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With Christmas coming up I was remembering that when Ronnie Barker died, the BBC did a show called the One Ronnie - a slightly bittersweet idea, a title tinged with sadness. I think enough time has passed for them to now do a show called the No Ronnie. Just the original sets, nothing happening at all, just silence. Maybe the camera pans around trying to find something to focus on, but finds nothing. Perhaps at one point we see an elderly Barbara Dixon sitting waiting to be introduced, but no one introduces us.
It would be a poignant tribute to a classic show, but more importantly very cheap TV, that everyone would nonetheless have to watch, or be accused of disrespecting a great double act.
Someone on Twitter mentioned a sketch they’d seen where there were 20 Ronnies, though it sounds like all twenty looked like the original two. I like the idea of there just being 20 random Ronnies, some of whom aren’t even very good at comedy and have just got the job due to their name. Like a TV executive has just decided that a show will be funnier the more Ronnies you can put in it.
I suppose I had this idea 34 years ago when I came up for the name for our student revue team, the Seven Raymonds. An escalation of the Ronnie idea. A bit enhanced by how difficult it would be to find seven people with that name. The moniker became so familiar that I had sort of forgotten that was the genesis of it. In reality there were six (and then five) of us and none of us were called Raymond. We were very funny. It’s amazing to think that any of that lot might have gone on to make a career in comedy, but three of us have given it a pretty decent try.
And it wasn’t until On The Hour that we started to find the name Ian funny. We wrote an idea called Ian Desk that was news just for people called Ian. It didn’t make it into the show, but we did make it into one of the funnier sketches for the Edinburgh show, the dum show (Coogan, Marber, Lee, Herring and Munnery - would be interested to see the alternate universe where we’d got a TV show out of it, but am pretty glad we didn’t as it was a stressful project and I don’t think it would have been much fun, but it could have been something pretty amazing) and then finally Ian News on Fist of Fun. And then a lifetime of just calling all my characters Ian.
Ian is much funnier than Raymond. Because Raymond is too much of a joke name. Weird how these things work out.
RHLSTP with the legendary and very funny Dragon, Deborah Meaden is now up wherever you get your podcasts -
like here.
