Yes, Ronnie Barker was a genius – but he stole my jokes

On Saturday, we published a magical extract from the memoirs of comedy writer David Nobbs, creator of Reggie Perrin.

Nobbs, who died this month, aged 80, worked with a host of top comics on the show from That Was The Week That Was to The Two Ronnies.Here we reveal more of his star-studded memories… 

Frankie Howerd always loved teasing audiences. If they laughed at a double entendre, Frankie would pretend to be shocked. Occasionally there might be a loud, coarse laugh at some particularly fruity insinuation. ‘Common as muck!’ he would say.

Things that worked for Frankie would not have worked for anybody else.I wrote for him mainly for the radio, a difficult medium but one well suited to him.

Frankie lived in an elegant Georgian terrace house in beautiful Edwardes Square, Kensington, West London.

This was a delightful surprise.He never struck me as elegant. He never quite managed to look as if he was the same shape as his clothes.

I upset Frankie on my first visit to the house by bringing champagne. ‘You didn’t need to do that,’ he said, as if he felt that his generosity had been impugned.’I have plenty of champagne in the fridge.’

Then he said, very seriously: ‘There’s always champagne in my fridge. You only have to ask.’

After that, the meeting went well.We decided that the show would consist of sketches linked by quite long monologues. In fact, it ended up rather like one endless stream of consciousness: deltas, rivers of comic thought spilling out in all directions.

If you read one of his monologues, it would seem to have very little substance. It was full of asides, irrelevances, corrections, contradictions, and yet it flowed much as Frankie flowed, breathlessly, nervously, vulnerably, irresistibly.

It was difficult stuff to write.You had to put in asides, or it wouldn’t be Frankie, but if there were too many it would get stuck, it wouldn’t go anywhere. And you had to remember that Frankie would put in a few of his own, and leave room for them.

A few years ago, TV viewers were given a very unappetising portrait of Frankie in a biopic in which he was brilliantly played by the comic actor David Walliams.I can’t claim to give a complete picture. I witnessed very little of his private life. But I can tell of the man I worked for.

He used to apologise for summoning us to meetings at his home.’You have wives. You have children. You’re normal.’ His use of the word ‘normal’ strikes me now as very significant.

Nobody today would use the adjective ‘normal’ to describe a hetero- sexual person, because they would not think of homosexuality as abnormal.But homosexuality was illegal in Britain until 1967.

When Frankie appeared on the satirical TV show That Was The Week That Was, he was still performing criminal acts in his private life.

His whole, complex persona as a comic, was based — and had to be based — on a huge distortion.

I now wonder, as I didn’t bother to wonder then, how much of a problem this was to Frankie in those distant days.

The two shows of his that I remember best are Up Pompeii!and Whoops Baghdad. If I tell you that in Up Pompeii! Frankie played a Roman slave called Lurcio and that his master was a senator, Ludicrus Sextus, you will know that little knowledge of Roman history was necessary to appreciate them, and even less knowledge of Roman history would stick in your mind as a result of having watched them.

You will realise also that subtlety was ‘conspi by its ab’, as the great writer P.G.Wodehouse used to say.

As for Whoops Baghdad … Could you repeat a show like that today? How much the world has changed. For the better, because neither we nor the Arab world would tolerate this sexist rag-bag of gags about harems and eunuchs?

Or for the worse, because more and more areas of potential comedy are denied us in this suspicious, politically correct, violent, embittered, frightened age?

At the end of one of our meetings, Frankie said to us: ‘I want to take you out to dinner to thank you for the scripts.’ Once we had sat down, he said: ‘I have one rule in restaurants.We don’t mention showbiz. We have to get away from it, or we’ll go blind.’

Then, at the end of the series, Frankie sent me a letter. What’s so extraordinary about that? Everything. 

I’ve thought hard about this and I do believe that this man was one of only two performers in my career who invited me out to dinner to thank me — and was also the only comic to write me a letter of thanks.Frankie’s letter was typical of the man. ‘Thank you so much for the scripts,’ he wrote. ‘I’m sorry I was so horrible, and I promise that next time I won’t be, but I will be.’

LOOKING UP TO A GIANT TALENT  

When John Cleese was in the cadet corps at school, an inspecting Army officer, a high-ranking and no doubt distinguished soldier, though perhaps not a genius at small talk, looked him up and down, mainly up, and said: ‘You’re very tall, aren’t you?’

John replied: ‘Sorry, sir.’

I have spent quite a lot of time trying to think of a better reply to that officer than ‘Sorry, sir’, but I haven’t come up with anything.It’s really funny, yet there’s no way it can be construed as remotely insubordinate. And John was just 17 at the time.

He always had a brilliant comic response to every situation. But his life could have been so different.

In the early days of his career, John starred in a comedy series called At Last The 1948 Show.The programme was not transmitted in the West Country, where John’s family lived.

John told me that his father was worried that he wasn’t going to make it in his career.

John told him that he was doing this hugely successful, ground-breaking comedy series in London, but his father didn’t believe him, took him for a walk along the beach at Weston-super-Mare, and said: ‘I’ve been having a chat with the manager at Marks and Spencer.There’s a job there for you any time you want it.’ John never needed to take that job.

There’s sometimes a cruel streak to John’s comedy, and he wouldn’t regard that as an insult. I recall a wonderful ‘quickie’ — a short sketch — written by a very talented Scotsman called John Law, also responsible for the iconic ‘I look up to him’ sketch about class, performed on David Frost’s satirical BBC show The Frost Report in 1966.

This quickie featured Cleese and a secretary, in an office in a tower block.John says to the secretary: ‘Miss Jones, take off your glasses.’ Miss Jones takes off her glasses. ‘Why, Miss Jones, you’re beautiful,’ says John amorously. ‘Come over here.’ Miss Jones approaches her love-struck boss, but without her glasses she misses him, goes on past him, and falls from the open 14th-storey window.

PARTYING WITH MY MONTY PYTHON PAL

One of the shows I wrote for was The Frost Report.Among its writers and actors were the future stars of Monty Python — Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and mup56 Michael Palin.

I used to get asked a lot of awkward questions about what the stars were really like, but I never minded when they asked: ‘Is Michael Palin really as nice as he seems?’ They were so pleased when I said he was.

Terry Jones was also the height of amiability to me, but the only Python I saw purely socially was Graham Chapman. Chapman, like me, was wild at parties.

When the BBC invited ‘Mr and Mrs Chapman’ to a reception to celebrate The Frost Report winning the Golden Rose, international television’s highest award, Graham brought his boyfriend, looking as avant-garde and disreputable as possible, and wearing a name tag, ‘Mrs Chapman’. 

I once offered Graham a drink in the BBC Television Centre bar, and he said: ‘Three pints, please,’ explaining that he drank three times as fast as anybody else.

THE NIGHT WE WERE DIDDLED BY DODDY

After one writing session for Ken Dodd on his radio show, Dodd suggested that all the scriptwriting team should have a drink.

We all agreed to meet in a bar called the Captain’s Cabin, near Piccadilly, after the recording.Dodd didn’t arrive till 10.59. ‘What are you having, lads?’ said Dodd.He then got out a piece of paper and wrote down all the drinks. He returned from the bar at 11.02, with a single light ale.

‘They’d closed,’ he said.’They let me have a drink as I hadn’t had one all night.’

Dodd was virtually the same character off-stage as on — eccentric and child-like. The fact that he was completely self-centred didn’t matter — I doubt if anyone could become a great comedian without being self-centred.

On television, Dodd is mildly amusing and a little childish. But, on the boards, Dodd is a giant. The only trouble with his theatre show was its length — sometimes as long as five hours.

By the time he’d finished, the buses had stopped, the boarding houses were locked, the night porters of hotels were slumbering.People sleeping in shop doorways might have been genuine vagrants or they might have been Ken Dodd’s audience — too exhausted to travel home.

Life as one of his writers had some very surreal moments.’Never forget, David,’ Dodd said to me one day, ‘the letter K is the funniest letter in the alphabet. Kettering, Kettle, Eskimo . . .’

For some impish reason, I interrupted with ‘string vest’.

‘Exactly!’ Dodd said.

• I DIDN’T Get Where I Am Today by David Nobbs, published by Arrow; The Second Life Of Sally Mottram by David Nobbs, published by Harper paperbacks.