WILL THIS WIND BE SO MIGHTY …?
The following month gave a perfect opportunity to see what was going on in comedy in Thatcher’s brand-spanking-new Britain, as a club called the Comedy Store opened its doors, in a venue hidden away above a Soho strip club, and Lloyd made sure to be there on the first night – as was agonisingly pointed out by terrified Footlighter turned barrister Clive Anderson in his debut stand-up set, alerting the crowd to the presence of the big-shot comedy producer. All around Lloyd harrumphed the stirrings of a revolution in British comedy that could form part of the manifesto of the rejigged Not. ‘There were two things really,’ Lloyd recalls of the programme’s ambitions. ‘One was to create something that was huge fun – like going to see your favourite rock band or going to a party, that kind of thing. And the other was to kind of reinvent what you could be funny about. Seventies comedy was all sort of very right wing, all the comedy was about cripples and fat women and gays – you wouldn’t even call them gays, you’d call them poofs in those days. There was a guy called Gus Macdonald who made a speech at the Edinburgh Television Festival in the seventies which I for some reason dropped in on, and he talked about stereotyping in comedy, how dreadful it was that we’d all got stuck in these habits. And at the same time the Comedy Store was starting … It was a complete coincidence that they were doing on the stage what we were trying to do on telly.’ But sadly once Anderson had pointed out one of the Oxbridge lot to the assembled crowds and acts, Lloyd was lucky to escape intact – and was in fact wedged in the lift by Keith Allen jamming a radiator into the door. In truth, the number of genuinely working-class acts who emerged to fame from the club which helped kick-start the ‘Alternative Comedy’ boom was very small indeed. For every Keith Allen, Tony Allen or Malcolm Hardee there were a dozen middle-class lads like Lloyd hoping to make punters laugh – and some of them had plenty to say, too. Ultimately, Not wouldn’t be identifiably ‘Alternative’. It would have its smattering of Irish jokes and a big helping of ‘busty substances’, and where the radical comics would have fought the power, Not stood on the sidelines, laughing at everybody.
One month after Lloyd’s lift calamity, very near geographically but in the smarter environs of Her Majesty’s Theatre, Rowan Atkinson was honouring the invitation of a lifetime. Once again, his fairy godperson John Cleese had conferred a great honour upon him by asking him to feature in the third of the Amnesty benefit concerts, to be called The Secret Policeman’s Ball. Clydeside Humblebum Billy Connolly would also be making his Amnesty debut, amid returning Oxbridge greats like Cook, Palin, Jones and Bron, and musicians like Pete Townshend and Tom Robinson, but Atkinson was clearly the stand-out act on the first night. ‘No one really knew who I was or what I did, they were sort of educated in those three or four spots throughout the evening; and the Schoolmaster was I think the first thing that I did, which kind of said, “Well, here I am, and this is what I do.”’ The Schoolmaster and Pianist skits wowed the crowd enough, but to be actually invited to make up the quartet for the ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ sketchfn11 was an unexpected welcome into the highest echelons of the comedy mafia. ‘For me, I was living a fantasy,’ Atkinson recalled for the thirtieth anniversary, ‘of actually being onstage with the Monty Python team doing a Monty Python sketch. Generally speaking, I think I felt as though I kept my end up as best I could. But it was a great privilege.’
If Rowan merely ‘kept his end up’ with the comedy gods of the decade, however, he almost inadvertently upstaged the true comedy Godfather, Peter Cook, in the climactic Beyond the Fringe sketch ‘The End of the World’, as the whole cast gathered with pullovers pulled over their heads in anticipation of the apocalypse.
COOK:
It will be, as ’twere, a mighty rending in the sky, and the mountains shall sink and the valleys shall rise and great shall be the tumult thereof, I should think … Certainly there will be a mighty wind, if the word of God is anything to go by.
ATKINSON:
Will this wind be so mighty as to lay low the mountains of the Earth?
COOK:
Can’t hear a blind word you’re saying. You’re speaking too softly for the human ear, which is what I’m equipped with. You’ll have to speak a little more loudly, please.
ATKINSON:
About this wind …
COOK:
No better, is it? I ask you to speak more loudly and you speak more softly. A strange reaction from a follower, or perhaps I’m very old-fashioned, expecting you to speak louder …
ATKINSON:
Yes, you are.
Atkinson has claimed that his bizarre strangulated squeaks (perhaps best described as his ‘funny little croaky one who isn’t anyone in particular, but is such a scream’) were an attempt to pay tribute to Dudley Moore’s original performance, but his unique cartoonishness, a melancholy alien among the tableau of comic masters, was the final cherry on top of his triumph as star of the show.
Or rather, that may have been the case were it not for Cook’s infamously sharp, rapid and devastating reaction to one of the first show’s reviews, a Telegraph article which denounced the evening for having no satirical bite. ‘Entirely a Matter For You’ was a lampoon of the biased summing-up of the infamous trial of Liberal politician Jeremy Thorpe on grounds of conspiracy to murder, as made by Mr Justice Cantley. This blistering destruction of Cantley’s calumny was pieced together on the fly by Cook with input from the whole cast, and utterly slayed the audience for the remaining three nights, becoming, in some people’s view, the last great creative flourish from Cook for at least a decade.
So popular – and indeed, satirically urgent – was the monologue that Cook decided to record it and release it as a single as quickly as possible, and there was no one better equipped to help him achieve his goal than John Lloyd, who was lurking in the shadows, as at any moment of comedic urgency. Brought in by the show’s producer Martin Lewis, his role on the EP Here Comes the Judge was to capture Cook’s timely masterpiece on vinyl, but for the B-side he found himself having to perform opposite the great man himself, delivering a fine Dagenham twang in a Derek & Clive-style sketch about the ‘Well Hung Jury’, and a desperate toff looking to get his wife wiped out in ‘Rad Job’. This was to be his final spot of comedy acting, and he remembers not feeling equal to the challenge. ‘I briefly became Peter Cook’s straight man. It was The Worst Job I Ever Had: the straight man who couldn’t stop laughing – a sort of dud Dud.’
SIX SHALL HE GATHER
These last performances quite closely presaged Lloyd’s last credit as a scriptwriter, certainly for a fiction of his own invention. Having seen the giddying heights of H2G2’s success, Adams’s old muckers Lloyd and Andrew Marshall already had their own idea for an epic radio comedy saga, tying into their own branch of geekiness: Hordes of the Things. In the wake of Peter Jackson’s blockbuster movie franchise, Tolkien spoofs seem trite and opportunistic, but when A. P. R. Marshall and J. H. W. Lloyd brought their swords ’n’ sorcery yarn to Radio 4 in 1980, they were not only treading on virgin snow (perhaps excepting Terry Gilliam’s Jabberwocky from 1977), but the programme’s broadcast even pre-empted the famed BBC Radio adaptation of The Lord of the Rings – which any Tolkien fan would assume they were aping – by a whole year.
Produced with his signature ear for ambitious atmosphere by Geoffrey Perkins, fresh off the back of H2G2, Hordes of the Things tells the incredibly sorry tale of the pre-Time world of Middle-Sea – or more specifically the land of Albion, ruled by the inaccurately named King Yulfric the Wise III. Even more specifically, it is the cliché-ridden heroic quest of the wood-poacher Agar, son of Athar, and his minotaur friend Stephen.
As the weak ruler is played by Paul Eddington, it’s all too tempting to draw parallels with his greatest portrayal of all, Jim Hacker in Yes Minister, which had debuted on BBC2 at the start of the year – and coincidentally, the sitcom’s co-creator Jonathan Lynn also featured in the radio saga as the greedy dwarf Golin Longshanks. But these weren’t
the only well-known voices in the cast – Irish actor Patrick Magee spat out the lunatic narration with rumbling rapidity, Maggie Steed played Queen Elfreda, Prince Veganin was Simon Callow in full Shakespearean bombast, the great Ballard Berkeley popped up briefly, and the crucial role of ineffective wizard Radox the Green was filled by Frank Middlemass. Perkins was also very lucky to retain the services of the extraordinarily versatile voice artist Miriam Margolyes, in the role of Agar’s gorgon mother, Dyandetes the Three-Faced Sybil, and sundry harpies. Despite being an Oxford native, of Jewish Belarusian descent, Margolyes had first shown her comedic flair in the Footlights, back in the days when girls were barely tolerated, let alone allowed into the club. She filled the allotted non-masculine roles in Double Take (with Cleese, Chapman, Barclay, Brooke-Taylor and Tony Hendra) in 1961, but sadly that was no breakthrough year, and neither were the first two subsequent decades of her career. But as her vocal expertise was always hugely in demand, she crammed in a dizzying array of jobs over the years, from Jackanory to the Cadbury’s Caramel bunny, the female roles in the TV series Monkey, and even recording audio porn. But her abilities stretched far beyond the microphone, as time would eventually prove.
The dry and linguistically pedantic humour of Hordes of the Things naturally bears some resemblance to H2G2, but in its epic nature the one comedy programme it feels closest to is undoubtedly The Black Adder. The sound aesthetic of the two programmes – mocking melodrama, setting up impressively epic scenarios from a time of kings and castles, battles and fresh horses, and then instantly undercutting them with silly pathos – makes them non-identical twins, but twins nonetheless.
RADOX:
Harpies have never dared approach the hidden glade before – it’s restricted, you see. You must have something very precious for them to seek you out like this. A magic coat of mail? A shield? A ring, perhaps?
AGAR:
A ring? What use to anyone is a ring? (STEPHEN groans.) Oh, yes! There’s my sword. Observe the scabbard of jewelled copper.
RADOX:
It’s magic, there is no doubt! I mean, look at the ivory inlay, the ebony motifs, and here on the blade, in fiery runes for all to see! The words of the elder tongue! (Reads) ‘Tra-gu-dan-borith, tra-corna-pagadarith …’
AGAR:
Could it … Does it mean, ‘One man shall save the realm, six shall he gather’?
RADOX:
I’ve no idea, I failed Runes.
Callow’s foghorn soliloquising as Veganin so blatantly foreshadows Brian Blessed’s terrifying Richard IV that it’s easy to imagine him being second on the list for the latter role, and the way that Lloyd & Marshall presented their four-part saga, with a meticulously constructed alternative reality in which their alter egos smoked pipes with the rest of Oxford’s Inklings in the 1930s (as outlined in the Radio Times), also gave Lloyd his first experience of rewriting history, creating an entire false reality to surround a single comedy programme.
Unfortunately (and perhaps due to a deliberately disappointing and far from epic conclusion), Hordes of the Things was swiftly forgotten by all but the most retentive fantasy fans, until BBC7 repeats finally paved the way for a CD release in 2009. With Tolkien still titanic box office, if we enjoyed a British film industry, it could form the basis for the best British spoof film since the Pythons were in their pomp.
NOT NOW NATIONWIDE
There’s a whole book to be written about the enormous success and lasting influence of Not the Nine O’Clock News – but this is not it. The struggling growth and heyday of the show will have to be glimpsed only in fleeting detail, as the seventies give way to the eighties and a whole new comedy landscape opens up in British culture.
Prior to starting on the series, Atkinson had enjoyed another sell-out Edinburgh Fringe show alongside Curtis and Goodall at the Wireworks, a huge, bare venue which required him to help design and build his own stage – a dream come true for such a passionate engineer, but one which proved an almost impossible task. Rowan remembers, ‘It was a tremendous engineering and technical exercise and you couldn’t see the stage from the gallery, except from the front row … It was a huge and horrible exercise really, the whole thing. In the end you look back and say, “It was all worth it,” but I’m not absolutely convinced that it was.’ These technical niggles didn’t stop the show from having a Fringe First to take back to London as work started on the new programme.
Having amassed his final team for a full series in October 1979, John Lloyd immediately had pause for thought. ‘We had this famous lunch, and I’m sitting there thinking, “I can’t imagine what I’ve done here, I’ve made the most horrible mistake … apart from a skip out of the back of Madame Tussaud’s, I can’t think of a more weird collection of people.” It was the most uncomfortable lunch, we had absolutely nothing to say to each other, and rehearsals started a couple of days later.’ The stunning and chameleonic Pamela Stephenson had entered the fray after Lloyd had scoured the comedy world to find the right female quarter for his cast, with both Victoria Wood and Alison Steadman turning him down, until (in true H2G2 fashion) Pamela’s dazzling personality called to him at a party, and his chat-up line soon developed into an invite to join the hottest comedy team in the country. ‘The first time people saw Pamela,’ Lloyd complains, ‘she turned up in a microskirt, very tottery high heels, and loads of make-up and lots of nail varnish, and I remember seeing Mel and Rowan – who always did, and still do, have a very similar sense of humour – standing behind a pillar laughing themselves stupid thinking, “This is John’s shag!” And it was so unfair, because it wasn’t true, I never slept with Pamela!’
The show’s viewing figures were not encouraging at first, which was good news for everyone in a way as much tinkering with the format was required throughout the first series. Lloyd says, ‘In the theatre, you’ve basically got one shot to do it, and if it’s crap on the first night, that’s your lot. With telly or radio, you can do the first series and make an awful mess of it, and in the second series – if you get one – you can improve it. And that is basically what I have done all my life – every first series I’ve done, virtually, has been a disaster … The only show I did that was good to start with was The News Quiz.’
But the first series, although a rough try-out by any standards, did contain several sketches now considered classics, including a stand-off between trade union leaders and management which called for a guest spot from Jim Broadbent. Acting was a calling that seemed fated for Jim since he was born to artist parents, conscientious objectors in World War II who were sent to the village of Holton-cum-Beckering to work the land, and founded a theatrical company there. By the age of thirty, eight years into his acting career, Broadbent had barely had a glimpse of a TV studio when he landed the Not job, and Lloyd knew he would be a handy name to remember for future comic roles.
A further quickly established memorable feature of the programme was Atkinson’s turn as a hectoring, reactionary member of the public (ultimately monikered ‘Eric Swannage of Liverpool’), who was liable to interrupt the proceedings with a litany of outrageous complaints at any moment. For the general public, who had not seen the young comic’s live shows, this persona was surely their first opportunity to pigeonhole him – a bizarre, anoraked figure ranting as he struggled through the audience, very much not part of the crowd.
One final sketch in the last episode has gone down in history, Lloyd himself claiming it as the moment when the series really gelled. As a timely reaction to the outcry attending the release of Life of Brian (and, more specifically, the famed clash between Cleese and Palin and Malcolm Muggeridge and the Bishop of Southwark on the TV discussion programme Friday Night, Saturday Morning), regular contributor Colin Bostock-Smith penned ‘The Life of Christ’, twisting the issue round by presenting Atkinson as the director of a movie accused of blaspheming against the hallowed name of Python. Langham, who had been a support player in the real film, was uneasy with what he saw as self-indulgence and comedic incest,
but that alone was not the reason he wasn’t invited back for the second series in 1980. His own problems relating to addiction to sundry narcotics at this time had helped to warrant a call from Head of Comedy John Howard Davies for his removal from the team – a task which Lloyd was dismayed to have to carry out, and finally left to his boss, despite Atkinson putting pressure on him to give Langham a reprieve.
Nevertheless, with the trusty Rhys Jones elevated from bit-part player to full member of the team, it was the second series in the spring of 1980 which saw Not take off as a real cogent comedic voice for the new decade, famed for its edgy piss-takes of every public figure in the news, its gross extended spoofs of TV hits, its talking daffodils and, of course, hedgehog abuse. The show became a haven not just for the cast, but for a whole host of great writers spilling out from the BBC Radio contacts book. The first among equals, however, was Richard Curtis. His father had suggested that a career in personnel at Unilever might be a more suitable career, as Curtis recalled on Desert Island Discs in 1991. ‘He was very keen I should do a proper job, and he wasn’t sure that writing was a proper job. So after I left Oxford he said, “I’ll give you a year, and at the end of it we can see how much money you’ve earned.” And I think I’d earned about £367 or something like that, but just before the year was up, Rowan got asked to do Not the Nine O’Clock News, and all was well.’
Looking back at the stress required to get the show made every week, Lloyd says, ‘It was a nightmare of overwork, I mean, everything was stressful, we used to be green with exhaustion. We were within an ace of disaster more or less every week. It was amazing what we did, and we were only able to do it by basically going without sleep for a week. But for the actors it was a very nice job.’ He estimates that Curtis contributed ‘about half’ of the scripts, becoming a major part of the show’s voice, though this is only partly confirmed by Curtis himself. ‘My major memory of the show is sitting in a basement in Camden Town, writing lots and lots and lots. Sometimes of course you’d watch a show and there was nothing by you.’ With Rowan as his muse, Curtis came up with reams of material for every series. ‘We tried to work out things which were odd, and which Rowan and I would sort of do more onstage, rather than writing satirical things about trade unions, or train timetables, stuff like that.’
The True History of the Blackadder: The Unadulterated Tale of the Creation of a Comedy Legend Page 6