘and it’s goodnight from him’. Together: ‘Goodnight!’
The Seventies were not a particularly happy time in Britain. The country suffered an economic slump, industrial unrest, power cuts, weak government. It is probably not an understatement to say that The Two Ronnies — with its spangly showbiz hoofing, ingenious wordplay and a family-friendly levity — helped to keep us cheerful.
Throughout his career, his contribution to the laughter came from his physical gifts, his bass singing voice, his ability to prune his chin, don a pair of horn- rimmed or pebble-thick glasses, stick in a pair of false teeth and assume hilarious personas. That is what they mean by comic talent. Despite all this, Corbett did not consider himself a funny man. He described himself as a ‘comedian/character actor’. It was his acting ability that marked him apart. Otherwise he would probably have sunk amid all the Oxbridge cleverclogs of David Frost’s set.
The best comic actors tend to have known pain. Tragedy struck Ronnie and Anne when their first child, Andrew, died soon after birth owing to a hole in the heart. Anne was soon pregnant again. She and Ronnie had two much-loved daughters, Emma and Sophie.
But he never forgot little Andrew and tears would well in his eyes when he remembered his brief life. One of the unsung qualities of Corbett was the amount of charity work he did, often for unfortunate children.
He sometimes admitted he had a quick temper — he was one of the models for Victor Meldrew in One Foot In The Grave, written by his friend David Renwick. He was also emotional, quick to tears. Ronnie had an actor’s temperament, the need to perform, the insecurity.
That is why, when Ronnie Barker retired in 1987 to run an antiques shop, Corbett kept going. His TV sitcom, Sorry, in which he played an ageing mummy’s boy, Timothy Lumsden, had a long and successful run through the Eighties. More recently, he had forays onto TV’s most popular comedy programmes: Little Britain, Harry Hill’s TV Burps and The Ben Elton Show.
He took stage roles and toured the country in a farce by French playwright George Feydeau. A true workaholic, he did charity performances and after- dinner cabaret turns and continued to earn a few pennies and pay the rent — though by now he was seriously wealthy. He drove a Rolls-Royce until he felt that it made him look a bit flash.
Corbett was rich but never remote. He encouraged a new generation of comedians, particularly Peter Kay and the Little Britain duo of Matt Lucas and David Walliams. Though he had harsh words for more controversial performers such as Frankie Boyle, Ronnie Corbett was no stick-in-the-mud.
He was a gentleman and, it is surely fair to say, a comic genius. As we mourn him, we must remember the laughter — and the Ambrosia Creamed Rice.