Comedy legend Ronnie Barker dies

[Salem6]

British TV comedy actor Ronnie Barker, who starred in Porridge and The Two Ronnies, has died aged 76.



Ronnie Barker entertained millions during his career

One of the most loved and respected comedy performers of his generation, he was best known as one half of a double act with Ronnie Corbett.

But he also proved himself as an outstanding sitcom actor and script writer, winning four Bafta TV awards.

Corbett led the tributes saying: "Ronnie was pure gold in triplicate - as a performer; a writer and a friend."

He went on: "We worked together since 1965 and we never had a cross word.

"It was 40 years of harmonious joy, nothing but an absolute pleasure. I will miss him terribly."

David Jason, Barker's co-star for many years in Open All Hours, said: "He was a very dear friend and someone for whom I had the greatest respect.

"Working with Ronnie was always a joy and were without doubt some of the best years of my career. The world of entertainment has lost a huge talent."

Barker's agent said the actor died peacefully on Monday with his wife Joy by his side, after a long period of heart trouble.

John Cleese, who began his career with Barker on The Frost Report, said he was a "warm, friendly and encouraging presence" and "a great comic actor to learn from".

RONNIE BARKER REMEMBERED


Cleese's Monty Python colleague Michael Palin said: "I can't think of anyone who knew how to play comedy better than Ronnie Barker and I count myself enormously fortunate to have known and worked with him."

Veteran comedian Eric Sykes said: "It's a very sad day. I've always admired him. Everything he did had a very evocative ring, of something great."

Last year Barker was awarded a lifetime achievement Bafta for his TV work and was honoured by a raft of contemporary comedians including Peter Kay.

That led to a return for The Two Ronnies on BBC One, 34 years after the show first appeared on TV screens and 17 years after he first retired from showbusiness.

Paying tribute on Tuesday, Kay said: "He made me laugh so much and I'm just so lucky to have been able to get to know my hero and the person that I aspire to be, my thoughts go out to Joy and the rest of his family".


The Two Ronnies ran for 15 years on the BBC

Barker starred in two of the most popular sitcoms in BBC history - Porridge and Open All Hours, creating two classic characters, the laconic inmate Fletcher and the stuttering shopkeeper Arkwright.

At the peak of his career Barker, along with his diminutive cohort Corbett, entertained 17 million people every Saturday night.

The Two Ronnies ran for 15 years and delivered comic sketches, funny songs and old-fashioned tall tales.

The most popular light entertainment programme of its day, every programme ended with Corbett bidding the audience "goodnight from me", to which Barker would add "and it's goodnight from him".

Paying tribute Michael Hurll, producer of The Two Ronnies, said the comedian delivered "laughs, big laughs, and laughs that you will always remember.

"We will never see his like again."

The BBC head of comedy Jon Plowman said Barker was "just a genius".

Chat show host Michael Parkinson told BBC News 24 that Barker was "one of our very greatest comedy actors".

He added: "He was not just a comedian. He had a writer's ear for a good script and was a very good writer himself."

A special half-hour programme celebrating Barker's life will be shown on Tuesday at 2235 BST on BBC One.

The show first screened last year to mark Barker's lifetime achievement Bafta will be shown again at 2100 BST on Friday on BBC One.

Barker leaves his wife and three children, actress Charlotte Barker, the actor Adam Barker and Larry Barker.




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[Salem6]

For more than 20 years Ronnie Barker was one of the leading figures of British television comedy.


Barker was one of Britain's greatest comedy talents

He was much loved and admired for his appearances in the long-running series The Two Ronnies, with Ronnie Corbett, as prison inmate Fletcher, in the series Porridge, and as Arkwright, the bumbling, stuttering, sex-obsessed shopkeeper in Open All Hours.

Born in Bedford in 1929, Barker went to school in Oxford, became an architecture student and even toyed with the idea of becoming a bank manager, the archetypal middle-class profession he would later parody so effectively in his comic sketches.

However, he joined Aylesbury Repertory Company in 1948, while still in his teens, before taking to the West End stage at the invitation of Sir Peter Hall, where he appeared in Mourning Becomes Her in 1955.

Masterful wordplay

He appeared in several more plays, and also broke into radio. He was in 300 editions of The Navy Lark as A B Johnson.

Ronnie Barker first worked with Ronnie Corbett in The Frost Report and Frost on Sunday, programmes for which he also wrote scripts. In 1971 they teamed up for the first Two Ronnies.


The Two Ronnies, were a national institution


In all, there were a dozen series. At its peak, more than 17 million viewers watched what had become a national institution, and the show was also admired abroad.

The scripts relied on masterful wordplay and impeccable timing, and Barker wrote many of them.

Barker himself, however, was among many viewers who regarded his portrayal of Fletcher in Porridge as the best work he ever did. The series ended in 1977, and was followed by the less successful Going Straight, about Fletcher's return to civilian life.

Open All Hours, with David Jason, which ran for several series, was the work which Ronnie Barker probably enjoyed most. He also played - less successfully - a Welsh photographer in The Magnificent Evans and, later, a short-sighted removal man in Clarence.

Comic chameleon

He wrote three films without dialogue - A Home of Your Own, Futtocks End and The Picnic.

Ronnie Barker won a number of awards. In the late 1970s he was three times the British Academy's best light entertainment performer, and in 1975 he took the Royal Television Society's award for outstanding creative achievement. In 2004 Barker was honoured with a Bafta tribute award and celebration evening for his contribution to comedy.


Barker was the inimitable Fletcher in Porridge


Barker was a man of contradictions. He never liked sex or obscenity on television, but there was no shortage of frisky gags in The Two Ronnies.

Equally convincing in an overall, uniform or frilly frock, one of comedy's great chameleons was less happy when asked to walk on stage and play himself. He was modest about his writing skills and often submitted his scripts under pseudonyms, in order for them to be judged on their own merits.

Able to deliver the great tongue-twisting speeches required of his characters, Barker pronounced himself "completely boring" without a script.

And when he considered that his own scripts had begun to decline in quality, he left showbusiness in 1988 to open an antique shop near his Oxfordshire home.

Resisted

As well as citing a decline in health for his reason for retiring, Barker said he always felt he should quit while he was ahead, and he had no further ambitions.

He resisted all calls back from retirement, until he felt compelled to write a play for his actress daughter Charlotte, in 1998. The play received poor notices, and Barker's name was only added to the bill at the behest of the director.


Barker also starrred in Open All Hours


He finally gave in to public demand in 2002, delighting millions of viewers with his first TV drama appearance in more than a decade, as Winston Churchill's manservant, in The Gathering Storm.

Three years before, he had enjoyed a Two Ronnies Reunion Night on BBC One. Barker joined Corbett to introduce the best of their sketches, and the hardware shop "Four candles - Fork handles!" set-piece was judged the most popular by a television audience of millions.

Earlier this year the two actors once again reunited for The Two Ronnies Sketchbook, for a four-week run that proved popular with audiences.

Viewers rediscovered the pleasures of the duo's tightly scripted routines, and proved that while Corbett's golfing jumpers had passed their sell by date, the pair's impeccable delivery and the comic chemistry between them had a longer lasting appeal.


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