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

by J. F. Roberts

  This problematic stretch of the Chronicles does suffer greatly from being dramatically at odds with the established record. Although purporting to cover the years 1560–66, Edmund’s comic tragedy is studded with impossible claims for the time – Shakespeare is mentioned despite having just been born, and Raleigh himself was only a youth in the 1560s, not to return from the New World until 1581 – bringing with him sweet tobacco, not potatoes. Although it’s possible that a forgotten member of the Percy family could have been at court in this time, the Chronicle also features the ever-present figure of Lord Melchett, who remains mysterious to history, while there is no mention of the Queen’s constant adviser William Cecil, Lord Burghley. Perhaps the Lord High Treasurer was unwell during Lord Blackadder’s visits, but the complete lack of any mention does seem fishy, as Cecil was the man to conquer, if Edmund stood any chance of wooing the Queen. Why Cecil also neglected ever to acknowledge such a favourite of Elizabeth (and a noble who allegedly discovered Australia two hundred years early, no less) is a question the Blackadder Chronicler fails to address. Perhaps the one note of verisimilitude in this passage comes from the depiction of one of the Queen’s closest servants, Blanche (not Bernard) Parry, who had been in the Queen’s service since birth, serving as her wet nurse, and would loudly and happily tell all and sundry, right up until her death in 1590, that she had rocked the sovereign in her cradle.

  Of course, if Prince Ludwig was in power under the guise of Elizabeth Tudor, it’s only natural that he would destroy every mention of the one man who came closest to vanquishing him, the ‘Indestructible’ master of disguise. If such a German prince had existed at this time, he would probably have to have been an unpopular son of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximillian II. Perhaps paternal neglect, being considered too short, greasy and spotty to be acknowledged in the family record, could have been enough to spur Ludwig on to killing his way to a throne, even if it did then mean spending forty years in a dress. But then, if the bloodshed of Prince Ludwig’s revenge was as horrific as described in the Blackadder Chronicles, it’s a wonder that anyone was ever in a position to record the death of Lord Edmund, and the real Elizabeth, at all.

  But is that reason enough to dismiss entirely the theory that Queen Elizabeth I was a man, from 1566 until her death in 1603? Professor Pollard certainly believes so. ‘Whilst there is the legend of the “Bisley Boy”, which does indeed suggest that the young Princess Elizabeth was swapped for a man, the clue to its authenticity comes in the title “The LEGEND of the Bisley Boy” and even in the florid pages of this story there is no mention of “Ludwig the Indestructible”. The Blackadder Chronicles of this date also present other insurmountable problems – the completely different make-up of the court, the failure of any protagonists from outside the Chronicles to be present at the place and time (and even age) that they are known from elsewhere and, perhaps most significantly, the fact that the only surviving manuscript of this section of the Chronicles appears to have been written in the margins of a copy of the Racing Post.’

  This is of course sheer wilful arrogance, when discussing a time as murky and duplicitous as the Elizabethan reign. Whoever it was who gave up the ghost at Richmond Palace on 24 March 1603, man or woman, Tudor or German, they took with them enough secrets to provoke a thousand conspiracy theories, and the one concerning Prince Ludwig would surely not be the least likely of them all. Besides, from the Blackadder family’s point of view, Ludwig’s massacre of the Elizabethan court and successful hushing up of his transvestite usurpation was at least delayed payback for Henry Tudor’s own dishonest takeover – the Tudor dynasty ending as it had begun, with one ambitious bastard, and a stack of dead bodies.

  Chapter 3

  BLACKADDER II

  I try, Madam … And then, ten minutes later when I’ve got my breath back, I try again

  Enrolling at Manchester University in the late 1970s may not have had the same cachet as going up to Oxford or Cambridge, but the ancient academies could never have hoped to hold their position as the near-exclusive training grounds of Britain’s educated comics forever, and the thriving revue traditions at institutions like Manchester and Bristol, many with a commitment to taking shows up to the Edinburgh Fringe, were sure to add to the nation’s wealth of entertainers eventually. By 1979 Manchester had already turned out two of the greatest comics of the next decade, Mayall and Edmondson, who had both been conspicuous stars of the university’s drama course – long-haired self-proclaimed genius Rik was going out with his tutor’s daughter, Lise Mayer, and Ade, already on his first marriage, was the lead in most of the department’s biggest productions, and liked trying to ride his motorbike up the stairs in Rik’s student house.

  The anarchic duo who staged plays about God’s testicles in the refectory to try and get their Equity cards couldn’t have failed to leave an impression on the freshers they left behind, but they equally wouldn’t forget about one eager bespectacled writing machine from two years below – even if Edmondson claims his earliest memory of the first year in question is Mayall shouting, ‘Duck! Ben Elton’s coming up the drive!’

  ‘As soon as Ben arrived, he started writing,’ Mayall recalls, astounded. ‘First years don’t do that! He got to know everyone very quickly, and he was casting! You know, meeting people, getting to know them, seeing who the best actors are, and churning out plays, really fast.’ ‘I didn’t really know them,’ Elton admits, ‘Rik and I were sort of pally – he used to take the piss out of me, basically – and I never really knew Ade … Rik was a couple of years above me, and my God, did he let that be known! He used to pretend he didn’t know my name, that was his great joke, he’d say, “Oh hi, fresher, what’s your name again?” I mean, we’d been working together for years. I was always the little farty fresher … But he came to see one of my plays, and he must have thought it was funny because two or three years later when he and Lise Mayer were starting to write The Young Ones and they felt they needed another element, they thought of me.’

  BENJAMIN CHARLES ELTON

  BORN: 3 May 1959, Catford, London

  Like Rik Mayall, Elton was born to academic parents, but his father was from a more exalted scholastic background. Gottfried and Ludwig Ehrenberg, the two sons of German Jewish scholars, first came to Britain in 1939 for obvious reasons, and it was while fighting against their ex-compatriots in World War II that they anglicised their names, to Geoffrey and Lewis Elton. Geoffrey would go on to be knighted for his work as a historian, specialising in the Tudor period, while Lewis moved to south-east London, became a professor of physics, and married English teacher Mary.

  Ben was one of four children – and the loudest. ‘I’ve always been a talkaholic. My mum used to have a rule when I was little, that she had to be on her second cup of tea before I was allowed to start talking.’ As he told Roger Wilmut in 1989, the family was ‘Middle class, no question there. My dad’s an academic, my mother’s a teacher, so I suppose I had quite an academic background, but I went to ordinary schools. We went to Guildford when I was ten. I was always grateful I was brought up in a liberal household – I always felt I learned a great deal more at home than I did at school.’ Over the years Elton has been criticised for affecting an estuary accent, but his state education in south-east London gave him the same vowels as his friends and siblings.

  By the time Ben was settled in at Godalming Grammar School, however, the eleven-year-old Catfordian had decided what he wanted to be: Noël Coward. ‘I hadn’t discovered his work at that point, but I fell in love with his life.’ Ben’s other main spur to follow the theatrical life – besides an adoration of the front-of-curtain antics of Morecambe & Wise – was joining the Godalming Theatre Group (of which he was ultimately made President), and winning the role of the Artful Dodger in their production of Oliver!. ‘I didn’t even have to audition! They thought, “There’s a show-off little oik, we’ll have him!” I don’t think they could get a boy to play Oliver, either the part was too wet, or there wasn’t a boy good e
nough or whatever, so they cast a girl, Gabrielle Glaister – my oldest friend, really.’ ‘He was wonderful,’ Glaister was to recall, ‘because he has got a huge stage presence, and that’s a fantastic part. He’s so vibrant, that’s the thing about Ben, he’s a little thing full of lots and lots of energy.’

  ‘I wanted to be an actor at that point,’ Elton continues, ‘but quite quickly my ambitions changed, and by the age of thirteen I knew that principally I wanted to be a writer.’ The precocious teenager began writing plays and jokes with a characteristic verve, and did not slow his pace when he moved away from home at the age of sixteen to study English, History and Drama in the apt locale of Stratford-upon-Avon. ‘I wouldn’t have wanted to be out facing the world at sixteen – or eighteen, I was pretty ill-equipped at twenty-one – but at least I had quite a lot of time to meet people, to think – no pressure – and I’m grateful for that.’ Having gained top grades after two years fending for himself in a Warwickshire caravan at such a young age, it’s no wonder that Ben seemed so immensely confident to his fellow freshers at Manchester University in 1977.

  The Farty’s Guide

  By the time he graduated in 1980, Ben Elton had written numerous plays (including two musicals), and garnered a reputation as a safe pair of hands on the typewriter, and certainly prolific. ‘That’s a bit of a legend, really – well, I don’t think you could go so far as to call it a legend – but it has been put about the place that I wrote thirty plays while I was at university. I certainly wrote thirty identifiable pieces, but I think about seven or eight full-length plays … a lot of sketches, monologues, anything. Most stuff was rubbish – you don’t write your best stuff when you’re eighteen.’ Comic ideas overflowed from the student, and though the words poured out in his own dyslexic approximation of the Queen’s English, his inventiveness, ambition and prodigious output were key to his future. The Bear Hunt, Man of Woman Born, Musso the Clown,fn1 all these early efforts were proffered up for undergraduate entertainment, and he simply didn’t care that his ambition and ‘let’s do the show right here!’ bravado made him a target for his cynical contemporaries. ‘I was never cool – in fact, the penny dropped quite early for me, that being cool was kind of holding things in contempt, you know? You hate what’s going on in the world, you hate your course, etc. And I didn’t – I loved what was going on!’ At five foot eight Ben was hardly a dwarf, but knew it was easy for his contemporaries to look down on his enthusiasm, and had already embraced his reputation as a theatre nerd by reclaiming the term ‘farty’ – not just for himself, but as a kind of ineffectual everyman.

  Although Manchester would remain central to his career for years to come, it was natural for the 21-year-old Elton to head homewards after graduation and equally natural that he would join his fellow Mancunian graduates to see how 20th Century Coyote were developing out in the wide world. ‘I’d just left university, and I bumped into Rik – and of course Rik and Ade were into something exciting, they’d become part of what was known as the “Alternative Comedy Boom”… I wrote myself an act, auditioned at the Comic Strip (very, very nerve-racking), and God bless Pete Richardson, he gave me a job. Then I got a job at the Comedy Store, and I very soon was able to do it, but it was always the material that was effective. People liked my material, they didn’t particularly like me onstage … Really, for want of anything better to do, I thought, “Well, I’ll have a bash. No one’s reading my plays, I’d better shout my comedy to the world.” I must say, of all the things I’ve done in my life, that decision was the most astute and the luckiest – I decided to become a comedian. It has to be said that everybody said, “Don’t!”’ Mayall admits, ‘I was the one who said to him, “Ben, listen, I’m your friend, right? Don’t go onstage. Don’t! Because you’ll have a bad time. You’re a writer, Ben, you keep writing. Don’t go onstage.” About a week later he went on at the Comedy Store and stormed the place.’

  Elton’s early act would be painful to him now – allegedly it involved inept impressions of Ronald Reagan – but whatever he was doing was still an improvement on his first stand-up attempt at college, when he thrust on a straw boater and performed a Frank Carson set verbatim. ‘There I was as a sixteen-year-old virgin, doing this sort of “grown-up” act.’ In the late-night bear-baiting arena of the Comedy Store, he quickly learned a survival tactic which would come to define his style – modesty was never going to ward off the dreaded gong, and so he attacked the boozy crowd at high volume, pre-empting heckling with a combative style and rattling off his painstakingly written material at a fast enough rate not to give the crowd time to get a word in edgeways. At the same time, although he was open about his motives for taking up stand-up, he realised he could not ignore current issues, and he found that he did have something to say, beyond the nightmares of student fridges and InterCity train travel. ‘The eighties was an extraordinary decade. People look back, they think it was about BMWs and slicked-back yuppie hair, but the decade was one of continual conflict. The first gigs I ever did, Brixton was in flames, as was St Paul’s, as was Toxteth. Y’know, I was twenty-one, twenty-two, playing in London with riots going on outside, it’s going to affect your act.’ Within six months the firebrand had been made compère at the Store, to some consternation but little surprise, and he admits, ‘I really felt like the King of London – I was twenty-one years old, I’d just earned thirty quid or whatever, the cab was gonna cost four quid, you know? I was earning more than the dole in a night, and it just felt fantastic!’

  With his great showbiz mates getting off to such a good start, there was little floundering before Ben was invited to showcase his stand-up skills on TV, and he was soon back in Manchester to be a regular on the confusingly named Oxford Road Show (broadcast from the BBC’s studios on Oxford Road). ‘I got a chance to be a bloody awful comedian live in front of a very aggressive audience. I used to think that the Oxford Road Show was a competition between a group of skinheads and a group of Mohicans to see who could look most bored during my act.’ Nevertheless, riding the wave of popularity attached to any comic who could manage ten minutes on the Comedy Store stage was setting Elton in good stead for his desired career in light entertainment, without any further help.

  On the other hand, when Mayall and Mayer sat on the tour bus for the Comic Strip tour in 1981 and had the brainwave of placing their regular characters in a student house together, Rik decided that ‘little Ben Elton’ was the perfect man to ‘churn out the gear’ – and without a moment’s hesitation, Elton became the youngest scriptwriter in BBC history. When Nigel Planer’s Outer Limits partner Richardson refused the role of Mike Thecoolperson, preferring to establish The Comic Strip Presents … on Channel 4, Ben was quick to offer himself up for the role, but was firmly shouted down. He nevertheless managed to play several small roles in the sitcom – a blind DJ, a stand-up cat, a Grange Hill pupil – and anyway, he had already secured himself his first acting gig on commercial TV – again, thanks to Mayall.

  Rik was as hotly in demand with comedy producers in the first years of the eighties as Rowan had been a few years previously, and having been the jewel in the plastic crown of one attempt to cater to young comedy fans in the wake of Not’s premature end, it wasn’t surprising that he was wooed by producer Sandy Ross at Granada to do the same thing for their new sketch show for ITV. In the end Mayall had to turn the offer down, but not before he’d recommended that they make use of the scripting skills of Elton – and having impressed the producers with his scripts, Ben was in a position to suggest that the best person to bring them to life was himself. So as the first series of The Young Ones was nearing completion, the writer was back on the train up to Manchester to meet up with the rest of the troupe for the try-out series of There’s Nothing to Worry About. In alphabetical order, the opening credits would scream the fledgling comic stylings of Ben Elton, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie.

  Belts Off, Trousers Down, Isn’t Life a Scream?

  Six years after John Lloyd picked up his degre
e from Cambridge, the Footlights revues were still a far cry from the salad days of A Clump of Plinths, despite the regular relay of big-names-to-be who continued to file through the club’s portals. Martin Bergman and Robert Bathurst would take over the presidency from Jimmy Mulville before Jan Ravens became the first ever female Footlights boss in 1979, but the excitement generated by Chox had long since abated by the time the summer revue, Nightcap, travelled up to Edinburgh. Even though the scripts came from some of the best writers of Footlights past and present (including Sandi Toksvig, Mulville and McGrath and even Lloyd himself), Bergman’s revue would never become embedded in the national psyche. Up against Rowan Atkinson at the Wireworks, Nightcap amused without remark, despite boasting not just Bergman and Bathurst in the cast, but the debuts of Emma Thompson, the radiantly gifted daughter of The Magic Roundabout genius Eric, and a twenty-year-old Anthropology and Archaeology student who never went to any Anthropology or Archaeology lectures, Hugh Laurie.

  Hugh’s presence in any comedy revue was a complete surprise to himself, he admits. ‘I think I made a girl laugh in a bar … so many stories start that way … It happened by sheer fluke. I’d gone to Cambridge University to become an oarsman, but I met this woman called Alison in the student bar one night. I told a joke or something and she said, “You’ve got to come with me.” She took me to this club and said, “Here are these people doing the Footlights; you’ve got to audition.” So I did and off it went …’ Emma Thompson instinctively knew that rowing was not to be Laurie’s real raison d’être, nudging a friend on her first sight of the buff blue-eyed six-footer and squealing ‘STAR!’ – and she would be proved right with surprising speed. Although the strapping young athlete would get his blue at the following spring’s Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, his crew would lose the race by a mere five feet, which would haunt him (at least on chat shows) for decades to come. A bout of glandular fever finally finished off any hopes he had of following his father into Olympic rowing, but that just left more room for fooling around getting laughs.