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Ten years on: Ronnie Barker, Pismonouncers Unanimous founder, remembered

One of Britain's best-loved comedy greats

Larking about

After a brief stint at the Mime Theatre Company, doing music and dance, Barker ended up working with the Famous Players in Bramhall; something he later considered one of his luckiest breaks, for it was there that he met leading stage actor Glenn Melvyn – the man who taught Barker “how to stutter” as well as teaching him everything else he “ever learned about comedy”.

Joining the Oxford Playhouse in 1951, Barker had three successful years there before Peter Hall spotted him and cast him in Mourning Becomes Electra in London’s West End. Barker’s speed and versatility were already clearly visible – in late 1955, for instance, he was rushing between theatres doing two different performances a night; one as a gypsy in Listen To The Wind and then one as a peasant in Summertime.

Ronnie Barker and Tenniel Evans in The Navy Lark

A.B Johnson (Ronnie Barker) and A.B Goldstein (Tenniel Evans) in The Navy Lark. Source: BBC

He was to keep up his stage work, sporadically, until well into the late 1960s, appearing in a variety of roles from Irma La Douce to Shakespeare, with his co-stars being the likes of Maggie Smith and Laurence Olivier.

But the majority of Barker’s work was soon to come from newer media than the theatre. In the post-Goons age radio comedy was booming and, after playing Lord Russett in Floggit’s (1956), Barker found himself up to his neck in The Navy Lark (1959 to 1977), appearing in over 300 episodes of the long-running BBC radio sitcom.

This led to Barker being cast in the TV version of The Navy Lark which was soon followed by a welter of small, but fee-paying, parts in Crowther’s Crowd, Glen Melvyn’s I’m Not Bothered, Jimmy Edwards’ The Seven Faces of Jim, Foreign Affairs, The Saint and The Avengers wherein he played Adrian Cheshire, a feline-obsessed individual who had, naturally, a Cheshire Cat grin.

John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett in the Frost Report Class sketch

John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett in The Frost Report Class sketch

There were also bits and pieces of feature film work in Kill or Cure (1962), Doctor in Distress (1963), The Cracksman (1963), Father Came Too! (1964), A Home of Your Own (1964), The Bargee (1964) and Runaway Railway (1966). All of which had established Barker as a minor character player, and acknowledged comic actor, within the trade – but he was hardly a household name.

His first real step towards such fame came when David Frost, following up a recommendation from producer James Gilbert, put Barker into the cast of the satirical The Frost Report (1966-67), which also featured John Cleese and one Ronald “Ronnie” Corbett. Barker and Corbett had actually been friends since meeting three years before at the Buckstone Club where Corbett had been a part-time barman. Their friendship deepened on The Frost Report, partly because unlike the rest of the cast, according to Corbett, neither of them had ever attended university.

The Frost Report’s most famous sketch – a parody of the British class system – featured both Ronnies, with Cleese representing the upper class, Barker the middle and Corbett the “lower” class: a sequence to which the Ronnies paid tribute, with some help from Stephen Fry, some 33 years later.

That Frost Report class sketch, re-enacted with Stephen Fry in 2000

When Frost’s special one-off Frost Over England – also featuring Barker – won the Golden Rose at the Montreux Television Festival, things seemed to be gaining an unstoppable momentum of their own. Frost soon signed both Ronnies to his Paradine Productions firm which then produced The Ronnie Barker Playhouse in 1968, a series of half a dozen comic plays with Barker playing a different role each time.

The Frost on Sunday (1968-70) show was developed in tandem and Barker also began to write sketches for the latter programme, although – still being shy offstage – he used the pen name Gerald Wiley. Since the Gerald Wiley scenes were often the funniest, people soon began to wonder who this Wiley character actually was – Frank Muir, Tom Stoppard, Alan Bennett, Noel Coward and David Frost himself were all put forward as serious suggestions.

Things came to a head when it was announced, after the second series of Frost on Sunday, that Mister Wiley would finally reveal himself at a staff dinner. A large table for fourteen was laid out in a Chinese restaurant in Soho and one by one the chairs were filled by the show’s writers and cast – with one seat staying empty, reserved as it was for Wiley.

And then Barker stood up and said, “That chair is going to stay empty all night because the fact is…I am Gerald Wiley.”

There were a few seconds of shocked silence and, at first, no one seemed to believe him – except Corbett, who he had told just before the dinner. It was assumed that Barker was merely cracking another joke.

In fact, Barker did love a pseudonym and was to use quite a few others before he retired, including Bob Ferris, Jack Goetz, David Huggett and Jonathan Cobbald. When the truth eventually did sink in for the Frost on Sunday gang, it was raconteur and wit Barry Cryer who made the fastest recovery, quipping from the end of the table, “No one likes a smartarse.”

Next page: Double act

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