As with so many great comedians, what made Ronnie Barker so funny was not so much what he said, but often what he didn’t say. Like Clint Eastwood in his spaghetti western movies, Ronnie Barker understood the potency of letting the tension build before delivering a line, filling the pause with an expression that often said more than his imminent punchline.

In comedy, timing is everything, as it is in so much great art. The pianist Artur Schnabel once said: “The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes — ah, that is where the art resides!” Barker shared that genius. He was able to make audiences laugh even more at his pauses than at his words. Often it was when Barker’s face — by turns lugubrious, impish, hurt — merely hinted at what the punchline might be that we laughed the hardest. Getting people to laugh by saying nothing might look easy, but it is a trick that only the greatest comedians can pull off.

Barker belonged to that generation which formed a bridge between the sauciness of Max Miller’s music-hall patter that always hinted but rarely said anything fruitier than “fig”, and the Eighties breed of “alternative” comics who often relied on nothing more than hissing the word “Thatcher” to trigger Pavlovian guffaws from their audiences.

With his long-standing, but short, partner Ronnie Corbett, Barker revelled in the old-fashioned comedy sketch — word play (“Four candles? No, fork handles”); singing songs in the guise of yokels, dressing up as women — which once formed the bedrock of Saturday night family television, along with shows like Morecambe & Wise.

Although he turned Norman Stanley Fletcher, the star of Dick Clement’s and Ian La Frenais’s Porridge, into one of the most memorable characters of British sitcom, alongside Alf Garnett and Basil Fawlty, it was the warmth of his personality that filtered like sunlight through episode after episode of The Two Ronnies that made Barker so loved.

It wasn’t just that, physically, Barker fitted so perfectly as the middle-class man in the famous Frost Report sketch in which John Cleese, Barker and Corbett conveyed a visual portrait of Britain’s class divides; Barker, thoughout a long career, always came across as an emblem and a representative of middle England. He could have been a bank manager. It surprised nobody to learn that when he quit showbusiness he became an antiques dealer in the Cotswolds. Unlike many TV performers who were larger than life, or who fanned out their feathers like peacocks when they walked off the street and into the beam of a TV studio spotlight, Barker always looked as if he had just arrived by bus from his three-bedroomed semi in the suburbs, and would be returning there just as soon as the cameras were switched off again.

He shunned the limelight, rarely gave interviews, and described himself as “really boring without a script” — even though he was the author of many of the Two Ronnies sketches.

You could imagine Bruce Forsyth or Jimmy Tarbuck playing in celebrity golf tournaments. But you could only imagine Barker walking his dog. It was perhaps fitting that he was rare among stars in being recognisable by the shorthand of his sensible black spectacle frames.

Comedy classic: The Two Ronnies on marriage

Comedy classic: the problem of pismonunciation

Comedy classic: The Four Candles sketch

Was Porridge his best work?
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