The True History of the Blackadder (22 page)

Like Rik Mayall, Elton was born to academic parents, but his father was from a more exalted scholastic background. Gottfried and Ludwig Ehrenberg, the two sons of German Jewish scholars, first came to Britain in 1939 for obvious reasons, and it was while fighting against their ex-compatriots in World War II that they anglicised their names, to Geoffrey and Lewis Elton. Geoffrey would go on to be knighted for his work as a historian, specialising in the Tudor period, while Lewis moved to south-east London, became a professor of physics, and married English teacher Mary.

Ben was one of four children – and the loudest. ‘I’ve always been a talkaholic. My mum used to have a rule when I was little, that
she had to be on her second cup of tea before I was allowed to start talking.’ As he told Roger Wilmut in 1989, the family was ‘Middle class, no question there. My dad’s an academic, my mother’s a teacher, so I suppose I had quite an academic background, but I went to ordinary schools. We went to Guildford when I was ten. I was always grateful I was brought up in a liberal household – I always felt I learned a great deal more at home than I did at school.’ Over the years Elton has been criticised for affecting an estuary accent, but his state education in south-east London gave him the same vowels as his friends and siblings.

By the time Ben was settled in at Godalming Grammar School, however, the eleven-year-old Catfordian had decided what he wanted to be: Noël Coward. ‘I hadn’t discovered his work at that point, but I fell in love with his
life
.’ Ben’s other main spur to follow the theatrical life – besides an adoration of the front-of-curtain antics of Morecambe & Wise – was joining the Godalming Theatre Group (of which he was ultimately made President), and winning the role of the Artful Dodger in their production of
Oliver!
. ‘I didn’t even have to audition! They thought, “There’s a show-off little oik, we’ll have him!” I don’t think they could get a boy to play Oliver, either the part was too wet, or there wasn’t a boy good enough or whatever, so they cast a girl, Gabrielle Glaister – my oldest friend, really.’ ‘He was wonderful,’ Glaister was to recall, ‘because he has got a huge stage presence, and that’s a fantastic part. He’s so vibrant, that’s the thing about Ben, he’s a little thing full of lots and lots of energy.’

‘I wanted to be an actor at that point,’ Elton continues, ‘but quite quickly my ambitions changed, and by the age of thirteen I knew that principally I wanted to be a writer.’ The precocious teenager began writing plays and jokes with a characteristic verve, and did not slow his pace when he moved away from home at the age of sixteen to study English, History and Drama in the
apt locale of Stratford-upon-Avon. ‘I wouldn’t have wanted to be out facing the world at sixteen – or eighteen, I was pretty ill-equipped at twenty-one – but at least I had quite a lot of time to meet people, to think – no pressure – and I’m grateful for that.’ Having gained top grades after two years fending for himself in a Warwickshire caravan at such a young age, it’s no wonder that Ben seemed so immensely confident to his fellow freshers at Manchester University in 1977.

The Farty’s Guide

By the time he graduated in 1980, Ben Elton had written numerous plays (including two musicals), and garnered a reputation as a safe pair of hands on the typewriter, and certainly prolific. ‘That’s a bit of a legend, really – well, I don’t think you could go so far as to call it a legend – but it has been put about the place that I wrote thirty plays while I was at university. I certainly wrote thirty identifiable pieces, but I think about seven or eight full-length plays … a lot of sketches, monologues, anything. Most stuff was rubbish – you don’t write your best stuff when you’re eighteen.’ Comic ideas overflowed from the student, and though the words poured out in his own dyslexic approximation of the Queen’s English, his inventiveness, ambition and prodigious output were key to his future.
The Bear Hunt
,
Man of Woman Born
,
Musso the Clown
,
^fn1
all these early efforts were proffered up for undergraduate entertainment, and he simply didn’t care that his ambition and ‘let’s do the show right here!’ bravado made him a target for his cynical contemporaries. ‘I was never cool – in fact, the penny dropped quite early for me, that being cool was kind of holding things in contempt, you know? You
hate what’s going on in the world, you hate your course, etc. And I didn’t – I loved what was going on!’ At five foot eight Ben was hardly a dwarf, but knew it was easy for his contemporaries to look down on his enthusiasm, and had already embraced his reputation as a theatre nerd by reclaiming the term ‘farty’ – not just for himself, but as a kind of ineffectual everyman.

Although Manchester would remain central to his career for years to come, it was natural for the 21-year-old Elton to head homewards after graduation and equally natural that he would join his fellow Mancunian graduates to see how 20th Century Coyote were developing out in the wide world. ‘I’d just left university, and I bumped into Rik – and of course Rik and Ade were into something exciting, they’d become part of what was known as the “Alternative Comedy Boom”… I wrote myself an act, auditioned at the Comic Strip (very, very nerve-racking), and God bless Pete Richardson, he gave me a job. Then I got a job at the Comedy Store, and I very soon was able to do it, but it was always the material that was effective. People liked my material, they didn’t particularly like me onstage … Really, for want of anything better to do, I thought, “Well, I’ll have a bash. No one’s reading my plays, I’d better shout my comedy to the world.” I must say, of all the things I’ve done in my life, that decision was the most astute and the luckiest – I decided to become a comedian. It has to be said that everybody said, “Don’t!”’ Mayall admits, ‘I was the one who said to him, “Ben, listen, I’m your friend, right?
Don’t
go onstage. Don’t! Because you’ll have a bad time. You’re a writer, Ben, you keep writing. Don’t go onstage.” About a week later he went on at the Comedy Store and
stormed
the place.’

Elton’s early act would be painful to him now – allegedly it involved inept impressions of Ronald Reagan – but whatever he was doing was still an improvement on his first stand-up attempt at college, when he thrust on a straw boater and performed a Frank Carson set verbatim. ‘There I was as a sixteen-year-old virgin, doing this sort of “grown-up” act.’ In the late-night bear-baiting arena of the Comedy Store, he
quickly learned a survival tactic which would come to define his style – modesty was never going to ward off the dreaded gong, and so he attacked the boozy crowd at high volume, pre-empting heckling with a combative style and rattling off his painstakingly written material at a fast enough rate not to give the crowd time to get a word in edgeways. At the same time, although he was open about his motives for taking up stand-up, he realised he could not ignore current issues, and he found that he did have something to say, beyond the nightmares of student fridges and InterCity train travel. ‘The eighties was an extraordinary decade. People look back, they think it was about BMWs and slicked-back yuppie hair, but the decade was one of continual conflict. The first gigs I ever did, Brixton was in flames, as was St Paul’s, as was Toxteth. Y’know, I was twenty-one, twenty-two, playing in London with riots going on outside, it’s going to affect your act.’ Within six months the firebrand had been made compère at the Store, to some consternation but little surprise, and he admits, ‘I really felt like the King of London – I was twenty-one years old, I’d just earned thirty quid or whatever, the cab was gonna cost four quid, you know? I was earning more than the dole in a night, and it just felt fantastic!’

With his great showbiz mates getting off to such a good start, there was little floundering before Ben was invited to showcase his stand-up skills on TV, and he was soon back in Manchester to be a regular on the confusingly named
Oxford Road Show
(broadcast from the BBC’s studios on Oxford Road). ‘I got a chance to be a bloody awful comedian live in front of a very aggressive audience. I used to think that the
Oxford Road Show
was a competition between a group of skinheads and a group of Mohicans to see who could look most bored during my act.’ Nevertheless, riding the wave of popularity attached to any comic who could manage ten minutes on the Comedy Store stage was setting Elton in good stead for his desired career in light entertainment, without any further help.

On the other hand, when Mayall and Mayer sat on the tour bus for the Comic Strip tour in 1981 and had the brainwave of placing their
regular characters in a student house together, Rik decided that ‘little Ben Elton’ was the perfect man to ‘churn out the gear’ – and without a moment’s hesitation, Elton became the youngest scriptwriter in BBC history. When Nigel Planer’s Outer Limits partner Richardson refused the role of Mike Thecoolperson, preferring to establish
The Comic Strip Presents …
on Channel 4, Ben was quick to offer himself up for the role, but was firmly shouted down. He nevertheless managed to play several small roles in the sitcom – a blind DJ, a stand-up cat, a Grange Hill pupil – and anyway, he had already secured himself his first acting gig on commercial TV – again, thanks to Mayall.

Rik was as hotly in demand with comedy producers in the first years of the eighties as Rowan had been a few years previously, and having been the jewel in the plastic crown of one attempt to cater to young comedy fans in the wake of
Not
’s premature end, it wasn’t surprising that he was wooed by producer Sandy Ross at Granada to do the same thing for their new sketch show for ITV. In the end Mayall had to turn the offer down, but not before he’d recommended that they make use of the scripting skills of Elton – and having impressed the producers with his scripts, Ben was in a position to suggest that the best person to bring them to life was himself. So as the first series of
The Young Ones
was nearing completion, the writer was back on the train up to Manchester to meet up with the rest of the troupe for the try-out series of
There’s Nothing to Worry About
. In alphabetical order, the opening credits would scream the fledgling comic stylings of Ben Elton, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie.

Belts Off, Trousers Down, Isn’t Life a Scream?

Six years after John Lloyd picked up his degree from Cambridge, the Footlights revues were still a far cry from the salad days of
A Clump of Plinths
, despite the regular relay of big-names-to-be who continued to file through the club’s portals. Martin Bergman and Robert Bathurst
would take over the presidency from Jimmy Mulville before Jan Ravens became the first ever female Footlights boss in 1979, but the excitement generated by
Chox
had long since abated by the time the summer revue,
Nightcap
, travelled up to Edinburgh. Even though the scripts came from some of the best writers of Footlights past and present (including Sandi Toksvig, Mulville and McGrath and even Lloyd himself), Bergman’s revue would never become embedded in the national psyche. Up against Rowan Atkinson at the Wireworks,
Nightcap
amused without remark, despite boasting not just Bergman and Bathurst in the cast, but the debuts of Emma Thompson, the radiantly gifted daughter of
The Magic Roundabout
genius Eric, and a twenty-year-old Anthropology and Archaeology student who never went to any Anthropology or Archaeology lectures, Hugh Laurie.

Hugh’s presence in any comedy revue was a complete surprise to himself, he admits. ‘I think I made a girl laugh in a bar … so many stories start that way … It happened by sheer fluke. I’d gone to Cambridge University to become an oarsman, but I met this woman called Alison in the student bar one night. I told a joke or something and she said, “You’ve got to come with me.” She took me to this club and said, “Here are these people doing the Footlights; you’ve got to audition.” So I did and off it went …’ Emma Thompson instinctively knew that rowing was not to be Laurie’s real
raison d’être
, nudging a friend on her first sight of the buff blue-eyed six-footer and squealing ‘STAR!’ – and she would be proved right with surprising speed. Although the strapping young athlete would get his blue at the following spring’s Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, his crew would lose the race by a mere five feet, which would haunt him (at least on chat shows) for decades to come. A bout of glandular fever finally finished off any hopes he had of following his father into Olympic rowing, but that just left more room for fooling around getting laughs.

One non-Footlighter up in Edinburgh for a Cambridge production of
Oedipus Rex
, an English scholar who had gained a bit of a reputation
as a handy performer to turn to when in need of an aged classical or Shakespearean king of any kind, managed to get tickets to both Atkinson’s and Laurie’s revues. The former would leave young Stephen Fry ‘almost unable to walk. My sides and lungs had taken a hell of a beating. They had never been put to such paroxysmal use in their lives … That is the kind of joy that can never be reconstructed, to encounter an outstanding talent for the first time with no preconceptions and no especial expectations.’
Nightcap
, on the other hand, though it made less of an impression on Fry’s funny bone and bladder, would have far bigger repercussions on his entire life, bringing him face to face with his closest colleague for the first time. ‘A tall young man with big blue eyes, triangular flush marks on his cheeks and an apologetic presence that was at once appallingly funny and quite inexplicably magnetic.’