> From: "RMStringer"

> I am not up on this show.  Who died?

Ronnie Barker, a very famous British comic actor who - I think - didn't really cross the Atlantic.

Very briefly, he was an actor for about 60 years, and was also an acclaimed comic writer.  He started in local theatre in Oxford, and then had a big break in a 1950s radio show called "The Navy Lark" (where he appeared with the third "Doctor Who" Jon Pertwee).  In the mid-sixties he appeared in David Frost's "Frost Report" with a young, pre-Monty Python John Cleese, along with his later comedy partner, the tiny Scotsman Ronnie Corbett.  Corbett and Barker launched a prime-time TV sketch show called "The Two Ronnies" in 1971/2-ish, and it ran for about 15 years, and was consistently one of the highest rating shows of the time.  Later, he became famous for two comedy characters - Norman Stanley Fletcher, the imprisoned criminal in the mid-1970s sit-com "Porridge" and Arkwright, the stuttering skinflint shopkeeper in "Open All Hours", another sit-com which ran for a good deal of the 80s and at times was the biggest rated show in the UK (beating all the soap operas).  He retired in 1987, after one final, self-written sitcom called "Clarence" (which wasn't very good) and set up an antiques shop in Chipping Norton (where the KLF played a rave two years later, coincidentally).  He ran this shop, quietly, for about 13-14 years, before returning to television, first as the butler to Winston Churchill in a recent biopic, and then in some new "Two Ronnies" sketches which were broadcast this year.

I'm trying to think of US equivalent of Ronnie Barker, but there probably isn't one.  He mixed elements of people like Steve Martin, Mel Brooks and Robin Williams, I suppose.  The news programmes this morning have been full of tributes.

John

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