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

by J. F. Roberts

  If it seems odd that Atkinson was in cahoots with anyone other than Curtis at this time, then the latter has the definitive excuse for his absence. ‘I fell in love, and that dominated my second year; and then I got heartbroken and that dominated the next year, entirely. I did a lot of work in the end, simply so I could hide from my heartbreak.’ Though remaining Rowan’s right-hand man for several more years as Atkinson took centre stage, Curtis was also busy organising the traditional Oxford Revues, giving first chances to Deayton and the future KYTV team.

  Besides this lovelorn industriousness, one other notable positive came out of young Curtis’s romantic desolation in 1977 – a lifelong comedic war against Bernards in all forms. As if being dumped in your teens isn’t bad enough, it is on record that Curtis’s girlfriend Anne left him for – and married – Bernard Jenkin, a future Tory MP and vice chairman of the Conservative Party. From that day forward, Curtis resolved to mock Bernards however he could in every fiction he created.fn4 Curtis’s youthful heartbreak would ultimately be the making of him. ‘Maybe if I hadn’t gone out with that particular girl then I would have been happier but, on the other hand, I don’t think I would have written all the films that I then wrote to, as it were, “put life right” … I had at least fifteen years of making love affairs turn out right, to try and make up for what happened outside Magdalen College.’

  While Atkinson was stitching together his replacement show at St Mary’s Street Hall, Griff Rhys Jones was directing that year’s Footlights offering, Tag, and was to record a fateful first clash between the two Oxbridge factions who would go on to all but run British comedy for the following decades. If a gas explosion had levelled St Mary’s in the summer of ’77, cutting off all those students in their prime – Atkinson, Curtis, Rhys Jones, Deayton, Peter Fincham, Rory McGrath, Jimmy Mulville, to name just several – then British comedy today would be unrecognisable.fn5

  On the first day at St Mary’s Street Hall, both the Oxford Theatre Group and Footlights, each with their own spots in the venue’s schedule, dropped off their gear and decamped to different pubs. When Curtis, Deayton and co. finally returned to find that their tinfoil set had been unwittingly cut into ribbons by Rhys Jones’s mob for their carnival float, righteous indignation rapidly melted into retreat as they saw that their far more drunken counterparts – Griff, Rory and Jimmy (a fiery scouse Classics student, already married at twenty-two and largely at Cambridge because his dad had put a bet on him) – were not to be messed with. Mulville went on the offensive, grabbing the enemy by the lapels and spitting, ‘See that wall over there? If you come any closer I’ll paint it red with your blood!’ ‘Although the two sets which had first met or mingled at this grubby church hall were to go on holiday together, intermarry, send their children to the same schools and meet frequently over the next thirty years,’ Griff recalls, ‘I never felt that the first sharp thwack of that initial meeting was ever forgotten.’

  AINSLEY AND PLECTRUM AND ZOB

  Ultimately, the squabbles between the Oxbridge kids were made irrelevant by the re-emergence of Rowan Atkinson into the spotlight, in the hastily cobbled-together Beyond a Joke: ‘A rather pretentious and inaccurate title.’ This was the tour de force that saw Rowan being compared favourably with the earlier wobbly-limbed graduate clown, Jonathan Miller; the performance which didn’t just catch John Lloyd’s talent-scout eye, but yanked it out of its socket and sent him pelting off to have a word with the star. John sat and watched Rowan play invisible drums and piano, portray beings from other universes, and create the first in an incredibly long line of fruity clergymen, from the pen of Richard Curtis.

  VICAR:

  You know, a lot of prospective brides ask me these days, ‘Father, what is the Church’s attitude towards fellatio?’ And I tend to reply by telling them a little story … A couple of years ago, a young attractive bride-to-be came up to me after the service and asked me just that question. ‘Father, what is the Church’s attitude towards fellatio?’ And I replied, ‘Well, you know, Joanne, I’d like to tell you, but unfortunately, I don’t know what fellatio is!’ And so, she showed me. And ever since, whenever anyone has asked me the question ‘Father, what is the Church’s attitude towards fellatio?’ I always reply, ‘Well, you know, I’d like to tell you …’

  ‘Undoubtedly,’ Rowan says, ‘the Edinburgh Fringe was a sort of melting pot, in terms of people seeing me and what I was doing, or what Richard Curtis and I, more accurately, were doing.’ John Lloyd recalls his first experience of the show itself: ‘It was unlike any revue that I had ever seen. Partly because of Richard’s genius, the lateral jumps it made in terms of subject matter – it didn’t obey any of the rules of student sketch writing, it wasn’t like what we were all doing at the time … Very beguiling and odd, and then suddenly this fantastically rude vicar talking about blow jobs, you know?’ But the young producer’s first impressions of his future collaborator offstage weren’t promising. ‘He was a very closed down, eccentric person, really, quite lonely-looking and shy. He was very offhand with us – quite frightening, actually. He had no idea who I was, and in those days I looked like a fifteen-year-old who’d been up all night. He obviously thought, “Who’s this git?” But Rowan is a perfectionist, and he didn’t think he did well in that performance, so we hovered for a while, but as he was very unforthcoming, we went to the pub.’

  Back down at Oxford, Beyond a Joke was to reach greater heights of success, with Atkinson-Wood alternating with Julia Hills as Rowan’s one co-star; and soon there were plans to move the show to London – in fact, to move to London full stop, with finals out of the way, as Atkinson got his Master’s degree and decamped to west London (Curtis would get a first the following year, alongside Goodall). Conveniently, another Oxford graduate, Michael Rudman, had already approached Rowan with the idea of mounting a new iteration of his latest revue at the tiny Hampstead Theatre in Swiss Cottage.

  This evolution of Beyond a Joke was supplemented by brand-new material, with one notable highlight being the ‘Schoolmaster’ sketch written by Richard Sparks – a graduate a few years ahead of Curtis and Atkinson, whose then comedy partner Peter Wilson joined Rowan in the cast, alongside actress Elspeth Walker. The new line-up required a few fresh items, such as a trio of Barclays Bank staff who stage a Christmas musical – but everybody knew that it would be the star’s solo spots, like the ‘Schoolmaster’ sketch, that people would remember. Sparks’s opening roll-call of ridiculously named pupils was the perfect vehicle for Atkinson’s other wild card as a performer – his unique delivery, born of the stammer which had afflicted him since he was small. ‘I do have a problem with the letter B, quite often when B is followed by a vowel … I remember at school my schoolmates getting a lot of amusement out of getting me to say the word “Bubble” and me stammering a bit.’

  Having had his natural Tyneside vowels ‘thrashed out’ of him at school, Rowan had developed a pretty good ability as a mimic (as well as a mime), but he could never be a true chameleon – his diction was as unique as his facial apparatus. ‘I do have a natural stammer,’ he says, ‘which I usually manage to contain, particularly when I’m acting, and saying lines that I have rehearsed well, it means that I’ve got very familiar and very confident with them. I mean, stammering is in the end a thing about confidence.’ It was the gaining of this confidence, syllable by syllable, which gave the Oxford star the ability to get laughs out of shopping lists. Tony Robinson rightly notes, ‘Rowan has this unique gift of being able to wring every single nuance out of every syllable of every single word. The over-articulation becomes funny in itself. That’s how he learned to overcome his stutter, and it’s become this great comic gift.’

  The ‘Schoolmaster’ sketch was a supreme example of this gift. Rowan froze in the spotlight, glaring at the audience and daring them to titter as name after name was called out from the attendance register, each less likely than the former – from ‘Ainsley’ and ‘Bland’ to ‘Nibble’ and the ever-absent ‘Zob’, vi
a ‘Haemoglobin’ and ‘Nancyboy-Possum’:

  MASTER:

  All right, your essays. ‘Discuss the contention that Cleopatra had the body of a roll-top desk and the mind of a duck.’ Oxford and Cambridge Board all over paper 1976. Don’t fidget, Bland. The answer: Yes. Jones M., Orifice, Sediment and Undermanager, see me afterwards … Put it away, Plectrum! If I see it once more this period, Plectrum, I shall have to tweak you … You’re a moron, Undermanager. A carbuncle on the backside of humanity. Don’t snigger, Babcock! It’s not funny. Antony and Cleopatra is not a funny play. If Shakespeare had meant it to be funny, he would have put a joke in it.

  In these sketches, Beyond a Joke didn’t really reflect the politically flammable, punk-spattered late seventies one iota, but harked back to the previous generation of Oxbridge comedy. Like Cleese, the striking twenty-something sketch actor excelled in patrician roles of beleaguered authority, and it’s little wonder that his Python idol was encouraged to pop along the road to Swiss Cottage to see what it was that had caught the eye of their mutual agent. Being immersed in the creation of both Life of Brian and Fawlty Towers, this was the zenith of Cleese’s career, but he had time to scope out the competition. ‘I was very intrigued,’ he admitted to the press. ‘He’s very, very good, he was making people laugh with some material I’d have paid money to avoid.’ With this final caveat, Cleese reflected some of the show’s less gushing write-ups, but even the generally scathing Time Out concluded that ‘with the right material, Atkinson could be very funny indeed’.

  Atkinson’s venue was well placed: Hampstead is a vast faux-rural comic’s retreat, and if the approval and patronage of Cleese wasn’t high praise enough, another famous Hampstead resident made it down the hill to check out the young pretender. But Peter Cook, having seen the show and struck up a rapport with its star, was more holistically charmed, insisting, ‘It is impossible not to be funny when you are around the man. He’s positively inspiring.’ Twenty years on from his own game-changing theatrical breakthrough Beyond the Fringe, it was likely – particularly during this dramatic period in his own career, with Dudley Moore having finally decamped to LA – that Cook was alert to the torch-passing element of his approval of Beyond a Joke, unwitting though the revue title’s similarity was. One of the undeniable high spots in the show was Curtis’s Tory MP, Sir Marcus Browning, a senile loon directly descended from Cook’s infamous Macmillan impersonation.

  MARCUS:

  There comes a time when we must all stand up and be counted. I am standing up now, and can be counted. One. To each of you, I say: you are a One. And Ones are about to become singularly important – because Britain is facing the gravest economic crisis since 1380. And you know, many of us still remember those days: the eternal torment, worry, exasperation and all manner of strife …

  After his graduation, there was some hope in Atkinson’s family that he would consider a move back to take over duties at the farm in Consett, as both his older brothers had fled the nest and were forging their own careers. But show business had already got him, 100 per cent. Rowan Atkinson in 1978 was standing centre stage – lauded by his heroes, under the wing of a hotshot agent, best friends with a hilarious writer, and with a whole raft of exciting job offers from the biggest movers in light entertainment: Bill Cotton, Humphrey Barclay and the ambitious radio producer John Lloyd.

  DON’T PANIC

  Any comedy producer who had achieved what John Lloyd had by 1978 could unquestionably have parked themselves comfortably on their laurels and been confident that their contribution would be celebrated for years to come. Revitalising Just a Minute and launching quick hits The News Quiz, Quote Unquote and The News Huddlines provided a CV any producer would maim for, but it couldn’t be enough for a man as restless as Lloyd. There’s a natural suspicion in Radio 4 circles that any talented young producer is just killing time until their big TV break comes along, but Lloyd insists it wasn’t quite like that for him. ‘I had five years in radio. I was happy there, felt privileged to be there. Nowadays people are in radio for a year and they want to get straight into telly and then make their first film.’ But having achieved so much in just a few years, with an estimated five hundred programmes to his credit, the odd niggle soon turned into a nudge – his mentor Hatch telling him ‘Lloyd, play your cards right, in seven years you could be deputy head of this department!’ when he was only twenty-five and seven years sounded like a life sentence, for instance. The main spur in Lloyd’s side, however, was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. After years of anguished inaction, Douglas Adams’s perseverance with the comedy sci-fi serial idea, which had first occurred to him while hitchhiking round Europe before attending Cambridge, had finally paid off, partly due to the huge success of Star Wars. Simon Brett backed him up, producing a pilot for the series in the summer of 1977, complete with a Footlighter-packed cast headed by Simon Jones. Brett’s own move to television then saw the drafting in of Lloyd’s one contender for golden boy of BBC Radio LE, Geoffrey Perkins, to carry out the Herculean task of producing a complete run of six episodes of Adams’s outrageously sonically ambitious saga.

  The problem was that Adams’s pilot script had so impressed the Doctor Who bosses at TV Centre that by the time the full series needed to be ready to air by spring 1978, he had been commissioned to write a four-part serial of the programme, The Pirate Planet, and would go on to be Script Editor, albeit briefly, in 1979. This was all too much for a deadline-phobe like Adams to bear, and in desperation he turned to his most regular collaborator for support. ‘I was living in Knightsbridge at the time, in the flat of a rather well-off friend,’ Lloyd told Nick Webb for Wish You Were Here. ‘There was a kind of garage that had been converted into a rough-and-ready office where we worked. And although it had taken Douglas almost ten months to write the first four episodes, the last two we wrote in three weeks … We laughed a lot.’ They had only recently received a handy £500 for writing a couple of quite interesting episodes of bizarre Dutch cartoon series Dr Snuggles, so they usually had something brewing on the typewriter together anyway.

  One of Lloyd’s numerous irons in the fire was his science-fiction comedy novel, GiGax – which may well mean ‘the greatest area which could be encompassed by the human imagination’, but was also named in honour of the creator of Dungeons & Dragons, Gary Gygax. Lloyd had filled the story with ideas both complex and incredibly silly, but was way off reaching any kind of conclusion, working away at every thread in his tale with characteristic logical precision. He generously showered Douglas with pages, and invited him to cherry-pick the ideas which best suited Arthur Dent’s odyssey of oddities. ‘Mine was a rather pretentious book I suppose, but there were quite a lot of crucial ideas in it and Douglas had this wonderful way of taking a kernel of an idea and turning it round to make it funnier. He always had a way of putting a gag on the end, whereas my natural inclination was to go forward with the basic idea to try to find a solution rather than a gag. It was in that garage that we jointly came up with the number 42 and the Scrabble set, which even at the time seemed the most wonderful, striking, simple and hilarious idea.’

  John Lloyd’s equal input into the last two episodes of the first series of H2G2 was to be only the start, with a co-written Christmas special and a second series on the cards, plus a novelisation under joint contract. This had been happily agreed between them face to face, but when Lloyd later received a letter from his friend explaining his decision to take back control of his characters and write the book on his own, Lloyd was utterly crushed. Losing his chance to finally be part of a successful sci-fi franchise was one thing, but being informed by mail when he was just in the next room seemed to make the rejection far worse. It was also true that John was in the red, and greatly needed his half of the handsome advance paid by Pan Books. The furious Lloyd found himself an agent as quickly as possible and – despite being advised to accept 15 per cent of the H2G2 profits in perpetuity – he negotiated half of the existing advance, and nipped the issue
in the bud. It wasn’t quite so easy to shake off his indignation at Adams’s use of him as an ‘emotional football’, however – even Douglas’s mother had to step in to placate John and try to put an end to the feud.

  Mrs Adams’s intervention may have been the clincher – certainly, by the end of the year the two friends were not just talking again, but working together. The instant popularity of H2G2 led to Adams himself joining Lloyd as a radio producer, doing the odd shift on Week Ending and producing that year’s panto, celebrating ninety-five years of the Footlights, Black Cinderella II Goes East. Douglas began his first big production with great confidence, hiring pals Clive Anderson and Rory McGrath to pen a corny script inspired by ISIRTA,fn6 and sending word out to vintage Footlights stars including Cleese (although he insisted on pre-recording his role of ‘Fairy Godperson’ at home), Richard ‘Stinker’ Murdoch, and, in the spectacularly nasty plum role of Prince Disgusting, Peter Cook. However, with the Christmas recording getting closer and closer, Douglas had to admit that he had bitten off more than he could chew, and called on his old friend in the next room to act as co-producer. ‘I was called in to help at the very last minute – if not days before the recording, then not much more than that. I came along because at least I knew about, you know, warm-ups and how to do read-throughs and all that.’