Bidding goodbye to a great comic talent inevitably inspires nostalgia, and the death of Ronnie Corbett has opened a floodgate. Torrents of affection for a whole era of television – an era that has recently spent time helping the police with their inquiries – have suddenly been released. Corbett’s heyday has been justly celebrated as unembarrassedly silly and all-embracing. It might be technically correct to point out that when The Two Ronnies were drawing 18 million viewers on a Saturday night there were not many channels on offer, but if their show had not provided warmth and laughter, the nation would have switched off.
The family audience was a broad club back then. There was an assumption of shared taste that may have alienated some important groups, and yet to become that unglamorous-sounding thing “a prime-time staple” the Ronnies’ double act had to be open and welcoming. Attempts to appeal on this scale today can look strained. Even the successful show Miranda is archly retro, while the brash Mrs Brown’s Boys smacks of a clever commissioning calculation.
The best lesson to learn is one that Corbett taught us. While he sprang from a music hall tradition, he was alert to the next trend. He started out on TV with a fashionable satirical edge, donning a working-class cloth cap in the sketch in which he “knew his place”, and then moving on through the jolly sexism and wordplay of the 1970s into the suburban parody of the sitcom. Most recently, he was darkly droll in the BBC Radio 4 series When the Dog Dies.
And now we know how kindly Corbett supported younger talent. Far from harking back to a golden age, he cheered stars-in-the-making. Harry Hill attests to this, as does Mark Gatiss of The League of Gentlemen, proving that Corbett also had a taste for Grand Guignol. So to mark his passing, like motorists on the M1 when that juggernaut of onions shed its load, we should all find a hard shoulder to cry on.
