Peak British TV comedy show.
"Corbett: "It's goodnight from me"
Barker: "And it's goodnight from him"
Both: "Goodnight!"
—
Humour, wordplay, brilliance and subtle, cunning smut. Genius writing, memorable characters and two men in front of the camera. Ronnie Corbett and Ronnie Barker.
Amazingly, the show ran on the BBC for only sixteen years, from 10 April 1971 to 25 December 1987. I say "amazingly" because they always seemed to have been there. Like Morecambe and Wise before them, this was largely a sketch show, with guest appearances, a musical finish and ample punchlines and in-jokes. In common with Morecambe and Wise, The Goon Show and Monty Python's Flying Circus, they also entered and helped define the humour of generations in Britain. There's hardly a soul of my generation that can't quote at least a few lines and still laugh.
The duo met in 1963, Corbett working as a waiter whilst "between acting jobs", Barker beginning a career as a character actor. A brief appearance on The Frost Report was followed by an impromptu eleven-minute fill-in segment during the 1970 BAFTA Awards. Bill Cotton and Paul Fox from the BBC were in the audience, recognised their talent and they were soon given their own show.
The duo had some extraordinary talent writing for them, including Spike Milligan, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palin and Terry Jones. You'll also see Gerald Wiley credited, this being Barker's nom de plume. The show was an immediate success, the pair attracting large audiences and critical acclaim. People were soon lining up to do guest appearances and the public loved it all.
The structure of the show was a series of sketches and monologues, often featuring some quite clever wordplay. There were regular set pieces, memorably Corbett sitting in a chair telling a somewhat rambling story rather like a British Garrison Keillor. The pair would often deal with an amazingly complicated and erudite script, which poked fun at British stereotypes (the Python team no doubt influencing these) and in particular, language. The best-known and most quoted of these sketches is, of course the Hardware Shop, often referred to simply as "Four Candles", but there were many others, demonstrating an equally sharp and insightful commentary on English. Spoonerisms, malapropisms and rhyming slang were commonplace, and the quickfire delivery showed off the pair's talents.
The Crossword is a great example of everything they strove to spoof. The skit features the two of them on a train, a working-class Corbett outwardly struggling with the tabloid
The Sun newspaper, and the bowler-hatted Barker struggling to concentrate on the
Financial Times puzzle (a
cryptic crossword set by the notorious
Mephistopheles). Through the interruptions, Barker's character takes subtle digs at the crass simplicity of tabloid newspaper crosswords, accompanied by some inadvertently suggestive responses to clues and references to
Page 3 girls.
Barker frequently demonstrates his ability to handle language, notably in The Mispronunciation and a brilliant take on collective nouns (which I am sadly unable to find).
Each show began and ended with the two Ronnies at a newsdesk, delivering mock news stories, always ending with the closing catchphrase "…Goodnight!" Goodnight indeed, gents, you gave us lots of laughs and you still do.
A YouTube playlist of their best
Iron node 27
$ xclip -o | wc -w
531