Ronnie Corbett: It's hello from him . . .

If the generation of shouty, political comedians who emerged in Britain in the 1980s had had their way, Ronnie Corbett and others of his comic stripe - golfers, Tories, Pringle knitwear enthusiasts - would have been banished to some humour gulag, never again to trouble us with their light entertainment. As things worked out, the alternative comedy Great Leap Forward may have damaged the already shaky reputations of some Littles, Larges, Cannons and Balls, but the sheer, uncomplicated pleasure that Corbett provides never entirely went out of favour.

Earlier this year the BBC brought Corbett back together with his old chum, Ronnie Barker, to present a collection of the finest sketches from their classic 1970s show, The Two Ronnies. Nearly eight million viewers tuned in to watch the repeats.

Flushed with success, the smaller Ronnie is taking to the road with a new show. One report suggests that the act, which arrives in Dublin next week as part of the Bulmers Comedy Festival, might be his first stand-up performance. Can this be possible?

"Well I am not sure what that means," he burbles over the phone from his house in the Home Counties. "It will not just be me. I will have a piano player with me as well. So I think that will make it seem a little less standy-up, though I will, in fact, be standing up. I hope that it will be surprising without actually being astonishing. That's the right balance I think."

Ronnie Corbett grew up - though, considering he still stands at 5ft 1in, not all that much - in Edinburgh as the son of a baker. Following national service in the RAF, he launched himself into the West End's burgeoning cabaret scene.

Years of modest success followed, during which time he met and married comic actress Anne Hart, but it was not until 1966, when he was already in his late thirties, that he achieved proper fame.

The story goes that David Frost, then a sort of comic impresario, caught him supporting our own Danny La Rue. At the time Corbett was due to appear in Twang!!, Lionel Bart's notoriously short-lived follow-up to Oliver!.

"Yes that's right. David used to come into Winston's to see Danny and he spotted me when, yes, I was in the ill-fated Twang!! David took me to the Ritz said: 'If the show comes off - which I think it's going to - then I want you to do The Frost Report on television.' And, fortunately it did come off or I would never have made it onto TV."

Would he have kept up the comedy if that big break hadn't come? "I used to have a theory in my mind that if no serious move had happened before I was 38 - not 40 oddly - then I would move into management or something. Fortunately I was offered The Frost Report when I was 37, so that was a close thing too."

It was on Frost's show that Corbett first met up with Barker. Did they hit it off from the beginning? "I think we did. There was us two and then there was John Cleese, who had a law degree from Cambridge. He was never cruel or nasty, but he had that upper-class, languid feel to him. Ron and I, who had more of a theatrical background and felt more relaxed about doing these sketches live, felt a bit suburban besides him."

The most famous sketch from The Frost Report saw Cleese (hugely tall), Barker (average) and Corbett (tiny) standing together as representatives of, respectively, the upper, middle and lower classes. It sounds as if the routine reflected certain realities on the set.

"Yes, that's right," he chuckles. "There still remains in people's psyche that physical representation of what is grand. They were always rather tall, while the gamekeeper is short - in puttees and boots."

Traditional in their tastes
While Cleese travelled off in surreal directions with Monty Python, Corbett and Barker, more traditional in their tastes, ploughed on separately in various sitcoms and variety shows. The idea for The Two Ronnies came to Bill Cotton, the BBC's near legendary head of light entertainment, during a television blackout at the BAFTA awards. The two men were asked to entertain the fidgety audience and the chemistry was, by all accounts, quite remarkable. The Two Ronnies ran successfully from 1971 until Barker's retirement in 1987.

You could hardly call the show revolutionary, but, in several senses, it was unlike anything else on television. For a start, Ronnie and Ronnie were not a traditional double act: neither was the straight man; neither had a consistent comic persona. It featured longer, more elaborate sketches than you saw elsewhere on television. And then there were Corbett's beautifully paced, rambling monologues, during which, leaning forward from a comfy chair, he worked in gentle digs at "the producer". Of the era's comics, only Dave Allen could ramble more amusingly.

Comedy boffins, when examining the show's success, have suggested that Barker was the better actor, while Corbett was the superior comedian.

"Ron is certainly the most wonderful comic actor," Corbett half-agrees. "I was a bit more of a vaudevilian in background, so I was perhaps a little sillier. I gave him the confidence to be silly and he gave me the confidence to do different voices and be other people. So that combination worked very nicely. We had exactly the same sense of humour. There were never any fights on the show."

Barry Cryer, the great comedian and joke writer, has referred to the gregarious Corbett as an open book and the private Barker as a closed book.

"Yes, I think Barry has a point there. I could talk to the public as myself in the chair, but Ronnie could never do that. He couldn't be himself. He always had to hide behind a moustache or in front of a blackboard."

Corbett says there were never any fights between the two men, but it has been suggested that he was disappointed when Barker decided to call it quits in 1987. Though Corbett has had his own successes - the amusing sit-com Sorry for one - he has never quite regained the status he enjoyed when partnered with the other Ronnie.

"He gave me a long warning that he was going to leave: a good year and a half. He wasn't all that sure of his health at the time. I was a bit disappointed because Sorry was ending then too. But, because we weren't a traditional double act, I wasn't all that concerned. I think we both realised it had gone on long enough."

Keeping busy
Corbett has managed to keep busy over the past few decades. A frequent after-dinner speaker, he looks forward to performing in the Olympia because "it will be nice to have everybody pointing in the right direction for once".

Meanwhile, Rob Brydon of Marion and Geoff fame has suggested that he might finally be getting round to writing Home, a sitcom in which Corbett will play the only male inmate of a care facility for the elderly.

And then there is the golf. Ah yes. The affection that working-class performers such as Corbett, Jimmy Tarbuck and Bruce Forsythe showed for this middle-class pastime particularly irritated the comedy commissars of the 1980s. I wonder how Corbett feels about all that sniping now. The Not The Nine O'Clock News team were particularly cruel about The Two Ronnies.

"I thought it was a bit stupid and inept of them," he says, betraying ill-spirits for the first time. "I have since worked with Griff Rhys-Jones and we are fine about it. But I think Ron was seriously upset. Here we were getting huge figures on Saturday night and he thought it was impertinent of some up-and-coming jesters to pull at our coat tails."

Oxbridge smart-arses? "Yes that's right. And he had a word with Alistair Milne, the director general of the BBC at the time, and said: 'Shouldn't you stop them doing this?' But nothing happened." So did they pay any attention to these suggestions they were out of date? "No. We paid no attention to that at all," he says, coming as close to a snap as anybody so genial could ever come.