Ronnie Barker: It says much about the changing character of British television that Ronnie Barker, one of its most creative comic talents, should have voluntarily turned his back on the medium long before he died at the age of 76.
One of the questions posed when commentators first foresaw the emergence of committee-concocted shows to fill market niches was what would happen to the truly talented. A cynical observer suggested that "they'll go off and run antique shops." Which is precisely what Barker - co-star of The Two Ronnies, star of the corner-shop comedy series Open All Hours and of the prison comedy Porridge - did.
Still less than 60, and at the height of his fame when he announced his retirement in 1987, he commanded audiences of more than 15 million people for those three series; he also wrote most of the material for The Two Ronnies, and much else, under the pen-names of Gerald Wiley, Jonathan Cobbald or Jack Goetz. Both as an actor and a writer, he was recognised as a master of pyrotechnic puns, surreal misbehaviour in public and private places, and crackling crosschat. "I refuse to be one of the still-with-us brigade," he explained enigmatically.
The only real clue to Barker's departure was that his last comedy series, Clarence, broadcast in 1988, about a shortsighted removal man, had been his least successful. But he could easily have survived one flop if he had still been in sympathy with the thrust of British television. In fact, he loathed the trend towards crudity and the sexually explicit. Always a prickly interviewee, he did not make public many of his adverse views - or the fact that he suffered from high blood pressure and had had heart surgery.
He did come back briefly, appearing with his former co-star Ronnie Corbett at the Royal Variety Performance in 1997. The BBC celebrated The Two Ronnies with a reunion night in 1999, and earlier this year with a four-week series in which Barker and Corbett presented their classic, tightly scripted sketches. As an actor, Barker appeared as the butler to Albert Finney's Winston Churchill in the BBC drama The Gathering Storm (2002) and as a general in the television film of the William Trevor novella, My House in Umbria (2003).
In 1998 he wrote a play for his actor daughter, Charlotte. Simply called Mum, it was produced at the King's Head pub theatre in Islington and had elements of tragedy as well as comedy, since its main character was an office-cleaner whose life was so lonely that she talked constantly to her dead mother. There was always a hint of unpredictable bleakness, or even menace, behind Barker's toothy forensic accountant's smile that gave his work tension as well as credibility.
But his background was mundane enough. Born in Bedford, Barker lived in Oxford from the age of four, went to the high school there, was a member of St James's church choir and was, for five dissatisfied months, a student of architecture.
His first job was as a bank clerk at £1.45 a week. Alhough he toyed with the idea of going on to become a bank manager, the closest he came was through parodying the role, as he did so effectively with other middle-class professions. However, he had also been performing and stage-managing with amateur dramatic societies for 18 months when he left to go into the professional theatre.
He failed to get into the Young Vic school in London, and his first paid stage job was in the Aylesbury Repertory Company for £2.50 a week, after he had read a script with six different accents. He made his acting debut in JM Barrie's Quality Street, followed by the part of the organist in JB Priestley's When We Are Married. He lived with his parents, or in digs in Aylesbury, the cost of which left him a few pennies a week to live on. His father, an oil company clerk, had told him that he would not support him if he chose to become an actor.
It was 1948, and the golden era of British weekly rep, in which actors had to deal with three plays in various states of preparation at once, and could thoroughly learn their trade. The regular public had their own favourite players, who socialised off-stage, producing a community spirit if no great financial rewards. Years later Barker drew a vivid picture of this lost world in his memoir, Dancing in the Moonlight (1993).
In his third role at Aylesbury, Barker discovered his suitability for comedy. Playing Charles the chauffeur in Miranda, a play about a mermaid who falls in love with a human, he got his first big laugh. "I want to make people laugh," he said. "Never mind about Hamlet. Forget Richard the Second. Give me Charley's Aunt. My mission in life was now crystal-clear."
It was Oxford Playhouse that established Barker as an actor. In the circus comedy He Who Gets Slapped, he played the clown to great applause. After that, the closure of repertory companies grew increasingly frequent and he felt he was not only in a rut, but a very insecure rut. Then the arrival of the 21-year-old Peter Hall to direct at Oxford in 1952 changed the drift of his life; after Hall became director of the Arts Theatre, London, in 1955, he invited Barker to make his West End debut, as the Chantyman and Joe Silva in Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra. Hall continued to encourage him to appear in the West End.
Thus Barker's London stage work continued, mainly in revues, and from 1959 he was Able-bodied Seaman Johnson in 300 editions of The Navy Lark on BBC radio, alongside Jon Pertwee and Leslie Phillips. His big break in television came through playing feature parts with June Whitfield in a series starring the bluffly popular comedian "Professor" Jimmy Edwards, Seven Faces of Jim.
A year later, in 1966, came David Frost's The Frost Report, on which Barker first worked with Ronnie Corbett, Peter Cook and John Cleese. Frost later featured Barker and Corbett in tandem in his Frost On Sunday show (1968). Thereafter, in quick succession, Barker was in Hark at Barker (1969), Six Dates with Barker (1971) and, most significantly, the Two Ronnies, of which 98 episodes were shown over 12 series between 1971 and 1987.
He starred with Corbett in many varieties of sketch and crosschat, largely of his own devising. The series was often repeated; it also ran for a while, live, at the London Palladium in 1978 and toured Australia.
Then came Porridge (1973-77), the first television comedy to be set in a prison. Barker played the wily, non-violent old lag Fletcher, always trying to get the better of other imprisoned villains and the prison staff. Open All Hours, in which he played the tight-fisted and lecherous Arkwright, keeper of the corner shop battling for survival, sealed his reputation as an actor who could make comedy roles sympathetic as well as funny.
Although he once turned down an award because it would have meant making an eight-minute speech of acceptance - he was always uneasy when speaking as himself rather than in character - Barker was the winner of many awards. They included those of the Variety Club of Great Britain three times (in 1969, 1974 and 1980), a rare achievement; of the Radio Industry Club in 1973, 1974, 1977 and 1981; and of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in 1975, 1977 and 1978, with a Bafta tribute evening to him in 2004.
He married Joy Tubb in 1957. She survives him, as do Charlotte and their sons, Adam and Larry.
Ronald William George Barker: born September 25th, 1929; died October 3rd, 2005