Upside down, strapped into a parachute, dangling from a studio ceiling as a Buddy Holly who never quite made it back to earth: that is how millions of viewers first met the performer known as Ronnie Golden, in the second episode of the BBC sitcom The Young Ones. Born Tony De Meur, he died at his home on September 26, 2026, at the age of 78, closing out a career that stretched from a run as a touring pop frontman in the 1970s to four decades on the front line of British alternative comedy. He carried both names, the birth name and the stage one, through all of it.

De Meur founded the pre-new wave band The Fabulous Poodles in 1975, taking the lead vocal and guitar chair in a line-up rounded out by Bobby Valentino on violin and mandolin, Richie Robertson on bass and Bryn Burrows on drums. Their self-titled 1977 debut, released on Pye Records, was produced by John Entwistle of the Who, who also played bass on three of its tracks, according to Trouser Press, which described the band's sound as occupying "a tiny and all but indescribable niche of clever English pop," its Kinks-inflected songs coloured by Valentino's country-fiddle lines. The Poodles carried those songs onto the BBC's Old Grey Whistle Test and across America, touring with Meat Loaf, Tom Petty and Chuck Berry, according to Chortle. Two more albums followed: Unsuitable in Britain in 1978, condensed together with the debut into an American compilation titled Mirror Stars on Park Lane/Epic that same year, then Think Pink in 1979, before the band played its last date at the Venue in Victoria, London, on New Year's Eve 1980.

De Meur did not stay off a stage for long. He auditioned for the comedy-music spot at the Comic Strip's residency at Raymond's Revue Bar and, taking the name Ronnie Golden, spent the early 1980s working the original Comedy Store and the rest of London's fledgling alternative circuit alongside Rik Mayall, Nigel Planer, Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, Arnold Brown and Alexei Sayle. Explaining the switch years later, he said the rock scene "had become tame to my ears after the thrills and spills of Punk and New Wave," according to Beyond the Joke, which also has him describing his eventual return to music as "hanging up my ukulele, clown shoes, red nose and fright wig." It was the comedy circuit that put him, upside down in a parachute harness, into the second episode of The Young Ones as Buddy Holly. He went on to front the R&B and soul outfit Ronnie and the Rex and to write songs and sketches for BBC Radio 4's The Right Time. In November 2019, well into his seventies, he reunited the Fabulous Poodles for a one-off show, billed as the Return of the Fabulous Poodles, at Nell's Jazz and Blues in West Kensington, London.

His most enduring partnership, though, was musical rather than solo: a long-running double act with the comedian Barry Cryer. The pair closed the Return of Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People at the Bloomsbury Theatre on 16 December 2009 with a number called Peace and Quiet that, as one reviewer put it, turned out to be anything but, according to Chortle. The pairing of the two men, a comic songwriter of the old variety-club school and a punk-era guitarist turned funnyman, summed up the range De Meur had covered since his first gig with the Poodles.

Golden's partner, Grace Carley, announced his death the day after it happened. "Without any fuss or bother, he simply slipped away yesterday afternoon while I was walking the dog," she wrote. "Never even fell off his perch, so to speak. I know it will be an enormous shock, as it was to me, but I am consoled by his complete lack of pain or suffering." Tributes followed quickly from the circuit he had helped build. The musician Steve Gribbin called him a "comedy legend, very funny act, excellent musician and all-round good fella." The comedian Charmian Hughes remembered him as "our dear friend, wit, pop legend, comedy hero, raconteur, funster." Jenny Lecoat, who had known him more than 40 years, said simply, "he was such a significant person in my life." The promoter David Stark called him "a top musician, comedian and all-round good bloke," the comic Bennett Arron said "he always had such great stories and was just a joy to be around," and fellow comic Anne Whyte put it most plainly of all: "this man could make a cat laugh."

What outlasts Ronnie Golden is oddly specific to him: three Pye-era albums that still circulate among fans of the mid-1970s pub and pop scene, a few seconds of parachute-clad slapstick that resurface every time The Young Ones is repeated, and the songs he and Barry Cryer built to make audiences laugh in the same breath as they sang. Tony De Meur wrote the tunes and stood on stages under two names, never quite sure, by his own account, whether the room in front of him was expecting a rock show or a punchline, and giving it both anyway.