The Best of The Two Ronnies

Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett first worked together in 1966 on a show called the The Frost Report with, among others, John Cleese. Sketches featuring the two proved popular and so an increasing amount of material was written to include both men. Their big break came while they were performing at the annual British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) awards ceremony. The Ronnies had to ad-lib for several minutes due to equipment failure and their performance impressed two BBC executives who happened to be in the audience. An offer was made for the two to work on a comedy/variety show to air at 8:15pm on Saturday nights. The original offer was for eight shows, but that was soon extended due to strong ratings. Before finishing in 1987, a total of 98 shows had aired and the program had run for 16 years.

My father was a big fan of the show and the whole family used to tune in for their weekly dose of comedy Ronnie style. Part of the entertainment was watching tears

rolling down my father's cheeks as he roared with laughter at the crazy sketches that were a feature of the show.

"...and it's good night from me... and it's good night from him. Good night!"

On this DVD there are 23 sketches taken from almost every year of production. Unfortunately we don't get to see any footage of the pseudo news reports that always closed the show. but we do get two examples of Ronnie Corbett's monologue. For those of you who haven't seen the show, these featured Ronnie Corbett (a pretty short bloke) sitting in a large arm chair telling seemingly random stories that almost always ended up being joined together as a single joke. Very clever stuff.

This show was produced from 1971 until 1987 for television broadcast and so you shouldn't expect too much from this full frame transfer. Having said that, I feel that the image quality on this disc is as good as is possible given the source material. The image is colourful, sufficiently detailed and generally clear of any MPEG related artefacts. The only artefacts of any note are some minor aliasing, some cross colouration and. on a couple of occasions, some overexposure of small sections of the image.

Easy to listen to, clear and in sync throughout, this Dolby Digital 2.0 transfer is fine but basically monaural. I only noticed the surrounds during one period of applause. My subwoofer went to sleep. Obviously it's not a Two Ronnies fan!

This disc isn't exactly stacked with extras, but we do get well-written and informative biographies for both Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett.

For fans of The Two Ronnies this is a no brainer, for everyone else it's a possible rental.