Death of a comedy icon: The one and only Ronnie

Ronnie Barker was one of the greatest comedians Britain has produced. Brian Viner remembers a writer and actor who combined a gigantic talent with a very modest demeanour

Barker, whose death on Monday at the age of 76 came as a shock even to those friends who knew he was suffering from a recurrence of heart trouble, was a colossus of television comedy, perhaps even its pre-eminent colossus, in that he mastered all its forms - the sitcom, the sketch show and the gag-laden monologue direct to camera - both as performer and writer.

Ronnie Corbett led the tributes to his erstwhile comedy partner, saying: "Ronnie was pure gold in triplicate, as a performer, a writer and a friend. 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."

To some extent, we all will. After all, Barker was that extraordinarily rare animal: a funny man who made everyone laugh. There are those who remained resolutely untickled by Spike Milligan and even Tommy Cooper; others who are immune to the ramblings of Billy Connolly and Eddie Izzard. But only a statue could sit stony-faced through the comedic output of Ronnie Barker, from sketch-based shows such as The Frost Report and The Two Ronnies, to his classic turns as the resourceful jailbird Fletcher in Porridge and the devious, stammering grocer Arkwright in Open All Hours.

Maybe only Eric Morecambe shared Barker's quality; the one which makes all of us feel, with his departure, as though the world is suddenly a smidgin less jolly. "I can only think that God must have needed cheering up," said the comedy writer and actor Craig Cash yesterday. "He had flawless comic timing", said Michael Palin, who worked with Barker on The Frost Report. "I never saw him blow a sketch. But he was quite self-contained. It was hard to write collaboratively with him. You'd write a piece and he would change it to what he knew he could do brilliantly. He was modest, never ambitious or pushy, but he knew what he did well."

What Barker did not do remotely well was egomania. I once saw him slipping quietly away from a BBC party and, against all my better instincts, rushed over to shake a doughy hand, just so that I could tell him how much pleasure he had given me. He was embarrassed and a little flustered by this attention from a complete stranger, and as an unassuming man he would have been touched but perhaps similarly flustered by all the lavish tributes in the pages of today's newspapers, as well as on last night's television news and on the BBC website, which invited people yesterday to contribute their favourite Barker lines.

Within minutes they were flying across cyberspace, mostly lifted from The Two Ronnies, such as: "In a packed show tonight we'll be talking to an out-of-work contortionist who can no longer make ends meet," and " The search for the man who terrorises nudist camps with a bacon slicer goes on. Inspector Lemuel Jones had a tip-off this morning, but hopes to be back on duty tomorrow."

Some of the best lines in the show - which ran for 15 years to adoring audiences regularly approaching 20 million - were written by Gerald Wiley, the pseudonym invented by Barker when he started submitting sketches to The Frost Report, on the basis that the unknown Mr Wiley's material would be judged entirely on its own merits.

However, the ruse also appealed to his sense of mischief, and whenever the team speculated as to who this fellow Wiley might really be - Noel Coward, Tom Stoppard and even Terence Rattigan were three half-serious guesses - Barker eagerly joined in. Famously, he then decided to come clean by writing in as Gerald Wiley and inviting everyone to a Chinese restaurant to meet him. Only when they were all assembled did he blow his own cover, but the talented Mr Wiley continued to write some of the finest sketches in The Two Ronnies, including the celebrated one in a hardware shop. "There you are, four candles!" "No, fork handles ... handles for forks!" Not to mention the Loyal Society for the Relief of Sufferers Of Pismronunciation, "for people who cannot say their worms correctly" .

For all his modesty, Barker was proud to be cited as a massive influence by modern stars such as Peter Kay, who once told me that, when he went on holiday to Majorca, he did nothing much more than sit beside the swimming pool listening to Porridge tapes on his headphones. When Kay wrote to Barker to say that his performance as Fletcher had informed his own comedy, Barker wrote back on Slade prison notepaper. He was a funny man off screen as well as on.

"But he was funny in such an understated way," said the writer David Renwick. "There was nothing loud or exuberant about his humour, he was just instantaneously witty. He was one of the very few people I've met - in fact I can only think of Eric Morecambe and Peter Cook - whose wit was that quick. But it was never to show off, it was just to make you smile."

Renwick it was who wrote one of The Two Ronnies' most fondly remembered sketches, the Mastermind sketch in which the specialist subject is answering the question before last. "I remember the night we recorded it, I'd completely lost faith in it," he recalled. "And Ronnie, who understood the audience as much as anyone ever can, was quite nervous too as to whether they would be able to follow it. In the end it was decided to record the sketch twice, once so that the audience got the idea, and again to get the laughs. But they only did it once, to huge laughs.

"Ronnie's timing was so wonderful that it worked immediately, and it was an immense privilege to have written for him at the height of his powers. And, of course, for Ronnie Corbett too. What made them so brilliant together was that Corbett was a comedian with a gift for acting and Barker was an actor with a gift for comedy."

Those comic gifts were such that Barker's skills as a straight actor were underused, even though they never went unrecognised. As butler to Albert Finney's Sir Winston Churchill in the excellent television film The Gathering Storm, he was unobtrusively splendid, as of course a good butler should be.

But that - and a one-woman play Barker wrote for his daughter Charlotte, one of his three children - represented a rare foray out of retirement. Barker decided to retire in 1987 partly because Sir Peter Hall had offered to cast him as Falstaff whenever he fancied doing it, and he realised he was feeling stressed just at the thought of driving to the West End every day. He had also had several health scares, including the discovery, after he lost his voice in the early 1970s, of a growth on his vocal chords which needed to be surgically removed. "I remember that night sitting in the bath in the hospital and singing my favourite songs because I thought I may never sing them again," he later recalled, and again Eric Morecambe springs to mind, as someone else who could invest even his own poor health with warm humour.

Barker spent his retirement running an antiques shop in Chipping Norton until he realised that it was losing money hand over fist. Heaven knows how much unused comic material that venture must have provided him with. The shop was spiritually a long way removed from television's corridors of power, yet he and Joy, his wife of nearly 50 years, and who was at his bedside when he died, never distanced themselves from their many showbiz friends.

Yesterday, Renwick described the Barkers' annual garden party as "a completely magical occasion. It really was the highlight of our summer, in such a glorious location, with people like David Jason and Barry Cryer and Ronnie Corbett there, and a trad jazz band playing in the adjoining paddock". Or ploughing in the adjoining piddock, as Barker might perhaps have preferred it.

Laughter lines

THE TWO RONNIES

Mastermind Spoof. Answering the question before last:

Barker: What would you use a rip cord to open?

Corbett: Large flies

Barker: Correct. What sort of person lived in Bedlam?

Corbett: A parachute

Barker: Correct. What is a jock strap?

Corbett: A nut case

* 'In a packed programme tonight, we will be talking to an out of work contortionist who's failing to make ends meet'

* 'The toilets at a local police station have been stolen. Police say they have nothing to go on'

* PISMRONUNCIATION: 'So you see how dickyfelt it is. But help is at hand. A new society has been formed by our mumblers to help each other in times of excream ices. It is balled Pismronouncers Unanimous, and anyone can ball them up on the smellyphone any time of the day or note, twenty four flowers a spray, seven stays a creek, and they will come round and get drunk with you'

OPEN ALL HOURS

Arkwright: What can I do you for?

Nurse Gladys: Two packets of peppermints.

Arkwright: Well, that sounds very reasonable. I accept

Granville: I wonder if I'll ever find time to get married?

Arkwright: Why bother? Your father never did

What they said

'Ronnie was pure gold in triplicate. We worked together since 1965 and we never had a cross word. It was 40 years of harmonious joy. I will miss him terribly'

Ronnie Corbett, The Two Ronnies co-star

'Working with Ronnie was without doubt some of the best years of my career. The world of entertainment has lost a huge talent'

David Jason, Open All Hours co-star

'Ronnie Barker was such a warm, friendly and encouraging presence when I started in television. He was also a great comic actor to learn from'

John Cleese, who began his career alongside Barker on The Frost Report

'We have lost a giant of comedy. Ronnie Barker will be numbered among a select band of comedy greats who shaped British comedy in the 20th century'

Mark Thompson, BBC Director General