The True History of the Blackadder (7 page)

The problem was that Adams’s pilot script had so impressed the
Doctor Who
bosses at TV Centre that by the time the full series needed to be ready to air by spring 1978, he had been commissioned to write a four-part serial of the programme,
The Pirate Planet
, and would go on to be Script Editor, albeit briefly, in 1979. This was all too much for a deadline-phobe like Adams to bear, and in desperation he turned to his most regular collaborator for support. ‘I was living in Knightsbridge at the time, in the flat of a rather well-off friend,’ Lloyd told Nick Webb for
Wish You Were Here
. ‘There was a kind of garage that had been converted into a rough-and-ready office where we worked. And although it had taken Douglas almost ten months to write the first four episodes, the last two we wrote in three weeks … We laughed a lot.’ They had only recently received a handy £500 for writing a couple of quite interesting episodes of bizarre Dutch cartoon series
Dr Snuggles
, so they usually had something brewing on the typewriter together anyway.

One of Lloyd’s numerous irons in the fire was his science-fiction comedy novel,
GiGax
– which may well mean ‘the greatest area which could be encompassed by the human imagination’, but was also named in honour of the creator of Dungeons & Dragons, Gary Gygax. Lloyd had filled the story with ideas both complex and incredibly silly, but was way off reaching any kind of conclusion, working away at every thread in his tale with characteristic logical precision. He generously showered Douglas with pages, and invited him to cherry-pick the ideas which best suited Arthur Dent’s odyssey of oddities. ‘Mine was a rather pretentious book I suppose, but there were quite a lot of crucial ideas in
it and Douglas had this wonderful way of taking a kernel of an idea and turning it round to make it funnier. He always had a way of putting a gag on the end, whereas my natural inclination was to go forward with the basic idea to try to find a solution rather than a gag. It was in that garage that we jointly came up with the number 42 and the Scrabble set, which even at the time seemed the most wonderful, striking, simple and hilarious idea.’

John Lloyd’s equal input into the last two episodes of the first series of
H2G2
was to be only the start, with a co-written Christmas special and a second series on the cards, plus a novelisation under joint contract. This had been happily agreed between them face to face, but when Lloyd later received a letter from his friend explaining his decision to take back control of his characters and write the book on his own, Lloyd was utterly crushed. Losing his chance to finally be part of a successful sci-fi franchise was one thing, but being informed by mail when he was just in the next room seemed to make the rejection far worse. It was also true that John was in the red, and greatly needed his half of the handsome advance paid by Pan Books. The furious Lloyd found himself an agent as quickly as possible and – despite being advised to accept 15 per cent of the
H2G2
profits in perpetuity – he negotiated half of the existing advance, and nipped the issue in the bud. It wasn’t quite so easy to shake off his indignation at Adams’s use of him as an ‘emotional football’, however – even Douglas’s mother had to step in to placate John and try to put an end to the feud.

Mrs Adams’s intervention may have been the clincher – certainly, by the end of the year the two friends were not just talking again, but working together. The instant popularity of
H2G2
led to Adams himself joining Lloyd as a radio producer, doing the odd shift on
Week Ending
and producing that year’s panto, celebrating ninety-five years of the Footlights,
Black Cinderella II Goes East
. Douglas began his first big production with great confidence, hiring pals Clive Anderson and
Rory McGrath to pen a corny script inspired by
ISIRTA
,
^fn6
and sending word out to vintage Footlights stars including Cleese (although he insisted on pre-recording his role of ‘Fairy Godperson’ at home), Richard ‘Stinker’ Murdoch, and, in the spectacularly nasty plum role of Prince Disgusting, Peter Cook. However, with the Christmas recording getting closer and closer, Douglas had to admit that he had bitten off more than he could chew, and called on his old friend in the next room to act as co-producer. ‘I was called in to help at the very last minute – if not days before the recording, then not much more than that. I came along because at least I knew about, you know, warm-ups and how to do read-throughs and all that.’

As with so many other green striplings in this story, the elder statesman Cook was to welcome Lloyd into his intimate circle of ribaldry without a qualm – even though, due to his lack of exposure to British TV in his schooldays, John wasn’t an avid fan. ‘I came to know Peter pretty well as a person,’ he says, ‘but I never got round to catching up on the fine detail of his career. Most famous people, I think, would have found this either offensive or incompetent. Peter couldn’t have cared less. He had the gift of being able to treat everyone absolutely equally, and he made no exception of himself.’

Another reason that Lloyd was clearly happy to help with the panto was that he had already put a new plan of his own into action. He had taken the book debacle with Douglas to heart, and at the same time as his old housemate’s mammoth success was beginning, all around him his colleagues seemed to be getting ahead, leaving for TV, finding their niche, while he was headed for thirty, working round the clock on radio shows with only a vague promise of promotion years ahead. When his radio hit
To the Manor Born
transferred to TV without him it all became too much for the young Lloyd, and on the most decisive
working day of his life he left his office, marched over to TV Centre, and as good as banged on comedy boss Jimmy Gilbert’s desk demanding a chance at producing a TV show. ‘To my huge surprise, they said, “Of course. What took you so long to ask? Would six programmes be enough?” They could do that sort of thing then.’

Lloyd’s commission was to create a brand-new satirical comedy show for the eighties – on the understanding that he share duties with Current Affairs producer and fellow Cantabrigian Sean Hardie, who had a habit of sneaking jokes into
Panorama
. The two put their heads together and began plotting a pilot for the spring of 1979. ‘It started off being called
Sacred Cows
, that was the BBC’s title for it, and it was designed to be a dissing of all the things that you weren’t supposed to diss.’ Hardie’s participation was always going to give the programme a more topical feel, but for Lloyd, this was in a way the creation of another in a long line of revues – and he knew which performer he wanted to head the cast.

A P
LAN
M
OST
C
UNNING

Atkinson and Lloyd had a near miss immediately prior to the launch of this new TV show, as Curtis and the comedy world’s greatest new visual performer readied their one and only foray into radio. Like
The Burkiss Way
team before them, Curtis and Atkinson started their audio experiment in the sober atmosphere of Radio 3, which perfectly suited their mockumentary style. Originally piloted as
Rowan Atkinson’s Profiles
in 1978,
The Atkinson People
, which debuted on 24 April 1979, was planned as a series of biographical studies of fictional men of achievement – Shakespearean actor Sir Corin Basin, politician and Renaissance man Sir Benjamin Fletcher, French philosopher George Dupont and the ‘Pope of Pop’ Barry Good. ‘I was script editor for the department,’ John confirms, ‘so I suppose I must have read the scripts, but I don’t remember it. I was the censor – in that strange way institutions
have of making the naughtiest boy in the school the head prefect.’ It was an understated, cerebral series, recorded without an audience and with the help of
Beyond a Joke
player Peter Wilson and actor Hugh Thomas
^fn7
, and can be most closely compared to painstakingly crafted spoofs such as
On the Hour
. The roles were quite equally shared out, although Atkinson played all but one of the subjects – an old bore (which allowed him to repeat his Marcus Browning speech), an outrageous Frenchman and a burned-out rocker, in depictions that seemed innocuously genuine to the casual ear, but were packed with verbal idiocy when you actually paid attention.

Although Rowan didn’t play Sir Corin, he did appear as a Jacobean villain in the first episode, in a faux-archive recording of the actor’s performance in
The Tragedy of Terence, or The Recalcitrant Lunatic
, which allowed Curtis and he to continue their assault on Shakespeare – revenge for all those dud roles given to Curtis at Oxford. Spot the first arrangement of a most famous phrase.

It may have seemed ironic to Lloyd that Atkinson was making his radio debut just as he was moving on from the medium, but as the series was produced by his old friend and pseudo-brother-in-law Griff Rhys Jones (one of his few productions in his short time as a radio producer), John was hardly that far out of the loop, and he listened in to the shows keenly, wondering how Rowan’s astounding live performances would translate to radio and, indeed, his own TV show.

Lloyd and Hardie’s programme would not be Atkinson’s first appearance on TV, though. Besides a fleeting appearance on a Richard Stilgoe special,
And Now the Good News
, Rowan had also been interviewed to publicise the Hampstead show, and in these early days, Afro’ed and bespectacled, he seemed happy to open up about his inner fears admitting, ‘I have a lot of fits of depression and lack of satisfaction, but they’re nearly all associated with the entertainment industry, and actually my other interests in life – I mean, silly things, but things I happen to enjoy doing a fantastic amount, like electronics, like driving trucks – are very simple. And the trouble with show business is that what you’re doing is exposing yourself entirely, and your heart and soul is being torn out and shown to millions of people.’

Richard Armitage had given Atkinson his first performing break on the small screen, in a way that it can only be presumed the two of
them agreed never to discuss again: the ‘Children’s Revue’
A Bundle of Bungles
. This attempt at preschool comedy (which would result in the popular show
Jigsaw
) was broadcast only once, in early ’79, and featured the young comedy star in the role of ‘Mr Ree’, performing his more child-friendly mime skits surrounded by sad-faced clowns and mime artists, with Howard Goodall accompanying him on the organ, in between airings of bizarre Eastern European cartoons. Over the years Atkinson’s work would have huge appeal to children, and even before the
Mr Bean
cartoon launched in 2002, younger viewers would flock to his post-watershed programmes, but
A Bundle of Bungles
was his one foray into performing specifically for an infant audience. It was a most unexpected debut for a comic already in the sights of some of the biggest names in TV comedy.

Humphrey Barclay remained fascinated by the possibility of putting Atkinson on screen, but went about it in an unorthodox way. Rowan remembers, despite having just completed his final exams, ‘He asked me to write an essay on what kind of comedy programme I would like to be involved with. And it was all tremendously pretentious stuff – that there shouldn’t be a studio audience and it should all be shot on location on film, desperately trying to get away from the traditional sitcom or sketch-show format that was popular then, as now. In the end it was largely ambitious but pretentious waffle. Trying to be original merely because you’ve learned to be different rarely works. You should try and learn from the past, rather than rejecting it outright.’

Despite the naivety of young Rowan’s argument against laughter tracks, the issue would seem to have inspired him in the creation of his first real TV comedy showcase,
Rowan Atkinson Presents … Canned Laughter
, broadcast on ITV on 8 April 1979. Without Curtis’s aid, the young comic pieced together the best showcase for his characterisations he could, in a sitcom format to be recorded with a live audience. ‘It was basically a chance for Rowan to use a few of his existing characters, woven into a story of sorts,’ Barclay confirms. ‘I turned to the director
of Marshall & Renwick’s
End of Part One
, Geoffrey Sax. Geoffrey had blagged his way into the director’s chair for that very funny series, and brought to it a striking visual element which was a cut above the normal for TV comedy.’ This try-out episode was mostly fresh material – with a few well-tested turns.