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

by J. F. Roberts

  The Corporation missed the bus this time, however, as by the time the remounted Cellar Tapes was broadcast, the cast – with a few adjustments – were packing their bags for an extended stay in Manchester, to film their all-new sketch show for Granada. ‘We were extremely lucky,’ Laurie says, ‘because Not the Nine O’Clock News was a great success, and very quickly other television companies were desperately scrabbling to get their own version of it, so suddenly young people doing sketch-comedy became a very sought-after … product is such an awful word, but that’s probably how television executives would have described it. We were sort of caught up in that scrabbling.’

  Pretty Much a Case of the Game’s Afoot!

  Congregating for the first time in the flat of Jon Plowman, then a researcher for Granada but eventually to become one of the most influential comedy executives in the business, the Footlights mob could not help but be aware of the perceived gulf between them and their new co-stars. In truth there was little in it – Scottish actress Siobhan Redmond graduated from St Andrews with an MA in English and, as we have seen, both Elton and eventual cast member Robbie Coltrane came from very comfortable backgrounds. Elton’s confident prolificacy, however, was a real eye-opener, as Laurie recalls: ‘Ben was just a whirlwind, he sort of blew us away, really. We had one thing written on the back of an envelope, and we’d hold it up and Ben would just smack down this forty pounds of good com.’ ‘Our slow, mournful and insecure rate of writing had been trumped and trampled on,’ Fry confirms. ‘Where our comedy was etiolated, buttoned-up and embarrassed, his was wild, energetic, colourful and confident to the point of cockiness … Ben would perform his, playing every part, with undisguised pleasure and demented relish. Despite our complete sense of humiliation and defeat we did laugh and we did unreservedly admire his astonishing talent.’ For all the Footlighters’ fears to the contrary, there was no chance of Elton indulging in inverted snobbery, as might be expected from a Comedy Store compère from a red-brick university. Whatever genuine revolutionary zeal had been apparent in the original cabal of comics at the birth of the Store had been swamped almost immediately by wave after wave of talented and ambitious performers, and besides, as Fry was to argue: ‘As an old lag I might be said to be the most real and hard of any of them, a thought preposterous enough to show that the idea of there being a group of working-class comics threatening Castle Poncey was really quite misguided.’

  Although Fry & Laurie’s writing naturally extended from The Cellar Tapes, with their revolting suburban ‘horror men’ Alan and Bernard (soon to mutate into greasy businessmen Gordon and Stuart) putting in an early appearance, Elton had crafted an entire Didsbury street full of characters for the first episode, in a way pre-empting The League of Gentlemen by setting interlinking (and rather sick) sketches within a community. His input also provided an unprecedented blend of social comment and juvenile vulgarity, particularly in the role he crafted for Stephen – or rather, as he had rechristened his pipe-smoking new pal, ‘Bing’. ‘In me he saw a crusty relic of Empire and created a character called Colonel Sodom, who might, I suppose, be regarded as a rather coarsely sketched forerunner of General Melchett.’ This grey old buffer lived on the same street as a tribe of yobbish Brüt-swigging ‘Wallies’, a sickeningly earnest group of young Christians, a tiresomely right-on couple played by Ben and Emma, and Hugh’s tragic loser Mr Gannet. Colonel Sodom’s main characteristic on his introduction was an apocalyptic case of flatulence which blasted a hole clean through his trousers – and although the undeniably stilted, almost dreamlike drabness of the first of the three tryouts Granada had commissioned was self-contained, Richard Armitage made it clear that he hated the direction in which his new signings were being steered, dubbing their new collaborator ‘a foul-mouthed cockney street urchin with a sewer for a mind’.

  These ‘Other Young Ones’ may have beaten Mayall and company to the screen by several months, but it wasn’t just to Armitage’s relief that their rudimentary offerings only ever aired in the Granada region, to a muted response. The try-out wasn’t considered such a disaster that a full series was out of the question, however, with the main alteration being the replacement of the blameless Shearer for Coltrane, fresh from threatening Kevin Turvey and on the verge of taking his place within the Comic Strip team. ‘Big, loud and hilarious,’ Fry recalls, ‘Robbie combined the style and manners of a Brooklyn bus driver, a fifties rock and roller, a motor mechanic and a Gorbals gangster. Somehow they all fitted together perfectly into one consistent character. He terrified the life out of me, and the only way I could compensate for that was to pretend to find him impossibly attractive and to rub my legs up against him and moan with ecstasy.’ There was also a change of name – with the crew taking advantage of the latest lightweight video equipment, they could eschew studios altogether and go out into Manchester to film anywhere a sketch dictated, shooting Alfresco.

  Another perhaps telling change was the introduction of John Lloyd, on script-editing duty. In truth he only cast an eye over a few of the scripts, but it was inevitable that he and this later generation of Cantabrigians would be drawn together, professionally as well as socially. Since the exodus to London, Fry especially had quickly established firm friendships with many of his idols, becoming the darling of the most exclusive parties and a regular at the Zanzibar, the Covent Garden club where almost every figure in this book would meet and drink and schmooze. Fry had already encountered Peter Cook in a restaurant as an undergraduate, and painted the town red with him, and within a short time of ‘entering society’ he was similarly embraced by his fellow computer nerd Douglas Adams,fn5 and even became a confidant of his hero Vivian Stanshall. As Noel Gay’s new young, erudite favourites, Stephen and Hugh were securely set up as part of the graduate comedy elite as if their places had been reserved for them, leaving them free to pop along to Soho to discover a whole new world of riches: advertising. Stephen’s deep, warm tones and Hugh’s puckish intonations were clamoured for by advertising executives on behalf of everything from nappies to Mexican cuisine, while there were high-profile on-screen roles for Extra Strong Mints, Alliance & Leicester, and myriad consumer goods.fn6

  Whether due to Lloyd’s limited influence or not, when the cast booked back into Manchester’s Midland Hotel that autumn to start on the new series, their scripts were quite drastically different to those for There’s Nothing to Worry About. In particular, the sudden explosion in the number of historical pastiches was noteworthy. Amid the twisted musings on the misery of Thatcherite Britain, the first episode cuts to a World War II Stalag, exploring that perennial sketch cliché, the silly POW escape plan. Ripping Yarns had already got a whole half-hour out of the set-up, but there’s no denying that the cast – especially future Pipe Smoker of the Year Stephen – looked the part in their uniforms (both Allied and Nazi), and the sketch would be recycled for Saturday Live a few years later:

  MAWKINS (BE):

  Well, we can’t just bloody sit here, can we, sir?

  CAPTAIN (HL):

  Mawkins, I’d like a word with you. Chaps, would you mind? (Everyone leaves.) Look, Mawkins, nobody’s worked harder on this show than you and, well, if anyone deserved a place on the first team it’s you, but I’m afraid I can’t let you go.

  MAWKINS:

  But sir, I …

  CAPTAIN:

  You’re a bastard, Mawkins, we all hate you.

  Three decades on, the extended period sequences have inevitably stood the test of time better than any of the satirical, surreal or sick contemporary sketches – although nearly all were so silly as to make little effort to cover up the fact that this was a bunch of youths with a dressing-up box. For the second episode, at roughly the time Curtis was still at the typewriter concocting his own Shakespearean comedy, the Alfresco team were out on location actually filming Ben Elton’s, on a battlefield complete with pikestaffs, spear carriers and gaily coloured tents:

  SERF 1 (SF):

  ’Ere, George?

  SE
RF 2 (RC):

  Yars?

  SERF 1:

  You remember yesterday as how I remarked as how it was pretty much a case of once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more or close up our wall with the English dead?

  SERF 2:

  Yars, I remember thinking at the time what a load of bollocks you do talk.

  SERF 1:

  Ar, that’s as maybe, but the King nicked the whole speech! I heard him yesterday, giving it down word for word like he made it up himself!

  SERF 2:

  The bastard!

  SERF 1:

  He nicks all my best lines, he does. Never a word of credit. Never an ‘As old Dick were saying the other night, it’s pretty much a case of the game’s afoot, God for Harry, England and St George’, none of that, no, thank you very much indeed …

  However, this conceit is quickly blown apart by Hugh approaching as a camping holidaymaker who has taken a wrong turn and gone through a time warp – despite a generous budget, all of the historical pastiches in Alfresco are deliberately paper-thin, with a smattering of Elton puns thrown in to try and provoke the audience into revealing their recorded presence. History was a subject Ben was regularly drawn to – even The Young Ones had a high number of jumps to period setting, with medieval TV shows, Coltrane as a Cycloptic pirate, Australia-bound convicts, etc. An Alfresco Crimean War sequence with Thompson as a vain Florence Nightingale complaining about the lack of shadow-kissing from her patients once again gives Fry an early run at the bluff General, replying to Nightingale’s complaints about the conditions in the field hospital with a blustering ‘Well, those are my conditions, Miss Nightingale, and you will just have to accept them!’ in true Duke of Wellington style. Wellington himself pops up played by Laurie, advertising his new line in gumboots. Among sketches involving World War II pilots, the French Resistance, gossiping wiggy fops, Regency duellists and Henge-crazy ancient Britons, the team even pulled on tights for their own Robin Hood sketch, pre-empting Tony Robinson’s vision by featuring Thompson as a heroic Maid Marian, forced to fight Elton’s Sheriff of Nottingham after Laurie’s cheesy American Robin accepts a job as a serving maid.

  Fry’s memoirs reveal that the team remained unsure of themselves through all this jolly dressing-up, not least because filming coincided with the launch of Channel 4, broadcasting The Comic Strip Presents… and also the first broadcast of The Young Ones – after a day’s filming, the cast would flop into Stephen’s hotel room to watch the competition. ‘When Ade Edmondson as Vyvyan punched his way through the kitchen wall in the opening five minutes … it felt as though a whole new generation had punched its way into British cultural life and that nothing would ever be the same again.’ In comparison, he felt, ‘We were guilty of over-complicating everything out of a fear of being perceived as imitative and unoriginal … so we wallowed about sightlessly, guiltily and confusedly without the confidence to do what we did best.’

  Alfresco’s first series once again aired only to a bemused North-West, drawing to a close one week before the debut of The Black Adder. Despite being bolstered by music from half of Squeeze, and kicking off a whole host of comic motifs which would stick with Fry & Laurie (including the fatuous foreign language of ‘Strom’), nobody claimed it as a hit.

  Fry & Laurie had a separate stab at finding a TV vehicle the following year, when BBC2 piloted their spoof science-magazine programme The Crystal Cube, a kind of Look Around You twenty years early, featuring everyone from Alfresco bar Elton and Redmond. The innovative mockumentary style of the show got the thumbs down from the BBC bosses, however, Laurie laments. ‘We loved The Crystal Cube, we just thought this was something that no one had ever done before, and there were all kinds of great comic possibilities, as we saw it. The BBC I think hated … would that be too big a word? No, I think that was about right, they loathed it.’

  This early setback aired at the same time as The Black Adder, but the team’s adoration of Atkinson aside, his new sitcom didn’t impress them quite as much as Mayall’s Molotov cocktail of a half-hour. ‘I do remember a little tiny part of me being faintly disappointed that it was a bit of a mess,’ Fry admits. ‘I don’t mean it was badly written or badly performed, it wasn’t either of those things. I have this theory that I call the Tennis Theory of Comedy (which sounds very pompous, and indeed is, I promise you). If you watch a tennis match, and it was two of the greatest tennis players in history, it would be meaningless, wouldn’t it, if you couldn’t see the ball? And I think with The Black Adder, you couldn’t really see the ball, there was no focus for the comedy, with comedy you have to see who’s speaking and who’s listening … The camera was so wide and so pleased with the rolling parkland and the horses and the guards in the castle and the reality of it all that you lost that. Plus it was filmed, and then shown to an audience, and you can always tell somehow, the audience is not there. I’m a great believer in real, old-fashioned sitcom where there’s an audience there. People complain about it, but it really brings it alive.’

  Though Stephen’s criticism was echoed by Ben, to someone as versed in British history as one of the Elton clan, The Black Adder was a weekly pleasure – dense where the Alfresco sketches had been scratchy, earthy where their spoofs had been shallow, and Elton declared himself a big fan when he finally got to meet the writer face to face, united by the godfather Lloyd for his new ITV show, Spitting Image, in the autumn of 1983.

  One Step Beyond

  John Lloyd didn’t carefully select Curtis & Elton as his chosen writers when perfecting the TV format for topical satire that the decade demanded; they just happened to be two hot names on a long list of gagsters who had impressed him over the years, from Week Ending onwards. Long after his failed attempts to interest Fluck & Law in a TV version of their art, the pair had independently struck out with a new scheme, swayed during a famous lunch with graphic designer Martin Lambie-Nairn. Their first choice for producer was an elder Footlighter, Tony Hendra, who had triumphed in the USA with National Lampoon since his days of being rude to Miriam Margolyes. Considering Lloyd’s early interest in bringing Fluck & Law’s grotesque creations to life, it was only fair that he in turn was brought in on the immensely complicated project, alongside Jon Blair. Throughout 1983, whenever The Black Adder was not diverting his attention, Lloyd and his fellow producers battled to find the right way to make a weekly topical puppet show a viable programme. Immediately prior to setting off for Alnwick there had been a very basic try-out then titled UNTV, with Elton as the sole writer and Lloyd attempting to voice a rubber Michael Foot. Although the show would eventually be driven by two other writing partnerships, Ian Hislop & Nick Newman and Rob Grant & Doug Naylor, Curtis & Elton’s involvement did go beyond those early meetings, with both getting several sketches in the first series when it finally aired on Central TV the following spring. The ensuing years would return John to the familiar pressures of passionate, maddening devotion to TV production which had characterised Not, with the wrangling of puppets and writers and performers and lawyers consuming him night and day, as he broke out to become sole producer.

  He was to bow out after three series,fn7 becoming executive producer and giving Geoffrey Perkins his first taste of TV production after years of success on Radio 4, where he was still keeping the Oxford Review spirit going in Radio Active (with Curtis still chipping in with jokes), just as fellow cast member Phil Pope had crossed over to become Spitting Image’s resident maestro. To have made such an era-defining success out of a wildly ambitious logistical (and legal) nightmare like Spitting Image was both a testament to Lloyd’s work ethic and a vindication of his original enthusiasm for the concept. Nevertheless, he realises the madness of claiming any sole praise, telling the audience at a 2005 BFI event, ‘When people used to say, “Was Spitting Image your idea?” I used to say, “No it wasn’t,” but actually it’s like somebody having this great idea: “Why don’t we fly to the moon?”, “Yeah, that’s great … how do we do that?” And then it takes somebody to in
vent the aeroplane, the internal combustion engine, the rocket, and there’s a thousand things … and all these little insights that each person on the team – the writer, the puppeteer, a mould-maker – would bring, meant an advance.’

  Not least in terms of scriptwriters and performers, Spitting Image became as crucial a training ground as Week Ending had been the previous decade, with far too many grand names to list submitting sketches throughout its twelve-year history. Few stayed on the credits for long before moving on to their own hit projects, and from that first meeting, it was clear that Ben and Richard had other topics to debate once they’d been brought together by the latex satirists – partly how much they loved each other’s sitcoms and shared a taste not just for the obvious influences, Python and Cook, but the more mainstream humour of Morecambe & Wise and Dad’s Army. By far their most distracting shared passion, however, was pop music – the cheesier the better (although Ben used to make Richard buy Kylie Minogue singles for him, as he was less recognisable). ‘Put me and Ben in a room, and we were only interested in Madonna and Madness and talking about pop and the Beatles. We didn’t care about comedy enough to waste our time talking about it,’ Curtis says. ‘I’d also tried writing in the same room with Rowan, and it was just so slow and boring that we’d get stuck on the jokes. So, from the start, Ben and I exchanged computer disks with each other. The only way is just to sweat it out on our own.’ ‘Nowadays, with email, I guess we would probably never have met!’ Elton adds. ‘In those days I used to glue bits on, and “lift tab here, see B attached”, etc., as did he.’ By this time, Curtis had abandoned Camden Town for the Oxfordshire countryside, and admits, ‘I had years and years that were spectacularly ill-disciplined as far as time was concerned. I lived in a little cottage in the country and used to be as chaotic and self-indulgent as writers are allowed to be: watching eight or nine hours’ television a day, watching Neighbours twice, and often not starting work until three in the afternoon.’ Another quirk shared by the two writers was an inability to do the job without having music playing – in Curtis’s case, because ‘I think that trying to write comedy is a bit like trying to get yourself in the mood you are with your friends at the end of a dinner party, cheerful, and the only way I can artificially bolster myself is to put on happy pop music.’