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

by J. F. Roberts

  As with so many other green striplings in this story, the elder statesman Cook was to welcome Lloyd into his intimate circle of ribaldry without a qualm – even though, due to his lack of exposure to British TV in his schooldays, John wasn’t an avid fan. ‘I came to know Peter pretty well as a person,’ he says, ‘but I never got round to catching up on the fine detail of his career. Most famous people, I think, would have found this either offensive or incompetent. Peter couldn’t have cared less. He had the gift of being able to treat everyone absolutely equally, and he made no exception of himself.’

  Another reason that Lloyd was clearly happy to help with the panto was that he had already put a new plan of his own into action. He had taken the book debacle with Douglas to heart, and at the same time as his old housemate’s mammoth success was beginning, all around him his colleagues seemed to be getting ahead, leaving for TV, finding their niche, while he was headed for thirty, working round the clock on radio shows with only a vague promise of promotion years ahead. When his radio hit To the Manor Born transferred to TV without him it all became too much for the young Lloyd, and on the most decisive working day of his life he left his office, marched over to TV Centre, and as good as banged on comedy boss Jimmy Gilbert’s desk demanding a chance at producing a TV show. ‘To my huge surprise, they said, “Of course. What took you so long to ask? Would six programmes be enough?” They could do that sort of thing then.’

  Lloyd’s commission was to create a brand-new satirical comedy show for the eighties – on the understanding that he share duties with Current Affairs producer and fellow Cantabrigian Sean Hardie, who had a habit of sneaking jokes into Panorama. The two put their heads together and began plotting a pilot for the spring of 1979. ‘It started off being called Sacred Cows, that was the BBC’s title for it, and it was designed to be a dissing of all the things that you weren’t supposed to diss.’ Hardie’s participation was always going to give the programme a more topical feel, but for Lloyd, this was in a way the creation of another in a long line of revues – and he knew which performer he wanted to head the cast.

  A PLAN MOST CUNNING

  Atkinson and Lloyd had a near miss immediately prior to the launch of this new TV show, as Curtis and the comedy world’s greatest new visual performer readied their one and only foray into radio. Like The Burkiss Way team before them, Curtis and Atkinson started their audio experiment in the sober atmosphere of Radio 3, which perfectly suited their mockumentary style. Originally piloted as Rowan Atkinson’s Profiles in 1978, The Atkinson People, which debuted on 24 April 1979, was planned as a series of biographical studies of fictional men of achievement – Shakespearean actor Sir Corin Basin, politician and Renaissance man Sir Benjamin Fletcher, French philosopher George Dupont and the ‘Pope of Pop’ Barry Good. ‘I was script editor for the department,’ John confirms, ‘so I suppose I must have read the scripts, but I don’t remember it. I was the censor – in that strange way institutions have of making the naughtiest boy in the school the head prefect.’ It was an understated, cerebral series, recorded without an audience and with the help of Beyond a Joke player Peter Wilson and actor Hugh Thomasfn7, and can be most closely compared to painstakingly crafted spoofs such as On the Hour. The roles were quite equally shared out, although Atkinson played all but one of the subjects – an old bore (which allowed him to repeat his Marcus Browning speech), an outrageous Frenchman and a burned-out rocker, in depictions that seemed innocuously genuine to the casual ear, but were packed with verbal idiocy when you actually paid attention.

  Although Rowan didn’t play Sir Corin, he did appear as a Jacobean villain in the first episode, in a faux-archive recording of the actor’s performance in The Tragedy of Terence, or The Recalcitrant Lunatic, which allowed Curtis and he to continue their assault on Shakespeare – revenge for all those dud roles given to Curtis at Oxford. Spot the first arrangement of a most famous phrase.

  TERENCE:

  Ah, now I am alone. Oh woe, they do think that I am mad, but no, I do but counterfeit, and have a plan most cunning, and yet … most cunning. But wait! Here comes my brother the usurper. See him smile; he feels he is on a winning wicket. Little does he know that in a trice he’ll kick it.

  USURPER:

  Hail, Terence, how goes it?

  TERENCE:

  Most porky, m’lud! Most porky! … Aye, m’lud! Mad I am! Woo!

  USURPER:

  Away, away, thou ravest.

  TERENCE:

  Nooo! ’Tis thou that ravest, foul usurper, prepare to meet thy doom! See, I cast aside my madman’s guise and stand before thee the man I was: thy wronged brother, fair Antonio …

  USURPER:

  Loon, I begin to tire of thee. I have no brother, nor is Antonio’s name a name beknown to me.

  TERENCE:

  No?

  USURPER:

  No.

  TERENCE:

  … Then I must be none other than Mad Terence, the foetid stirp?

  USURPER:

  True, loon! Away, I am full of business …

  It may have seemed ironic to Lloyd that Atkinson was making his radio debut just as he was moving on from the medium, but as the series was produced by his old friend and pseudo-brother-in-law Griff Rhys Jones (one of his few productions in his short time as a radio producer), John was hardly that far out of the loop, and he listened in to the shows keenly, wondering how Rowan’s astounding live performances would translate to radio and, indeed, his own TV show.

  Lloyd and Hardie’s programme would not be Atkinson’s first appearance on TV, though. Besides a fleeting appearance on a Richard Stilgoe special, And Now the Good News, Rowan had also been interviewed to publicise the Hampstead show, and in these early days, Afro’ed and bespectacled, he seemed happy to open up about his inner fears admitting, ‘I have a lot of fits of depression and lack of satisfaction, but they’re nearly all associated with the entertainment industry, and actually my other interests in life – I mean, silly things, but things I happen to enjoy doing a fantastic amount, like electronics, like driving trucks – are very simple. And the trouble with show business is that what you’re doing is exposing yourself entirely, and your heart and soul is being torn out and shown to millions of people.’

  Richard Armitage had given Atkinson his first performing break on the small screen, in a way that it can only be presumed the two of them agreed never to discuss again: the ‘Children’s Revue’ A Bundle of Bungles. This attempt at preschool comedy (which would result in the popular show Jigsaw) was broadcast only once, in early ’79, and featured the young comedy star in the role of ‘Mr Ree’, performing his more child-friendly mime skits surrounded by sad-faced clowns and mime artists, with Howard Goodall accompanying him on the organ, in between airings of bizarre Eastern European cartoons. Over the years Atkinson’s work would have huge appeal to children, and even before the Mr Bean cartoon launched in 2002, younger viewers would flock to his post-watershed programmes, but A Bundle of Bungles was his one foray into performing specifically for an infant audience. It was a most unexpected debut for a comic already in the sights of some of the biggest names in TV comedy.

  Humphrey Barclay remained fascinated by the possibility of putting Atkinson on screen, but went about it in an unorthodox way. Rowan remembers, despite having just completed his final exams, ‘He asked me to write an essay on what kind of comedy programme I would like to be involved with. And it was all tremendously pretentious stuff – that there shouldn’t be a studio audience and it should all be shot on location on film, desperately trying to get away from the traditional sitcom or sketch-show format that was popular then, as now. In the end it was largely ambitious but pretentious waffle. Trying to be original merely because you’ve learned to be different rarely works. You should try and learn from the past, rather than rejecting it outright.’

  Despite the naivety of young Rowan’s argument against laughter tracks, the issue would seem to have inspired him in the creation of his first real TV comedy sh
owcase, Rowan Atkinson Presents … Canned Laughter, broadcast on ITV on 8 April 1979. Without Curtis’s aid, the young comic pieced together the best showcase for his characterisations he could, in a sitcom format to be recorded with a live audience. ‘It was basically a chance for Rowan to use a few of his existing characters, woven into a story of sorts,’ Barclay confirms. ‘I turned to the director of Marshall & Renwick’s End of Part One, Geoffrey Sax. Geoffrey had blagged his way into the director’s chair for that very funny series, and brought to it a striking visual element which was a cut above the normal for TV comedy.’ This try-out episode was mostly fresh material – with a few well-tested turns.

  The hero of the piece, Robert Box, is certainly the closest forerunner of Bean on Atkinson’s CV – an awkward, selfish, unpopular and childish disaster magnet. Rowan himself always claimed, ‘I’m best at playing lonely and vulnerable people in small-scale comedies of tiny situations.’ Box is in love with a cute work colleague played by Sue Holdernessfn8, and Canned Laughter follows him on the day that he finally plucks up the courage to ask her out – from his hectic morning routine to inevitable late-night rejection. Box’s bizarrely florid gesticulations, elastic expressions and slapstick reflexes gave Atkinson the perfect excuse to revisit some business he had been performing since the earliest Oxford Revues, as Box’s morning rush required him to ingest coffee on the fly, putting granules, milk and water straight from the kettle into his mouth and mixing them on the go, plus shaving his entire face – bar eyebrows – with an electric razor. Repressing young Robert is his cold-hearted boss Mr Marshall, also played by Atkinson, with a third character coming from left field, in the form of Dave Perry – a struggling (and hopeless) Geordie comedian who is over the moon to get a booking at the restaurant where Robert takes his date. This seems like a transparent display of unusual openness from Atkinson, in a sense splitting his personality and laying it bare for all to see. On the other hand, Perry’s chirpiness in the face of a complete lack of prospects or talent was simply very amusing:

  DAVE:

  Good morning, Mrs Nolan!

  MRS N:

  Morning, Mr Perry, you’re up with the lark.

  DAVE:

  Oh yes. I’ve got to see my agent about a booking. He wants to try me in a swish restaurant in Camden Town. Could be the big break, Mrs Nolan!

  MRS N:

  Oh, I’ve never been in a Swiss restaurant.

  DAVE:

  No, swish! Posh.

  MRS N:

  Oh, well, I hope you’re funny.

  DAVE:

  Oh, so do I, Mrs Nolan. That’s what I’ll be paid for, after all!

  There’s a lot to raise one’s eyebrows at in Canned Laughter – besides Atkinson’s set-piece routines of social awkwardness, an odd melancholia hangs over the whole half-hour, the episode concluding with the broken Box and Perry slumped in despair together in the seedy restaurant as a looped, distorted sample of canned laughter plays, the lights dim and the viewer is left not just nonplussed, but disconcerted. Still, it would have been interesting to see how the idea could have been stretched to a series – if such a course wasn’t made null and void by the acceptance of Lloyd’s offer of a sketch show on the BBC. Barclay now admits, ‘I was elated at the quality of the piece, and having had the power to take someone right at the beginning of his career and give him his own TV show. My plan was immediately to proceed to a series, probably called Rowan Atkinson Presents, which would be a collection of individual half-hours. When I put this plan over the telephone to Richard Armitage, I was absolutely flabbergasted to learn that, undivulged to me, Rowan had simultaneously been working with another team on a sketch show … I went ballistic.’

  Atkinson’s agreement to join the BBC camp was not obtained without some difficulty. John recalls his first tremulous dealings with the mighty Armitage: ‘He was a very classic old-fashioned agent; he looked the part, he was sort of squat and enormously upper class, smoked cigars – the most powerful agent in light entertainment in the country at that time.’ Lloyd had to make it clear that his brief was to create a team for a topical show, and although Atkinson was much sought after, this was not a solo vehicle. ‘He brought his boy in, Rowan, the young star, and they clearly thought this was going to be “The Rowan Atkinson Show”. BBC management in those days was very powerful in its own right, and they were very sure of themselves, and although in the politest way, they said, “We want to get some other talented people, and put them around Rowan, so that if he’s good he’ll shine by comparison, and they’ll support him. He won’t have to carry the whole weight, and also it won’t use up the material nearly so fast.” And to do Richard and Rowan credit, they saw the point of that, and bought into it, and the rest is history.’ Atkinson confirmed years later, ‘My instincts undoubtedly were to protect myself really, to sort of be part of a group of people as I explored the wonders of television.’

  The first episode of Not the Nine O’Clock Newsfn9 appeared in the Radio Times listings with little fanfare, set for broadcast on 2 April 1979 – a week before Canned Laughter was shown on the other side. Keeping as up to the minute as possible, Atkinson was in the studio to record the programme just three days earlier, although he had to wait a full fifteen minutes to get his face in edgeways – performing the Marcus Browning speech again. The Not ‘pilot that wasn’t’ is a cold affair in general, with Atkinson’s original cohorts being Chris Langham, ex-Scaffold and then-Tiswas joker John Gorman, Jonathan Hyde and Christopher Godwin, with gags supplied by some of Week Ending’s finest, including Andy Hamilton and Laurie Rowley – but John and Sean had a nightmare getting it in the can and it shows. Some crucial touchstones of the future show were there from the start – edited news footage was always central to the humour, despite the BBC having always bridled at the idea of mocking politicians by showing them out of context (apparently the public were ready for this by 1979). Quick-fire topical gags were also dominant, albeit mainly relayed via electronic billboard, slowly, as the audience cough.

  There was even a sign of Lloyd’s future plans, with rudimentary Spitting Image-style skits featuring Denis Healey and Bob Hope. Lloyd was convinced that a satirical TV show with puppet caricatures inspired by the modelling work of Peter Fluck and Roger Law, and utilising the voice and script talents he knew well from Week Ending, would be a hit. However, on approaching Fluck & Law, he was told something along the lines of, quote, ‘We don’t know how to make puppets, fuck off!’ so he gave it a go anyway with limited BBC resources, and Chris Emmett providing the voices for crudely animated masks. The end result is interesting, but probably no more biting or funny than Rowan’s Healey impressions in 1975.

  Another item very much at odds with Not as we know it was a tiny historical joke, with a picture of a castle and the caption ‘Worcester 1641’. Roundhead forces cry out: ‘All right, Your Majesty, you’re surrounded! Now come out with your head under your arm.’ The fact that Charles I would not face arrest until seven years after that date provides a tantalising early example of complete anachronism, in favour of a decent joke.fn10

  Only at the end of the first pilot does the crucial Not idea of having the cast – including Atkinson – sitting at news desks churning out topical gags come into play. But one bonus this try-out did have was the ultimate endorsement from the funniest show on TV. With industrial action delaying the final episode of Fawlty Towers, ‘Basil the Rat’, the director Bob Spiers (who also helmed the Not pilot) and star Cleese took a moment to record a special introduction for a ‘cheap tatty revue’, seeing as he refused to ‘do’ Basil that week – there was even a short epilogue featuring Manuel. Cleese would eventually put in a ‘celebrity’ appearance in series three (non-speaking), so he clearly never regretted this largesse.

  The Fawlty endorsement was such a crucial fillip for the team that it was certain to be recycled for the eventual series, but the same could not be said of the rest of the rudimentary revue – with Labour PM Jim Callaghan calling an election just a co
uple of days before the recording, at the eleventh hour the BBC confirmed that their new experiment in biting satire would have to obediently wait its turn for broadcast, at a less politically sensitive date, and was halted.

  Lloyd could not have been more relieved – he knew his TV debut was not at all up to scratch. ‘I prayed every night of that week, it was the most stressful thing, I thought that was the end of my career, because I had no idea, I was a radio producer! I had no idea of all the things you need, car parking, food, lights, that kind of thing.’ The last-minute reprieve – the allotted Thursday-evening slot being given to US sitcom Rhoda – was the best thing that could have happened for the project. John had asked Mel Smith to join the team from the start, and despite having formed a double act with Bob Goody at the time, Mel would have been at the recording but for a stint directing at the Liverpool Everyman Theatre. When shown what was now deemed the ‘pilot’, he agreed that it was ‘sort of awful’, but was in. Forming a new team with him and retaining Atkinson and Langham, Lloyd and Hardie now had an eventful summer in which to rethink their show. Recalling the back-to-basics process Hardie says: ‘We found we disliked the same things. That’s where the whole Not idea came from really – we ran through all the shows we hated. And we wanted to be slightly more out in the street than comedy had been for a long time. And who better qualified to find out what the working class were up to than two Oxbridge graduates with public-school backgrounds?’