IT WOULD be difficult to imagine Russell Brand or Ricky Gervais taking a break from stardom to stand behind the counter of an antiques shop in deepest West Oxfordshire.

But that is what comedy legend Ronnie Barker chose to do after deciding he had had enough of television comedy, which he considered increasingly vulgar.

Bad language and gags about bodily functions were repugnant to this national icon.

And after creating and writing so many jokes and sketches, and appearing in such massively successful shows as Porridge, The Two Ronnies and Open All Hours, Mr Barker had also come to believe his own well of humour was drying up.

“I’d run out of ideas, and to be honest, I’d done everything I wanted to do. And I’m sorry to say the material coming through wasn’t such good quality,” he reflected, when asked why he had withdrawn at the height of his fame.

He had settled in the small west Oxfordshire village of Dean, the perfect home for a man determined to disappear off the professional radar. He would also realise one of his few unfulfilled ambitions, to run his own antiques shop.

He opened it in Chipping Norton’s High Street, christening it The Emporium. In many ways it was really just an extension of his hobby of collecting antiques, memorabilia and Victoriana. It was said his postcard collection alone extended to 53,000 items.

The story of his search for peace in the tranquillity of the Oxfordshire countryside, before his death, aged 76, in Katharine House Hospice in Adderbury in 2005, is touchingly told in the biography Remembering Ronnie Barker, published in paperback this month.

Author Richard Webber spent months tracing Mr Barker’s old school friends at the City of Oxford High School and people who remembered his early acting career.

Born in Bedford in 1925, Ronald William George Barker moved to Oxford when still a young child. His family first moved into 386 Cowley Road, before settling into a newly built terraced brick property at 23 Church Cowley Road.

Mr Webber said: “He sought perfection throughout his career and he was fastidious from an early age. Even as a child staging little plays with his mates in the back gardens in Oxford, everything had to be just so.”

All that talent could so easily have been missed, when after first trying his hand at architecture he joined the Westminster Bank’s Cowley Road branch as a junior clerk.

Everything changed in a chance meeting on a showery day in 1946, when he bumped into an old friend, Geoff Broadis, on a street in Oxford.

Mr Webber takes up the story: “Broadis floated an idea which might bring a little excitement into his friend’s life.”

Assuring him there would be plenty of girls around, Broadis, a member of The Theatre Players, suggested that Mr Barker looked in on the group which rehearsed at the St Mary and St John Church Hall, in Cowley Road.

After spells of acting in Aylesbury and Cheshire, Ronnie returned to Oxford in 1951 to join the Oxford Playhouse company.

He made his name there over four years.

As it turned out, working in his antiques shop was not to prove entirely stress free.

Once the star unwittingly bought an antique cabinet from a man who turned out to be a convict. “The crook was apparently dressed in his blue prison uniform and home on leave when he duped Barker into buying the item, which resulted in Ronnie being questioned by police and released without charge.”

Then there was the time when the shop was visited by two under-cover Sun reporters, who offered Mr Barker a silver salver, which had been valued at about £1,000 by a leading auction house. When he offered them £20, the Sun ran a story highlighting the difference between its value and Mr Barker’s low offer.

The little shop run with his wife Joy, who died last year, closed in 1999.

Troubled with diabetes and heart disease, toward the end he would put off seeing friends because he did not want them to see his weight loss.

But Prof Ronald Spiers, who retired to Chipping Norton, recalls seeing Mr Barker at the local branch of Barclays just months before he died.

He said: “I remember waiting in a queue when Ronnie came out from an office with a young attractive manageress, who had a bundle of files under her arm.

She was leading the way and turned to Ronnie saying, ‘ I’m afraid this is something we’ll have to go upstairs for.’ Ronnie replied, ‘Oh, it’s a long time since anyone said that to me’.”

The whole bank queue erupted, little suspecting they may well have witnessed the great Ronnie Barker’s final performance.