himself 'completely boring' without a script." Peter Hall spoke of Barker's skills as a dramatic actor, calling him "the great actor we lost" and lamented that Barker was unable to take a role in one of his Shakespearean productions. Barker, though, preferred comedy, and felt it was "as good and as important as serious work" and he was not "dumbing down" by doing it. Actor Gene Wilder compared him to Charlie Chaplin in saying "no matter how farcical [his performance] was ... there was always an element of reality to what he did." Corbett praised Barker's skill at playing serious authority figures saying absurd things, using Barker's verbal dexterity and energetic performances. Barker's writing style was, for The Times, "based on precise scripts and perfect timing." It often involved playing with language, including humour involving such linguistic items as spoonerisms and double entendres. Dennis Baker of The Guardian wrote that Barker "preferred innuendo over the crudely explicit, a restraint that demanded some imagination from the audience and was the essence of his comedy." Corbett said he had "a mastery of the English language". In private, he annotated a copy of A Book of Nonsense by Edward Lear, penning punch lines of his own for each limerick. On the title page he wrote, "There was an old fossil named Lear, Whose verses were boring and drear. His last lines were worst – just the same as the first! So I've tried to improve on them here." The annotated copy of Lear's book, signed and dated November 2001, was auctioned in 2012. Personal life Barker met Joy Tubb in Cambridge while she was a stage manager for two plays he was in. They married nine months later in July 1957 and had three children: two sons, Larry (born 1959) and Adam (born 1968), and one daughter, Charlotte (born 1962), who became an actress. Larry, a leading advertising creative director, was named after Barker's idol Laurence Olivier. Adam Barker became an actor, but was jailed for twelve months in 2012 on twenty counts of making indecent images of children, having evaded police for eight years; he was not present at his father's funeral. The family lived in Pinner for many years, and subsequently in a converted mill in Dean, Oxfordshire. According to Corbett, Barker was "first and foremost a family man". Joy died in January 2011, aged 78. Barker received an OBE in