Artistes of the Month

Also featured: Ronnie Corbett, George Alagiah

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Keith Elliott

Keith Elliott is one of the UK's best speakers on The Secret of Success in handling change.

Keith has built a first class reputation as a motivational speaker because his energy enthusiasm and participative style creates 'electricity' that really inspires audiences. He mixes his Liverpool humour with the very latest 'leading edge' insights from NLP [the science of achievement] to show how individuals, teams and organisations can achieve their goals. Keith takes his audience on a motivational journey more Participative Powerful and Positive than they have ever experienced before. He is therefore an ideal speaker whenever teams, sections and organisations face rapid change.

For many years he was the top rated speaker for the Institute of Bankers, on five separate occasions he's given 'Thought for the Day' for a full week on BBC Radio Merseyside on 'Positive Thinking', his successful Motivational course for the long term unemployed in Liverpool was featured in every national newspaper with Keith going live on coast to coast American Radio and on BBC Radio 2, and he's also worked with professional footballers.

Keith has addressed conferences, seminars and dinners and presented to audiences from 15 Senior Bank managers to 1,500 company staff in a London Theatre.
His client list includes a host of public and private sector organisations including BT, Barclays Mercantile, Royal Bank of Scotland, Fiat, Lafarge, Cattle's Holdings and the British Print Association.

'You certainly achieved a level of audience participation that I would never have thought possible. Your own very positive style and positive message seems to be infectious and people haven't stopped talking about it since. I'm sure you have made a lasting impression on many of them, both at home as well as in their business life.'
BT

'Very very good - I would go so far as to say life changing in terms of my own attitude.'
BARCLAYS BANK

Click here to see Keith's online video showreel

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Ronnie Corbett

Also lurking in the audience was a certain David Frost who invited Ronnie to join John Cleese and Ronnie Barker on the FROST REPORT, which was to become one of the most influential television shows of the 1960's. "David turned my life around," is Ronnie's assessment. The 'I know my place' sketch in which Cleese and the two Ronnies stood in a line representing the British Class system is still revered as a comedy classic.

After subsequent television successes with FROST ON SUNDAY, CORBETT'S FOLLIES - a variety show, and NO, THAT'S ME OVERHERE - a sitcom with Rosemary Leach, Ronnie got perhaps his biggest break - thanks to, of all things, a cock-up at the Bafta Awards. The diminutive Ronnie C and the well-built Ronnie B, then the resident comedians on LWT's Frost On Sunday, were hosting the live ceremony when a technical hitch meant they had to fill in, unscripted, for several minutes. "We managed to hold it together," says Ronnie, "and Paul Fox (a high ranking executive at the BBC) is reputed to have turned to Bill Cotton (BBC's Head of Light Entertainment) and said, 'what about these two for the BBC?' We'd never have thought of it ourselves, but The Two Ronnies was not a difficult title to come by." And so a comic legend was born.

The Two Ronnies won the Best Entertainment Show Award of 1972, ran for sixteen highly popular years on the BBC and for a record-breaking spell at the London Palladium in 1978. Ronnie puts the success of the partnership down to the fact that "we got on. We were similar in what we thought was amusing. And we complemented each other. He has this hugely wonderful character-acting skill which I didn't. And, I had a theatrical, vaudeville twinkle, which he didn't. So I brought him on in that way and he brought me on the other."

"We had a certain kind of material," Ronnie continues, "that was not dangerously esoteric. It's difficult to be clean and clever at the same time, but a lot of our stuff was. Sketches like the one set in the hardware shop were dextrous without being above people's heads. It was obvious that we'd taken a lot of trouble.

"We didn't quite realise, perhaps you don't when it's all going very well, just how potent we were," he goes on. "Such was the effect of it that even though it hasn't been on for eight or nine years, folk still have the strongest memories of the Two Ronnies." The 'news items', Ronnie C's celebrated 'chair spots' and Ronnie B's 'spokesmen' word-plays are certainly fondly recalled, not just in Britain but throughout the world.

Since Barker's retirement in the mid 1980's, Ronnie has had many starring roles in the Theatre, (SEVEN YEAR ITCH, OUT OF ORDER, THE DRESSMAKER), and on television (notably in Ian and Peter Vincent's well-regarded sitcom, SORRY). His most recent success has been presenting 3 series of SMALL TALK, a captivating BBC1 programme in which contestants try to guess how children will respond to set questions. It plays to Ronnie's strong suit: his twinkley charm. "Phil Harris, who worked with Jack Benny, used to say 'you must never forget what the audience first liked you for'," Ronnie muses "That's true. You must never relinquish that."

In 1996 Ronnie appeared in John Cleese's follow-up to A FISH CALLED WANDA, FIERCE CREATURES. Ronnie played a sealion-keeper at a zoo, but his worst experience on the film was when "I had to carry a very smelly baby ostrich".

In 1997 Ronnie recorded 'An Audience With…' for ITV which transmitted in October.

1998 saw Ronnie returning to his famous and much loved armchair, in the new Ben Elton series for BBC1 and starring in the new Pizza Hut commercial campaign.

A naturally modest man, Ronnie has to be cajoled into pinpointing the reasons for his enduring popularity. "You have just got to hang on in there and keep pottering away in order to be a name that people don't forget, to become part of the folklore." If I said to someone, 'could you describe Ronnie Corbett?' I'd be hard pushed to find somebody, wherever I went, who could not describe him. That goes not just for Britain, but for the whole of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa.

"People laugh when I arrive, without my even having to say a funny joke, there is something, I suppose, essentially comic in the marriage of the way I speak and move," he observes. "I can see that people's faces want to smile when I come in the room. People expect to be uplifted if not amused. This is coupled with the fact that they seem to like me, which is perhaps something that some younger performers don't value so much. Groucho Marx said that if you wanted a long period at the top it was more important for a comedian to be liked than to be funny." That is the secret of Ronnie's success - He's eminently likeable.

George Alagiah

Before going behind the studio desk, George Alagiah was one of the BBC's leading foreign correspondents, recognised throughout the industry for his reporting on some of the most significant events of the last decade.

Recently he has presented live news programmes from Sri Lanka following the Tsunami, as well as reporting from New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and from Pakistan following the south-Asian earthquake.

George is a specialist on Africa and the developing world. He has reported on: trade in human organs in India; the murder of street children in Brazil; the civil war and famine in Somalia; the genocide in Rwanda and its aftermath; the plight of the marsh Arabs in southern Iraq; the civil wars in Afghanistan, Liberia and Sierra Leone; the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa; the fall of Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire; the effects of Hurricane Mitch on Honduras; the Kosovan refugee crisis; the NATO liberation of Pristina; the international intervention in East Timor; the farm invasions in Zimbabwe; the intifada in the West Bank; and the aftermath of the terror attacks on New York.

Documentaries and features include reports on: why affirmative action in America is a 'Lost Cause', for the Assignment programme; Saddam Hussein's genocidal campaign against the Kurds of northern Iraq for Newsnight; the last reunion of the veterans of Dunkirk; and a BBC ONE special on the trial and conviction of Jill Dando's murderer.

Among prominent figures interviewed by George Alagiah are: Nelson Mandela; Archbishop Desmond Tutu; President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda; Kofi Annan of the United Nations; Yasser Arafat; President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe; and Tariq Aziz of Iraq.

In March 2002, George launched BBC FOUR's international news programme and, more recently, he also presented his own compelling story of a continent in BBC ONE's News Special, Africa: Journeys of Hope.

George Alagiah has won several awards including: the Critics Award and the Golden Nymph Award at the Monte Carlo Television Festival (1992); award for Best International Report at the Royal Television Society (1993); commendation from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (1993); Amnesty International's Best TV Journalist award (1994); the One World Broadcasting Trust Award (1994); the James Cameron Memorial Trust Award (1995); and the Bayeux Award for War Reporting (1996).

In 1998 he was voted Media Personality of the Year at the Ethnic Minority Media Awards. In 2000 he was part of the BBC team which collected a Bafta award for its coverage of the Kosovo conflict.

He first joined the BBC in 1989 after seven years in print journalism with South Magazine. He has contributed to several British newspapers including The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and the Daily Express.

He has spoken at the Royal Geographical Society, the Royal Society for Arts and at the Royal Overseas League. His appearances at literary festivals include Cheltenham, Keswick, Hay-on-Wye and London.

George Alagiah is a patron of the following organisations: The Presswise Trust, the NAZ Project, the Parenting, Education and Support Forum and the Fairtrade Foundation.

His first book, A Passage to Africa, was published by Little, Brown & Company in September 2001. It won the Madoc Award at the 2002 Hay Literary Festival.

Alagiah's essay Shaking the Foundations was published by the BBC in its book on the aftermath of September 11.

George Alagiah was born in Sri Lanka in November 1955. His primary education was in Ghana where his parents moved in 1961. He attended secondary school at St John's College in Portsmouth, England and is a graduate of Durham University.

"George came over very well and managed a complex running order to a tight schedule. The client was very pleased."
George hosted a Youth Conference for the Central Office of Information in June 2007

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Further Information

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