The True History of the Blackadder (25 page)

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:

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 invent 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.’

Naturally, this first meeting between the two pop addicts brought up the subject of the regular bands who played in
The Young Ones
lounge every week – a clever ploy designed to make use of the bigger budgets doled out for BBC Variety programmes. Both were big fans of the north London ska outfit Madness, who had made the most memorable musical appearance in the first series episode ‘Boring’ (‘You hum it, I’ll smash yer face in’), and would be back for a musical street riot in the second series. Geoff Posner had shared with Ben his admiration for the witty musicians’ style, and had an idea. ‘I felt that there was a bit of a lack of a youth-orientated comedy programme, and when Madness were in
The Young Ones
, although they were a little ill-disciplined when they recorded their bit, it was quite clear that they generated a lot of excitement, they were the group that everybody wanted to have on. And I thought that this could be the eighties equivalent of
The Monkees
.’

Curtis leapt at the chance to try and create a musical sitcom with Elton, but at this stage any spin-off had to wait, as Elton had second outings for
The Young Ones
and
Alfresco
to write, and perform. There was a final attempt to rejig the latter to find the right chemistry for a
break-out hit – the original mournful credits were replaced with a jaunty comic-strip intro, setting up a zany return to the sitcom-style framing device of the first pilot. Taking their own advice to the
Blackadder
team, the cast returned to performing in front of a live audience in their new comic personas, who congregated in Bobza Coltrane’s ‘pretend pub’. Stephen became florid kindly aristocrat Lord Sezza, Hugh the right-wing Huzza, and Ben gave his persecution complex a physical manifestation as the prole-like Bezza. The show was edging from strength to strength, but after another six episodes it was clear that this cast couldn’t be kept together for more regional engagements, and they called it a day after two series. Thompson was especially unable to commit to further shows, due to starring in the massively successful revival of Noel Gay’s thirties musical
Me and My Girl
, masterminded by the composer’s son, who invited Fry to pen the new book – making him a millionaire by his mid-twenties in the process.