First watched : 1975
A little research has proved I'm a bit late in including this one as the scene I remember most was actually broadcast in 1975. It was during the second of four serial inserts starring the comic detective duo Piggy Malone ( Ronnie Barker ) and Charley Farley ( Ronnie Corbett ) , Death Can Be Fatal where Charley is being smuggled through an airport in a large packing case to save on air fare. He's rigged up a series of pipes to the air holes so that he can be given drinks but got it wrong so that the drink is coming out of the side through another hole. When Piggy is trying to feed him some orange juice , it looks to an elderly customer who Piggy has already alarmed that he's having a piss on the concourse. I thought that was the funniest thing I'd ever seen on TV and was chuckling about it for hours afterwards.
The duo got their own show in 1971 after doing time on The Frost Report where according to Corbett they were drawn together as grammar school boys without the Oxbridge education of their colleagues. The show played to their strengths with many sketches highlighting Barker's genius for clever wordplay and musical parody. There was also a healthy dose of seaside postcard smut; even though much of it still went over my head, the tuts of mum or gran gave it a delicious frisson of naughtiness.
Other favourite bits included the rude waiter sketch ( "You're nuts my lord "), the phantom raspberry blower and the apparently innocuous song about a naturalist which repeated the wrong bits ( "the bum - the bum - the bum - the bum - the bumblebee at bay ). Of the musical parodies the Adam and the Ants one is notable for how uncannily Barker, as portly guitarist Marco Pirroni , resembles Pirroni as he is today.
Like many people I regarded Ronnie Corbett's solo spot in the chair as an endurance test or a chance to go for a pee but eventually I made the connection with the way my dad rambled off the point when he had an audience and it became much funnier when I imagined Corbett was taking the piss out of him.
In 1980 Not The Nine O Clock News did a savage and unusually long parody sketch "The Two Ninnies" apparently in response to a disparaging remark Barker had made. It implied that Barker who wrote 75 % of the show was using that to make himself look good at Corbett's expense ( there was a general perception that they were unequally talented ) and went to town on their love of innuendo with an outrageous but not too far off the mark song parody. Corbett was less offended than Barker but shared his anger that it had been broadcast by the BBC.
Nevertheless it didn't sink the show which carried on for another seven years. I remember their parody of Kid Creole and the Coconuts based on There's Something Wrong in Paradise which must have been late 1983 at the earliest but I didn't stay with the show to the finish. In the end it did seem to have outstayed its welcome. Ronnie Barker announced his retirement in 1987 on Wogan and that brought the series to an end. For all the talk of him being something of a passenger Ronnie Corbett always had other irons in the fire and continues working to this day.
Barker opened an antiques shop but admitted it was to keep himself busy rather than make money. After 10 years he made a limited return to the public eye contributing to a couple of tribute nights then taking a couple of straight acting roles. In 2005 he reunited with Corbett to do a series The Two Ronnies Sketchbook where they did new links between some classic sketches but his health was deteriorating and the Christmas edition had to be filmed in July. He died that October aged 76.
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