He might never have met the bartender, a between-jobs Scottish performer who shared Barker’s forename. Ronnie Corbett hailed from Edinburgh. As he served Ronnie a drink, they spent a few moments talking about this and that, actors shooting the breeze. In a few short years these two casual acquaintances would become one of the nation’s best­loved double acts.

When Ronnie Barker died last week, there were many tributes to his genius as a comic actor. But it was as one half of The Two Ronnies that he really came to prominence and it all started that night.

“It was a theatrical club,” Barker recalled. “You could have lunch and dinner there and the bar could be said to be open till about 3.30am. It should have closed at 11pm but it was one of those sort of places that I think the police didn’t bother with. It wasn’t sleazy, it was just an actors’ drinking club and the actors simply carried on drinking halfway through the night.

“I used to go in and there he was behind the bar. He had a part-time job there. That’s where I met him first. Then, he was just the man who was serving. I knew who he was, I knew he was an actor, but we didn’t become chums then. We first became chums when we met again three years later on the Frost show.”

David Frost had ushered in humour with a sharper edge that made audiences sit up and pay attention. While his Cambridge contemporary Peter Cook was shepherding the British “satire boom” via his London nightclub, The Establishment, Frost was packaging it wholesale and serving it up into the mainstream courtesy of television. As the front man of both That Was the Week that Was (TW3) in 1962-63 and Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life in 1964, he had established himself as a unique force in British television, equally comfortable cracking gags or interviewing leading politicians.

In March 1966 he launched his new series, The Frost Report, designed as an irreverent look at one particular topic each week. It featured a number of sketches for which Frost assembled a team of three — John Cleese, Ronnie Corbett and Ronnie Barker. “Ronnie Corbett and John Cleese were suggested by David Frost,” Barker said.

“David had seen Ronnie when he was working with Danny LaRue at Danny LaRue’s club. And then the producer Jimmy Gilbert put me in, and that’s when Ronnie and I teamed up because they were all a bit university and we were grammar school boys. Everyone goes to university now, but (then), university was considered a cut above.

“So they were a bit grand, especially John Cleese who was very grand. He looked down on Ronnie, and Ronnie was right down there. John was nice, but nevertheless we felt that he and David were ‘them’, and we were ‘us’. There was no enmity or no real distance, but if you had to group together in twos, naturally Ronnie and I would go together as John and David did.”

Corbett also vividly remembered the early days of the Frost Report. “He (Barker) was doing quite a lot of radio shows like The Navy Lark at that time. I don’t think we thought about it in any momentous way but we knew each other a bit because I had worked with his wife Joy in a pantomime in Bromley where she was the stage manager.”

A lack of a university background was not the only thing that the two Ronnies had in common. “That linked us, it’s true,” said Corbett. “Also the fact that we were much more experienced theatrical performers than both of them, Ronnie in particular. We’d knocked about a bit.

“John used to get very, very nervous at doing live television, but Ronnie and I didn’t. I think it’s also funny that both Ronnie and I were brought up and raised in big university towns, Oxford and Edinburgh, with the university glowering over both of us, although we didn’t attend it. There was a comfort thing between us, I’d say.”

“University then was very different,” agreed Barker. “There was a university and there was a town and they didn’t seem to mix much, although of course when I was at the Oxford Playhouse it was very different because there was a very famous coffee bar there that was always full of students and actors.