The True History of the Blackadder: The Unadulterated Tale of the Creation of a Comedy Legend

by J. F. Roberts

  Besides, it could have been worse. While Lloyd was in the early stages of his tutelage under Hatch, that year’s Footlights show (still with Rhys Jones, but this time also featuring Clive Anderson and Geoffrey McGivern) was taking a spectacular dive. Lloyd had a writing credit, and was there to witness the nightmare. ‘The next year, Chox, looked like it was going to be huge, and that had a London premiere, plus they did a pilot for a television show. They had this gala opening, all the Pythons went, and it was a complete disaster. It closed within days, I think. Oddly enough I was stranded on the safe beach of radio, because it was going very well. I was doing a lot of writing with Jon Canter and a guy called Gerry Brown, which led to a commission for a Footlights radio series called Oh No It Isn’t! We dubbed it that because we were fearful of getting bad reviews – nobody could say anything more negative than that!’ Produced by Simon Brett as Lloyd learned the ropes, the radio show could have taken off, but a perfectionist even at this stage, John decided it was time to move on after one short run.

  Lloyd was still performing at this time, but despite many offers to be on the microphone (or indeed in front of the camera, if he’d taken the job of being one of Esther Rantzen’s smug boys on That’s Life), he soon found that producing was not just his niche, but a passion. He did once admit: ‘I became a producer because Douglas was my best friend, he was obviously a better writer than me, and Griff was the comedy star, obviously forty times as good an actor, so I got the sort of comedy cleaning-lady job, the sort of job that nobody else particularly wanted, but which had to be done.’ But on reflection, musing on the chance given to him by the late David Hatch, Lloyd adds, ‘He was such a supportive, energetic guy, he gave me my life’s motivation in a way, because he showed that it was a great thing to be the person behind the scenes. That it wasn’t a lesser thing to be the producer, but it was a noble and brave and difficult job, and that somebody has to do it, and you may as well do it well. And that’s sort of gone, really, to a large extent. Unless you’re a celeb, you don’t count these days – they don’t give a shit who the producer is.’

  Given this chance, the now ex-comedy performer went at it with far more than aplomb. ‘I was only twenty-two, so I had lots of energy and got a lot of work done. By the mid-seventies I’d done Just a Minute and Week Ending and started Quote Unquote and The News Huddlines and The News Quiz. Around that time Douglas was offered a job, and suddenly everyone at the BBC was young! When I first went there everybody was wearing tweed suits and seemed to be about eighty, very sort of serious and lined.’ John had already made a name for himself head and shoulders above all the new interns, especially for his innovative eye for editing. ‘One thing that annoyed some of the producers in the department,’ he remembers, ‘I was the third of the producers of Just a Minute, and because David was always in a hurry, he used to give the show to an editor called Butcher Bert. Bert Fisher was known as the fastest editor in the BBC, famous for getting so annoyed with one young producer that he literally tied the quarter-inch tape together like a bootlace and put it through, and it was a perfect edit! When David edited he would just take out a round or something like that, so he could process more shows. And I thought I could do it another way, because I’m far more pedantic, and I used to edit it very tightly, take out coughs and “um”s and “er”s, and it used to drive this bloke Bert absolutely nuts. But it made the programme extremely tight. That’s a lesson I learned very young and I’ve always done it since.’ ‘I got a review in The Times, I think, which began: “John Lloyd’s Just a Minute goes from strength to strength!” Giving a radio producer who would have been twenty-three, twenty-four, the credit in a national newspaper? Everyone was saying, “What the fuck’s he done to get all this credit? That doesn’t seem on.” But I ratcheted it up, and it started to get noticed a bit more.’

  Besides the trailblazing production work, John continued to write like a machine, working with his struggling flatmate and others. Week Ending had amassed an army of writers who would go on to script some of the best comedy of the next few decades, from Cambridge graduates like Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin to grammar-school jokesmiths David Renwick and Andrew Marshall – creators, alongside John Mason, of cult radio sketch show The Burkiss Way, which was produced for one series by ‘John Lloyd of Europe’. Marshall and Renwick had first come across Lloyd and Adams when they were in the audience for the Adams–Smith–Adams undergraduate revue The Patter of Tiny Minds, which had briefly played in London, with Lloyd and his girlfriend, Mary Allen, fleshing out the cast.

  Of all these early connections, John’s close and complicated comradeship with Douglas has been the most widely examined and discussed over the years. Adams entered a postgraduation malaise in the late seventies, which was barely helped by his ambitious fraternising with the Python team, stepping in to be one of Chapman’s collaborators after Cleese left the TV show, co-creating the aborted Chapman sketch show Out of the Trees and an unmade TV special for a real Beatle, The Ringo Starr Show. But these exciting inroads to showbiz all seemed to lead to a dead end.

  During this early stage of their careers John and Douglas shared a flat owned by another of Chapman’s script facilitators, Bernard McKenna, and a hard day’s slog at BBC Radio’s Light Entertainment HQ at Aeolian House for John would often culminate with attempts to gee up his morose giant of a friend, working together on pitches for TV shows such as Sno 7 and the White Dwarfs. This sci-fi sitcom pilot concerned a couple of astrophysicists in an observatory on the top of Mount Everest who discover that an intergalactic advertising agency aim to write a slogan across the galaxy in supernovae – ‘Things Go Better With Bulp!’ – with Earth selected as the full stop. The space slogan was an idea which would eventually be used by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor in their Red Dwarf novels, but back in the late seventies the BBC considered science fiction to be ‘too fifties’, and the idea was canned. As Lloyd told Neil Gaiman in 2002, ‘The idea was minimum casting, minimum number of sets, and we’d just try to sell the series on cheapness. That failed to come to anything.’ The same fate awaited a movie treatment the duo wrote for Robert Stigwood, in which a hostile alien race challenges our planet in a series of feats taken from The Guinness Book of Records – but at least they got a holiday in Corfu out of sketching that one out (which was only slightly marred by the dashing Lloyd ending up with his friend’s hoped-for love interest).

  You couldn’t blame Lloyd for needing a holiday – even a working one. Few people in BBC history had established themselves quite so rapidly and impressively – and it all came down to his ferocious work ethic at this time. Perhaps the most telling capsule of this stage of Lloyd’s career was mockingly quoted in Nick Webb’s official Adams biography, Wish You Were Here – while his contemporaries blundered into post-grad life, Lloyd’s usual patter was along the lines of ‘I’m so, so jealous that you have time to offer me a beer. If only I could. Such an enviable quality of life – a moment to oneself to think. Oh God. I have at least a hundred programmes to produce, and three attractive women to juggle.’

  Yet despite having graduated from campus to corporation, this comedic whirling dervish still set aside time to be up in Edinburgh every August. Lloyd’s name was usually somewhere in smallish print on Footlights Fringe shows for a good while after he’d graduated, including being director of 1975’s Paradise Mislaid (starring Rhys Jones of course, whose sister was now Lloyd’s girlfriend). In the following year he and Adams formed a team with the creators of The Burkiss Way, to put on a show called The Unpleasantness at Brodie’s Close. Crammed into a tiny room in a Masonic hall, the team (minus Marshall, who was teaching) fitted a bizarre array of sketches around the framework of a Brief Encounter-esque meeting in a train station between two lovers who keep getting interrupted. The cast were responsible for everything, even making the props, and had a reasonable smash with it, packing audiences in beyond fire safety regulations. They even left Edinburgh with £10 profit each.

  However, the following year, while at th
e Fringe as part of his duties producing Radio 2 arts programme Late Night Extra, John was witness to the red-hot response given to a show put on by a small team from Oxford just round the corner from Brodie’s Close, and had to concede that there were performers out there who came from a completely different universe. Having exhausted himself laughing at this student revue, he was determined to meet its star, convinced he could well have found the equal of Chaplin.

  RICHARD WHALLEY ANTHONY CURTIS

  BORN: 8 November 1956, Wellington, New Zealand

  Richard Curtis’s father was a self-made man, an Italian resident in Czechoslovakia who anglicised his name from ‘Anton Cecutte’ to the respectable-sounding ‘Tony Curtis’ – a year or so before the Hollywood star became a household name. As an executive at Unilever, Tony and his wife Glyness travelled the world, and Richard, the first of two sons, happened to be born during a sojourn in New Zealand.

  The Curtis family’s next home was Manila, where young Richard developed an American accent, and first became aware that his relatively cosseted existence was not shared by everyone. ‘Every day as my driver took me back to my house with a swimming pool I could see huge slums with people living under corrugated-iron roofs.’ More importantly, he was shown how to try and do something about such inequality. ‘My mum cancelled Christmas in 1968. No presents. No special food. We gave all the money to the Biafra appeal. I was thrilled because it meant I could watch Top of the Pops, which was normally spoiled by Christmas lunch lasting forever.’

  After Manila came Stockholm, and then only at the age of eleven did Curtis permanently take up residence in the UK, moving with the family to Folkestone, then Warrington, before being sent to Papplewick School in Ascot. Shortly after, he won a scholarship to the exalted establishment of Harrow, where the bright pupil was made head boy: ‘I think I was put there as a sort of antidote to every other head of school, because I was known to be very left wing, if there is such a thing at Harrow.’ Certainly, during Curtis’s tenure the ancient practice of fagging was finally abolished – and swiftly reinstated after he left for Oxford.

  Although theatre became his passion, young Richard’s main preoccupation during his schooldays was, he admits, a desire to be a Beatle. ‘From the age of about six, music was my life… In about 1963, bad babysitters started bringing pop records into the house – the Supremes, the Beatles and, since we were living in Sweden, the Hepstars and, my particular favourite, Ola & the Janglers – and my life changed forever.’ When his own rock group, Versus, flunked the only gig they ever had by chickening out of introducing rock to the staid Harrow Concert, Curtis decided his future pointed towards the stage. He was only half right …

  PUCK WILL MAKE AMENDS…

  In the autumn of 1975 Richard Curtis, a softly-spoken bespectacled English scholar with a riot of fair curly hair like two rhododendron bushes very close together, arrived in Oxford, burning to act. ‘I started off working hard in the first term,’ he says, ‘but then realised that didn’t seem to be strictly necessary. I had a very good time, just enjoying myself with friends. I made most of my best friends for life.’

  His experiences onstage at Harrow may not have been the most convincing presages of thespian greatness, but he did have the balls to go beyond the traditional school Shakespeare production (in which he tended to play women, in badly fitting wigs) to stage The Erpingham Camp – surely the first time that any Joe Orton play was performed at Harrow, let alone the playwright’s most pointed work, attacking organised religion and authority in general. When he enrolled to study English at Christ Church college, Curtis was convinced that the extracurricular theatrical opportunities offered by the celebrated Oxford University Dramatic Society would finally allow him to make his mark. ‘All the greats lay before me,’ he recalled. ‘I was ready for Pinter, I was ready for Beckett, my Macbeth was bursting to come out in all its bloody horror …’

  His first experience with OUDS was not encouraging – while the actor Hugh Quarshie earned plaudits playing the title role in Othello, Curtis was initially cast as ‘Clown’. A stroke of luck came when that part was cut and he was given a few lines as ‘Third Gentleman’ in the storm scene, but sadly the storm was so loud it drowned out all the dialogue. ‘The director said our inaudibility was a brilliant metaphor for something,’ Curtis said. ‘I have forgotten what.’ Undeterred, the young thesp spent his first few terms diligently turning up to every audition he saw advertised. ‘In Twelfth Night, I was cast as Fabian, a character who makes Clown look important. I got a good part in French Without Tears but the production was cancelled. Everything else, I came away empty-handed, while handsome boys with chiselled jaws and hints of dark sexuality got every part.’

  This called for drastic measures, and a switch from Drama to Comedy. ‘Finally, I had to take a pre-emptive strike. I decided, if no one else would give me decent parts, I would write them for myself. I wrote and staged a little revue and did get three or four laughs.’ At last, Curtis had found his calling. There was a fine tradition of comedy at the university stretching back at least as far as the setting up of the Oxford Theatre Group in the early fifties, with alumni including Alan Bennett, Dudley Moore, Michael Palin and Terry Jones – and Richard Curtis felt he could become the comic performer to top them all.fn1 But Perkins had left Oxford before Curtis’s arrival, and now was a time for a new generation. When Richard spied an advert for auditions for that year’s revue in the student newspaper, it must have seemed like fate – the cocky Harrovian knew that it was ‘my moment to shine, my moment to step forward, the best, the funniest, the actor’s actor’.

  He threw himself into the early script meetings with unmistakable vim, standing out among the several faceless fellow students who gathered in a tutor’s study every Thursday evening to haggle over sketch material. He was discovering his voice as a humorist, with a knack for precise wordplay and an eye for characterisation that exemplified the frustrated actor, and he showed that he could easily run the whole show on his own. For two meetings he enthused about his ideas and became confident that the 1976 Oxford Revue would be his first big break.

  At the third meeting, just as a running order was beginning to take shape, one curiously coy student arose to finally share his own ideas with the gang. Curtis had sized this fellow up in the first meeting, where he was to be found skulking silently in the corner, and had long ago dismissed him as part of the furniture – a cushion or, at best, some form of stuffed toy. He had a curious appearance certainly, bespectacled and with black curls in such abundance that the two of them could have been negative reflections of each other. But nobody had paid him very much attention at all – until now.

  The human cushion quietly explained that he had a couple of sketch ideas of his own, and proceeded to drop every jaw in the room with a transformation into a living cartoon, or some kind of creature from another dimension, in two astonishing comic turns. ‘He did a monologue about driving followed by the thing where he mimed and talked at the same time,’ Curtis recalls. ‘It was unlike anything else I had ever seen.’ There was no doubt who the star of the 1976 revue would be.

  ROWAN ATKINSON

  BORN: 6 January 1955, Consett, County Durham

  As the youngest of three sons – Rupert, Rodney (subsequently a UKIP candidate) and Rowan – born to farmers Eric and Ella, Atkinson grew up in the shade of Consett Steelworks, among the rusting tractors of the family farm, midway between Durham and Newcastle upon Tyne (the home, Hole Row Farm, is now the Royal Derwent Hotel). Despite this agricultural upbringing, Rowan was aware that show business was in his family, thanks to his grandfather Edward Atkinson, proprietor of a whole chain of picture houses across the North-East – one of which had been run by Stan Laurel’s father, Arthur Jefferson – and as a boy Rowan would visit the Consett Empire for free movie shows, in lieu of TV.

  Like his brothers, Atkinson was sent to board at the Durham Cathedral Choristers’ School (where he was a year behind Tony Blair), and then to St Bees School on
the Cumbrian coast, within dashing distance of the Windscale nuclear power plant, latterly Sellafield. It was at St Bees that Atkinson had his first real comic awakening, getting laughs from his friends, who dubbed him ‘Dopey’, ‘Zoonie’, ‘Green Man’ and ‘Moon Man’, as his distinctively animated features began to develop.

  Atkinson was an upstanding student, joining the cadets and the school choir, and yet he still had plenty to rebel against at St Bees, where misdemeanours were punished with compulsory horse-dung-shovelling, for which, he recalled, ‘Only the privileged few were given shovels.’ Young Rowan soon developed a talent for facetiousness, once being punished for responding to one master’s assertion that he should pull his socks up by laboriously and pointedly following the order literally, and also reportedly teaching another master’s small child to parrot the phrase ‘fuck off’ at will. ‘I never meant any harm or offence to anyone,’ he was to insist, ‘I was just trying to enjoy myself. Because, make no mistake, life is short.’

  Although Rowan showed a flair for science, having an obsession with engines (at home, he drove around the farm in his mother’s old Morris Minor, which he had saved from the scrapheap and rebuilt from scratch), the schoolboy’s most notable achievements were in the arts. As one of two pupils given the job of running the St Bees Film Society ‘with no democracy whatsoever’, Atkinson was thrilled to receive a print of Jacques Tati’s wordless classic M. Hulot’s Holiday, and besides the official showing on Saturday night, he and his friends gleefully sat through the entire film seven times in one weekend.

  He had been in plays before St Bees, including an early triumph as the Dauphin in Saint Joan, but Atkinson’s initial involvement with the school’s theatrical side was predictably technical. However, as part of the lighting team for one school production, he remembers ‘looking down from the lighting gantry on to the stage during the performance and thinking, “I’ve made the wrong decision – I’d prefer to be down there.”’ His subsequent performances, including a notable Mephistophilis in Doctor Faustus, earned him the stunned applause of his peers, astonished that the odd-looking stammering lad had such a range of extraordinary characters brewing within him.