SHOULD you have wandered into the special service at Westminster Abbey on Wednesday without knowing what was going on, you might have spotted some clues. At the front of the church was an empty chair, padded but worn from long use. And to one side, in tall golden candelabra, were four candles. Not fork handles. Four candles. The service was for the late Ronnie Corbett of course.
The four candles – like you need reminding – were a tribute to one of Corbett’s greatest sketches with his partner Ronnie Barker in which Corbett plays a storekeeper frustrated by Barker’s thick accent. And the chair was the one Corbett sat in during those interludes in which he would relax into a long meandering chat, with frequent detours, towards a gentle punch line.
Speaking at the service in the abbey, which was attended by 2000 people, the comedian Rob Brydon talked about his friendship with Corbett and how people would react when they saw him. “To walk down the street with Ronnie Corbett was to witness something really rather wonderful,” said Brydon. “Faces would light up with joy like shop windows. Here was that man, that friend, who had entertained us for so long.” Corbett himself also once remembered how a taxi driver rolled down his window and just blew a kiss at him. Because you would, wouldn’t you? Because we loved Ronnie Corbett.
I loved him from the moment I saw him on The Two Ronnies when I was six and clocked him got up as a charlady or the ridiculously moustachioed policeman investigating the phantom raspberry blower of Old London Town. It was silly, and eccentric, and warm; other comedians stabbed and jabbed and by the 1980s most of them were shouting, but Ronnie Corbett, more so than Barker who often played lechy, pervy characters, was always gentle, self-deprecating but sharp.
But there’s something I regret as well, which is that Ronnie Corbett represented a kind of comedian which has slowly faded from television. Ronnie was from an ordinary background, the son of an Edinburgh baker, and he was part of that generation of performers that served in the war then worked their way through rep and music hall. Yes, a lot of the BBC in the 1970s was dominated by Oxbridge types, but ordinary working class boys and girls could make it in comedy and the arts. Not so much nowadays, which has affected the comedy we see. The music-hall traditions of dressing up, cross-dressing, and song and dance have narrowed to something cleverer but colder and with Ronnie’s death, it felt like one of the last bits of warmth disappeared; the temperature of comedy has dropped.
Which is why I’ll end with a couple of the warmest, funniest lines from The Two Ronnies. “West Mercia police announced tonight that they wish to interview a man wearing high heels and frilly knickers, but the Chief Constable said they must wear their normal uniforms.”
And this: “After a series of crimes in Glasgow, Chief Inspector McTavish says he’s looking for a man with one eye. If he doesn’t find him, he’s going to use both eyes.”
And, finally, this one: “It’s goodnight from him and it’s goodnight from him.”
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