The US equivalent of Ronnie was actually Mr. Whippy, the well-known ice-cream fetishist who died while inhaling an ice-cream in 1979.
> > From: "RMStringer"
>
> I am not up on this show. Who died?
> Ronnie Barker, a very famous British comic actor who - I think - didn't really cross the Atlantic.
> Very briefly, he was an actor for about 60 years, and was also an acclaimed comic writer. He started in local theatre in Oxford, and then had a big break in a 1950s radio show called "The Navy Lark" (where he appeared with the third "Doctor Who" Jon Pertwee). In the mid-sixties he appeared in David Frost's "Frost Report" with a young, pre-Monty Python John Cleese, along with his later comedy partner, the tiny Scotsman Ronnie Corbett. Corbett and Barker launched a prime-time TV sketch show called "The Two Ronnies" in 1971/2-ish, and it ran for about 15 years, and was consistently one of the highest rating shows of the time. Later, he became famous for two comedy characters - Norman Stanley Fletcher, the imprisoned criminal in the mid-1970s sit-com "Porridge" and Arkwright, the stuttering skinflint shopkeeper in "Open All Hours", another sit-com which ran for a good deal of the 80s and at times was the biggest rated show in the UK (beating all the soap operas). He retired in 1987, after one final, self-written sitcom called "Clarence" (which wasn't very good) and set up an antiques shop in Chipping Norton (where the KLF played a rave two years later, coincidentally). He ran this shop, quietly, for about 13-14 years, before returning to television, first as the butler to Winston Churchill in a recent biopic, and then in some new "Two Ronnies" sketches which were broadcast this year.
> I'm trying to think of US equivalent of Ronnie Barker, but there probably isn't one. He mixed elements of people like Steve Martin, Mel Brooks and Robin Williams, I suppose. The news programmes this morning have been full of tributes.
> John
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