It was Ronnie Barker who tended to get the most plaudits for The Two Ronnies, but it was always the warmth and wit of Ronnie Corbett that kept me watching. Yes, Barker was a genius of a performer who also wrote several of the scripts. Yet his character-comedy pyrotechnics would never have connected with us in the same way without the more approachable, deceptively casual elan that Corbett brought to the show.
He was the one whom the impressionists could take off, with his (seemingly throwaway but tightly scripted) digressions as he sat, dwarfed by his leather chair, making references to “my producer” and touching his glasses. He was a consummate craftsman, who was still making the business of standing there and telling jokes to strangers look the most friendly, personal thing to do well into his ninth decade.
Like many performers who make what they do look easy, he risked getting underrated. Add to that the V-neck jerseys that reminded us of his fondness for a round of golf and it was easy to tell yourself that he was some sort of dilettante. A gifted amateur.
Yet look at the famous, justly celebrated Four Candles sketch from 1976. Barker wrote the lines and his increasingly odd requests as the surly customer are what move the routine forward. But it’s Corbett as the brown-coated hardware shop assistant, with his commitment to serving his customer, his puzzlement and Paddington stares, that takes it from smart wordplay to a hilarious situation.
In moments like that he was the best straight man you could possibly wish for. A decade earlier, when called on to deliver the punchlines as the working-class man standing next to Barker’s middle-class man and John Cleese’s upper-class man in the famous sketch from The Frost Report, he made sure every joke landed without tipping over into stridency. He always knew which club to pick for what shot.
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He and Barker went on to have an amazing run together, appearing in 93 episodes of The Two Ronnies between 1971 and 1987. That’s a lot of rustic, cockney and posh accents to pull off, a lot of mock news headlines to deliver with authority and good cheer.
In the Eighties, he showed he could carry a series on his own as the star of Sorry!, in which he played a man still living at home while he was in his forties. Corbett was in his fifties at the time. Six years ago he got his one-off show, The One Ronnie. It was patchy — most sketch shows are, as Tracey Ullman’s recent comeback reminded us — but Corbett’s timing remained a thing of joy.
What lingers in the memory, though, and what I experienced when I last saw him live, in a guest spot in a mishmash of a seasonal special hosted by Sandi Toksvig at the Royal Festival Hall in 2009, was the sense of ease, the sense of enjoyment. Like all great performers, he made you feel that we were in good hands, that he was in charge, even as he protested his vulnerability.
