And It's Goodnight From Him...

The sad news that Ronnie Barker has died has just been broken.

Barker dominated comedy in the 1970’s with his hugely popular shows, "The Two Ronnies", "Porridge", "Open All Hours" and "Going Straight". Most people will probably remember him as Fletcher, the charismatic, insolent wheeler-dealer of Slade Prison, delivering some of the most brilliantly written comic writing ever to grace British television.

But it is for the Two Ronnies, a show I watched religiously as a child, that I will remember him for. Ronnie Barker made words funny, sometimes by making them up, sometimes by saying them in the wrong order, sometimes just by delivering them at exactly the right moment. He was a master of word-play and equally at ease with the most complex puns and the broadest of seaside postcard humour. I recall great stuff like “The Phantom Raspberry Blower”, and “The Worm That Turned” but the one gag that gets me ending myself even to this day was one of the songs Barker and his partner Ronnie Corbett always delivered at the end of the show.

Dressed as North American Indians, The pair quoted verbatim the first few verses of the Longfellow poem Hiawatha, which lasts a good few minutes. The only thing they changed was the very last line. After extolling the supernatural heroics of this mythical figure for several minutes, the last line should have been “…and his name was Hiawatha”. They changed that to “ …and his name was Des O’Conner.” The audience collapsed with laughter and our house was in an uproar as well. A three minute set-up to get to a weedy gag about their mate. Sheer comic genius – maybe Morecambe and Wise could have gotten away with something similar, but no-one else.

An excellent writer, Barker shunned fame and retired after developing the heart problems that eventually killed him. He made a limited return to our screens in the last few years to present compilation shows of old Two Ronnies material and recently collected a well earned BAFTA for lifetime achievement.

His passing highlights a bygone age of quality in British comedy. Barker’s incredible ability to marry intelligence with universal appeal seems beyond anyone working within the fragmented parameters of British Comedy today. Barker’s achievement was to make the entire nation laugh. 17 million people watched the Two Ronnies every week. That feat is unlikely ever to be matched.