Ronnie Barker

NICE TO BE WITH YOU AGAIN!
by Peter Vincent

Barker & Corbett
THE TWO RONNIES

There's news of two important business mergers: BAC have joined with Cyril Lord's to make flying carpets for the Persian market - And Krispie Bacon Ltd have merged with Rolls Royce to make Sausage Rolls and Royce Krispies.

Some sports news: Fulham FC, worried by falling attendances, have just paid £90,000 for three spectators from Liverpool.

George Rumford, the Neasden Palace striker who committed a vicious foul in Saturday's televised game, was today awarded a six match suspension - four for the offence and two for the action replay.

And finally, a row developed today over Sussex County Council's new library catalogue for 1978. It lists the BR timetable under fiction.

Cover photograph by Don Smith

A Star Book Published in 1977

IT'S HELLO FROM HIM! by Ronnie Barker

When, a little while ago, Ronnie Barker decided to retire, he just left a message on his answer phone. No Positively Final Appearance, no press statement, no fuss.

After nearly forty years, a 'jobbing actor', in his own phrase, was leaving the stage. Farewell Norman Stanley Fletcher, goodbye Piggy Malone, Arkwright, Clarence...

The end of a career that began in 1948 when a seventeen-year-old bank clerk handed in his notice. He was off to join the Manchester Repertory Company, based for obscure reasons in Aylesbury.

'You're mad,' said the bank manager. Stay five or six years and you could be a cashier.'

Instead he, and the rest of us, had to settle for a stage, film and TV career as a brilliant comic actor - and writer. A very professional, well-liked man who made us laugh and laugh.

Bank managers do make mistakes.

© 1988 by Ronnie Barker
First published in Great Britain in 1988 by New English Library hardbacks
First New English Library paperback edition 1989

OPEN ALL HOURS by Christine Sparks

Granville looked down at his short, undistinguished person, wrapped round in a large white pinny. Here he was, a young man in his twenties, already at work in the shop at six-thirty in the morning. What did the future hold for him? A continuing occupation as shop assistant, warehouse attendant, delivery boy, window cleaner and general underpaid dogsbody to Uncle Arkwright?

Uncle Arkwright, of course, didn't see it that way. He asserted that Granville was a lucky lad with no appreciation of his good fortune in being born to an inheritance, always knowing he was secure and need never fear unemployment. Wasn't Granville on the threshold of a satisfying career, learning the trade from the bottom, all found, and wasn't he - in the due process of time - going to inherit this thriving grocery business, Arkwright's life work and his sole reason for existence? Well, his sole reason as long as Nurse Gladys Emmanuel remained adamant to his advances. Even lavish gifts like half a pound of out-of-date butter or one of last year's unsold Christmas novelties from the stockroom couldn't tempt her.

Here they were, Arkwright and Granville both, trapped in a corner grocery that sold everything and stayed open all hours to do it.

Cover photograph shows RONNIE BARKER as Arkwright in the BBC TV series OPEN ALL HOURS
BBC Copyright photograph