The True History of the Blackadder (34 page)

In truth, scripting
FR&C
was a literally painful experience for Ben, who was in hospital with a hernia for much of the show’s composition. ‘It was the most unhappy experience of my life, writing that show,’ he would tell Roger Wilmut in 1989, ‘because I never really knew where I was – was Rik writing it with me or not? In the end he said, “I haven’t written a word, so you’d better have the credit,” but by that time I’d spent four months trying to write something as part of a team, so it wasn’t easy. Having said that, I’m very proud of it. All right, it’s loud, it’s dirty, it’s noisy, but there are some good bits in it – we got more fan mail than for
The Young Ones
– we also got the most vitriolic critical panning …’ But as ever, Elton was not interested in looking back – by the time his sitcom was either delighting or disgusting the British public, he was back in DHT on the second series of
Saturday Live
.

Q
UITE
F
RANKLY
, M
R
P
ERKINS
…

While
Blackadder
thrives by being untied to its decade of origin,
Saturday Live
did such a spectacular job of capturing the spirit and the comedy scene of the mid-eighties that shallower viewers of the twenty-first century could find it hard to see past the forest of mullets and appreciate the excitement of the phenomenon at the time. Elton was the perfect frontman for Jackson’s aim to bring together variety and youth culture – volubly denouncing the latest machinations of Thatcher’s government, while wearing a sparkly suit that radiated a kind of ironic showbiz pizzazz. Although it was his job to get material out of the top stories, being cheered to the rafters by the fashionably right-on punters with every pump of his fist, Elton was never comfortable with the whooping reflexes his attacks on ‘Thatch’ inspired, regularly chiding the crowd with rapid disclaimers and put-downs, reminding them that ‘This isn’t a rally, it’s a comedy programme’; laughing ‘Don’t clap, you sycophants!’ when the crowd got overexcited and ate into his allotted time; ominously admitting, ‘I put myself down so I don’t give you a chance to do it’; and of course, sending himself up with a piss-taking ‘Little bit of politics, ladies and gentlemen, yes indeed …’ The vast majority of Elton’s material concerned everyday insecurity, not satire – the arch-satirist John Lloyd was relinquishing control of
Spitting Image
at this time, and would lament, ‘I think satire changes perceptions, but I don’t think it changes the actuality. When I left
Spitting Image
I certainly felt that we’d achieved nothing but possibly made the government slightly more powerful than we had found it.’ It was a time when the government positively
invited
attack, but Elton’s weekly diatribes, though heartfelt, were ultimately just ‘a little bit of politics’.

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.

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.

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.

D
ELVING INTO THE
P
AST

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.’