by Stephen Fry
I picture Richard and Ben reading this and snorting with outrage. 'Hang on, we presented you with the scripts and devised the characters and the style. Don't go pretending that it was all your work.' Ben and Richard did indeed create the style, the storylines and most of the jokes. We added and subtracted in rehearsal, but they were the writers, there can be no doubt of that. My admiration for their work was and is extreme and unconditional. Nonetheless, as anyone who spent any time in Blackadder rehearsals then or later will confirm, the days were always a constant coffee and cigarettes grind of tweaking, refinement and emendation.
Sunday was the taping night, the night we performed the show in front of an audience. Ben would act as warm-up man, introducing the characters and setting the series in context. This was important, for there was always a detectable air of disappointment emanating from the audience. No part of the current series would yet have been broadcast, so they would be staring at an unfamiliar set and fretting at the absence of the characters they had known from the previous series. When they came to Blackadder II they were sorry not to have Brian Blessed there as the King; when they came to Blackadder the Third recordings they missed Queenie; and when they arrived for recordings of Blackadder Goes Forth they wanted to see Prince George and Mrs Miggins.
For all that, it was a happy experience. The Saturday after the taping of the last episode of Blackadder II Richard Curtis held a party at his house in Oxfordshire. It was a glorious summer's day, and, as we all wanted to watch television, Richard unwound an extension cord and put the set on a wooden chair in the shade of an apple tree. We sat on the grass and watched Live Aid all the way through to the end of the American broadcast from Philadelphia.
'We should do something similar,' Richard said.
'How's that?' I wasn't sure what he could mean.
'Comedians can raise money too. Look at what John Cleese did for Amnesty with those Secret Policeman's Balls.'
'So you mean a Comedians' Live Aid show?'
Richard nodded. He had already been germinating Comic Relief in his head for some time. Now, almost twenty-five years later, he has devoted six or seven months of his time every other year to an organization that, love or loathe the enforced custardy jollities of its biennial television pratfest, has raised hundreds of millions of pounds to comfort those who have sorely needed it.
Coral Christmas, Cassidy, C4, Clapless Clapham, Cheeky Chappies and Coltrane's Cock
With Blackadder II in the can, I was called up by Richard Armitage.
'Happy to say that they want to put on Me and My Girl in Australia. Mike will need you there to help with changes that we can try out for Broadway.'
I didn't really believe that Broadway would happen. How could Americans possibly respond to Cockney capers and rhyming slang with anything other than blank stares and fidgety coughs? Australia seemed like a wonderful idea, however, and Mike and I flew out with the rest of the core production team to rehearse an Australian cast in the Melbourne Arts Centre. I wish I remembered more about the production. I think I fiddled about with the lyrics a little and changed one or two scenes, but that is all that springs to mind. It was towards the end of the year, and Mike and I decided that it would be fun to stay on and Christmas up in Queensland. He chose Hamilton, one of the Whitsunday Islands of the Coral Reef. I spent almost all of Christmas Day in my hotel room shivering, throbbing and shaking with sunstroke and sunburn, much to the amusement of Billy Connolly and Pamela Stephenson, who were staying in the same hotel.
Back in England Hugh and I turned our minds to the Channel 4 show that Paul Jackson had mentioned to us. Seamus Cassidy, the young commissioner at C4, was anxious for something akin to America's long-running Saturday Night Live. Our show, he decided, was to be called Saturday Live. I thought of him ever after, not unaffectionately, as Shameless Cassidy.
Stand-up was taking over the world. Our brand of sketch comedy, it seemed to Hugh and me, was in danger of looking more and more dated as each month passed, certainly as far as the prospect of live TV was concerned. The problem with being a duo rather than a solo performer is that you speak to each other, rather than out front to the audience. We had in the past written a certain number of sketches, the Shakespeare Masterclass for example, in which the audience could be directly addressed, but for much of our time we played characters locked in mini-dramas with a fourth wall between us and the watching world. Out of some act of rare reckless abandonment we decided that before putting ourselves in front of the cameras for this new show we should practise by performing in a comedy club. One of the premiere venues at that time was Jongleurs in Clapham, and thither we went for one night, sandwiched between a young Julian Clary and Lenny Henry. Julian performed as 'The Joan Collins Fan Club' in those days and shared the stage with his little terrier 'Fanny the Wonderdog'. He did very well, I recall. When Hugh and I left the stage after our fifteen minutes and puffed out our usual 'Christ they hated us' (Hugh) and 'It wasn't so bad' (me), we stayed back to watch Lenny. I remember thinking how wonderful it must be to be known and loved by an audience. All your work is done before you go on stage. Lenny entered to an enormous cheer and, or at least so it seemed to me, only had to open his mouth to have the audience writhing with joy and drumming their feet on the floor with approval. Hugh and I were unknown, Blackadder II hadn't aired yet, and The Crystal Cube and Alfresco had been watched by seven people, all of whom wanted to kill us. That night at Jongleurs we sweated blood as we treated the audience to our exquisitely wrought phrases, cunning jokes and deft characterizations only to be rewarded with vague titters and polite but sporadic applause. Lenny came on, did a bird call, boomed a hello and the building almost collapsed. This is to take nothing away from him at all. He had built up a rapport over the years and he had the gift that can guarantee a good time in a comedy club. He was relaxed and he made the audience relax. Hugh and I might have hidden our nerves and anxiety as best we could, but from the beginning we were working the audience rather than welcoming them with any confidence into our world. A tense audience might admire our writing and performing, but they are never going to give us the great rolling waves of love they sent out to Lenny. Later, when we were familiar figures and went on stage to gusts of welcome, I would remember that night at Clapless Clapham, as I always thought of it, and thank my lucky stars that I no longer had to prove myself in quite the same way. Yet, having said that, there came an evening some years later where I was able clearly to witness the reverse effect. I directed a number of 'Hysteria' benefit shows for the Terrence Higgins Trust in the late eighties and early nineties. For the third one I had the duty of welcoming on to the stage a very well-known comic. He entered to a thunderous ovation - they were so pleased to see him. He exited to only a ... respectable level of applause. The next act was new. No one out there had any idea who he was or what they might expect. I did my best as compere to get the audience on his side.
'Dear ladies, darling gentlemen, I have no doubt in the world that you will give the next artist your warmest and wildest welcome. He is a brilliant young comic, I know you'll adore him - please greet the wonderful Eddie Izzard!' They were polite and they did their best, but they would so much rather have screamed a John Cleese or Billy Connolly on to the stage.
I stood in the wings and watched as Eddie left the stage to a gigantic round of applause. How much better to go on to polite clapping and off to roars than, as the established comic had, to go on to roars and off to polite clapping.
Saturday Live was a bear garden: transmitted live from the biggest studio in London Weekend Television's South Bank studios, it featured a large central stage, side stages for the bands, random giant inflatables floating above and a vast arena for the audience of groundlings, mostly young fashion-conscious people who milled about getting in the way of the cameras and harassed floor managers in a style that was becoming the established fashion in hip youth TV, a style that veered between sulky disaffection and hysterical whooping adulation. Hugh was convinced that they wer
e more interested in how their hair looked on screen than in anything we might be saying or doing to try and amuse them.
The man who put the turd in Saturday Live. I cannot recall a single thing about that sketch. Why the rolled-up trouser leg?
A month or so earlier we had gone to the Comedy Store to see a new comedian about whom we had heard great things. His name was Harry Enfield and he performed a stand-up routine as a most marvellously curmudgeonly and perverse old gentleman, a character he had consciously modelled on the persona Gerard Hoffnung adopted in his legendary interviews with Charles Richardson. Harry worked on Spitting Image as an impressionist and had, like us, been booked for Saturday Live.
He had bumped into and become friends with Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson, our painter-decorators, and together Harry and Paul had developed a character based on Adam, Paul's Graeco-Cockney kebab-shop owner. Now named Stavros, he was working well as a puppet on Spitting Image, and Harry fancied the idea of trying him out in the flesh for Saturday Live. Hugh and I rather envied Harry the stability of having one returning character. Each week for the twelve of the first run of Saturday Live we had to think of something new to do. Each week the blank sheet of paper and accusatory pen, or rather the blank screen, flashing cursor and accusatory keyboard. The sketches that seemed to work best in the insanely hot, loud and unstable atmosphere of the studio were the ones, as we had imagined, where Hugh and I talked out to the audience. We developed a line of talk-show parodies where Hugh played a character called Peter Mostyn, who interviewed me in increasingly strange formats.
More Saturday Live: with Hugh, Harry Enfield and Ben Elton. Why the electric carving knife, if that's what it is? I remember nothing of this moment.
'Hello and welcome to Stealing a Car Stereo With. I'm Peter Mostyn and tonight I'll be stealing a car stereo with Nigel Davenant, Shadow Home Secretary and Member of Parliament for South Reason. Nigel, hello and welcome to Stealing a Car Stereo With ...' and so on.
I remember that Mostyn sketch with especial clarity (most of our Saturday Live experiences are a blur of jumbled memories: the brain can be kind that way) because it allowed us to film away from the feared studio audience and down in the LWT underground car park. With the show being live it was rather tense. We had some sort of iron punch with which to smash the nearside window of a car and pull out the radio. Rather than using the friable and safe sugar glass usually favoured as a prop we were going to do it on the real thing, a car belonging to someone in the production crew.
'Right - so, Shadow Home Secretary, have you ever stolen a car stereo before?'
'Ooh, not since I was a young parliamentary assistant.'
'Feeling confident?'
'Give it a damned good go, anyway ...'
'That's the spirit! This is the kind of tool most car thieves use. One firm blow and then, quick as you can, out with the stereo. But while you're doing that, let me ask you, was politics always your first love?'
'Oh, no, Susanna was my first love, then a boy called Tony and then politics.'
'Right, has politics changed much since you first entered the house as a young man after that by-election in 1977?'
And, which was the purpose of these sketches, Hugh would continue an earnest and commonplace interview as if we were doing the most normal thing in the world. Later scenarios included 'Introducing My Grandfather To', 'Photocopying My Genitals With' and 'Flying a Light Aircraft Without Having Had Any Formal Instruction With'.
It took about six heavy bangs on the glass to smash the window that night, I recall. I could clearly hear the alarmed voice of Geoff Posner, the director, in the earpieces of the two cameramen and assistant floor manager each time the punch bounced harmlessly off the window. 'Jesus! Hell! Oh, for fuck's sake!'
Hugh improvised nobly. 'Would you say, Nigel, that new European lamination standards have succeeded in toughening glass since your early days stealing car stereos?'
'That's ... bang ... right, Peter. I would ... bang ... say ... exactly ... bang ... that. Plus I've lost a lot of strength in my arms due to bang ... Crash!! ... ah, that's got it ...' What I had lost a lot of strength in my arms due to I fortunately never had to declare.
The only other sketch I remember with any clarity is seared into my memory like a brand because it necessitated a visit to a hypnotist.
I am not able, as I have discussed before, to sing. By which I mean I am really not able to sing, much as I am not able to fly through the air by flapping my arms. Not. Able. It is not a question of me doing it badly but a question of me not being able to do it at all. I have told you what my singing voice does to those cocky and wrong-headed fools who have skipped about the place proclaiming, 'Why, that's nonsense! Everyone can sing ...' Hugh, as we know, sings marvellously, as he does most things marvellously, but Stephen just plain doesn't. I think I can sing when I'm on my own, in the shower for instance, but there is no way of testing it. If I imagine for a second that there is anybody in the house, or in the garden, or within a hundred yards of me, I freeze up. And that would include a microphone, so my singing is like a physicist's quantum event: any observation fatally alters its outcome.
Well, came the day in the middle of the second series of Saturday Live that I found that Hugh had painted me, or I had painted myself, into a dreadful corner. Somehow a routine had been written in which it was essential for me to sing. Hugh was performing some other crucial function in the sketch, and I could not but accept that I was going to have to sing. Live. On television.
For three days I was in a complete panic, trembling, sweating, moaning, yawning, needing a pee every ten minutes - all the symptoms of extreme nervous tension. At last Hugh could take it no more.
'All right then. We'll just have to write another sketch.'
'No, no! I'll be fine.' Annoyingly it was a good sketch. Much as I dreaded the prospect of its approach, I knew that we should do it. 'Really. I'll be fine.'
Hugh took in my quaking knees, ashen complexion and terrified countenance. 'You won't be fine,' he said. 'I can see that. Look, it's obviously psychological. You can hammer out a tune on a piano, you can tell one song from another. You're obviously not tone deaf.'
'No,' I said, 'the problem is I am tone dumb.'
'Psychological. What you should do is see a hypnotist.'
At three o'clock next afternoon I rang the doorbell of the Maddox Street consulting rooms of one Michael Joseph, Clinical Hypnotist.
He turned out to be Hungarian by birth. Hungarian, I suppose because of my grandfather, is my favourite accent in all the world. I shan't attempt to write 'Vot' for 'What' and 'deh' for 'the', you will just have to imagine a voice like George Solti's weaving its way into my brain.
'Tell me the issue that brings you here,' he asked, expecting, I imagine, smoking or weight control or something along those lines.
'I have to sing tomorrow night.'
'Excuse me?'
'Tomorrow night I have to sing. Live on television.'
I outlined the nature of the problem. 'You say you can never sing, you have never sung?'
'Well, I think it must be a mental block. I have a good enough ear to be able usually to recognize some keys. E flat major, C minor and D major, for instance. But the moment I have to sing in front of anybody else I just get a hammering in my ears, my throat constricts, my mouth goes dry and the most tuneless, arrhythmic horror comes out.'
'I see, I see. Perhaps you should put the palms of your hands on your knees, that would be pleasantly comfortable, I think. You know, if you feel your hands on your legs, it is amazing how they seem almost to melt into the flesh, is it not? Soon it is hard to tell which is your hands and which is your legs, don't they? They are as one. And as this is happening it now feels as if you are being lowered down a well, haven't you? Down into the dark. But my voice is like the rope that keeps you confident that you will not be lost. My voice will be able to pull you back up, but for the moment it is dropping you down and down and until you are in the warm and i
n the dark. Yes? No?'
'Mm ...' I felt myself slipping into a state - not of unconsciousness, for I was fully awake and aware - of willing relaxation and contented stupor. Light closed around me until I was snug and securely held in the well of darkness and warmth that he had described.
'Tell me when it was that you decided that you could not sing?'
And now, quite unexpectedly, there popped fully formed into my head a perfectly clear memory of cong. prac.
Congregational practice is held every Saturday morning in the prep school gym/chapel/assembly hall. The music master, Mr Hemuss, takes us through the hymns that will be sung in tomorrow's service. It is my first term. I am seven years old and just getting used to boarding 200 miles from home. I stand at the end of a row with a hymnbook in my hand joining in as the school sings its way through the first verse of 'Jerusalem the Golden'. Kirk, the duty prefect, saunters up and down the aisles, making sure everyone is behaving. Suddenly he stops right next to me and holds up his hand.
'Sir, sir ... Fry is singing flat!'
There is tittering. Mr Hemuss calls for hush. 'On your own then, Fry.'
I don't know what singing flat means, but I know it must be terrible.
'Come on,' Hemuss strikes his hand down on the keyboard to sound a chord and belts out the opening line in a strong tenor, 'Jerusalem the golden ...'
I try to pick it up from there. 'With milk and honey blest ...' The school erupts with hoots of derisive laughter as a husky tuneless squeak emerges from me.