Life & Mortality Quote by Ronnie Corbett

There is a quietly shrewd showbiz anthropology in Ronnie Corbett's use of "starved". It frames audiences not as fickle consumers but as people missing a basic cultural nutrient: pleasure that doesn't arrive wrapped in irony, homework, or a brand "experience". "Nice, glamorous entertainment" is deliberately unthreatening language, the sort you might hear in a theatre foyer rather than a critics' circle. Corbett isn't arguing for escapism as avoidance; he's arguing for escapism as maintenance.

The list he rolls out - "costumes and gaiety and a singer" - functions like a variety-show inventory, tactile and specific. It's not "content", it's texture: fabric, sparkle, a live voice. That concreteness is the point. In an era of grittier prestige drama and increasingly mediated celebrity, Corbett pitches old-fashioned entertainment as something analog: shared, legible, and generous. You can hear the implicit critique of contemporary culture's default mode of knowingness, where sincerity is often treated as naivete.

Calling it "old-fashioned" isn't self-deprecation so much as a strategic rebrand. He turns nostalgia into durability: "it won't die easily". The subtext is both comforting and competitive. Comforting, because the appetite for pageantry and communal laughter persists across cycles of taste; competitive, because Corbett is defending a tradition - British variety, music hall, light entertainment - that was often dismissed as lightweight even while it quietly held the public's attention. In the end, he's staking a claim that glamour isn't frivolous; it's craft, and craft survives.