Monthly Archives: September 2023

Film, TV, and Theatre

The Two Ronnies’ Mastermind Sketch (1980)

Leave a comment

Like Morecambe and Wise before them, the comedy partnership of Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett as the Two Ronnies was one made in heaven. Two strikingly affable guys with naturally funny bones, remarkable chemistry, and an obvious mutual deep friendship, the Two Ronnies’ legacy has happily been besmirched by neither time nor scandal. Their TV show was a hugely popular feature of Saturday night entertainment from 1971 to 1987 and everyone growing up during this period will remember their shows with great fondness, and perhaps conjure a mental picture of the Ronnies as newsreaders, reading spoof news items and ending each show with:

Corbett: That’s all we’ve got time for, so it’s “Goodnight” from me.

Barker: And it’s “Goodnight” from him.

Both: Goodnight!

The Ronnies had met each other back in 1963 and first appeared on television together in 1966 in The Frost Report with David Frost and John Cleese. However, their big break occurred as a result of an eleven-minute technical hitch at a BAFTA awards ceremony at the London Palladium in 1970, in which they filled in, unprepared and unscripted, with such aplomb that two audience members, Bill Cotton and Sir Paul Fox (the Head of Light Entertainment and the Controller of BBC1 respectively), offered them a show on the BBC!

The Two Ronnies show was filled with sketches, either standalone or featuring recurring characters, and often involving clever word-play (their Four Candles sketch being a case in point). Many of the jokes revolved around Corbett’s lack of height, with the self-deprecatory Ronnie C delivering many of them himself:

Barker: This next part does suit Ronnie C. right down to the ground.

Corbett: Mind you, that’s not far is it?”

The Ronnies also had their own solo section: Ronnie B usually appearing as the head of some ridiculously-named organisation, and Ronnie C delivering a discursive monologue to camera from his famous armchair. Each series also had an ongoing comic serial featuring private detectives Charley Farley and Piggy Malone (remember The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town?), giving ample scope to guests such as Diana Dors and Kate O’Mara to ham it up.

My favourite sketch though is this classic from 1980, the hilarious Mastermind sketch, which you can enjoy below and then perhaps go on to read the transcript of the revised, expanded (and in some places even corrected) version which was performed as part of their 1983 London Palladium residency.

Transcript:

MAGNUS: And so to our final contender. Your name, please?

SMITHERS: Good evening.

MAGNUS: Thank you. In the first heat your chosen subject was Answering Questions Before They Were Asked. This time you have chosen to Answer the Question Before Last each time. Is that correct?

SMITHERS: Charlie Smithers.

MAGNUS: And your time starts now. What is palaeontology?

SMITHERS: Yes, absolutely correct.

MAGNUS: Correct. What is the name of the directory that lists members of the peerage?

SMITHERS: A study of old fossils.

MAGNUS: Correct. Who are David Owen and Sir Geoffrey Howe?

SMITHERS: Burke’s.

MAGNUS: Correct. What’s the difference between a donkey and an ass?

SMITHERS: One’s a Social Democrat, the other’s a member of the Cabinet.

MAGNUS: Correct. Complete the quotation, “To be or not to be…”

SMITHERS: They’re both the same.

MAGNUS: Correct. What is Bernard Manning famous for?

SMITHERS: That is the question.

MAGNUS: Correct. Who is the present Archbishop of Canterbury?

SMITHERS: He’s a fat man who tells blue jokes.

MAGNUS: Correct. What do people kneel on in church?

SMITHERS: The Most Reverend Robert Runcie.

MAGNUS: Correct. What do tarantulas prey on?

SMITHERS: Hassocks.

MAGNUS: Correct. What would you use a ripcord to pull open?

SMITHERS: Large flies.

MAGNUS: Correct. What did Marilyn Monroe always claim to wear in bed?

SMITHERS: A parachute.

MAGNUS: Correct. What was the next new TV station to go on the air after Channel Four?

SMITHERS: Chanel Number Five.

MAGNUS: Correct. What do we normally associate with Bedlam?

SMITHERS: Breakfast television.

MAGNUS: Correct. What are jockstraps?

SMITHERS: Nutcases.

MAGNUS: Correct. What would a jockey use a stirrup for?

SMITHERS: An athletic support.

MAGNUS: Correct. Arthur Scargill is well known for what?

SMITHERS: He puts his foot in it.

MAGNUS: Correct. Who was the famous clown who made millions laugh with his funny hair?

SMITHERS: The leader of the mineworkers’ union.

MAGNUS: Correct. What would a decorator use methylene chlorides to make?

SMITHERS: Coco.

MAGNUS: Correct. What did Henri Toulouse-Lautrec do?

SMITHERS: Paint strippers.

MAGNUS: Correct. What is Dean Martin famous for?

SMITHERS: Is he an artist?

MAGNUS: Yes – what kind of artist?

SMITHERS: Erm… pass.

MAGNUS: Yes, that’s near enough. What make of vehicle is the standard London bus?

SMITHERS: A Singer.

MAGNUS: Correct. In 1892, Brandon Thomas wrote a famous long-running English farce – what is it?

SMITHERS: British Leyland.

MAGNUS: Correct. Complete the following quotation about Shirley Williams: “Her heart may be in the right place but her…”

SMITHERS: “Charley’s Aunt”.

MAGNUS: Correct, and you have scored 22 and no passes!

The Two Ronnies
Poetry

Alexander Pope’s An Essay On Criticism (1711)

Leave a comment

When it comes to literary “wits”, two names are often bandied about, namely Samuel Johnson and Oscar Wilde, but honourable mention should be reserved for a veritable club of wits that thrived in early 18th century London. Founded in 1714, The Scriblerus Club was an informal association of writers comprising prominent figures of the English literary scene such as the satirists Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and John Gay. One of the club’s purposes was to ridicule pretentious writing of the era which they did through the persona of a fictitious literary hack, Martinus Scriblerus. They were the Private Eye of their time.

Swift would become famous for his 1726 prose satire Gulliver’s Travels; John Gay for The Beggar’s Opera in 1728; and Alexander Pope for a series of erudite mock-heroic narrative poetry including The Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad, and An Essay on Criticism. Despite its dry title, the latter was indeed poetry, one of Pope’s first major poems, in fact, and one which had already been published prior to the coming together of the Scriblerati. It is the source of the famous quotations “To err is human; to forgive, divine“, “A little learning is a dang’rous thing“, and “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread“, which is a pretty impressive set of additions to the lexicon for just one poem.

An Essay on Criticism was composed in heroic couplets (pairs of rhyming lines of iambic pentameter) and written in the manner of the Roman satirist Horace (65–8 BCE), known for his playful criticism of the many and varied social vices of Roman society through his light-hearted odes. Essentially, Pope’s poem is a Horatian-style verse essay offering advice about the chief literary ideals of his age and critiquing writers and critics who failed to attain his (evidently pretty high) standards.

Pope’s opening couplets contend that bad criticism is even worse than bad writing, thus signalling that even critics should be on their guard, not just pure writers. Dare I say, it has an element of contemporary “rap battles” or “roasts” with its gentle ribbing of inferior writers; it’s not too hard to imagine a modern-day rendering of these lines, perhaps with a mike-dropping flourish at the end:

‘Tis hard to say, if greater Want of Skill
Appear in Writing or in Judging ill;
But, of the two, less dang’rous is th’ Offence,
To tire our Patience, than mis-lead our Sense:
Some few in that, but Numbers err in this,
Ten Censure wrong for one who Writes amiss;
A Fool might once himself alone expose,
Now One in Verse makes many more in Prose.

Pope points out common faults in poetry such as settling for easy and clichéd rhymes:

While they ring round the same unvary’d Chimes,
With sure Returns of still expected Rhymes.
Where-e’er you find the cooling Western Breeze,
In the next Line, it whispers thro’ the Trees;
If Crystal Streams with pleasing Murmurs creep,
The Reader’s threaten’d (not in vain) with Sleep.

The couplets are impeccably and relentlessly delivered, 372 in all, each rapped out in that steady da-dum da-dum da-dum da-dum da-dum iambic pentameter. Pope only breaks out of iambic pentameter once, and that’s deliberate:

A needless Alexandrine ends the song,
That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along

The second line of this couplet is itself an Alexandrine, which is iambic hexameter, a form that Pope evidently regarded as laboured and inelegant with that extra da-dum and which this line demonstrates (geddit?). The whole piece is a masterclass in poetry, and all written when Pope was just twenty-two, so take that, pretentious and turgid writers of the 1700s!

Alexander Pope
Music

Sam & Dave’s Soul Man (1967)

Leave a comment

In the sixties, just as Berry Gordy up in Detroit was driving the Motown sound, down in Memphis the most influential creator and promoter of that crossover of blues/soul/pop music known as the Memphis sound was Stax Records, founded in 1957 by Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton (Stewart/Axton = Stax). Unprecedented in that time of racial tension and strife in the South, Stax’s staff and artists were ethnically integrated, including their legendary house band Booker T & the MGs, who played on hundreds of recordings by artists including Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, and Bill Withers.

Booker T & the MGs c. 1967 (L–R): Donald “Duck” Dunn, Booker T. Jones (seated), Steve Cropper, Al Jackson Jr.

Another successful Stax act was Sam & Dave, made up of harmoniously-compatible soul singers Samuel Moore and David Prater, and today let’s enjoy their 1967 recording, Soul Man, written by Isaac Hayes and David Porter. Hayes had found the inspiration for the song in the turmoil of the Civil Rights Movement. In July 1967 he had watched a television newscast about the aftermath of the 12th Street riot in Detroit, Michigan, and noted that black residents had daubed the word “soul” onto their buildings in the hope that the rioters would pass them by – analogous to the biblical story of the Passover, it was their way of saying “Please don’t wreck my building, I’m one of you” (so to speak). The idea morphed in Hayes’ mind into an expression of pride and defiance: “I’m a soul man!”.

The MGs were drafted in to record the song, with the help of horns from that other reliable Stax house band, the Mar-Keys, and the result was an instant smash that would enter the Grammy Hall of Fame. Sam and Dave take it in turns to sing the verses, joining in together for the choruses, and complementing each other seamlessly. One of Steve Cropper’s guitar licks is introduced by the exclamation “Play it, Steve”, a nuance that was repeated some years later when Soul Man was included as one of the soul classics paid tribute to by the makers of 1980’s The Blues Brothers movie (in which Cropper makes an appearance).

Here’s a TV appearance by the duo singing Soul Man (sans Cropper and thus sans the “Play it Steve” snippet but hey…) to an audience that doesn’t quite yet know how to move to the rhythm!

Sam and Dave