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

by J. F. Roberts

  Of course, not being allowed access to the Chronicles in full, it’s only natural that many historians will take such a cynical view. It certainly takes a great deal more effort to construct a scenario in which a single word of the history of Prince Edmund could be true than it does to take Henry VII’s word for it, and fall into line with canonical Tudor history. But that, it should go without saying, is just what Tudor always hoped would be the case.

  fn1 The nobleman’s true identity has escaped public record.

  fn2 You can also save yourself the bother of checking for Gertrude in the official records.

  fn3 After two Saxon kings, including the tenth-century King Edmund, blandly named ‘the deed-doer’.

  Chapter Two

  THE BLACK ADDER

  We few, we happy few, we band of ruthless bastards!

  All for one – and each man for himself!

  By 1982, Rowan Atkinson was an established Prince of Comedy – indeed, the establishment took him to their hearts – and the spoils of his rise were there to be revelled in. After an extensive period of seeking a habitable castle to call his home, he gave up and settled into a handsome rectory in Oxfordshire, where he lived with his girlfriend, Leslie Ash, one of Britain’s most idolised young actresses. He was the unmistakable star of the BBC’s hottest comedy in a generation, and was even contracted to appear alongside Sean Connery in his shock return to the role of James Bond, in Never Say Never Again – specifically added to the movie at the last minute by writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais to capitalise on his popularity. Admittedly his eventual performance as weedy MI6 pen-pusher Nigel Small-Fawcett remains Atkinson’s least favourite – ‘There aren’t many things I look back on with dismay, but that was one. There was something so clichéd about it. I was hoping to have done a character rather than a caricature’ – but it showed that a movie career could be no idle dream for him.

  There had been setbacks – his show for the 1980 Edinburgh Fringe, coming halfway between the second and third series of Not, hadn’t sat well with the critics, many of whom saw the TV star as an interloper, as he complained to Michael Dale. ‘They will tend, like the record press, to praise anyone who’s unknown and pour large buckets of excreta over anyone who is known. Indeed that’s how most of our media thrive and that was the first time I’d experienced the backlash of fame. In terms of the rest of the country, I was still just budding, but in terms of the Fringe I was virtually a failure.’ Despite this, he was happy to accept a place on the board of directors for the Fringe, and would return often, with or without a show.

  I Spurn You As I Would Spurn a Rabid Dog!

  Two series bookended 1980, putting John and Rowan on the BAFTA stage for the first time, with the latter claiming the Light Entertainment Performance Award, but there was no series of Not for the whole of 1981. Through his live shows however, the upward trajectory of Atkinson’s career did not waver. November 1980 saw his Royal Variety Performance debut, and it wouldn’t be long after that he was named the Royal Variety Club Showbiz Personality of the Year. A four-month UK tour in the autumn had given his fans a chance to see what he did best – as he told the Daily Mail, in his own estimation, ‘I’m just not at my best on television, working around the clock for sketches which last two minutes at the most; all that whiz, bang, crash stuff. I much prefer the stage where I can stretch myself and really develop my act.’

  The combination of well-travelled Fringe material, brand-new sketches and Not hits was ultimately commemorated on vinyl, as Rowan Atkinson Live in Belfast, recorded at the Grand Opera House in September, and rushed out for Christmas 1980. In this one-and-a-half-man show, Atkinson was of course accompanied by Curtis in the two-handers, while Goodall joined them on the road to provide the music for classic numbers like ‘Do Bears Sha La La’ and his solo spot, ‘I Hate the French’. Ever the technician, however, Rowan always prepared his own sound-effects tapes at home.

  ‘The Ranting Man’ turned up to berate the audience for paying to see the ‘rubber-faced twat’, but bottoms still filled seats in their droves, with Atkinson’s Oxford homecoming an especial riot. Atkinson and Curtis’s sketches tended to be low-key affairs, episodes centred on the tiniest details of life, such as being stuck behind a student in the post office, but the new monologues gave Rowan far more metaphysical scope, especially the sketch eventually called ‘Welcome to Hell’, in which his louche, acerbic Devil, Toby, showcased the performer’s unique skill with casual invective.

  TOBY:

  Now, you’re all here for Eternity, which I hardly need tell you is a sod of a long time, so you’ll get to know everyone pretty well by the end, but for now I’m going to have to split you up into groups … Murderers, over here, thank you. Looters and Pillagers – over there. Thieves, if you could join them, and Bank Managers … Sodomites, over there against the wall. Atheists! Atheists? Over here, please. You must be feeling a right bunch of charlies … OK, and Christians! Christians? Ah yes, I’m sorry, I’m afraid the Jews were right.

  Toby’s taunting would come in handy throughout the decade, an audience favourite cheered at the first sight of a pair of horns on Rowan’s head, as the crowd looked forward to being berated just as they were by his Schoolmaster. For more general cries of abuse, they had to wait for the last of the trilogy of speeches in ‘The Wedding’, or ‘With Friends Like These …’ Richard noticed, as his twenties progressed, that most of his Saturdays tended to be earmarked for one wedding after another, as individuals from his troops of friends began to pair off and demand free kitchen utensils. Naturally the monotony of weekly church services gave him plenty of time to study the archetypes, and Rowan’s resultant turns as a tiresomely groovy Vicar, utterly clodhopping Best Man and drunken, bitter Father of the Bride were only the beginning of the writer’s obsession with nuptials:

  FATHER:

  Ladies and gentlemen, and friends of my daughter … There comes a time in every wedding reception when the man who paid for the damn thing is allowed to speak a word or two of his own … Primarily, I’d like to take this opportunity, pissed as I may be, to say a word or two about Martin. As far as I’m concerned, my daughter could not have chosen a more delightful, charming, witty, responsible … wealthy? Let’s not deny it … well-placed, good-looking and fertile young man than Martin as her husband. And I therefore ask the question: why the hell did she marry Gerald instead? … As for his family, they are quite simply the most intolerable herd of steaming social animals I have ever had the misfortune of turning my nose up to. I spurn you as I would spurn a rabid dog! … I would like to propose a toast: To the caterers!

  The show settled into the Globe Theatre (now the Gielgud) in a new guise directed by Mel Smith, headed NOT Not the Nine O’Clock News But … Rowan Atkinson in Revue – With Richard Curtis and Howard Goodall – but few punters paid much attention to the latter duo. Curtis cycled from his flat in Camden to the theatre night after night, onstage for at least an hour feeding Atkinson lines, blinking in the lights and cursing his anonymity. ‘My greatest hero, David Bowie, came backstage after one show, and was introduced to me. He had no idea who I was. He had been watching me for nearly an hour but my face didn’t ring any bells at all – he assumed I had been the stage manager and congratulated me on how efficient the scene changes had been.’ This was the final gasp of Curtis’s long-held thespian dream – he admitted his job was to ‘look as ordinary as possible all of the time’, but the snubs got to him – one night, playing the blind man in the prototype Mr Bean sketch in which Rowan tried to change into swimming trunks without detection, Atkinson’s forced absence from the stage presented an opportunity for the writer: ‘I was alone, onstage, in the West End – the moment I’d dreamed of all my life. I left a big pause. Then crossed my legs. Huge laugh. Another pause. I did it again. Smaller laugh. And again. No laugh at all. By the time Rowan returned, to tumultuous applause, my desire for an acting career had died forever. So I gave up, definitely, once and for all, and accepted that writing was
my game.’

  The idea of this twenty-something trio on the road suggests all sorts of antics, but Goodall remembers very little in the way of debauchery; in fact the reception Rowan received on every date of the tour made the experience quite odd. ‘You’re touring with one of the great comic geniuses of the century, you’re all twenty-two and you’re three friends. So how do you handle that? Because obviously the minute Rowan walks onstage, he has three thousand people in the palm of his hand; it’s an extraordinary gift. We don’t really discuss it very much, but that’s what’s happening. I think the rest of us found it quite difficult to adjust to the fact that he was becoming very famous very quickly, and we were still who we were. So there was quite a lot of adjustment to be done, especially for Rowan. Difficult for him to get used to his friends always wondering whether he was going to buy the meal or not.’

  Besides his own show, Atkinson made time for the numerous charitable gigs which called for his patronage – The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball found him rubbing shoulders with Alexei Sayle, Billy Connolly and Victoria Wood, appearing in more sketches with Cleese and Footlights classics like ‘Top of the Form’, as well as donning the surplice once again for Curtis’s Not sketch ‘Divorce Service’.

  But closer ties to a new generation of performers, who already made Atkinson seem like one of the old guard, came from the Not team’s appearance on a show in June called Fundamental Frolics, staged by ‘Schoolmaster’ scribe Richard Sparks in support of learning disability charity Mencap. A duo new to the Comedy Store called 20th Century Coyote were given eight minutes on the bill, but their blisteringly insane, inane blend of extreme violence and crap gags about gooseberries in lifts ended up stunning the crowds for more than double their allotted time. For Atkinson, this act was the most electrifying new brand of humour he’d seen since, well, his own. But for his part, Rik Mayall was happy to announce, ‘We were very anti Not the Nine O’Clock News – we reckoned that we were the best because we were doing cabaret and not revue. Revue was a dirty word, and so was Oxbridge, we had a down on the Pythons … although we secretly all thought that the Pythons were great, and half of us were red-brick and university anyway.’

  RICHARD MICHAEL MAYALL

  BORN: 7 March 1958, Harlow, Essex

  Richard Mayall grew up in Droitwich Spa from the age of three, the second son born to drama teachers John and Gillian, with two younger sisters completing the family. With his parents’ background there was a certain inevitability about young Rik’s fascination with theatre, but it was no guarantee of the academic skill which would put him two years ahead of his contemporaries, starting his secondary education at the King’s School, Worcester, at the age of nine, and immersing himself in school drama, with and without his parents’ supervision. ‘I used to do shows after school with mates – it was also a way of getting off games. We used to do absurdist drama, mainly – Waiting for Godot, a bit of Pinter, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, Endgame, The Real Inspector Hound – good fun to perform, and would have a bit of an impact on the teachers and the parents. Those plays are quite significant because you can be very serious by being funny … that was mainly where I developed my distaste for being serious.’

  Being just another face among the freshers on his arrival at Manchester University in 1976 predictably did nothing to cow the ebullient show-off, who dripped with confidence gained from years in the spotlight. Forming an anarchic theatrical group with the more worldly Adrian Edmondson in his first year, the then five-man-strong 20th Century Coyote tried and failed to get Equity cards by putting on semi-improvised plays in the university canteen, but became famous on campus in the meantime, staging forgotten dramas such as God’s Testicles, How to Get a Man Out of a Bag, Who is Dick Treacle? and King Ron & His Nubile Daughter. ‘We were doing a half- to three-quarter-hour show every two weeks,’ he recalls, ‘so we had personas that we could do best – I was best at being angry and petulant and selfish and a nuisance and ugly and unpopular. Adrian generally played either heavies or women.’

  These plays greatly honed Rik & Ade’s comedic chops, while a tour of the USA with the Oxford and Cambridge Shakespeare Company sharpened Rik’s straight acting skills – but this was no help in finding work after he graduated with a 2:2. ‘I was living in Droitwich with my parents and working in a foundry during the whole of 1979. Adrian and I did a show every month or two; we put together a show called Death on the Toilet – I played God and Death, and Adrian played a character called Edwin.’ Taking this play to Edinburgh that August – and actually making money – was the spark that showed Mayall that he had to leave home and start performing professionally. By now 20th Century Coyote was reduced to just Rik & Ade, but their audition to replace the popular Fundation comedy group (including a fledgling Hale & Pace) at the Woolwich Tramshed showed that the years the duo had spent honing their brand of lavatorial absurdism put them in a class of their own – until, that is, they moved on to the Comedy Store and met Peter Richardson and Nigel Planer, performing as the Outer Limits. But even among this group, Mayall glaringly stood out as a unique entertainer.

  Although Ade Edmondson’s brand of nihilistic stupidity made him a tricorned ginger icon of eighties comedy almost as quickly as Mayall himself, there was something about Rik’s bravado, ambition and nostril-flaring, bogey-wiping demeanour which seemed to push him to the front, right from the start of their careers. He quickly found himself an agent who set him up for a flurry of tiny movie roles including a memorable cameo playing dominoes in the Slaughtered Lamb in An American Werewolf in London, as well as being taken under the wing of Paul Jackson.

  Jackson was a comedy boss from a completely different school to John Lloyd, the son of a TV producer who had started out as a runner on The Two Ronnies in the early seventies and worked his way up to become producer and director of the show as well as working on a host of mainstream favourites like The Generation Game. He became the first producer to put his budget where his mouth was and bring the most exciting regulars at the Comedy Store to TV in their own vehicles, starting with two special shows broadcast one year apart named Boom Boom Out Go the Lights, which showcased Mayall’s turn as an undeservingly arrogant poet, alongside Nigel Planer as a terrible hippy musician, plus Pauline Melville, Alexei Sayle and Keith and Tony Allenfn1.

  Mayall’s first fully formed TV creation, however, came via the unlikely patronage of BBC Scotland. The early eighties saw a steady stream of shows hoping to take on Not, offering a topical sketchbook with a limited licence to offend. A Kick Up the Eighties was a Colin Gilbert production – the script editor for Not, Gilbert would eventually score a hit with Naked Video, but this prototype sketch show had less of a Scottish flavour. The first series was rather unpromisingly linked by the far from Alternative Richard Stilgoe, but for the sketches Tracey Ullman headed the cast (fresh from Jackson’s Three of a Kind), backed up by two more experienced comic performers – Miriam Margolyes, finally getting a chance to showcase her skills in visual comedy, and Roger Sloman, five years after his creation of the hideous Keith in Mike Leigh’s Nuts in May. By the second series in 1984, they were joined by a burly Scotsman with impressive versatility, Anthony ‘Robbie’ McMillan.fn2

  Entirely separate to A Kick Up the Eighties’ sketches were the weekly ‘investigations’ from Kevin Turvey. Kevin’s bizarre rants, centred on the mind-numbing minutiae of his life as a young unemployed self-styled investigator from the duller part of Redditch, entwined with moments of surreal surprise, made for one of the most difficult to categorise comic characters – though ‘bastard son of E. L. Wisty’ would be a starting point – Mayall himself told Roger Wilmut in Didn’t You Kill My Mother-in-Law?, ‘My comedy is a lot less pointed than other people’s – the meaninglessness of my comedy is really the message. There’s hardly ever any constructive message in there … I don’t deal in words and rational ideas. I deal in the unusual, the exciting, the very personal …’

  Before long Mayall and Edmondson had moved from the S
tore to the Comic Strip, to form a solid team of new comedians, each one ready to find a place for their humour on TV, as Rik had already managed, to an extent. Kevin Turvey may be an undervalued part of British Comedy history, but he remains the one thing most people remember about A Kick Up the Eighties. Though several writers worked for both shows, and Sean Hardie himself was executive producer for the first seriesfn3, none of the new pretenders could compete with Not’s ongoing success. With the fourth series lined up for the start of ’82, Lloyd and Hardie called their team together to lay out future plans.

  Why Don’t You Grow Up, You Bastards?

  ‘We had an empire, we had a franchise,’ laments Lloyd, ‘and what I wanted to do was break into America, and I wanted to do movies, and, you know, make something that would last forever. Sean and I asked the cast to dinner, and the proposal we were going to make was that we were going to do exactly what the Pythons had done, when they started Monty Python Productions.’ With everyone gathered, however, Rowan had to offer an apology – in not so many words. ‘You’re all very nice people,’ he began, ‘and I like you a great deal and you’re all very talented … but I’ve talked to my agent, and he thinks that I shouldn’t play with the second eleven any more.’

  Jaws dropped all around the table. ‘You won’t get Rowan being rude to people,’ Lloyd insists, ‘he doesn’t do rude to people. He was passing on a remark … He then left the restaurant and everybody else got fantastically drunk, because we all thought that was the end of our careers, basically. And we had to go in the next day and be polite to each other in rehearsal, which was pretty tricky.’ The BBC’s thirtieth-anniversary tribute of the debut, Not Again, did allow Atkinson a belated apology, when he jovially admitted, ‘Retrospectively, I’d like to apologise for my high-handed attitude towards the whole thing.’ But the fact remains that back in 1982 he had big plans: movies to make, and perhaps – like many a great comic keen to cement their place in comedy history – a solo sitcom vehicle which he and Curtis had already begun to toss back and forth. They were done with sketch comedy, as the third member of their trio, Howard Goodall, reflects today: ‘It would have been an odd thing had he stayed in a topical weekly TV show forever. You’re talking much more Chaplin, Jacques Tati-type character. Rowan needed to find a bigger, wider stage to play on. And boy, did he …’