The True History of the Blackadder (10 page)

Looking back at the stress required to get the show made every week, Lloyd says, ‘It was a nightmare of overwork, I mean, everything was stressful, we used to be green with exhaustion. We were within an ace of disaster more or less every week. It was amazing what we did, and we were only able to do it by basically going without sleep for a week. But for the actors it was a very nice job.’ He estimates that Curtis contributed ‘about half’ of the scripts, becoming a major part of the show’s voice, though this is only partly confirmed by Curtis himself. ‘My major memory of the show is sitting in a basement in Camden Town, writing lots and lots and lots. Sometimes of course you’d watch a show and there was nothing by you.’ With Rowan as his muse, Curtis came up with reams of material for every series. ‘We tried to work out things which were odd, and which Rowan and I would sort of do more onstage, rather than writing satirical things about trade unions, or train timetables, stuff like that.’

The weekly production process was more like going to a youth club than a BBC rehearsal – the team even had their own pinball table. ‘It was amazing,’ Curtis recalls. ‘The energy and the fire and creative enthusiasm in the room when they were playing pinball was devastating. And then they’d say “we’d better get back to the sketches”, and everybody would go “ugh …” just waiting for something funny to be said.’ For Rowan, with his natural abilities never allowing anyone to forget who the star of the show was, this period seemed idyllic. ‘My job on
Not
, I always felt, was quite straightforward – I just learned the scripts, and turned up on Sunday and recorded them! It seemed like a very simple job.’ But
what was simple for Atkinson was a revelation to everybody else – his gobbledegook rendition of the poem ‘Abou Ben Adhem’, for instance, left his colleagues aghast at where it was all coming from.

Led by Mel Smith, a naturalistic style of performance was established which marked
Not
out from everything before it, and everything around it, Curtis attests. ‘It was definitively negatively influenced by
Monty Python
. So the thing we took particular joy in was naturalistic performances, because the
Python
style had been so high.’ Atkinson agrees. ‘It was something that I’d never done, because even then I tended to do characters that were rather extreme, either extremely old or extremely silly, or facially very active.’ Figures of authority were still a speciality, of course – the senior policeman in ‘Constable Savage’, numerous politicians, judges, vicars of all descriptions and even a gorilla called Gerald, who managed to maintain an air of ineffable superiority despite having a mouth patently incapable of accommodating bananas.

Not
’s line in inspired musical pastiche – be it punk, ska, heavy metal, country or Olivia Newton John – also gave a helping hand for the third member of Atkinson’s regular team: as well as being Rowan’s housemate, Howard Goodall became the show’s musical director and formed a house band for the show, often including himself on the organ.
^fn12

Goodall shared composition duties with future TV music greats like Peter Brewis and Philip Pope, while the latter became Curtis’s musical collaborator on
Radio Active
– the Oxford Review show which transferred to radio in 1980 at the behest of budding producer Jimmy Mulville, showing that his original violent reaction to the gang had long since dissolved. In the same year, Pope and Curtis’s Bee Gees hatchet job, ‘Meaningless Songs in Very High Voices’ (as performed by Phil, Angus and Michael as the Hee Bee Gee Bees), may not have
troubled the UK charts, but it did get to number 2 in Australia, where the team had enjoyed a successful tour.

Not
’s success was really brought home to everyone by the massive sales of the first tie-in book (a magazine spoof simply entitled
Not!
), and indeed the first album, both released hot on the heels of the second series and snapped up in unexpectedly astronomical amounts. When the team agreed to do a signing session in Oxford, the queue stretched the length of the high street and lorry loads of extra books had to be sent for to meet with demand. The first album went double platinum, knocking Queen off the top of the charts, and the following year the show won the
Smash Hits
TV award – even
Monty Python
hadn’t reached such heights of youth appeal, certainly not so quickly.

Lloyd had always wanted his own hit comedy franchise, and here it was – TV, books, albums, all hits, not just artistically, but commercially. Rowan Atkinson and his retinue were the biggest thing in UK comedy, and the decade had only just begun. There was also the financial reward to be considered, Atkinson recalls. ‘Suddenly the royalties started to come in, because the record sales were quite bizarrely large. And my predominant thought was probably “Which model of Aston Martin will this buy me?” I suspect that was my priority – when looking at a large cheque it was always immediately cars that would sort of flash in my head.’

Having turned away from his technical ambitions, and completed one of the most impressive rises to greatness in British Comedy history, he remained, at heart, a petrolhead, only happy when behind the wheel or under the bonnet. It had taken him a few attempts to pass his driving test, but despite all his achievements, the greatest moment of his life came in the same decade as all these glorious comic successes, on the day that he received his HGV licence. ‘The thrill of making two thousand people in a theatre laugh is but a light breeze compared to the tornado of excitement that I felt at that moment,’ he admits. ‘I’ve always been a bit of a loner and lorry driving is a loner’s dream. I love the sense of power and responsibility. I suppose it reveals a suppressed megalomania …’

^fn1
The Oxford Revue had been in good hands with Geoffrey Perkins in the early seventies and, if nothing else, his surname provided them with a multitude of sketch characters – ‘Come in, Perkins!’ becoming a meme shared by a whole generation of sketch writers (albeit one piloted a generation earlier by
Beyond the Fringe
).

^fn2
She was also a close friend of Ian Curtis, who was morbidly drawn to the girl who had cheated death – though by the time Helen arrived at Oxford he was back in Manchester, performing with his new band Joy Division.

^fn3
Rowan told
theartsdesk.com
‘it was called
After Eights
because the Eights are the rowing race in Oxford. I think it was a pun.’

^fn4
The campaign has to date included the sex-mad gawd-help-us played by David Haig in
Four Weddings and a Funeral
, Alan Cumming’s naive loser in
Bernard & the Genie
, another no-hoper played by Hugh Bonneville in
Notting Hill
, and of course, a bear-baiter and a celebrated Tudor nurse.

^fn5
One of the few major comedy bosses to have escaped would have been Peter Bennett-Jones, who was present with the Footlights the year before just in time to wonder at Atkinson’s first show, but by 1977 had moved into theatre production.

^fn6
A script which, ironically, he had to personally wrench out of the tardy writers to meet their deadline.

^fn7
Who would crop up in other Curtis/Atkinson projects, most notably as the barking doctor in
The Tall Guy
.

^fn8
The future Marlene Boyce in
Only Fools and Horses
and
The Green Green Grass
, at that time starring in the aforementioned
End of Part One
, the TV incarnation of
The Burkiss Way
.

^fn9
Named in honour of
Not the New York Times
, a parody printed during US print strikes in 1978.

^fn10
Generally
Not
avoided period sketches, unless they were sending up BBC costume dramas – perhaps the only exception being a Stone Age quickie featuring Rowan as a caveman who gets to clobber Griff with his club.

^fn11
Originally written by Cleese & Chapman with Marty Feldman and Tim Brooke-Taylor for
At Last the 1948 Show
, but since sucked into
Python
lore.

^fn12
The rest of the cast mimed along as best they could but besides Atkinson’s passion for percussion, the quartet’s ability as a band may have been one thing which inspired Douglas Adams to opine: ‘
Not the Nine O’Clock News
is to
Monty Python
what the Monkees were to the Beatles.’

Parte the Second:

THE TUDOR BASTARD

HENRY TUDOR WAS
a very clever bastard – albeit one who was, strictly speaking, born in wedlock. John Lennon claimed that ‘You have to be a bastard to make it, and that’s a fact,’ and if ‘making it’ comprises ending the aristocratic civil war that would come to be known as the War of the Roses and establishing a new royal dynasty in the back-stabbing environment of medieval England, then Henry, Earl of Richmond, more than deserves the bastard crown.

When the Black Prince, eldest son of Edward III, succumbed to illness in 1376, leaving his infant son Richard on the verge of inheriting the kingdom, a course was set which would lead to the end of centuries of solid hereditary rule, in favour of the worst culture of crown-grabbing among the big nobs since King Stephen took on the Empress Matilda. Henry Bolingbroke, son of the Black Prince’s powerful kid brother John of Gaunt, felt compelled to flex his muscles and usurp the rightful but inept monarch Richard II, and in the process opened up a whole new world of opportunity for blue bloods – not just in warfare, but propaganda. Terry Jones has made it his business to try and see through the lies, and reveals, ‘There’s a couple of Northern Chronicles where at some point somebody takes over and says, “There’s a lot of stuff written here that shouldn’t have been written! Henry’s a jolly good man!” I’m sure it’s ex-Archbishop Thomas Arundel who creates this propaganda, to make out that Richard was a tyrant, and Henry was welcomed by the majority of English people. And he rewrites history! He puts out this spin, he wants the chroniclers to fall over backwards to write propaganda for Henry.’

By the time Henry’s soppy namesake grandson was barely balancing the British crown on his head in the mid-fifteenth century, the extended British royal family were embroiled in a vicious loop of ambition, treachery, bloodshed, exile, invasion and murder, with each move awaiting a write-up from some chronicler or other, for some faction or other. Grabbing the crown was one thing, but keeping it safe from an uppity third cousin with a chip on his shoulder and an army on his payroll was quite another. Convincing all posterity that you are the one and only true King of England required a hugely impressive flair for lies and obfuscation.

As has become apparent only in recent times, few people could deny that in the 1480s no man more deserved the throne than Richard III. Thanks in many ways to Richard’s own military skill, his elder brother Edward IV had maintained a pretty strong grip on the kingdom for twenty years (bar several months in exile at half-time). Having finally seen off John of Gaunt’s Lancastrian descendants (securing his claim as grandson of Gaunt’s little brother Edmund), Edward proved to be a whore-mongering yob of a despot. However, crucially, a discovery made by Dr Michael K. Jones during the filming of Tony Robinson’s Channel 4 documentary
Fact or Fiction – Richard III
in 2004 makes it rather fanciful to dispute that Edward IV, and therefore his children, the ‘Princes in the Tower’ and indeed every monarch for the last five hundred years, were all complete bastards, without any genuine hereditary claim to the throne at all. Records at Rouen Cathedral made the ancient rumour that Edward was the result of his mother’s knee-trembler with a Welsh archer while her husband Richard of York was away on campaign far more than gossip. When he died (quite possibly poisoned by his ambitious in-laws) in 1483, at last a true-blue descendant of Edward III could rule – the handy younger son whose personal motto had always been ‘Loyalty Binds Me’.