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The blurb on the back:

The Best Of The Two Ronnies Rolled Into One.
This is a selection of the Two Ronnies' rib-tickling humour culled from their three collections of dialogue published in Star:
But First The News
Nice To Be With You Again and
In A Packed Programme Tonight
After many hours of anguish over which wisecracks to exclude, our compiler finally took the tough decisions (though the responsibility nearly killed him). See if you agree that the BUMPER BOOK is the Two Ronnies at their most uproarious.

Were you a teenager in the 1970s? Then you'll know the full horrors of Saturday night telly on BBC1: Mike 'and this is me' Yarwood, Dick 'ooh you are awful' Emery and That's Life in its Cyril Fletcher/Jake Thackeray days. In this environment, the Two Ronnies were hailed as comic geniuses. So starved of quality were we that I can remember the head of an English faculty at London University in the early-1980s claiming that Ronnie Barker's word play gags were the height of literary humour.

They weren't.

The Two Ronnies were tolerable at best, mostly mediocre and on occasion downright embarrassing. There were even weeks when Barbara Dickson's song was the highpoint.

These books collect the short-form jokes ('Here is the news') that the show was mostly associated with, and they demonstrate the problems with the format:

The Prime Minister held a meeting with the Cabinet today. He also spoke to the bookcase and argued with the chest of drawers.

Shirley Bassey has just had a single come out ... one of the straps broke on her dress.

Here is a message for seven honeymoon couples in a hotel in Peebles: breakfast was served three days ago.

Stop me if your sides are aching too much.

Two men, one of them
hilariously dressed as a woman

Incidentally, have you seen how red Ronnie Corbett's nose is? What was that all about?

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ARTISTIC MERIT: 2/5
ENTERTAINMENT VALUE: 2/5
HIPNESS QUOTIENT: 1/5

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