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

by J. F. Roberts

  Atkinson’s headmaster Geoffrey Lees took a particular interest in his charge’s future, spurring Rowan on to pass his English O level by betting against him. Two years later, with Atkinson receiving top-grade science A levels and considering a Technical Drama course in Portsmouth or a BSc in Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Newcastle University, Lees broke the habit of a lifetime when he took the budding engineer aside and confided, ‘I have never recommended to anyone that they should take up a career in the entertainment industry, but it would seem silly for you, Atkinson, not at least to try.’ ‘I didn’t know quite what I wanted to do when I left,’ he admits, ‘but I certainly didn’t have very high expectations of the future …’

  ‘It was instantly clear that he was a real genius,’ Curtis recalls with mock chagrin. ‘He got every single laugh in the summer show. I did have one quite funny monologue, but just before opening we decided to give it to Rowan because he would be funnier … And it was downhill from there.’ The story of Atkinson’s apparent transformation from meek cuddly toy to comic master has always been somewhat disingenuous, though – by the time he knocked Curtis’s socks off, he was already more than familiar with the Edinburgh Fringe scene, and had even attempted a small revue there in 1975, before enrolling at Oxford for his MSc in Engineering Science.

  Prophetically, his first Edinburgh experience had been as part of a group of ex-pupils and budding actors a year after leaving St Bees, playing the role of Captain Starkey in Joseph Heller’s anti-war play They Bombed at Newhaven, directed by English master Richard Elgood. Heller had based the action on the Vietnam War, but its message about the madness of conflict was equally applicable to any hostility in history, and would set the young actor in good stead for future comedic clashes with the military. Rowan’s main experience of army life had been a period of guard duty with the cadets – forced to remain vigilant out on the Cumbrian moors from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m., in a foot of water, with nothing to comfort him but a soaking wet cigarette. Whether this informed his performance is debatable, but his portrayal of Captain Starkey – a quiet man who during the course of the play goes through a complete breakdown – singled Atkinson out for praise from the Scotsman when he was barely past adolescence.

  It would be two years before he returned to the Fringe, during which time he was at Newcastle University. He was always drawn to the ‘sparks’ side of show business, harbouring thoughts of maybe making it as a BBC cameraman, or a sound engineer, but still the lure of being in the spotlight kept getting in the way. By his own admission, ‘There was something inside me crying to get out.’

  Atkinson’s second Fringe experience was, via tenuous connections, with the Dundee University Theatre Group, who cast him in the central role of the sexually frustrated city official Angelo in Measure for Measure – a play with the dubious reputation of being by far the least amusing of all Shakespeare’s ‘comedies’. This one foray into interpreting Shakespeare was not a pleasant experience for young Rowan, who says, ‘It takes a hell of a lot of time and a lot of effort to get even the most willing audience to smile at someone like Touchstone (and I speak from bitter experience).’ So while in Edinburgh doing his best by the Bard, he took his chance to try something different with one of his friends, hiring the Roxburgh Reading Rooms for a lunchtime comedy revue. ‘No more than thirteen people came – probably because the show was absolutely diabolical. It was me doing impersonations of Denis Healey and things like that, so you can imagine how grim it was.’

  Having got a 2:1 from Newcastle, you would be forgiven for thinking that it was the tug of stardom which took Atkinson to Oxford for his Master’s, but on arrival at the historic university, his first time living in the south, away from home, it took a long time for this garlanded student performer to return to the stage, and he spent much of his first term ‘just relishing the whole slightly olde worlde privileged nature of the place, and going to endless organ recitals, I was a great lover of the organ’ – indeed, he was even compiling a book on the history of Oxford’s organs, and trying to design a synthesiser of his own.

  So the explosion of comic invention Richard Curtis witnessed that Thursday evening had been bottled up for quite a long time. ‘I saw this little advert in the university newspaper saying, you know, “We’re thinking of getting a comedy revue together,”’ Atkinson recalls, ‘so I thought I’d beetle along, because I felt as though I had an interest. And Richard was there … So that was our first meeting – I said very little, and I’m sure Richard said a great deal.’

  IT’S IN MY BLOOD AND IN MY SOUL

  There was, of course, a whole pantheon of future stars and media darlings at Oxford alongside Curtis and Atkinson in the mid-seventies. Older boy Mel Smith had just progressed from the Oxford Revue and OUDS to a budding career in theatre, and the new blood included Tim McInnerny and Helen Atkinson-Wood, with most of the rest of the Radio Active team, Angus Deayton, Michael Fenton Stevens and Philip Pope, arriving a year or two afterwards. McInnerny was one of the brightest stars of OUDS, but couldn’t shake off a natural comic flair, and became one of Curtis’s favoured performers – at least, for any sketch that wouldn’t have suited Atkinson.

  Atkinson-Wood similarly filled her time with comedy performing when she wasn’t studying Fine Art at the Ruskin School, and came from the same part of the world as McInnerny, being from a well-to-do family in Cheadle Hulme, head girl of her school and crazy about ponies, despite a near-fatal riding accident at the age of sixteen.fn2

  Helen recalls: ‘I arrived a year after them. I was doing a show called The Female Person’s Show in my very first term – written by Marcy Kahan – which Richard saw, and asked if I would like to come and audition for the revue. It’s fair to say that even at that point, Rowan was becoming a legendary comedy figure, because there was nobody else like him … Tim and I also did serious drama – we were in a production of Measure for Measure at the Oxford Playhouse – so, very illustrious productions, alongside horsing around with our pals.’

  TIMOTHY MCINNERNY

  BORN: 18 September 1956, Cheadle Hulme, Cheshire

  Born to William and Mary McInnerny in a corner of what is now part of Greater Manchester, Tim McInnerny’s background may be a degree less highfalutin than his Harrovian and Etonian colleagues, but a desire to perform was clearly in the blood – Lizzie, his younger sister, is also a successful star of stage and screen. While others in this history went through the public-school system, Tim graduated from grammar school, the Marling School in Stroud, before earning his place at Wadham College, Oxford. He paused for a year’s backpacking around the world (and being held up at gunpoint by a gang of drunken Italian policemen, for a laugh) before launching himself into the Oxonian theatre scene in 1975.

  Rowan couldn’t hog all the limelight at the Oxford Revue shows, and Curtis had plenty of sketches which wouldn’t have suited him anyway – many of them, perhaps unsurprisingly, involving love and relationships, including the clever ‘Prompt’, originally penned for Tim and Helen.

  TIM:

  We thought we’d just slip back on and have a private word … First perhaps we should get introduced. Her name’s Helen.

  HELEN:

  And his name’s Tim.

  TIM:

  And together we make Tim and Helen. (Smiles.) We thought we might, I don’t know why, just, you know, talk about how we first met, how we fell in love … Right, well, Helen, you start away.

  HELEN:

  OK. Um … Prompt.

  PROMPT:

  (Off) I don’t know what to say really.

  HELEN:

  I don’t know what to say really, I’m not very good at … Prompt.

  PROMPT:

  Improvisation.

  HELEN:

  Improvisation. Prompt.

  TIM:

  Come on, Helen. Think!

  HELEN:

  What do you mean, ‘Come on’? … You just don’t seem to care at all any longer, Tim.

  TIM:

  O
h I do care, Helen, for heaven’s sake, I … Prompt?

  All the young sketch performers knew that Atkinson was a different breed of performer, and even if they never shared a stage, friendships soon budded. Atkinson-Wood recalls, ‘When I first met him he was nervous, and he was odd. I mean, there was a lot of sort of nervousness about being around women generally, which of course was fantastically endearing.’ To add to this great herd of thespians, Bridget Jones creator Helen Fielding dated Curtis during her time at Oxford, and elsewhere in their year you could find two future TV executives, Kevin Lygo and Jon Plowman, and comedy writer Tony Sarchet. But Atkinson, once his comedic cat was out of the bag, immediately stood apart from all of his contemporaries.

  He prepared himself to unleash his stage persona for the first time by returning to his halls, his bedroom littered with coils of insulated wire and electrical tinkerings for the synthesiser that would never be completed, and gazed at himself in the mirror. ‘I don’t think it was a time when people who pulled faces were admired,’ he once admitted to the Telegraph, but amid the undergraduate linguists, all trying to outdo each other with their witticisms, he knew there was something in his features which gave him an edge. ‘I remember when I discovered how extreme my facial expressions could be for comic effect, and practising them, and thinking, “Gosh, that looks pretty funny to me, I think I’ll try that tomorrow night in front of a paying audience, and see how they react.”’ He was sure the malleable chops and elastic facial muscles that had entertained his school chums at St Bees could be just as funny to his sophisticated college colleagues, and he set to, creating an act that used his abilities to the full, without requiring a single word to be written down.

  When he emerged onstage at the first show, hair sculpted into Eraserhead topiary, clad in crumpled pyjamas (later, a shockingly clinging leotard), the spectators weren’t sure whether to laugh or call the authorities – but they settled for the former. This fledgling act consisted of Rowan appearing from the shadows with a mysterious crumpled envelope, proffering it to the audience, and then jealously snatching it back with a wash of emotions – suspicion, pride, anger, confusion – playing over his striking features, ‘like Peter Lorre in a panic’. Despite the simplicity of the act, he could make it last for twice the length of most sketches, keeping the laughter rolling, abating and returning for far longer than would seem plausible. Although a lifelong cynic when it came to mime (an art form he described as ‘so worthy of draughty community halls’), Rowan was clearly a natural – or, rather, he was a pedantic technician, with every single tic and nuance perfected and primed well in advance.

  By the time that year’s revue was ready for the Playhouse,fn3 the bevy of ambitious comics who had first met to discuss the show had been whittled right down – there were few who could keep up with Atkinson, but Curtis had immediately recognised his new friend’s comic powers, and the two began working closely together almost immediately, experimenting with Rowan’s comic machinery in much the same way that he himself tinkered with anything that required a plug. ‘I was doing a tremendous amount of visual stuff at the time, and it was that side of me that I think Richard particularly latched on to,’ he recalls; although Curtis puts it more humbly: ‘Rowan was clearly so much better than all the rest of us put together that I hung on to his coat-tails for a decade.’

  Overly humble or not, the critics of the Oxford Mail would have agreed. After the first night of the Easter revue, Atkinson was paid a gushing tribute which made it clear that his former headmaster had been right about his performing potential, and there was to be no more talk of life as an engineer – or indeed as a student. Atkinson himself estimated that in his first term, his time at Oxford had been 90 per cent study to 10 per cent performing (and that included his stint as drummer in a hard-rock band). But after this first revue, the ratio was switched.

  Remembering his earliest acclaim in 1988, he outlined the original formation of a plan that was to have immediate success: ‘I’d got a very good notice in the Oxford Mail, that redoubtable publication of the Midlands. It really was an extremely good crit. It was very much one of these, you know, “the next John Cleese” sort of things. I remember asking this other man, who was doing Zoology or something, what you did if you wanted to be in show business and he said, “Try and find out who the agents of the people you admire are and write to them.” So I did, and I wrote to nine agents that summer before I went to Edinburgh, saying, “Now look, I’m going to do the Edinburgh Fringe,” and I enclosed a photocopy of the review. Nobody replied, except Richard Armitage. He flew up especially to see me and we worked together from the day that he came.’

  The son of the composer Noel Gay, Armitage was a theatrical legend who had played with the Grades when they were children, taken over Noel Gay artist management in 1950, and had showbiz running through every major artery. He was also John Cleese’s agent, which made Atkinson all the more overjoyed to be scooped up. Armitage claimed that he was first drawn to Atkinson by his letter, which humbly began ‘Dear Sir or Madam’, but one sight of the 1976 revue was enough for Armitage to add the 21-year-old to his personal stable. This was also good news for Mrs Atkinson, who was terrified for her youngest son, making his way in the seamy world of showbiz. ‘She thought it was full of bouncing cheques and homosexuals and nasty men in velvet bow ties, so I got a really well-dressed middle-class agent who looked like a bank manager and that reassured her a lot. She found that not everyone wears bow ties, so her view was modified to an extent.’

  The 1976 Edinburgh show, staged at St Mary’s Street Hall (just round the corner from where Lloyd was performing in The Unpleasantness at Brodie’s Close) was a semi-refined hotchpotch of the best of the Oxford Revue, but the production basically amounted to Curtis and Atkinson travelling up in Rowan’s VW camper van – this ‘Oxford Theatre Group’ only had one star, already tooled up to take the comedy scene by storm.

  However, there was the matter of actual study. Returning for their second year at Oxford, Rowan and Richard moved into a house together on Woodstock Road, and began to revel in being the driving force of the university’s comedy scene. Rowan naturally found himself on the revue stall at that year’s freshers’ fair – just in time to meet a musical master, and make a friend for life.

  Howard Goodall was born in Bromley, but the family moved to Rutland, and then Oxford, when he was still small – and music was the younger son’s obsession from the very start. He became a chorister aged eight while attending New College prep school, then began to master the organ at Stowe school in Buckinghamshire, before forming a band (featuring his older brother Ashley) at Lord William’s school in Thame. When he landed a place studying Music at Christ Church college in 1976, it would have been little surprise to anyone to learn that he was headed for a first.

  ‘In my first week at university I went to the freshers’ fair and I had decided that I wanted to be involved, as a musician, with the revue. So I went to the desk, and I said to the guy, “Look, I’d really like to be involved musically, I don’t know how.” We talked for a little bit, and he said, “Well, someone will come and see you.” It turned out the guy behind the desk was Rowan Atkinson, and then when I went back to my room that afternoon, Richard Curtis came to see me, and he said, “Me and Rowan are doing a show, like a student revue, in three weeks’ time at the Oxford Playhouse. Would you like to do the music?” So I said, “Yeah!”’ Goodall expected nothing more at first than a bit of scene-shifting, but he was instantly put to work at the keyboard crafting material with Oxford’s brightest duo. Seeing his new chum in the spotlight, he was as stunned as anyone. ‘When they saw him for the first time, people were just really helpless. For whole periods of the show, they would be just out of control laughing so much, because it was so different.’

  With Atkinson, Curtis and Goodall working on the faces, words and music, the Oxford Playhouse shows went from strength to strength – one early audience member who was impressed enough to pop round backstage for a pri
vate chat about TV opportunities was the celebrated LWT producer Humphrey Barclay, beating the BBC’s Bill Cotton by a whole year. Barclay recalled his first impressions of the new talent whom everyone was whispering about: ‘While clearly still an undergraduate performer, he displayed the rare talent of physical comedy: not knockabout, but visually creative, in the style of Jacques Tati or Robert Hirsch of the Comédie Française, instantly conjuring hilarious characters by contortions of his flexibly angular body and his odd deadpan face. I didn’t laugh at everything, but hugely at most of the show, and when the odd sketch didn’t appeal to me, I took in the fact that the house around me was falling about. Here was a talent to amuse, big time.’ By coincidence the show’s rave reviews had already caught the attention of those higher up the LWT echelons, and John Birt and Michael Grade detailed Barclay to bring Atkinson into the fold.

  Amid all this success, however, Atkinson’s 1977 Fringe experience began as an absolute disaster. The friend from the Dundee University Theatre Group whom Atkinson had been working with on and off for years convinced him to do away with anything else which had been going on in the revue. ‘We kind of took it over. I think we were completely cruel and selfish in setting up virtually a one-man show, but I can’t remember. You forget these things,’ Atkinson didn’t quite recall in 1988. ‘The first night was awful. It was his fault really and I think he would accept the blame. It was full of long parodies of Brecht and the like, which if you’re going to get away with it anywhere then Edinburgh will let you get away with it, but it wasn’t really the stuff of popular entertainment. I’m someone who’s always preferred to entertain for people rather than to people. I thought it wasn’t working, so I cancelled it for three nights and we rustled up a new revue.’ Eager punters were ushered across the road to the pub for a few days as Atkinson marshalled his trusted friends around him to come up with a plan B. The resultant one-man revue – featuring more than one man, plus Helen, who was at the Fringe performing in Goodall’s musical, The Loved One – was to become the basis of Atkinson’s breakthrough show the following year.