The Fry Chronicles (51 page)

It is probable that if you have bothered to buy, steal or borrow this book you will have watched or at least know about
Blackadder
but you will forgive me if I describe its principal features for the benefit of Americans and others who may be less familiar. The second series of this ‘historical sitcom’ is set in Elizabethan England with Rowan Atkinson in the title role of Edmund, Lord Blackadder, a suave, scheming, manipulative and attractively amoral courtier. Tony Robinson and Tim McInnerny play his grubby servant Baldrick and idiot friend Lord Percy respectively, as they had in the first series. In the royal court Miranda Richardson plays the young Queen Elizabeth, Patsy Byrne her breast-fixated nurse and I the character Ben had described to me, Lord Melchett – a sort of William Cecil, Lord Burghley figure, all forked beard, forked tongue and fur-lined cloak.

We rehearsed at the BBC’s North Acton rehearsal rooms, just as I had for
The Cellar Tapes
,
The Crystal Cube
and the ‘Bambi’ episode of
The Young Ones.
The director was the very charming and capable Mandy Fletcher. I ought to explain the difference between a director for multi-camera television and a film or theatre director. In the latter two
worlds the director is absolute monarch, in charge of all the creative decisions and ultimately responsible for what is seen on screen or stage. In television it is the
producer
who takes that role. Our producer was John Lloyd. Mandy’s job was to think about how the cameras would move and be coordinated in order best to capture what John and the cast constructed. Which is not to downplay her role and her skill, it is just that most people might think the director is the one running the show in terms of script, performance, comic ideas, directing the actors and so on. All that, especially since neither Richard Curtis nor Ben Elton liked to attend rehearsals, came from our producer.

When histories of British television comedy are written, the name of John Lloyd is certain to figure prominently. A graduate of Cambridge and the Footlights, he was a contemporary of his friend and occasional collaborator Douglas Adams. After Cambridge he moved to BBC radio, where he created
The News Quiz
,
Quote Unquote
and other quizzes and comedy shows before making the move to television with
Not the Nine O’Clock News
. Richard Curtis was the lead writer on that show, and Rowan Atkinson one of its stars. It was natural, then, that John should produce Rowan and Richard’s
The Black Adder
. The year after that he produced the first series of
Spitting Image
, which he continued to work on until the end, as well as producing the subsequent three major series of
Blackadder
, including its occasional minor outbursts in charitable or other specials. In 2003 he and I started work on another child of his fertile mind,
QI
. As it happens, although he will not thank me for pointing it out, he had worked as a script consultant on a couple of episodes of
Alfresco
too, so it can be seen that my career has run in harness with his
for the best part of thirty years. He is, I should point out at this stage, quite mad.

Success has a dozen parents and failure is an orphan, as I mentioned before when talking about the genesis of the ‘Bambi’ episode of
The Young Ones.
As it happened, although we had no idea while we were rehearsing it,
Blackadder II
turned out to be a great success with the public. I have no more authority in pronouncing why this was than anyone else might have, connected or unconnected to it. What Ben Elton brought to the party in terms of energy, fantastic wordplay, brilliant anachronisms and general
jeux d’esprit
cannot be overestimated, as cannot Richard Curtis’s ear, wit and skill nor his uncanny understanding of Rowan’s range and power. The transformation of Tony Robinson’s Baldrick from a rather smart sidekick in the first series to a most terrifyingly dim-witted lowlife in the second was also crucial for the show’s success. Tim McInnerny’s Lord Percy was divine, as was Patsy Byrne’s Nursie. Many would cite Miranda Richardson’s performance as a young and terrifyingly unstable Queenie as one of the absolute highlights of that series and among the best comic characterizations ever seen on British television.

We had the most marvellous guests too. Tom Baker played a seadog called Captain Redbeard Rum. His performance was superb, and he himself was entirely charming. While a scene that didn’t involve him was being rehearsed he would disappear and return with a tray fully laden with sweets, crisps, chocolates, sandwiches, nuts and snacks, which he would hand round to everyone in the room, often nipping off again to reload. During his
Doctor Who
days he had been quite the party animal in the
pubs and clubs of London and often used to fetch up at the North Acton rehearsal rooms at three or four in the morning, where friendly security guards would admit him and let him sleep on a rehearsal mat until morning. Production assistants would arrive and wake him up for work. He had a way of gazing at you with grave bulging eyes that made it rather hard to determine whether he thought you an idiot or a god.

Miriam Margolyes made an appearance as the puritanical face-slapping Lady Whiteadder in a show called ‘Beer’. Rik Mayall’s Captain Flashheart exploded into the world like a firework display and, to my especial delight, Hugh appeared as a guest twice, firstly as one of Blackadder’s flatulent drinking companions in ‘Beer’ and then, more magnificently, as a deranged Germanic super-villain and master of disguise in the final episode, at the conclusion of which we all somehow ended up dead.

Having bowed and paid due homage to all these great contributors I have to turn to what was for me the real miracle: Rowan Atkinson’s performance as Edmund. I would watch him in rehearsal, and my mouth would drop open in stunned admiration. I had never before come close to such an extraordinary comic talent. I had seen him on stage at Edinburgh and laughed until I weed, I had admired him in
Not the Nine O’Clock News
and I had watched his rather disturbing character in the first series, but the Edmund of
Blackadder II
was a revelation. The urbanity, sarcasm, vocal control, minimalism and physical restraint were not sides of Rowan I had ever seen before. This Edmund was sexy, assured, playful, dynamic, debonair, soigné and charismatic.

Rowan, it is well known, is a private and unassuming figure. He read Electrical Engineering at Newcastle before completing a Masters degree at the Queen’s College, Oxford, and has always retained something of the manner of a quiet and industrious scientist about him. It is hard when meeting him to see quite where the comedy comes from. When making the best man’s speech at his wedding some years later I tried to explain this. I said that it was as if the Almighty had suddenly noticed he had a full decade’s allocation of comic talent, a supply that he had forgotten to dole out more or less evenly amongst the population as was His usual divine practice. For a joke he decided to give the whole load to the least likely person he could find. He looked down at the north-east of England and saw a diffident, studious young engineer wandering the streets of Jesmond, dreaming of transistors and tractors, and zapped him full of all that comedy talent. He gave him none of the usual showbiz pizzazz or yearning for fame, adulation and laughter, just the gigantic consignment of talent alone. I still wake up at night sometimes with a surge of shame fearing that I expressed this thought badly and that it sounded less affectionate and admiring than it might, that it somehow ignored the skill, concentration, commitment and conscious application of that talent that makes Rowan the authentic comic genius he is. Aside from all of this he is a delightful, kindly, sweet-natured and wise individual whose personal human qualities quite match his comic attainments.

When Rik Mayall came to rehearsals for his episode in
Blackadder II
, the contrast between his style and Rowan’s was astonishing. It was like seeing a Vermeer next to a van Gogh, one all exquisite detail with the subtlest and most invisible working and the other a riot of wild and thickly
applied brushstrokes. Two utterly different aesthetics, each outstandingly brilliant. With Rik you could see the character grow out of his own personality. Flashheart was an emphasized and extreme version of Rik. In Rowan’s case it was as if Blackadder was somehow conjured up from nowhere. He emerged from Rowan like an extra limb. I am as capable of envy and resentment as the next man, but when you are in a room with two people who possess an order of talent that you know you can never even dream of attaining, it is actually a relief to be able to do no more than lean back and admire like a dewy-eyed groupie.

My make-up on
Blackadder II
was done by a divinely pretty girl called Sunetra Sastry. From a Brahmin-caste Indian family, she was bright, funny and as captivatingly alluring as any girl I had met for years. I was quite seriously considering asking her out on a date, when Rowan timidly approached me one morning during rehearsals for the second episode and asked if I would mind swapping make-up artists with him. Since he had grown his own beard for the part, unlike me, who had to have my large excrescence glued on with spirit gum every week, I thought this rather odd: his make-up sessions lasted as long as it took to powder the tip of his nose.

‘Don’t you like the one you’ve got?’ I said.

‘N-no, it’s not that, she’s splendid. It’s just that well …’ He gave me a look of uncharacteristic intensity.

‘Oh!’ I said, as the penny dropped. ‘My dear fellow. Of course. Yes.’

All ideas of my asking Sunetra out left me, and over the course of the remaining five weeks I watched as she and Rowan grew closer and closer. They had been together
for five years before they at last married in New York City. As the best man, I flew out to be there and record the ceremony on eight-millimetre film. They now have two children and twenty years of marriage behind them, but I still sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had been bold enough and quick enough on my feet to have asked Sunetra out straight away.

‘Oh, you should have done!’ Sunetra often says to me. ‘I’d have gone out with you.’ But I know how happy she is and how right it was that I stayed silent.

Hang on, Stephen, you’re gay, aren’t you? Indeed I am, but, as I was to tell a newspaper reporter some years later, I am only ‘90 per cent gay’, which is of course pretty damned gay, but every now and again on my path through life I have met a woman in the 10 per cent bracket. Caroline Oulton at Cambridge was one, although I never told her so, and Sunetra another.

The
Blackadder
rehearse-record rhythms somehow made the time fly by. On Tuesday morning we would read through the script, with Richard and sometimes Ben in attendance. John would wince and clutch his brow and shake his head at the dire impossibility of it all – not the most tactful way to endear himself to the writers or indeed the performers. He never meant to transmit disapproval or disappointment, the tutting and moaning were just his way of gearing himself up for the work of the week ahead. Next, each scene, starting at the beginning, would slowly have ‘legs’ put on it. As the show was blocked out in this fashion, Mandy would make notes and build up her camera script, and John would grimace and sigh and smoke and pace and growl. His perfectionism and refusal to be satisfied was part of the reason
Blackadder
worked.
Every line, plot twist and action was taken, rubbed between his fingers, sniffed and passed, rejected or pulled in for servicing and improvement. We would all join in the process of joke polishing or ‘fluffing’, as John called it. I relished participating in these sessions which over the years became an absolute characteristic of
Blackadder
rehearsals. Visiting guest actors would often sit for hours working on a crossword or reading a book as we built up the epithets and absurd similes.

I picture Richard and Ben reading this and snorting with outrage. ‘Hang on, we presented you with the scripts and devised the characters and the style. Don’t go pretending that it was all your work.’ Ben and Richard did indeed create the style, the storylines and most of the jokes. We added and subtracted in rehearsal, but they were the writers, there can be no doubt of that. My admiration for their work was and is extreme and unconditional. Nonetheless, as anyone who spent any time in
Blackadder
rehearsals then or later will confirm, the days were always a constant coffee and cigarettes grind of tweaking, refinement and emendation.

Sunday was the taping night, the night we performed the show in front of an audience. Ben would act as warm-up man, introducing the characters and setting the series in context. This was important, for there was always a detectable air of disappointment emanating from the audience. No part of the current series would yet have been broadcast, so they would be staring at an unfamiliar set and fretting at the absence of the characters they had known from the previous series. When they came to
Blackadder II
they were sorry not to have Brian Blessed there as the King; when they came to
Blackadder the Third
recordings they missed Queenie; and when they arrived for recordings of
Blackadder Goes Forth
they wanted to see Prince George and Mrs Miggins.

For all that, it was a happy experience. The Saturday after the taping of the last episode of
Blackadder II
Richard Curtis held a party at his house in Oxfordshire. It was a glorious summer’s day, and, as we all wanted to watch television, Richard unwound an extension cord and put the set on a wooden chair in the shade of an apple tree. We sat on the grass and watched
Live Aid
all the way through to the end of the American broadcast from Philadelphia.