The True History of the Blackadder (8 page)

The hero of the piece, Robert Box, is certainly the closest forerunner of Bean on Atkinson’s CV – an awkward, selfish, unpopular and childish disaster magnet. Rowan himself always claimed, ‘I’m best at playing lonely and vulnerable people in small-scale comedies of tiny situations.’ Box is in love with a cute work colleague played by Sue Holderness
^fn8
, and
Canned Laughter
follows him on the day that he finally plucks up the courage to ask her out – from his hectic morning routine to inevitable late-night rejection. Box’s bizarrely florid gesticulations, elastic expressions and slapstick reflexes gave Atkinson the perfect excuse to revisit some business he had been performing since the earliest Oxford Revues, as Box’s morning rush required him to ingest coffee on the fly, putting granules, milk and water straight from the kettle into his mouth and mixing them on the go, plus shaving his entire face – bar eyebrows – with an electric razor. Repressing young Robert is his cold-hearted boss Mr Marshall, also played by Atkinson, with a third character coming from left field, in the form of Dave Perry – a struggling (and hopeless) Geordie comedian who is over the moon to get a booking at the restaurant where Robert takes his date. This seems like a transparent display of unusual openness from Atkinson, in a sense splitting his personality and laying it bare for all to see. On the other hand, Perry’s chirpiness in the face of a complete lack of prospects or talent was simply very amusing:

There’s a lot to raise one’s eyebrows at in
Canned Laughter
– besides Atkinson’s set-piece routines of social awkwardness, an odd melancholia hangs over the whole half-hour, the episode concluding with the broken Box and Perry slumped in despair together in the seedy restaurant as a looped, distorted sample of canned laughter plays, the lights dim and the viewer is left not just nonplussed, but disconcerted. Still, it would have been interesting to see how the idea could have been stretched to a series – if such a course wasn’t made null and void by the acceptance of Lloyd’s offer of a sketch show on the BBC. Barclay now admits, ‘I was elated at the quality of the piece, and having had the power to take someone right at the beginning of his career and give him his own TV show. My plan was immediately to proceed to a series, probably called
Rowan Atkinson Presents
, which would be a collection of individual half-hours. When I put this plan over the telephone to Richard Armitage, I was absolutely flabbergasted to learn that, undivulged to me, Rowan had simultaneously been working with another team on a sketch show … I went ballistic.’

Atkinson’s agreement to join the BBC camp was not obtained without some difficulty. John recalls his first tremulous dealings with the mighty Armitage: ‘He was a very classic old-fashioned agent; he looked the part, he was sort of squat and enormously upper class, smoked cigars – the most powerful agent in light entertainment in
the country at that time.’ Lloyd had to make it clear that his brief was to create a team for a topical show, and although Atkinson was much sought after, this was not a solo vehicle. ‘He brought his boy in, Rowan, the young star, and they clearly thought this was going to be “The Rowan Atkinson Show”. BBC management in those days was very powerful in its own right, and they were very sure of themselves, and although in the politest way, they said, “We want to get some other talented people, and put them around Rowan, so that if he’s good he’ll shine by comparison, and they’ll support him. He won’t have to carry the whole weight, and also it won’t use up the material nearly so fast.” And to do Richard and Rowan credit, they saw the point of that, and bought into it, and the rest is history.’ Atkinson confirmed years later, ‘My instincts undoubtedly were to protect myself really, to sort of be part of a group of people as I explored the wonders of television.’

The first episode of
Not the Nine O’Clock News
^fn9
appeared in the
Radio Times
listings with little fanfare, set for broadcast on 2 April 1979 – a week before
Canned Laughter
was shown on the other side. Keeping as up to the minute as possible, Atkinson was in the studio to record the programme just three days earlier, although he had to wait a full fifteen minutes to get his face in edgeways – performing the Marcus Browning speech again. The
Not
‘pilot that wasn’t’ is a cold affair in general, with Atkinson’s original cohorts being Chris Langham, ex-Scaffold and then-
Tiswas
joker John Gorman, Jonathan Hyde and Christopher Godwin, with gags supplied by some of
Week Ending
’s finest, including Andy Hamilton and Laurie Rowley – but John and Sean had a nightmare getting it in the can and it shows. Some crucial touchstones of the future show were there from the start – edited news footage was always central to the humour, despite the BBC having
always bridled at the idea of mocking politicians by showing them out of context (apparently the public were ready for this by 1979). Quick-fire topical gags were also dominant, albeit mainly relayed via electronic billboard, slowly, as the audience cough.

There was even a sign of Lloyd’s future plans, with rudimentary
Spitting Image
-style skits featuring Denis Healey and Bob Hope. Lloyd was convinced that a satirical TV show with puppet caricatures inspired by the modelling work of Peter Fluck and Roger Law, and utilising the voice and script talents he knew well from
Week Ending
, would be a hit. However, on approaching Fluck & Law, he was told something along the lines of, quote, ‘We don’t know how to make puppets, fuck off!’ so he gave it a go anyway with limited BBC resources, and Chris Emmett providing the voices for crudely animated masks. The end result is interesting, but probably no more biting or funny than Rowan’s Healey impressions in 1975.

Another item very much at odds with
Not
as we know it was a tiny historical joke, with a picture of a castle and the caption ‘Worcester 1641’. Roundhead forces cry out: ‘All right, Your Majesty, you’re surrounded! Now come out with your head under your arm.’ The fact that Charles I would not face arrest until seven years after that date provides a tantalising early example of complete anachronism, in favour of a decent joke.
^fn10

Only at the end of the first pilot does the crucial
Not
idea of having the cast – including Atkinson – sitting at news desks churning out topical gags come into play. But one bonus this try-out did have was the ultimate endorsement from the funniest show on TV. With industrial action delaying the final episode of
Fawlty Towers
, ‘Basil the Rat’, the director Bob Spiers (who also helmed the
Not
pilot) and star Cleese took a moment to record a special introduction for a ‘cheap tatty revue’,
seeing as he refused to ‘do’ Basil that week – there was even a short epilogue featuring Manuel. Cleese would eventually put in a ‘celebrity’ appearance in series three (non-speaking), so he clearly never regretted this largesse.

The
Fawlty
endorsement was such a crucial fillip for the team that it was certain to be recycled for the eventual series, but the same could not be said of the rest of the rudimentary revue – with Labour PM Jim Callaghan calling an election just a couple of days before the recording, at the eleventh hour the BBC confirmed that their new experiment in biting satire would have to obediently wait its turn for broadcast, at a less politically sensitive date, and was halted.

Lloyd could not have been more relieved – he knew his TV debut was not at all up to scratch. ‘I prayed every night of that week, it was the most stressful thing, I thought that was the end of my career, because I had no idea, I was a radio producer! I had no idea of all the things you need, car parking, food, lights, that kind of thing.’ The last-minute reprieve – the allotted Thursday-evening slot being given to US sitcom
Rhoda
– was the best thing that could have happened for the project. John had asked Mel Smith to join the team from the start, and despite having formed a double act with Bob Goody at the time, Mel would have been at the recording but for a stint directing at the Liverpool Everyman Theatre. When shown what was now deemed the ‘pilot’, he agreed that it was ‘sort of awful’, but was in. Forming a new team with him and retaining Atkinson and Langham, Lloyd and Hardie now had an eventful summer in which to rethink their show. Recalling the back-to-basics process Hardie says: ‘We found we disliked the same things. That’s where the whole
Not
idea came from really – we ran through all the shows we hated. And we wanted to be slightly more out in the street than comedy had been for a long time. And who better qualified to find out what the working class were up to than two Oxbridge graduates with public-school backgrounds?’

W
ILL
T
HIS
W
IND
B
E
S
O
M
IGHTY
…?

The following month gave a perfect opportunity to see what was going on in comedy in Thatcher’s brand-spanking-new Britain, as a club called the Comedy Store opened its doors, in a venue hidden away above a Soho strip club, and Lloyd made sure to be there on the first night – as was agonisingly pointed out by terrified Footlighter turned barrister Clive Anderson in his debut stand-up set, alerting the crowd to the presence of the big-shot comedy producer. All around Lloyd harrumphed the stirrings of a revolution in British comedy that could form part of the manifesto of the rejigged
Not
. ‘There were two things really,’ Lloyd recalls of the programme’s ambitions. ‘One was to create something that was huge fun – like going to see your favourite rock band or going to a party, that kind of thing. And the other was to kind of reinvent what you could be funny about. Seventies comedy was all sort of very right wing, all the comedy was about cripples and fat women and gays – you wouldn’t even call them gays, you’d call them poofs in those days. There was a guy called Gus Macdonald who made a speech at the Edinburgh Television Festival in the seventies which I for some reason dropped in on, and he talked about stereotyping in comedy, how dreadful it was that we’d all got stuck in these habits. And at the same time the Comedy Store was starting … It was a complete coincidence that they were doing on the stage what we were trying to do on telly.’ But sadly once Anderson had pointed out one of the Oxbridge lot to the assembled crowds and acts, Lloyd was lucky to escape intact – and was in fact wedged in the lift by Keith Allen jamming a radiator into the door. In truth, the number of genuinely working-class acts who emerged to fame from the club which helped kick-start the ‘Alternative Comedy’ boom was very small indeed. For every Keith Allen, Tony Allen or Malcolm Hardee there were a dozen middle-class lads like Lloyd hoping to make punters laugh – and some of them had plenty to say, too. Ultimately,
Not
wouldn’t be identifiably ‘Alternative’. It would have its smattering of Irish jokes
and a big helping of ‘busty substances’, and where the radical comics would have fought the power,
Not
stood on the sidelines, laughing at everybody.

One month after Lloyd’s lift calamity, very near geographically but in the smarter environs of Her Majesty’s Theatre, Rowan Atkinson was honouring the invitation of a lifetime. Once again, his fairy godperson John Cleese had conferred a great honour upon him by asking him to feature in the third of the Amnesty benefit concerts, to be called
The Secret Policeman’s Ball
. Clydeside Humblebum Billy Connolly would also be making his Amnesty debut, amid returning Oxbridge greats like Cook, Palin, Jones and Bron, and musicians like Pete Townshend and Tom Robinson, but Atkinson was clearly the stand-out act on the first night. ‘No one really knew who I was or what I did, they were sort of educated in those three or four spots throughout the evening; and the Schoolmaster was I think the first thing that I did, which kind of said, “Well, here I am, and this is what I do.”’ The Schoolmaster and Pianist skits wowed the crowd enough, but to be actually invited to make up the quartet for the ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ sketch
^fn11
was an unexpected welcome into the highest echelons of the comedy mafia. ‘For me, I was living a fantasy,’ Atkinson recalled for the thirtieth anniversary, ‘of actually being onstage with the
Monty Python
team doing a
Monty Python
sketch. Generally speaking, I think I felt as though I kept my end up as best I could. But it was a great privilege.’

If Rowan merely ‘kept his end up’ with the comedy gods of the decade, however, he almost inadvertently upstaged the true comedy Godfather, Peter Cook, in the climactic
Beyond the Fringe
sketch ‘The End of the World’, as the whole cast gathered with pullovers pulled over their heads in anticipation of the apocalypse.