With fifty years' experience of wordplay and punch lines, Ronnie Barker, who has died aged 76, knew that few obituarists and headline writers would be able to resist a twist on his celebrated trick signoff with Ronnie Corbett on The Two Ronnies: "It's goodnight from me ... and it's goodnight from him."
But, behind the gut instinct for belly laughs that made him the most accomplished comic actor of his generation, Barker was obsessed with the timing of that final goodnight. Fear of an early death had shaped his career and robbed viewers of nearly two decades of potential performances.
The actor had retired from television in 1987, concerned by the heart-related deaths on stage of his peers Eric Morecambe and Leonard Rossiter and the premature loss from a coronary of Richard Beckinsale, his co-star in the prison sitcom Porridge, aged only 31.
Already suffering questionable blood pressure, an alarmed Barker became a very rare example of a performer who walks away while still in high demand.
Three years ago, presumably concluding that the risk of dying very young was receding, the then 73-year-old Barker unexpectedly returned to play Winston Churchill's valet opposite Albert Finney in the award-winning TV drama The Gathering Storm and then a dyspeptic general in the film My House in Umbria.
Television, though, was where Barker had been most missed and, last year, he reunited with Corbett to introduce favourite songs and sketches from their series between 1971 and 1986 in The Two Ronnies Sketchbook. But the heart problems the actor had long anticipated now occurred and he announced his retirement once more.
Those Ronnies anthologies drew huge audiences, bringing the double entendres and spoof songs of the pair to a new generation, and proved that Barker's self-imposed exile had not affected his reputation, although his re-run and DVD immortality is likely to come less from The Two Ronnies than from Porridge, the Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais comedy in which, from 1974 t0 1977, he played canny old lag Norman Stanley Fletcher serving a five-year stretch.
Almost all British sitcoms are about class and hierarchy and the theme was present in Fletcher's teasing and bettering of the pompous senior warder played by Fulton McKay. But the special quality Barker brought to the part - and which raised the show to the holy trinity of British sitcoms, alongside Fawlty Towers and Dad's Army - was the nagging acknowledgement behind the gags of the failure and loneliness of the old con's condition.
This poignancy was achieved because the key to Barker - lifting him finally above even as brilliant a contemporary as Eric Morecambe - was that he was primarily an actor rather than a comic. Probably only Peter Sellers matches him in this respect and, revealingly, Barker was offered Inspector Clouseau when Sellers died, turning it down. Although a lesser part than Fletcher, Barker's stammering shopkeeper Arkwright in Open All Hours, which ran between 1976 and 1985 on BBC1, was a remarkably sustained piece of technical acting.
Barker's theatrical grounding had come from appearing in at least 350 productions in weekly rep and later, in the West End, in Tom Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound in 1968. He was Bottom in a TV production of A Midsummer Night's Dream and the theatre director Sir Peter Hall, a great admirer, offered him the role of Falstaff at the National in 1986. Barker told his official biographer, Bob McCabe, that nervousness about the prospect of this role partly prompted his first retirement shortly afterwards.
TV in the 1960s was largely run by producers recruited from variety and music hall, and they favoured physically mismatched acts. So, in The Frost Report in 1966, the portly Barker was often posed in triplicate with the pixie-like Ronnie Corbett and the beanpole John Cleese. These height gaps prompted a visual gag about social distinctions in a celebrated sketch in which the three men represented the upper, middle and lower strata of British life, each literally and metaphorically looking down on the other.
It was, however, a class similarity. Barker and Corbett, unlike most colleagues on the Frost shows, had not gone to college, which encouraged the development of their double act, in a mirror of the big and little pairing that was already working for Morecambe & Wise. In this case, a coincidence of baptism allowed the later pair to establish a rival first-name brandname as The Two Ronnies.
Yet even in his sketch-show career, Barker was set apart from Corbett, Morecambe, Wise and most other comedians of the period by the fact that he wrote his own material. This distinction went unnoticed for a long time, even by most of those working on the programme because, wary of producers thinking that they had to use his stuff, Barker submitted his work under other names, primarily Gerald Wiley.
The shadow of "wily" in that name is typical. Raised on radio comedy, Barker wrote verbally rather than visually for television, delighting in wordplay. One Wiley script, Fork Handles, won a poll to find the nation's favourite sketch. It consists of multiplying misunderstandings in which Corbett, as a shop assistant, struggles to ascertain whether Barker's stubborn shopper requires "four candles" or "fork handles", "hoes" or a "hose".
Barker's most memorable moments on the show all involve words coming wrongly out of mouths: a Mastermind sketch in which the contestant gives his answers one step out of a sequence and another featuring Dr Spooner at home. Barker's constantly erect antenna for the slipperiness of human tongues also showed in his hobby of collecting saucy seaside postcards.
The writer's superstition about pseudonyms was perhaps proved correct when a rare work credited to his birth-name, the stage play Mum, was savaged by critics. But the motivation for the play was characteristic of his commitment to his family: he wrote it to showcase the talents of his actress daughter, Charlotte, one of his three children with his wife, Joy.
Barker disliked public attention and was distressed when his retirement occupation running a Cotswolds antique shop was more than once disrupted by tabloid reporters. Recently he had been troubled by publicity surrounding his son Adam.
We will never know what roles Ronnie Barker might have played if he had not been frightened away by his health in the late 80s but, by then, he had already done the work that would earn him immortality. While The Two Ronnies remains well-remembered and influential - its signature routine of ridiculous news bulletins delivered solemnly recognisable in Not The Nine O'Clock News and On The Hour - a lot of Barker's and Corbett's comedy together is too sexist for the humour police.
Porridge never seems to go off boil, no matter how long you watch it. Though sentenced to only half a decade in 1974, Norman Stanley Fletcher will stay in Slade prison until they throw away the TV.