Even this mid-rant self-deprecation would eventually become a stick with which to wallop the comic for his detractors, who felt they saw through his honest style, considering him a bourgeois pretend socialist. But it was his duty, as a comic with a platform, to reflect what was going on, and he worked tirelessly at it, writing fresh material every week and sweating through laugh-free weekly rehearsals with LWT’s lawyers to see if his up-to-the-minute jibes were broadcastable. ‘The audience loved it,’ Jackson observes, ‘the audience at home picked up on it, he was saying intelligent things, he was making them laugh but he was making points. And he also, I have to say, did it against the most difficult circumstances.’ Lee Cornes adds, ‘I remember seeing him on Saturday Live, thinking, “He’s taken on so much!” Almost single-handedly stepping out and saying what he wanted to say. He’s a very nice bloke who likes to be liked though, so the aggressive persona was never quite who he was.’
Despite having such a solid team powering the second series, the experience of recording the show remained terrifyingly chaotic. ‘Saturday Live was a bit of a party,’ Elton says, ‘and meant to be like a party. If I hadn’t been terminally terrified for the whole of it, I’m sure I’d have enjoyed it,’ and even a quarter of a decade on, Fry concurs: ‘By about Wednesday we were sweating blood, by Thursday we were vomiting, by Friday our bowels were completely loose, and by Saturday we were just simply barely alive.’ The sketch format, however, can be a very comforting thing, and the spirit of Alfresco (not to mention a few verbatim sketches) pervaded the moments when all the team came together. Elton recalls, ‘I loved the sketches, I wrote a few. Those were the moments within the live broadcasts that were least horrible, because you weren’t on your own, and you could sort of almost relax.’ Further comfort came from the friendly faces of Robbie Coltrane (who also appeared in an extended spoof of The Third Man with Miranda Richardson), Emma Thompson, and indeed Rowan Atkinson, who showed up in series two, performing his country song ‘I Believe’ and remaining silent as the Rev. Sebastian Kryle in a sketch with Hugh and Stephen, as the Dalston Christian Community Club, Ben introducing Rowan with: ‘He broke America; he was the king of Broadway for all of two days!’ The inspiration for that jibe rewinds the story to the start of 1986, as the star’s all-new tour began to be pieced together.
Atkinson was so pleased with the scripts for Blackadder II that he decided to make his new show another Elton/Curtis collaboration, and the development from the 1981 material was striking. It would seem rather too neat to suggest that the revue was heavily steeped in the dark, acerbic Blackadder spirit, if it weren’t for the fact that Rowan took his bows to the sitcom’s theme at the end of every night on the tour. Subtly accepting his small share of applause beside him every night was Angus Deayton, taking time out from Radio Active to inherit the thankless role of sidekick, which Curtis had finally forsworn.
The New Revue would tour the UK, kicking off at the Shaftesbury Theatre,fn7 and taking in Edinburgh for Atkinson’s last time on the Fringe. The UK shows were a run-up for his first real attempt to make inroads into America, fittingly at the Brooks Atkinson Theater on Broadway that October. ‘I know that it is a potential graveyard for English comics,’ he confided in the Express beforehand. ‘It’s something I must plan very carefully and I hope they turn out to see me.’
Where the humour of his earlier shows tended to be of a more low-key, almost dreamlike nature, the sketches and monologues written by Curtis & Elton were a far punchier (and notably sicker) collection, bristling more than ever with egregious helpings of people called Perkins. Atkinson’s array of bastards was more devilishly offensive than previously, with one of the most celebrated two-handers, ‘Fatal Beatings’, more morbidly amusing than anything in earlier shows.
HEAD:
Mr Perkins, Tommy is in trouble. Recently his behaviour has left a great deal to be desired … he seems to take no interest in school life whatsoever, he refuses to muck in on the sports field, and it’s weeks since any master has received any written work from him.
PERKINS:
Oh dear me.
HEAD:
Quite frankly, Mr Perkins, if he wasn’t dead, I’d have him expelled.
PERKINS:
I beg your pardon?
HEAD:
Yes, EXPELLED! If I wasn’t making allowances for the fact that your son has passed on, he’d be out on his ear!
PERKINS:
Tommy’s dead?
HEAD:
Yes … He’s lying up there in sickbay now, stiff as a board and bright green. And this is, I fear, typical of his current attitude.
The Geordie football manager who has to explain to his team what a ball is has a shade of Edmund teaching Baldrick ‘advanced mathematics’, a peace camp soldier sings Gilbert & Sullivan’s ‘A Wand’ring Minstrel’, and an actor forced to pick up an award for a colleague who has beaten him seethes, ‘What is it about Johnnie that sets him apart from other actors of his generation? Well, I think we all know the answer to that one – syphilis. And what a great and heart-warming thing it is that he has already started passing it on to a whole new generation of younger actors.’ The LP of the show, Not Just a Pretty Face, was recorded at the Alhambra Theatre, Bradford, and augmented by extra links produced by Atkinson himself – with a coda underlining the despicable Adder-like criminality of the show’s star.
ANGUS:
…Would they be applauding quite so rapturously if they knew that Mr Atkinson was in fact none other than the notorious gangland chief Ronnie ‘Hatchet’ Atkinson, wanted in connection with nefarious crimes including murder, arson, cattle-rustling, escorting a minor across a state border, and parking on those zigzag lines you get either side of zebra crossings? Well I’m now gonna see how Mr Atkinson responds … Mr Atkinson, this is Roger Crook from Central Television, I’m here to talk to you about one or two allegations … Is it true The Black Adder isn’t funny? Is Ned Sherrin right in claiming that Not the Nine O’Clock News was simply a rehash of That Was The Week That Was, Mr Atkinson?
ROWAN:
I’m not answering these questions, go away! F––k off, you f––king f––ker!
However, the Broadway debut of the show, even including the best material from previous tours, failed to impress the most influential voice in the city: New York Times critic Frank Rich, ‘the Butcher of Broadway’. On 15 October, the first night of the revue was viciously dismissed as ‘the interminable proof that the melding of American and English cultures is not yet complete. As long as the British public maintains its fondness for toilet humour, there will always be an England … The writing, by Mr. Atkinson and various cronies, is stunningly predictable. Were Rowan Atkinson at the Atkinson to be edited down to its wittiest jokes, even its title might have to go.’ No amount of fake villainy could rally the team from this conclusive blow, the first indisputable setback in a career which had seemed charmed since Oxford, and the show closed in two weeks, losing backers £500,000. Atkinson swore to the Daily Mail, ‘The only way I’ll go back is if I can take out insurance against that man coming anywhere near me … The only good thing to come out of the whole venture is that now I will be home for Christmas.’
‘At least a third of it was as funny as I had been anywhere,’ he later said on Radio 4’s Loose Ends, ‘and if he didn’t like that there was nothing I could do – lavatorial or not – that would have pleased him.’ Fry was part of the regular team on the brand-new Saturday-morning magazine programme-cum-plug fest,fn8 and from his position around Ned Sherrin’s green baize table, he expressed his own fears about the fate of Me and My Girl on Broadway. However, he and Armitage need not have fretted, it would run for three years, and pick up a handsome collection of Tony awards.
Sadly, Richard Armitage was not to live to see this continued success, as his sudden death at the age of fifty-eight in November 1986 robbed both Stephen and Rowan of the man who had been their greatest supporter and crucial guide to the perilous world of show business.
> DELVING INTO THE PAST
Stephen Fry had excitedly embraced every offer of work from Radio 4, becoming an admired rookie player of games such as Just a Minute, I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue and the fledgling Whose Line Is It Anyway? before he hit thirty. He wouldn’t get his own self-penned show until the ingenious Saturday Night Fry in 1988 (with regular guests Laurie, Thompson and Jim Broadbent), and while Deayton was aping Roger Cook for Atkinson’s LP, Fry’s main wireless persona was David Lander, the presenter of another crusading investigative programme, Delve Special, created by Tony Sarchet. Kicking off in 1984 with an exposé of corruption in the building of ‘London’s third airport’ in Shifton (a village near Birmingham), Lander’s inept and often physically damaging investigations went to great lengths to establish a believable spoof, despite boasting famous voices including Dawn French, Harry Enfield, Philip Pope and even Tony Robinson. The show ended in 1987, but there was a TV transfer the following year, This Is David Lander, with Robinson reprising the role of a porn-obsessed victim of police corruption. As part of the Who Dares Wins team, his return for the TV version was only natural, This Is David Lander being the first official production from Jimmy Mulville’s newly rechristened production company, Hat Trick.
His TV work alone would have kept Tony busy after discarding Baldrick’s jerkin, but the greatest progress in his career had been his venture into writing. He had a long association with children’s TV, and on Jackanory had displayed a revolutionary zeal in his ability to tell a tale with unbridled enthusiasm, but after narrating and co-writing Debbie Gates’s award-winning CITV series Tales from Fat Tulip’s Garden, he gained the confidence to create his own stories. He was aided and encouraged by Curtis, who had already co-authored the children’s book The Story of Elsie and Jane and even been instrumental in originating the swaggering, abusive character of Roland Rat for TVAM. Richard would co-write Tony’s books and TV retellings of Theseus and Odysseus: The Greatest Hero of Them All, before Robinson found the confidence to write alone. ‘I actually learned to write through being involved with the people in Blackadder,’ he admits. ‘Not that I learned the answers to writing, but I learned the questions to ask, and that was what the environment was like in rehearsals, it wasn’t much to do with acting … I went to a publisher with the idea of writing the Odysseus books, and they said, “Yes, that’s fine, we’ll commission you.” And I said, “Great!” and walked away … and then, when I got home, I thought, “I don’t know the first thing about writing, what am I going to do?” So I went to see Richard and said, “I can’t do this,” and he said, “Yes, of course you can. I’ll tell you what we’ll do. You write it and keep coming to me, and we’ll knock it into shape.” So that’s what we did, I would drive up to Oxford from Bristol and Richard would say, “For a start you can cut the first two paragraphs, and that isn’t a character it’s just a cipher, what can we do to beef this character up? And those jokes are very good, why do they run out here …?” And he would write a couple of paragraphs and fit them in, and that was how we wrote those books.’
These diverse frenzies of career progression did not make it easy for Lloyd to regroup the usual suspects for the third incarnation of Edmund Blackadder. He recalls, ‘We had two-year gaps between series and at the time of Blackadder II none of us had many strings to our bows – apart from Rowan who was red hot at the time. However, between series two and three Ben had Saturday Live, Richard had Comic Relief, I’d done Spitting Image … The net effect was that we had bigger egos and were more used to having our own way, so we were much more reluctant to surrender any territory.’
Nevertheless, Richard and Ben had already found time between rhapsodising about Stock, Aitken & Waterman to settle on the next period for their comedy, doubling the distance between series to leapfrog the seventeenth century entirely. Moving on so dramatically allowed for an entirely evolved British society to send up – although Robinson insists that the choice of Regency England was a brave one. ‘I think my favourite series is Blackadder the Third. Partly because of Hugh’s performance, but also because I think it’s so audacious to create a six-part comedy series about a period of history where virtually none of the viewers can remember anything about that period!’
For much of the Georgian era, this concern would make sense – from the dramatic end of the Stuart reign to the late eighteenth century, the nation boringly fermented under Hanoverian rule, with each German George less interesting than the last, but by the latter years of George III’s reign, so many revolutions were afoot – Industrial, American and French, to name but three – that few periods of our history could have contained such rich material for Blackadder. From The Madness of George III to The Scarlet Pimpernel, the cusp between Georgian and Victorian Britain has always been such a magnet for dramatists that the writers needed to do little to no research to bring a bewigged Blackadder to life. Also, as with the previous two series, they could draw on yet another BBC costume drama, as Peter Egan had portrayed the infamous ‘Prinny’ in 1979’s Prince Regent.
Because in the Regency period, where would Blackadder be but as close to the Regent as possible? With both writers as devoted to P. G. Wodehouse as they were to Kylie, the fresh epoch inspired a central set-up indebted to the Master, making their anti-hero the Prince’s closest retainer. ‘What I think it did was that it made it a very different dynamic,’ Curtis says. ‘You could have had it about the King and then Blackadder would have been a Lord again, and we’d have been back in the same situation that we were in before. It’s the whole Jeeves thing, isn’t it, the idea of somebody actually being much cleverer than the person above them.’ ‘Rather than being a lone wolf as he was in the first series,’ Elton adds, ‘it made life easier to actually give him a position, it meant we could find things for him to do. He sort of dropped a class every time, from royal to courtier to butler to sort of lower-middle-class officer. He’d have ended up a trade union leader if we’d done the 1950s!’ Fry continues, ‘The fact is, a lifetime of prep school, public school, prison and Cambridge had given me, and most of us, a tremendous acuity when it came to the nuances of British class and hierarchy. Blackadder worked the way it did because someone was at the top and someone was at the bottom and there was a real threat of punishment or death. And as in Goldoni and Ben Jonson, you don’t always find that the one on top is the smart one … that tradition connects all the way up to Jeeves and Wooster too, of course.’
Robinson believes that the butler Mr B’s world was a step towards Lloyd’s ambition for simplicity, and containment. ‘I think one of the things that we were always striving for in Blackadder was more focus, more discipline, really to concentrate on every single little joke, every scene, every concept. So The Black Adder goes hurtling all over the place, loads of extras, loads of horses, loads of characters. Series two is reduced from that, but by series three, that was the time when I really felt that we were focusing on what we really wanted to do.’ Where previous series had taken cues from Shakespeare, there was an equally celebrated vein of Restoration and Regency theatre to inspire the new show, with sesquipedalian verbiage aplenty, and a tradition of complicated farce, from the French. ‘I don’t think we consciously crafted these supposedly “brilliant” playwright-type structures,’ Lloyd says, ‘but we were certainly trying to make Blackadder more than a mere extended sketch. We could see that, if he was a butler, for example, he’d have a different attitude, a different turn of phrase and so on. Those things are taken on board and to some extent dictate the action … In the first series he talks like a lord; butlers don’t talk like that. He has to be in a different relationship, so we had to unlearn all those things and start again.’
It was established that there would be an ‘upstairs/downstairs’ feel to the new Edmund’s life, with the ineffable Jeevesian servant in Antony Thorpe’s BAFTA-nominated gilt royal quarters reverting to type by the time he reached Baldrick’s kitchens – although his reduced circumstances would, if anything, intensify his feeling of entitle
ment to the throne. Atkinson muses, ‘He’s got a ladder to climb, but he’s so cynical about climbing it. And he’s also cynical about those who are climbing up towards him. He’s just a fantastically cynical man. He wants the fast track, and yes – he’s trying to get up there … or at least to get out.’ It’s mildly disturbing that Atkinson has claimed in the past that Mr B is the one incarnation which most closely resembles himself, as the butler is probably the most ruthless of all Blackadders: seemingly urbane, but happy to commit or commission bloody murder to achieve his aims. On the other hand, Mr B is the first Edmund to be ‘respected about the town’, despite being just as duplicitous, ambitious and cowardly as his forebears.
The True History of the Blackadder: The Unadulterated Tale of the Creation of a Comedy Legend Page 24