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

by J. F. Roberts

  One non-Footlighter up in Edinburgh for a Cambridge production of Oedipus Rex, an English scholar who had gained a bit of a reputation as a handy performer to turn to when in need of an aged classical or Shakespearean king of any kind, managed to get tickets to both Atkinson’s and Laurie’s revues. The former would leave young Stephen Fry ‘almost unable to walk. My sides and lungs had taken a hell of a beating. They had never been put to such paroxysmal use in their lives … That is the kind of joy that can never be reconstructed, to encounter an outstanding talent for the first time with no preconceptions and no especial expectations.’ Nightcap, on the other hand, though it made less of an impression on Fry’s funny bone and bladder, would have far bigger repercussions on his entire life, bringing him face to face with his closest colleague for the first time. ‘A tall young man with big blue eyes, triangular flush marks on his cheeks and an apologetic presence that was at once appallingly funny and quite inexplicably magnetic.’

  To this day neither Hugh nor Stephen can agree on how the two would make meaningful personal contact beyond mumbled post-gig congratulations – whether it was Thompson dragging Fry to Hugh’s home where they instantly began working on a song for the Footlights pantomime together, or perhaps Hugh rolling up at Stephen’s rooms for tea, crumpets and chess – but as Fry was to affirm in his second volume of autobiography in 2010, ‘The moment Hugh Laurie and I started to exchange ideas it was starkly and most wonderfully clear that we shared absolutely the same sense of what was funny and the same scruples, tastes and sensitivities as to what we found derivative, cheap, obvious or stylistically unacceptable.’

  STEPHEN JOHN FRY

  BORN: 24 August 1957, Hampstead, London

  ‘One of the interesting things about being English is that people who are said to be exemplars are often curiously hybrid, as I am,’ Fry offers of his genealogy. ‘My father’s family, the Frys, are as English as you can get. As my great-uncle George wrote in a not highly successful book entitled The Saxon Origins of the Fry Family, “unlike so many so-called English families, the Frys did not come over with the Conqueror, they were there to meet him when he arrived”. But my mother’s family is entirely East European Jewish.’

  Fry was the middle child of three born to physicist and inventor Alan and his wife Marianne, and from a very young age it was clear that he was more of a handful than his older brother Roger and little sister Jo put together. A relatively idyllic infancy in Norfolk was interrupted at the age of seven when the time came to decamp to prep school at Stout’s Hill in the West Country, where he was acknowledged to be notably gifted, but equally averse to school rules and discipline – a trait which was only exacerbated when he progressed to Uppingham School in Rutland. Between a tendency towards kleptomania, which funded his hard-core addiction to sweets, and the heartbreak which came from coming to terms with his own sexuality (having fallen head over heels in love with a fellow pupil), Fry’s regular rebellion led to expulsion from the school at fifteen for going AWOL in London, supposedly addressing the Sherlock Holmes Society, but indulging his love for cinema by watching Cabaret and The Godfather on a loop.

  He spent even less time at his next school before being shown the door, and at the age of sixteen tried to take his own life. The failure of this attempt did not lead to any turning over of new leaves, and one year later he reached a nadir when he stole the credit card of a family friend and led police on a cross-country chase, until the law finally caught up with him in a hotel in Swindon, and the teenager was placed on remand for three months at the misleadingly cuddly-sounding Pucklechurch prison in Gloucestershire.

  Whether due to the suffering of his family, or the experience of playing the ‘Professor’ role for his fellow inmates, who had far fewer opportunities in life than the public-school boy, Stephen left prison and marched confidently towards rehabilitation, gaining a place at City College Norwich by assuring administrators that his A-level grades would earn him a place at Cambridge – and being proved right. A short period of teaching (and mastering smoking a pipe) in Yorkshire presaged his entrance into Queens’ College on an English scholarship in 1977. A sensible return to teaching after gaining his degree was his only ambition, but as his two decades of existence had already shown, nothing in Fry’s life ran along conventional lines.

  JAMES HUGH CALUM LAURIE

  BORN: 11 June 1959, Oxford

  The Lauries are an ancient Scottish family, but Hugh’s father, Olympic rowing hero and colonial doctor William Laurie (known as ‘Ran’, from his middle name Ranald), was born in Cambridgeshire and settled in Oxford with his family after serving in World War II. By the late fifties, William and his wife Patricia already had a son and two daughters, and one more addition to the family, several years on, came as something of a surprise.

  Their youngest son would have his work cut out earning the respect of his parents, and the pressure of having to follow in the footsteps of his gold-medallist father, coupled with a stern Presbyterian upbringing, would not allow the baby of the family any of the swagger which prejudice would suggest comes from being the product of a privileged background. Like his father and brother before him, Hugh would be sent to the world’s most elitist school, Eton College, but this exclusive environment, which had churned out world leaders for centuries, failed to instil the school’s traditional sense of superiority in the youngster. In fact, his parents struggled to put Hugh through the college, and he admits, ‘I went to a very posh school with some very posh people, but I’m not especially posh myself.’ He was a gifted child with an innate musical ability, plus a deep love of the blues, passed down to him by his brother. Crucially, he also excelled on the sports field, which at Eton was more important than any academic achievement.

  For all his gifts, Laurie describes himself, particularly in adolescence, as a ‘horrible’ child: lazy, discourteous and difficult, and he has underlined in the past a particularly fraught relationship with his mother, for whom he never felt any achievement was good enough. However, he credits his teenage redemption to the discovery of the works of P. G. Wodehouse, almost single-handedly converting the stroppy adolescent into a bringer of sweetness and light. Winning a scholarship to Selwyn College, Cambridge, also just like his father, Laurie may not have been academically minded, but remained determined to make Ran proud with his rowing career, before making himself useful in some far-flung corner of the Empire.

  Having arrived at Queens’ College after a year of teaching and a period at Her Majesty’s pleasure, Stephen Fry was committed to immersing himself in the world of academe, and despite a rich love of comedy from Wilde, Wodehouse and Coward to the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, Cook & Moore and Morecambe & Wise, he had no thoughts of the Footlights until he and Laurie clicked in that second year. Tall, thin and saturnine, with meticulously fluffy verbiage on tap and prone to tweed and pipe-sucking, the sudden manifestation of young Fry within the Footlights coterie like the bastard son of Graham Chapman was so smooth it’s a wonder that his comic powers weren’t unearthed earlier, but even after a thirty-year friendship, the Footlighter who rubber-stamped his entry only offers, ‘I just delight in the way his brain works.’ Both well over six feet, the goggle-eyed Hugh and bent-nosed Stephen stood out together in any crowd, and over the tops of their contemporaries’ heads, the duo made a connection which has survived decades of fame, crises of depression and transatlantic career moves, to become one of Britain’s most loved double acts. ‘We were very traditional,’ Fry says, ‘he was the straight man, I was the homosexual man, which is the way it always works.’

  When a comedy partnership is forged out of a deep friendship rather than showbiz accident or financial expediency, the love they have for each other tends to be returned by the public a hundredfold, although Fry has noted, ‘One of the most fortunate things really for me, as a gay man, is that I never fancied him. Although he’s extremely good-looking – which he is, and a lot of women could faint at the sight of him – fortunately, for some reason, that switch wa
s never on with me and Hugh. And it would have been embarrassing if it had been, if you think about it.’ Although Stephen and Hugh have flourished apart for longer than they were a partnership, for many fans, no amount of solo success can overshadow the blessed twinning of Fry & Laurie (the ampersand is significant), a partnership which began in the Michaelmas term of 1979.

  The new colleagues were only credited sketch writers for the following summer’s revue (Footlights’ first all-female show), but by their last year, they and Thompson had formed a strong comic group, with Emma repeating her final terms for theatrical reasons, despite having already been enthusiastically signed up to the Noel Gay organisation by Richard Armitage. Cambridge comedy was not just about the annual Footlights shows at the Arts Theatre and the Fringe, and the show that was to become The Cellar Tapes emerged from months of charity balls, private parties and smokers.fn2

  With his allegiance now shifted from the rowing team to his new comedy chums, Laurie could be terrifying in the face of barracking and heckling, dragging one ‘bijou revolutionary’ out from an Emmanuel College May Ball entertainment and shaking him by the throat until the whole marquee quaked, yelling, ‘Don’t you dare insult my friends!’ ‘I used to have a lot of confidence,’ he admitted on Desert Island Discs in 1996, ‘I used to think: “I know I can do this; I can stand on a stage with virtually nothing and no idea of what I’m going to say or do, and know that it will be all right, I can make it work.” And as soon as I started doing it for a living, it all changed, I don’t know why. One of the strange things that happened was that hitherto I had always thought of audiences as being female in character, and when I started to do it professionally for some reason they became male. They became competitive, an adversary that had to be conquered, and I imagined rows of men with their arms folded saying, “Go on then!” I have to confess I’d get very aggressive. Stephen and I would absolutely seethe with rage if we hadn’t triumphed.’

  Laurie had been such a team player since his first year at Cambridge that it seemed natural for him to inherit the presidency in 1981, with Jan Ravens remaining to direct the revue he and Stephen were poised to stitch together. Fry had indoctrinated multitalented and dirty-minded fresher Tony Slattery into the troupe, although the acknowledged thespian star of their generation, Simon Russell Beale, turned down a similar offer, to concentrate on his serious craft. With Paul Shearer (who was fated to remain an unknown in British Comedy until his roles in The Fast Show more than a decade later) and Penny Dwyer (who relinquished comedy for a career in metallurgy before her tragic death in 2003), The Cellar Tapes team became without a doubt the first Footlights gang to rival the success of Cleese’s generation seventeen years previously. As they rehearsed, Fry & Laurie would gaze up at the imposing monochrome icons of Footlights Past – Cook, Cleese, Garden et al. – and confirm to each other that the good times were gone. Nevertheless, The Cellar Tapes would trace the same path as every previous May Week revue, plopping into the Edinburgh Fringe melting pot in August 1981. Hugh was adamant, that if nothing else, the new show would be different. ‘I was absolutely determined that it should be very grown-up, in that very pompous sort of twenty-year-old way. Some of the previous revues had been very sprightly, with young undergraduates nipping around the stage, and that had rather nauseated me, so I wanted to do something … rather sick, in fact. And I chose Stephen. Not for the sickness reason, but because he appeared then to be about sixty.’

  With hindsight, as with every single Footlights revue ever staged, it’s difficult to claim that The Cellar Tapes, at least as captured for broadcast by the BBC, could safely be regarded as a classic. With a title giving an early suggestion of Laurie’s obsession with espionage thrillers, the show was presented as a rather low-key assemblage of linguistically intricate pastiches – Victorian melodrama, Alan Ayckbourn – and darkly satirical musical spots, concluding with a haunting choral number about the National Front. There are, however, definite highlights that still showcase the revue’s original appeal even today – Thompson’s prophetic award acceptance speech as ‘Juliana Talent’, Fry & Laurie’s ‘Shakespeare Masterclass’, and Fry’s Bram Stoker send-up, ‘The Letter’:

  STEPHEN:

  The day the letter arrived I was due in court on the intricate case of Melchett versus the Vatican, which was coming to a delicate and potentially explosive stage. The letter, then, came as a welcome diversion, and I tipped the delivery boy out of the window with more than ordinary generosity. Even then, I fancy I gave a momentary shudder as I unfolded the letter, but it was a cold morning, and in accordance with Mr Tulkinghorn’s instructions with regard to Melchett versus the Vatican, I was naked …

  Fry’s choice of name for the man who took on the Pope of course provides an early sign of how much influence he would eventually have on Blackadder. Perhaps the standout moment in The Cellar Tapes, this monologue, revised and extended – ‘I stooped, I recall, to pick a buttercup. Why people leave buttocks lying around I have no idea’ – remains Fry’s party piece for charity benefits and royal galas alike.

  Reviews were unusually kind for a Footlights show – there’s a long tradition of critics showing themselves up with bad predictions when it comes to Footlights revues, but there was an irrefutable star quality in this cast that few could ignore. At the close of one performance, Fry recalled, the applause reached an unusual crescendo which mystified the cast – unaware that behind them, in his official role as a member of the Fringe board, the unmistakable figure of Rowan Atkinson had crept onstage, and was ineffectually holding his hand up for silence. Rowan had met the cast a couple of nights earlier, and sent them into paroxysms of embarrassed joy with his praise, but this was inexplicable. ‘For a moment or two I thought he had gone insane,’ Fry recalled. ‘His reputation for timidity was already established. It made no sense whatsoever for him to be there.’ Thirty years after the event, Stephen’s recollection of the speech that followed can be heard all too clearly in the Not star’s halting tones: ‘Um, ladies and gentlemen. Do forgive me for interrupting like this. You must think it very odd. You may know that this year sees the institution of an award for the best comedy show on the Edinburgh Fringe. It is sponsored by Perrier, the bubbly water people. The organisers and judges of the award, which is to encourage new talent and new trends in comedy, were absolutely certain of one thing – that whoever wins, it wouldn’t be the Cambridge bloody Footlights. However, with a mixture of reluctance and admiration, they unanimously decided that the winner had to be The Cellar Tapes!’ To be the inaugural winners of the most influential award in British Comedy was one thing, to have it sprung on you by your new comic idol, in front of your own ecstatic audience, was an unlooked-for delight.fn3

  Already a stablemate of Thompson’s, Rowan continued to play comedic Santa in Hugh and Stephen’s lives, as they received their own invitations to sign up to Noel Gay. Armitage had been deeply impressed with Stephen especially, and lost no time in laying out the deal. This impressive figure with the beautiful Bentley and enormous cigars eyed up the lofty pair and asked, ‘Do you see yourselves doing this kind of thing professionally? As a career?’ And on reflection, they realised that they did. They were shortly to pick up indifferent degrees, with Stephen accepting a 2:1 for English, and Hugh bagging a third. ‘He had been to one lecture, which gave him the material for a quite brilliant monologue about a Bantu hut, but otherwise had not disturbed his professors, written an essay or entered the faculty library. I think he would be the first to admit that you know more about archaeology and anthropology than he does,’ Fry says, and here was an unexpected consolation. They were lined up for a tour of The Cellar Tapes, with a run at the Lyric Hammersmith and heading as far as Australia with Bergman in charge, but after that? Stephen had only considered an academic life, and Hugh was almost entirely sold on joining the Hong Kong Police; but with Emma’s inspiration, the two new friends realised that whatever doomed musings about fame they may have had as undergraduates, here was a real old-fashioned, p
owerful agent who could make it happen for them. ‘Stephen was always destined for attention,’ Hugh reflected a quarter of a century later, ‘he was always going to get attention in this life. I was never sure attention was something I wanted …’

  Both Stephen and Hugh had been on television before, two years earlier – Fry in the Queens’ College team on University Challengefn4 and Hugh presenting scraps of Nightcap on BBC show Friday Night, Saturday Morning. ‘It was trying to be a sort of David Frosty-type thing, with tart comment on the week’s news; and so I suppose I was meant to supply some tart comment. I didn’t have any then, and I don’t have any now. It’s not my thing, tart comment.’ Their first joint engagement for BBC TV was a filmed version of The Cellar Tapes that was never broadcast – Geoff Posner had seen the show, and asked the team whether they minded being the subject of his Studio Direction Course graduation piece. As his incredible track record from Not onwards would suggest, it was good enough for the young Posner to pass with flying colours, but the revue was eventually restaged with a live audience when the cast returned from their tour in 1982, produced by the top man, Dennis Main Wilson.