Double the Fun
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday February 15, 2014

The Two Ronnies were a Saturday night institution when I was eight. At 7.25pm, my Nan would untie her apron and announce: “Off you go then. Do the honours!”

That was my signal. I’d race down the hall to the good room and switch Nan’s hulking Thorn television to ‘ON.’ We didn’t call it TV in those days because Nan was a stickler for formalities: “Abbreviations are uncouth. We have a television set and a refrigerator and a lavatory and a lounge suite. These are their proper names!” Nan referred to the on/off button on her television set as the knob.

The station dial was always set to Channel 2 – we were loyal to Aunty no matter what she gave us. I would kneel on the carpet and wait, the television staring blankly at me on its splayed wooden legs. Studying the inky screen I’d begin counting: One thousand, two thousand, three thousand… And there it was! A pinprick of light, right in the middle of the screen. It grew larger and brighter, flickered sideways, and then Peter Holland and his moustache filled the screen: “That’s all from the newsroom. Good night.”

“That Peter Holland speaks the Queen’s English,” said my Nan, clearly smitten. Twenty years later, I got a tongue-lashing from that handsome baritone as I bolted into the edit suite with a late-breaking story about Alan Bond. Minutes earlier, I’d screeched my car to a halt outside the newsroom’s back door. I  commandeered the first available car space: Holland’s. His Queen’s English became laden with expletives.

My Nan and I had Saturday nights to ourselves. It was Mum’s date night. She’d be off to dinner at the tennis club with my soon-to-be step-father. Mum had sashayed out the door in her most flattering frock – sapphire-blue polyester blooming with giant yellow hibiscus.

Nan and I would settle into the paisley armchairs that belonged to her Merry Widow lounge suite: great hulking chairs with sweeping arms and plush upholstery. Mine engulfed me. I would sit cross-legged on my velvet throne and wedge my knees into the padding to balance my tray table on my lap. There we’d eat our savoury mince on toast, watching The Two Ronnies, my Nan tittering away –  she was quite the merry widow herself.   

I was confused by the sight gags: Ronnie Corbett, the publican, standing on two boxes to see over the bar –  one marked ‘Agnes,’ the other ‘Champ’. It took me a year of French lessons to work out it was a Champagne crate cut in half.

The sketch that had Sid and George drinking pints and discussing women went way over my head:

“You’ve heard of erosive zones, ‘aven’t you?”

“Well, yeah, I seen pictures of ‘em in holiday brochures.”

“Nuh, erosive zone – it’s the medical term for a place a woman’s got, you see, where if you touch it she goes mad! I bet your Edie’s got one of them.

“Yeah. Her wallet.”

Every Saturday night I’d watch an hour of television I didn’t understand. But it didn’t matter – I loved it because Nan loved it. Ronnie C was my favourite because he looked like a glove puppet, Ronnie B was her’s because his elocution was flawless, even when he was deliberately ‘pispronouncing.’

Their double act would never have survived today’s political correctness – all that groping of buxom maids and lewd patter about knockers and the clap.

Admirably, my husband has a touch of the Ronnie Barkers – a ribald wit (and a shapely figure in a dress).  He also wears square glasses with thick black rims which he uses to score cheap laughs at parties. He’ll wave them in the air and announce: “Whenever I go to buy a new pair of specs, I ask them for the cheapest, plainest, least breakable glasses they have. You know – like Ronnie Barker’s. And every time I walk out looking like Ronnie Corbett!”

I was in London, aged 37, when Ronnie Barker died. I overheard someone relaying the news on the tube from Notting Hill. My eyes pricked with tears and I was transported back to my childhood, enthroned in my velvet armchair watching television with my giggly Nan.

I chastised myself for being a sentimental fool, then saw that the businessman and the matronly woman sitting either side of me were both reading the tributes in the paper. We three strangers were from different worlds but I bet we’d shared many a Saturday night with The Two Ronnies.

As I breached the pale daylight outside Oxford Circus station, I caught The Sun’s headline on a placard propped against a lamp post. Ronnie had the front page all to himself: it featured a giant picture of his glasses and just four words – “It’s Goodnight From Him.” God must have needed cheering up.