Perched on his famous armchair at the front of the London Palladium stage, Ronnie Corbett spied movement in the stalls just as he was about to launch into his story.
It was his 11-year-old daughter Emma rising from her seat and leading her younger sister Sophie into the aisle and out of the auditorium.
This was their father’s solo slot in The Two Ronnies’ stage show – his inimitable meandering monologue which was, by now, a national institution on TV.
And here was his daughter pointedly snubbing it and making her sister an accomplice. What made her do it?
‘It was boring,’ she says. ‘That’s just what he did. I didn’t know that was hugely talented.’
Emma Corbett, 58, is sitting in the magnificent garden of the five-bedroom home next to Muirfield Golf Course in Gullane which her father bought in 1980.
She used to come here during school holidays. For the last few years, it has been her home – a seemingly idyllic East Lothian bolthole with gorgeous views across the Firth of Forth.
From a distance, Corbett family life surely seemed idyllic too. First class travel; posh hotels; celebrity parties …
Emma Corbett in the garden of the family home in Gullane, East Lothian
Corbett and Barker were close on screen, but not socially
Up close, it was filled with turmoil for the elder daughter who craved a normality that was wholly incompatible with her father’s showbusiness career. She began to loathe the attention he attracted: ‘We’d go out to the theatre and the queue for the ice cream would be shorter than the queue for my Dad.
‘When my Dad walked down the street it was like Aladdin. It was like he was almost magical – and for me that was just beyond tiresome.
‘I had no time, I felt, to be with my Dad. And people [approaching him] would say things like “I know I shouldn’t…”
‘Up until about 13, I’d let them do that and then, at 14, I’d go “So why are you?”. And then I’d get the look. My Dad was never rude to anyone ever.’
In her rebellion she became increasingly rude – and unhinged. She was a headstrong teen, careering off the rails, getting thrown out of private school and, as she approached adulthood, showing ominous signs of mental health problems.
In her 20s she would be incarcerated in psychiatric units three times. She suffered appalling depression and became a regular no-show at family gatherings.
‘I don’t think I could cope with life,’ she says. ‘And I think I learned to go to dark places. And the more I couldn’t cope with life the more I went to the dark place – and then I became really good at it. And then I spent more time in the dark place than I did in the light.’
A sense of dread, then, attended many of Ronnie Corbett’s years in the spotlight.
Emma, left, and aged 33 with her father and younger sister Sophie, is following in Ronnie’s footsteps
The Edinburgh-born star and his wife Anne – herself a former musical comedy performer – fretted endlessly over what would become of the daughter who seemed to exist under a cloud.
Well, her career path is finally set. She has become a stand-up comedian.
‘My parents had to be dead for me to start this stuff,’ she says. But why? Wouldn’t they have been thrilled to see her continuing the family tradition?
‘I doubt any of the Beckham children are going to try and play football,’ she says in response.
‘We are not talking a mediocre comedian here. We are talking, you know, “icon” was the word used when he died. That is one of the painful things about Dad – he’s such a f****** high bar setter, everything about him, and that makes it tricky. So now I’m not letting anyone down.’
She may be several inches taller than his 5ft 1in, but there are echoes of his features in hers.
There is a familiarity in the timbre of her voice, even if her refined
London vowels are distinct from her father’s Edinburgh ones. Yet almost no one at the live shows she has done so far has twigged that she is the daughter of comedy royalty.
True, her frequent swearing may have thrown people off the scent. She knows well that would have been her father’s central criticism of her routines.
Her first performances were five-minute affairs at Edinburgh venue Monkey Barrel which, at the time, had a mural featuring her father at the back of the stage.
‘So I had to stand with him painted next to me – nobody knowing. It’s weird. I think maybe two people have gone “Interesting surname, you’re not by any chance …” I think people think “There’s no way she’s related; I won’t ask; that will be embarrassing. Of course she’s not Ronnie Corbett’s daughter.’
Emma Corbett was born in April 1967, a year after her brother Andrew, who had a hole in his heart and survived only weeks.
‘Mum and Dad weren’t married when he was born. They got married in the weeks that Andrew was alive, and they had him baptised, and then they lost him.
‘That’s a lot for a family. And also, now that I know what I know about mental health and us as humans, I was born to grieving parents. No wonder I was anxious.’
‘Is she still alive? Is she still alive?’ she repeats frantically, mimicking a pair of panic-stricken parents.
A year later, her sister Sophie was born, and while the younger sibling embraced the ‘glitter’ that went with family life, the older one bitterly resented the disruptions.
She remembers the summer seasons in seaside resorts where her father would perform for nine weeks on the trot.
‘So we’d all go – guinea pigs, dogs – we’d all go, rent a house, very nice, but we’d finish the summer term at a new school. That’s sh*t. How do you integrate?
‘My sister learned to be sweet – is sweet – like a butterfly, and I’m ballsy and funny and that’s how I got away with it.’
Far more disruptive times lay ahead. In 1979, Australia’s Channel 9 commissioned its own series of The Two Ronnies and Corbett and Barker moved there, families in tow, for more than a year.
It was a remarkable sojourn – a chance for their families to observe at close quarters one of the most fascinating partnerships in showbusiness: warm, even devoted, yet strangely distant.
‘When it was work, it was love. And I suppose it was so intense that it was quite nice to get a break from each other to refresh.
‘The closest we were is when we all went to Australia. So, enormous warmth, very different characters.
‘For example, Dad wouldn’t say: “Oh, it’s a beautiful Sunday. Let’s get the Barkers over for a barbecue”. It wasn’t that sort of relationship.
‘My Dad was boundaried and that was “work” so he would see that as unnecessary.’
Arriving back at Old Palace School, in Croydon, young Emma was horrified to find she was being dropped down a year because – thanks to Australia – she was now behind in many subjects.
‘That’s when I went “I’m getting off the bus”.’
Within months, she was kicked out of school. ‘In the nicest way,’ she adds. ‘Because everything happens nicely when you are Ronnie Corbett’s daughter.’
She was sent to a tutorial college in South Kensington – with large gaps in the timetable to get up to mischief in the capital.
‘Suddenly I was getting a train up to the centre of London and meeting a whole bunch of delinquents. We were all bright kids who had lost our way and our parents had a few quid.’
By 21, she was a mother – the relationship with the father didn’t last – and, within a few years was so troubled she went into a psychiatric facility while her parents took care of her son, Tom.
‘I joke that I’ve been sectioned – of course, I haven’t because I’m posh, but I’ve had three incarcerations.’
Were they against her will?
‘The first time, definitely. The next two times I had a better understanding of why it was happening. So, I think, 15-and-a-half months of my life I’ve spent in a psychiatric unit.’
The roots of her recovery lie in a showbiz function where her father was chatting to Monty Python star Michael Palin. Corbett told him just how worried he was about his older daughter and Palin gave him a name – psychiatrist Gerald Libby.
‘I saw so many West End Harley Street boys and I would say anything that fell out of my mouth – they didn’t get me.
‘It felt like they were trying to put right something that couldn’t be right – and then I met Gerald Libby who, without a shadow of a doubt, saved my life.’
At 30, she gave birth to her second child – daughter Tilly – but remained fragile. A few months of her pregnancy were spent in The Priory. Although she married the father, the union was short-lived.
But, in adulthood, she knew that her parents were firmly in her corner. ‘They were brilliant,’ she says. ‘They threw everything at it.
‘Dad, who had always been unbelievably busy – very kind, generous, but not ridiculously generous – when I got properly ill, he was amazing.’
Now a single mother of two, she took a job as a librarian at Bede’s School in Sussex because the post gave her 75 per cent off the fees.
She later became a house matron, where her natural empathy with teenagers and their problems soon suggested a way forward.
She trained as a therapist, eventually establishing her own private practice.
‘My favourites are school refusers – my favourites are me, really. I am not a therapist who will sit in the sh*t with people for very long any more. So I will hear and watch and then I will call them out and challenge it.’
By the time her father died, aged 85, in 2016, he knew that his daughter had turned her life around and was now helping to turn others around.
In the garden of his former Scottish home, she mentions the gap in the wall which Muirfield Golf Club cut for her father to walk straight on to the course. In his later years, they would leave a golf buggy there for him.
Photos of the star in a flat cap still adorn the downstairs toilet. It was here in Gullane that the older Corbett daughter became a carer for her ailing mother during lockdown. Life, it seemed, had come full circle.
‘It was slow and difficult at times – it was a miracle I didn’t kill her myself,’ she says laughing.
‘And then suddenly it was over, and I didn’t know what to do with myself.’
Anne Corbett died aged 90 in 2023 and her daughter stayed on in a house filled with family memories. She discovered that her parents had kept all her cards and letters of apology for her errant behaviour down the years.
‘It’s quite hysterical – “there are no words for my behaviour”. I was always very good at apologising.’
For now, the house is in a state of disarray. She is moving into a one-bedroom wooden chalet she has had built in the garden and the Corbett home is to become a short-term holiday let.
In her live shows, she majors on many of her own misadventures. Her last husband left her for a religious cult, she tells audiences (he really did) – he found God while she found cake.
She rails at the fearful, woke tendencies of modern comedy – while admitting she won’t go anywhere near gender ID – and, when asked if stand-up has become too Left-wing, answers emphatically: ‘Yes! Yes!’
So far, her father has been largely absent from her routines, but that is about to change. ‘Next year I’m hoping it will be a lot more about the extraordinary story of being brought up famous.’
She adds: ‘It’s a tricky bridge to privilege because my life has been tough but it ain’t that tough and I don’t want them not to like me, so it’s going to have to be crafted very well.’
What would her father think of her new direction in life?
‘I think he really would have approved of me being brave enough. He always thought I had undersold myself. However, he would not like my language.’
After every gig, she comes home and ‘unpicks’ her show in her head with the comedy master whose own routine she boycotted as a child all those years ago.
What does he say to her?
‘He says “Trust your instinct, my dear one. You’ve waited a long time. Never take it for granted and never stop working hard”.’
- Emma Corbett is appearing at Corbett’s Comedy Cabaret at Fringe by the Sea in North Berwick on August 6. She also features in Five Mugs, No Tea, from August 11 to 24, at Edinburgh’s Leith Depot.
