by Stephen Fry
Since leaving university I had been a member of the Oxford and Cambridge Club in Pall Mall, a classic St James's palace of smoking rooms, dimpled and winged leather armchairs and grand marble staircases. Fiery torches on the outside wall throw their flames upwards in the evenings, and in the courts below can be heard the thump and clack of racquet and billiard balls. You had to be a member of either of the universities to join, of course, but more surprisingly, given the seventy-year co-educational status of both establishments, it was a male-only club, with women grudgingly being allowed to visit in a special wing and drawing-room reserved for them. Perhaps the greatest privilege of membership for me was the availability of other clubs in London and around the world. Reciprocal arrangements came into force during August when the Oxford and Cambridge closed for staff holidays. During that time the Reform Club (forever associated in my mind with Phileas Fogg in Round the World in Eighty Days), the Traveller's Club (home of the private oratory of the mysterious and sinister Monsignor Alfred Gilbey), the RAF Club, the Naval and Military (usually referred to as the 'In and Out'), the absurdly named East India, Devonshire, Sports and Public Schools Club in St James's Square and half a dozen others opened their doors to bereft Oxford and Cambridge members in need of clubly pampering. The Carlton Club, a High Tory edifice in St James's Street, more or less opposite the triple ancient glories of wine merchants Berry Bros and Rudd, Lock the hatter and Lobb the boot-maker, was also on the list of establishments offering us August and august hospitality.
I had taken Ben Elton to the Oxford and Cambridge, and he had revelled in the wonders and absurdities of it. The lecterns on the dining-room tables for those solitary lunchers or diners who wanted to read, the strange brass and mahogany weighing machines with an ancient book next to them in which members could record their weight, the library, the barber shop and the billiard-room had all appealed to his fondness for the dottily traditional. His word for it all was 'crusty', crusty as in old port and crusty as in the crabby and cantankerous old men that infest such places.
I called him up one day in the late July of '85.
'Ben, time for a crusty.'
'You're on, Bing, and that's perfect because I want to talk to you anyway.' Ben always called me Bing or Bingable and does so to this day. I cannot quite remember why.
'If we make it next week,' I said, 'I can offer you all kinds of clubs, but the one I think we'd enjoy most is the Carlton.'
'I love the name already.'
We met for a preliminary gargle at the Ritz on the evening of the following Thursday. You may think it wrong, or hypocritical, or snobbish, or grotesque, or pathetic for two such figures in their twenties to swan about as if they were characters in a Wodehouse or Waugh novel, and perhaps it was. I would try and ask you to believe that there was an element - I won't say of irony - of playfulness perhaps, of self-conscious awareness of the ridiculous nature of what we were doing and the ludicrous figures that we cut. Two Jewish comics pretending to be flaneurs of the old school. Ben was more obviously a visitor to this world, I more inexcusably connected to it or more successfully, and therefore more creepily, giving off an air of belonging. I was a genuine member, after all, of a London club and over the next decades I was to join at least four more as well as half a dozen of the new kind of members-only media watering holes that were about to burst into the world of Soho bohemia.
We strolled down St James's Street, and I told Ben about Brooks's and White's, the Whig and Tory bastions that glowered across the street at each other. White's was and is the most aristocratic and exclusive of all the London clubs, but the Carlton, which we were now approaching, remains the most overtly political.
We crossed the threshold, and I waved what I hoped was a nonchalant hand towards the uniformed porter in his mahogany guichet.
'Oxford and Cambridge,' I said. 'I have my membership card somewhere ...'
'That's all right, sir,' said the porter, his eyes taking Ben in without flickering. Ben was, as he knew one had to be in such places, dressed in a suit and tie, but there are suits and ties and there are ways of wearing suits and ties. My charcoal tailor-made three-piece, New and Lingwood shirt with faintly distressed silk Cherubs tie looked as if they belonged, whereas Ben's Mr Byrite appearance suggested (and I mean this warmly and lovingly) a bus-driver reluctantly togged up for his sister's wedding.
We ascended to the first-floor dining-room. Ben nearly exploded as we passed the bust of a woman at the foot of the stairs.
'Bing,' he hissed, 'that's Thatch!'
'Of course it is,' I said with what I hoped was blithe ease. 'This is the Carlton Club after all.'
As we sat down I broke the news that I had brought him to the very citadel of modern Conservatism, the club where the present-day party had been born and constituted. Margaret Thatcher's image was certainly represented, as were those of all the Tory leaders since Peel. Ben was dazed and delighted to find himself right plumb spang in the centre of the enemy's camp. We both felt childishly mischievous, like children who have found the key to their parents' drinks cabinet.
'Not many people about,' said Ben.
'Well, being August, most of the members will be out of town. They'll be returning from the Riviera in time for the grouse.'
'We shall go up to the moors ourselves next week,' said Ben. 'I shall be your scamp.'
Scamp was the word Ben used as a generic term for a mixture of Oxford scout, Cambridge gyp, manservant, old retainer and loyal page. We maintained a peculiar fiction of myself as a crusty old country squire and Ben as my trusty scamp. Crusty and Trusty.
'Anyway,' I said. 'Here it is, the Carlton Club. The beating heart of the Establishment. But when I called you up, you said you wanted to talk to me?'
'That's right. Thing is, Bing. As you know, Dickie C and I have been working on this new Blackadder.'
'Indeed,' I said.
'Well, there's a part in it for you.'
'Really?'
'I won't lie to you,' he said. 'It's not like the greatest character in the world. He's called Lord Melchett and he stands behind the Queen and sucks up to her. He and Blackadder hate each other. He's a kind of chamberlain figure, you know?'
'Ben, of course I'll do it,' I said.
'Yeah? That's great!'
I could see out of the corner of my eye that an ancient gentleman a couple of tables away had been having difficulty accepting Ben's vowel sounds as they ricocheted off the portraits of Wellington and Churchill and into his disbelieving ears. For the past ten minutes he had been spluttering and growling into his soup with growing venom. He looked up at Ben's last exclamation, and I recognized the blotched, jowly and furious countenance of the Lord Chancellor, Quintin Hogg, now Lord Hailsham. He had his napkin tucked into his shirt collar like Oliver Hardy and his mixed expression of outrage, disbelief and reluctant desire to know more put me in mind of a maiden aunt who has just had a flasher open his raincoat at her in the church tea-rooms.
All in all, our Carlton Club adventure was one of the happier and more memorable evenings of my life.
As Lord Melchett in Blackadder II.
Courtly Comedy
It is probable that if you have bothered to buy, steal or borrow this book you will have watched or at least know about Blackadder but you will forgive me if I describe its principal features for the benefit of Americans and others who may be less familiar. The second series of this 'historical sitcom' is set in Elizabethan England with Rowan Atkinson in the title role of Edmund, Lord Blackadder, a suave, scheming, manipulative and attractively amoral courtier. Tony Robinson and Tim McInnerny play his grubby servant Baldrick and idiot friend Lord Percy respectively, as they had in the first series. In the royal court Miranda Richardson plays the young Queen Elizabeth, Patsy Byrne her breast-fixated nurse and I the character Ben had described to me, Lord Melchett - a sort of William Cecil, Lord Burghley figure, all forked beard, forked tongue and fur-lined cloak.
We rehearsed at the BBC's North Acton rehearsal ro
oms, just as I had for The Cellar Tapes, The Crystal Cube and the 'Bambi' episode of The Young Ones. The director was the very charming and capable Mandy Fletcher. I ought to explain the difference between a director for multi-camera television and a film or theatre director. In the latter two worlds the director is absolute monarch, in charge of all the creative decisions and ultimately responsible for what is seen on screen or stage. In television it is the producer who takes that role. Our producer was John Lloyd. Mandy's job was to think about how the cameras would move and be coordinated in order best to capture what John and the cast constructed. Which is not to downplay her role and her skill, it is just that most people might think the director is the one running the show in terms of script, performance, comic ideas, directing the actors and so on. All that, especially since neither Richard Curtis nor Ben Elton liked to attend rehearsals, came from our producer.
When histories of British television comedy are written, the name of John Lloyd is certain to figure prominently. A graduate of Cambridge and the Footlights, he was a contemporary of his friend and occasional collaborator Douglas Adams. After Cambridge he moved to BBC radio, where he created The News Quiz, Quote Unquote and other quizzes and comedy shows before making the move to television with Not the Nine O'Clock News. Richard Curtis was the lead writer on that show, and Rowan Atkinson one of its stars. It was natural, then, that John should produce Rowan and Richard's The Black Adder. The year after that he produced the first series of Spitting Image, which he continued to work on until the end, as well as producing the subsequent three major series of Blackadder, including its occasional minor outbursts in charitable or other specials. In 2003 he and I started work on another child of his fertile mind, QI. As it happens, although he will not thank me for pointing it out, he had worked as a script consultant on a couple of episodes of Alfresco too, so it can be seen that my career has run in harness with his for the best part of thirty years. He is, I should point out at this stage, quite mad.
Success has a dozen parents and failure is an orphan, as I mentioned before when talking about the genesis of the 'Bambi' episode of The Young Ones. As it happened, although we had no idea while we were rehearsing it, Blackadder II turned out to be a great success with the public. I have no more authority in pronouncing why this was than anyone else might have, connected or unconnected to it. What Ben Elton brought to the party in terms of energy, fantastic wordplay, brilliant anachronisms and general jeux d'esprit cannot be overestimated, as cannot Richard Curtis's ear, wit and skill nor his uncanny understanding of Rowan's range and power. The transformation of Tony Robinson's Baldrick from a rather smart sidekick in the first series to a most terrifyingly dim-witted lowlife in the second was also crucial for the show's success. Tim McInnerny's Lord Percy was divine, as was Patsy Byrne's Nursie. Many would cite Miranda Richardson's performance as a young and terrifyingly unstable Queenie as one of the absolute highlights of that series and among the best comic characterizations ever seen on British television.
We had the most marvellous guests too. Tom Baker played a seadog called Captain Redbeard Rum. His performance was superb, and he himself was entirely charming. While a scene that didn't involve him was being rehearsed he would disappear and return with a tray fully laden with sweets, crisps, chocolates, sandwiches, nuts and snacks, which he would hand round to everyone in the room, often nipping off again to reload. During his Doctor Who days he had been quite the party animal in the pubs and clubs of London and often used to fetch up at the North Acton rehearsal rooms at three or four in the morning, where friendly security guards would admit him and let him sleep on a rehearsal mat until morning. Production assistants would arrive and wake him up for work. He had a way of gazing at you with grave bulging eyes that made it rather hard to determine whether he thought you an idiot or a god.
Miriam Margolyes made an appearance as the puritanical face-slapping Lady Whiteadder in a show called 'Beer'. Rik Mayall's Captain Flashheart exploded into the world like a firework display and, to my especial delight, Hugh appeared as a guest twice, firstly as one of Blackadder's flatulent drinking companions in 'Beer' and then, more magnificently, as a deranged Germanic super-villain and master of disguise in the final episode, at the conclusion of which we all somehow ended up dead.
Having bowed and paid due homage to all these great contributors I have to turn to what was for me the real miracle: Rowan Atkinson's performance as Edmund. I would watch him in rehearsal, and my mouth would drop open in stunned admiration. I had never before come close to such an extraordinary comic talent. I had seen him on stage at Edinburgh and laughed until I weed, I had admired him in Not the Nine O'Clock News and I had watched his rather disturbing character in the first series, but the Edmund of Blackadder II was a revelation. The urbanity, sarcasm, vocal control, minimalism and physical restraint were not sides of Rowan I had ever seen before. This Edmund was sexy, assured, playful, dynamic, debonair, soigne and charismatic.
Rowan, it is well known, is a private and unassuming figure. He read Electrical Engineering at Newcastle before completing a Masters degree at the Queen's College, Oxford, and has always retained something of the manner of a quiet and industrious scientist about him. It is hard when meeting him to see quite where the comedy comes from. When making the best man's speech at his wedding some years later I tried to explain this. I said that it was as if the Almighty had suddenly noticed he had a full decade's allocation of comic talent, a supply that he had forgotten to dole out more or less evenly amongst the population as was His usual divine practice. For a joke he decided to give the whole load to the least likely person he could find. He looked down at the north-east of England and saw a diffident, studious young engineer wandering the streets of Jesmond, dreaming of transistors and tractors, and zapped him full of all that comedy talent. He gave him none of the usual showbiz pizzazz or yearning for fame, adulation and laughter, just the gigantic consignment of talent alone. I still wake up at night sometimes with a surge of shame fearing that I expressed this thought badly and that it sounded less affectionate and admiring than it might, that it somehow ignored the skill, concentration, commitment and conscious application of that talent that makes Rowan the authentic comic genius he is. Aside from all of this he is a delightful, kindly, sweet-natured and wise individual whose personal human qualities quite match his comic attainments.
When Rik Mayall came to rehearsals for his episode in Blackadder II, the contrast between his style and Rowan's was astonishing. It was like seeing a Vermeer next to a van Gogh, one all exquisite detail with the subtlest and most invisible working and the other a riot of wild and thickly applied brushstrokes. Two utterly different aesthetics, each outstandingly brilliant. With Rik you could see the character grow out of his own personality. Flashheart was an emphasized and extreme version of Rik. In Rowan's case it was as if Blackadder was somehow conjured up from nowhere. He emerged from Rowan like an extra limb. I am as capable of envy and resentment as the next man, but when you are in a room with two people who possess an order of talent that you know you can never even dream of attaining, it is actually a relief to be able to do no more than lean back and admire like a dewy-eyed groupie.
My make-up on Blackadder II was done by a divinely pretty girl called Sunetra Sastry. From a Brahmin-caste Indian family, she was bright, funny and as captivatingly alluring as any girl I had met for years. I was quite seriously considering asking her out on a date, when Rowan timidly approached me one morning during rehearsals for the second episode and asked if I would mind swapping make-up artists with him. Since he had grown his own beard for the part, unlike me, who had to have my large excrescence glued on with spirit gum every week, I thought this rather odd: his make-up sessions lasted as long as it took to powder the tip of his nose.
'Don't you like the one you've got?' I said.
'N-no, it's not that, she's splendid. It's just that well ...' He gave me a look of uncharacteristic intensity.
'Oh!' I said, as the penny dropped. 'My dea
r fellow. Of course. Yes.'
All ideas of my asking Sunetra out left me, and over the course of the remaining five weeks I watched as she and Rowan grew closer and closer. They had been together for five years before they at last married in New York City. As the best man, I flew out to be there and record the ceremony on eight-millimetre film. They now have two children and twenty years of marriage behind them, but I still sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had been bold enough and quick enough on my feet to have asked Sunetra out straight away.
'Oh, you should have done!' Sunetra often says to me. 'I'd have gone out with you.' But I know how happy she is and how right it was that I stayed silent.
Hang on, Stephen, you're gay, aren't you? Indeed I am, but, as I was to tell a newspaper reporter some years later, I am only '90 per cent gay', which is of course pretty damned gay, but every now and again on my path through life I have met a woman in the 10 per cent bracket. Caroline Oulton at Cambridge was one, although I never told her so, and Sunetra another.
The Blackadder rehearse-record rhythms somehow made the time fly by. On Tuesday morning we would read through the script, with Richard and sometimes Ben in attendance. John would wince and clutch his brow and shake his head at the dire impossibility of it all - not the most tactful way to endear himself to the writers or indeed the performers. He never meant to transmit disapproval or disappointment, the tutting and moaning were just his way of gearing himself up for the work of the week ahead. Next, each scene, starting at the beginning, would slowly have 'legs' put on it. As the show was blocked out in this fashion, Mandy would make notes and build up her camera script, and John would grimace and sigh and smoke and pace and growl. His perfectionism and refusal to be satisfied was part of the reason Blackadder worked. Every line, plot twist and action was taken, rubbed between his fingers, sniffed and passed, rejected or pulled in for servicing and improvement. We would all join in the process of joke polishing or 'fluffing', as John called it. I relished participating in these sessions which over the years became an absolute characteristic of Blackadder rehearsals. Visiting guest actors would often sit for hours working on a crossword or reading a book as we built up the epithets and absurd similes.