It would be difficult to imagine Russell Brand or Ricky Gervais taking a break from stardom to stand behind the counter of an antiques shop in deepest Oxfordshire.
But that’s what comedy legend Ronnie Barker chose to do on deciding that he’d had enough of television comedy, which he considered increasingly vulgar.
Bad language and gags about bodily functions were repugnant to this national icon. But after creating and writing so many jokes and sketches, and appearing in such massively successful shows as Porridge, The Two Ronnies and Open All Hours, Barker also had come to believe his own well of humour was drying up.
“I’d run out of ideas, and to be honest, I’d done everything I wanted to do. And I’m sorry to say the material coming through wasn’t such good quality,” he reflected, when asked why he had withdrawn at the height of his fame.
“I find it difficult to laugh at shows nowadays,” he added. “Unnecessary bad language in scripts can turn people away and much of it isn’t needed. One of the problems is that everyone wants to write their own scripts now.”
He had settled in the west Oxfordshire village of Dean, the perfect home for a man determined to disappear off the professional radar.
And he would also realise one of his few unfulfilled ambitions, to run his own antiques shop.
He opened it in Chipping Norton’s main street, christening it The Emporium. In many ways it was really just an extension of his hobby — collecting antiques, memorabilia and Victoriana. It was said his postcard collection alone extended to 53,000 items.
The story of Ronnie Barker’s search for peace in the tranquillity of the Oxfordshire countryside, before his death in Katharine House Hospice in Adderbury in 2005, is touchingly told in a biography of this comic genius, Remembering Ronnie Barker, published in paperback this month.
Author Richard Webber spent months tracing Ronnie Barker’s old school friends at the City of Oxford High School, then based in George Street, and people who remembered his early acting career.
Although born in Bedford, in 1925, Ronald William George Barker moved to Oxford when still a young child. His family first moved into 386 Cowley Road, before settling into a terraced property at 23 Church Cowley Road.
“He sought perfection throughout his career and he was fastidious from an early age,” Mr Webber tells us. “Even as a child staging little plays with his mates in the back gardens in Oxford, everything had to be just so.”
But all that talent could so easily have been missed, when after first trying his hand at architecture, he joined the Westminster Bank’s Cowley Road branch as a junior clerk.
It seems the man, who came to resemble a retired bank manager, could have spent his working life among dusty ledgers and well-thumbed bank notes, if not for a chance meeting on a showery day in 1946, when he bumped into an old friend, Geoff Broadis, on a street in Oxford.
Mr Webber takes up the story: “Telling his pal about the mundanities of his banking job, Broadis floated an idea which might bring a little excitement into his friend’s life.”
Assuring him there would be plenty of girls around, Broadis, a member of The Theatre Players, suggested that Ronnie looked in on the group, which rehearsed at the St Mary and St John’s Hall, in Cowley Road. It was to be a defining moment in Ronnie Barker’s life.
After spells of acting in Aylesbury and Cheshire, Ronnie returned to Oxford in 1951 to join the Oxford Playhouse’s company. For him it was the mecca of all theatres, and he made his name there over four years.
Much of the information Mr Webber gleamed about this period came from a detailed letter, full of anecdotes, that the star sent to Don Chapman, the former Oxford Mail journalist, to help him with a history of the Oxford Playhouse.
Last year Mr Webber made an appeal in The Oxford Times to find Ronnie’s first love, the student actress Jean Wagstaff.
“Someone contacted me but it was to confirm she had, sadly passed away,” he said.
The comedian would always view getting to work with Sir Peter Hall in Oxford as another milestone in his career. For it was the great director who took the actor, then aged 25, to the West End.
“If you met Ronnie in the bar of a pub behind the Oxford Playhouse, you would have thought he was a trainee estate agent or bank manager,” recalls Sir Peter.
“But after two minutes’ conversation you knew you were in touch with a very anarchic spirit who’d be making you laugh.”
The director was one of those who tried to tempt Ronnie out of retirement in the mid-eighties. Over several years Sir Peter had tried to persuade him to play Shakespeare’s greatest comic creation, Sir John Falstaff, but he was never to get his man.
“He made me a promise that he’d one day play Falstaff,” said Sir Peter.
“It’s one of my great regrets that he never got there. He became too weak to take on something like that.”
As it turned out, working in his antiques shop was not to prove entirely stress free and he would twice find himself in the headlines, said Mr Webber.
Once the Porridge star unwittingly bought an antique cabinet from a man who turned out to be a convict.
“The crook was, apparently, dressed in his blue prison uniform and home on leave when he duped Barker into buying the item of furniture, which resulted in Ronnie being questioned by police and released without charge.
“Such a situation is an occupational hazard for those in the trade. The risk must have been higher for someone like Ronnie Barker, who after all, saw antiques and collectables as just a hobby.”
How Porridge’s Fletch would have enjoyed that one.
Then there was the time when the shop was visited by two under-cover Sun reporters, who offered Barker a silver salver, which had been valued at about £1,000 by a leading auction house.
When he offered them £20, the Sun ran a story highlighting the difference between its value and Barker’s low offer.
The comedian, visibly riled, went on the Terry Wogan programme to say he had, in fact, thought the woman reporter looked shifty and made a ridiculous offer simply to send her packing.
The little shop run with his wife Joy, who died last year, closed for the final time in 1999.
He had once joked about his shop: “I lose money every week, but it’s a hobby. It’s cheaper than skiing and safer at my age.”
Troubled with diabetes and heart disease, toward the end he would put off seeing friends like Richard Briers because he didn’t want them to see his weight loss.
But Professor Ronald Spiers, who retired to Chipping Norton, recalls seeing Barker at the local branch of Barclays Banks just months before he died.
“I remember waiting in a queue when Ronnie came out from an office with a young attractive manageress, who had a bundle of files under her arm,” the professor recalls.
“She was leading the way and turned to Ronnie saying, ‘I’m afraid this is something we’ll have to go upstairs for’.’ “Ronnie replied, ‘oh, it’s a long time since anyone said that to me’.”
The whole bank queue erupted, little suspecting that they may well have witnessed the great Ronnie Barker’s final performance.
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