The True History of the Blackadder (12 page)

Toby’s taunting would come in handy throughout the decade, an audience favourite cheered at the first sight of a pair of horns on Rowan’s head, as the crowd looked forward to being berated just as they were by his Schoolmaster. For more general cries of abuse, they had to wait for the last of the trilogy of speeches in ‘The Wedding’, or ‘With Friends Like These …’ Richard noticed, as his twenties progressed, that most of his Saturdays tended to be earmarked for one wedding after another, as
individuals from his troops of friends began to pair off and demand free kitchen utensils. Naturally the monotony of weekly church services gave him plenty of time to study the archetypes, and Rowan’s resultant turns as a tiresomely groovy Vicar, utterly clodhopping Best Man and drunken, bitter Father of the Bride were only the beginning of the writer’s obsession with nuptials:

The show settled into the Globe Theatre (now the Gielgud) in a new guise directed by Mel Smith, headed
NOT Not the Nine O’Clock News But
…
Rowan Atkinson in Revue – With Richard Curtis and Howard Goodall
– but few punters paid much attention to the latter duo. Curtis cycled from his flat in Camden to the theatre night after night, onstage
for at least an hour feeding Atkinson lines, blinking in the lights and cursing his anonymity. ‘My greatest hero, David Bowie, came backstage after one show, and was introduced to me. He had no idea who I was. He had been watching me for nearly an hour but my face didn’t ring any bells at all – he assumed I had been the stage manager and congratulated me on how efficient the scene changes had been.’ This was the final gasp of Curtis’s long-held thespian dream – he admitted his job was to ‘look as ordinary as possible all of the time’, but the snubs got to him – one night, playing the blind man in the prototype Mr Bean sketch in which Rowan tried to change into swimming trunks without detection, Atkinson’s forced absence from the stage presented an opportunity for the writer: ‘I was alone, onstage, in the West End – the moment I’d dreamed of all my life. I left a big pause. Then crossed my legs. Huge laugh. Another pause. I did it again. Smaller laugh. And again. No laugh at all. By the time Rowan returned, to tumultuous applause, my desire for an acting career had died forever. So I gave up, definitely, once and for all, and accepted that writing was my game.’

The idea of this twenty-something trio on the road suggests all sorts of antics, but Goodall remembers very little in the way of debauchery; in fact the reception Rowan received on every date of the tour made the experience quite odd. ‘You’re touring with one of the great comic geniuses of the century, you’re all twenty-two and you’re three friends. So how do you handle that? Because obviously the minute Rowan walks onstage, he has three thousand people in the palm of his hand; it’s an extraordinary gift. We don’t really discuss it very much, but that’s what’s happening. I think the rest of us found it quite difficult to adjust to the fact that he was becoming very famous very quickly, and we were still who we were. So there was quite a lot of adjustment to be done, especially for Rowan. Difficult for him to get used to his friends always wondering whether he was going to buy the meal or not.’

Besides his own show, Atkinson made time for the numerous charitable gigs which called for his patronage –
The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball
found him rubbing shoulders with Alexei Sayle, Billy Connolly and Victoria Wood, appearing in more sketches with Cleese and Footlights classics like ‘Top of the Form’, as well as donning the surplice once again for Curtis’s
Not
sketch ‘Divorce Service’.

But closer ties to a new generation of performers, who already made Atkinson seem like one of the old guard, came from the
Not
team’s appearance on a show in June called
Fundamental Frolics
, staged by ‘Schoolmaster’ scribe Richard Sparks in support of learning disability charity Mencap. A duo new to the Comedy Store called 20th Century Coyote were given eight minutes on the bill, but their blisteringly insane, inane blend of extreme violence and crap gags about gooseberries in lifts ended up stunning the crowds for more than double their allotted time. For Atkinson, this act was the most electrifying new brand of humour he’d seen since, well, his own. But for his part, Rik Mayall was happy to announce, ‘We were very anti
Not the Nine O’Clock News
– we reckoned that we were the best because we were doing cabaret and not revue. Revue was a dirty word, and so was Oxbridge, we had a down on the Pythons … although we secretly all thought that the Pythons were great, and half of us were red-brick and university anyway.’

RICHARD MICHAEL MAYALL B ORN : 7 March 1958, Harlow, Essex

Richard Mayall grew up in Droitwich Spa from the age of three, the second son born to drama teachers John and Gillian, with two younger sisters completing the family. With his parents’ background there was a certain inevitability about young Rik’s fascination with theatre, but it was no guarantee of the academic skill which would put him two years ahead of his contemporaries, starting his secondary education at the King’s School, Worcester, at the age of nine, and immersing himself in school drama, with
and without his parents’ supervision. ‘I used to do shows after school with mates – it was also a way of getting off games. We used to do absurdist drama, mainly –
Waiting for Godot
, a bit of Pinter,
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead
,
Endgame
,
The Real Inspector Hound
– good fun to perform, and would have a bit of an impact on the teachers and the parents. Those plays are quite significant because you can be very serious by being funny … that was mainly where I developed my distaste for being serious.’

Being just another face among the freshers on his arrival at Manchester University in 1976 predictably did nothing to cow the ebullient show-off, who dripped with confidence gained from years in the spotlight. Forming an anarchic theatrical group with the more worldly Adrian Edmondson in his first year, the then five-man-strong 20th Century Coyote tried and failed to get Equity cards by putting on semi-improvised plays in the university canteen, but became famous on campus in the meantime, staging forgotten dramas such as
God’s Testicles
,
How to Get a Man Out of a Bag
,
Who is Dick Treacle?
and
King Ron & His Nubile Daughter
. ‘We were doing a half- to three-quarter-hour show every two weeks,’ he recalls, ‘so we had personas that we could do best – I was best at being angry and petulant and selfish and a nuisance and ugly and unpopular. Adrian generally played either heavies or women.’

These plays greatly honed Rik & Ade’s comedic chops, while a tour of the USA with the Oxford and Cambridge Shakespeare Company sharpened Rik’s straight acting skills – but this was no help in finding work after he graduated with a 2:2. ‘I was living in Droitwich with my parents and working in a foundry during the whole of 1979. Adrian and I did a show every month or two; we put together a show called
Death on the Toilet
– I played God and Death, and Adrian played a character called Edwin.’ Taking this play to Edinburgh that August – and actually making money – was the spark that showed Mayall that he had to leave home
and start performing professionally. By now 20th Century Coyote was reduced to just Rik & Ade, but their audition to replace the popular Fundation comedy group (including a fledgling Hale & Pace) at the Woolwich Tramshed showed that the years the duo had spent honing their brand of lavatorial absurdism put them in a class of their own – until, that is, they moved on to the Comedy Store and met Peter Richardson and Nigel Planer, performing as the Outer Limits. But even among this group, Mayall glaringly stood out as a unique entertainer.

Although Ade Edmondson’s brand of nihilistic stupidity made him a tricorned ginger icon of eighties comedy almost as quickly as Mayall himself, there was something about Rik’s bravado, ambition and nostril-flaring, bogey-wiping demeanour which seemed to push him to the front, right from the start of their careers. He quickly found himself an agent who set him up for a flurry of tiny movie roles including a memorable cameo playing dominoes in the Slaughtered Lamb in
An American Werewolf in London
, as well as being taken under the wing of Paul Jackson.

Jackson was a comedy boss from a completely different school to John Lloyd, the son of a TV producer who had started out as a runner on
The Two Ronnies
in the early seventies and worked his way up to become producer and director of the show as well as working on a host of mainstream favourites like
The Generation Game
. He became the first producer to put his budget where his mouth was and bring the most exciting regulars at the Comedy Store to TV in their own vehicles, starting with two special shows broadcast one year apart named
Boom Boom Out Go the Lights
, which showcased Mayall’s turn as an undeservingly arrogant poet, alongside Nigel Planer as a terrible hippy musician, plus Pauline Melville, Alexei Sayle and Keith and Tony Allen
^fn1
.

Mayall’s first fully formed TV creation, however, came via the unlikely patronage of BBC Scotland. The early eighties saw a steady stream of shows hoping to take on
Not
, offering a topical sketchbook with a limited licence to offend.
A Kick Up the Eighties
was a Colin Gilbert production – the script editor for
Not
, Gilbert would eventually score a hit with
Naked Video
, but this prototype sketch show had less of a Scottish flavour. The first series was rather unpromisingly linked by the far from Alternative Richard Stilgoe, but for the sketches Tracey Ullman headed the cast (fresh from Jackson’s
Three of a Kind
), backed up by two more experienced comic performers – Miriam Margolyes, finally getting a chance to showcase her skills in visual comedy, and Roger Sloman, five years after his creation of the hideous Keith in Mike Leigh’s
Nuts in May
. By the second series in 1984, they were joined by a burly Scotsman with impressive versatility, Anthony ‘Robbie’ McMillan.
^fn2

Entirely separate to
A Kick Up the Eighties’
sketches were the weekly ‘investigations’ from Kevin Turvey. Kevin’s bizarre rants, centred on the mind-numbing minutiae of his life as a young unemployed self-styled investigator from the duller part of Redditch, entwined with moments of surreal surprise, made for one of the most difficult to categorise comic characters – though ‘bastard son of E. L. Wisty’ would be a starting point – Mayall himself told Roger Wilmut in
Didn’t You Kill My Mother-in-Law?
,
‘My comedy is a lot less pointed than other people’s – the meaninglessness of my comedy is really the message. There’s hardly ever any constructive message in there … I don’t deal in words and rational ideas. I deal in the unusual, the exciting, the very personal …’

Before long Mayall and Edmondson had moved from the Store to the Comic Strip, to form a solid team of new comedians, each one ready to find a place for their humour on TV, as Rik had already managed, to an extent. Kevin Turvey may be an undervalued part of British Comedy history, but he remains the one thing most people remember about
A Kick Up the Eighties
. Though several writers worked for both shows, and Sean Hardie himself was executive producer for the first series
^fn3
, none of the new pretenders could compete with
Not
’s ongoing success. With the fourth series lined up for the start of ’82, Lloyd and Hardie called their team together to lay out future plans.