Four Candles

A customer in a woolly hat arrives at a cluttered hardware shop with a written list and asks for four candles; the shopkeeper duly produces four candles, only to learn the man wanted fork handles. The pattern repeats down the list: bathroom plugs lead to questions about size and type, a request answered with a coil of garden hose turns out to mean something else, tins of peas and pumps get muddled, and a request for washers prompts the shopkeeper to reel off every kind he can think of. Each misunderstanding sends him climbing ladders and rummaging through labelled drawers, growing steadily more exasperated while the customer stays mildly patient. Finally he snatches the list to read it himself, takes offence at one entry and summons his assistant from the back to deal with the customer, and the assistant calmly opens the drawer of billhooks.

Ronnie Barker wrote the sketch under his pseudonym Gerald Wiley. In 2005, on The Two Ronnies Sketchbook, he revealed an alternative ending he had written to replace the original billhooks payoff.