The Fry Chronicles (50 page)

I was flattered to have my opinion so valued. My contribution to the success of
Me and My Girl
, which had made Richard the happiest man in London, and the fact that I could be taken to any weekend gathering or dinner party without letting the side down, had led him to rely on me as a kind of intermediary between his world and the brave new one that was springing up around him.

‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘There really is going to be another series is there?’

‘The question,’ said Richard, snatching blindly at the receiver hanging on the complicated switchboard behind his right shoulder, ‘is whether we can persuade the BBC to give it a second chance. They want to decimate the budget.’

‘That’s not too bad. Only ten per cent.’

‘Hey?’

‘To decimate means to take away one in ten …’

This kind of footling pedantry makes most people want to give me a good kicking, but Richard always enjoyed it. ‘Ha!’ he said and then, as a voice came on the line, ‘Get me John Howard Davies. By the way,’ he added to me as I stood up to leave, ‘we must talk about
Me and My Girl
on Broadway some time soon. Farewell.’

I was not, of course, privy to Richard Curtis, Rowan, Ben and John Lloyd’s discussions as they created the second
Blackadder
series, but I do know that the decision to reduce the scale of the show was, from Ben’s point of view, a
comic
necessity; the fact that from the BBC’s it was a
financial
one might be regarded as a rare and happy collision of interests. When the executives saw the scripts that Ben and Richard came up with they breathed a sigh of relief. The budget was more than decimated, it was at the very least quartered.

It is not my job to speak for Ben, but this is how I interpret his conviction that it was comically necessary to pare the show back.
The Black Adder
had been shot on a grand scale, with many filmed exteriors and imposing locations. There were extras everywhere, there were populous battle scenes and much riding on horses and clanking of armour. The footage for each episode was edited and then shown to an audience, whose laughter was recorded on to the track. The resultant programme was without atmosphere, but more importantly without
focus
. I have a theory about situation comedy that I trot out to anyone who is prepared to listen or, in your case, to read. I see sitcoms as like a tennis match, where the most important thing for the spectator is to be able to
see the ball
. It does not matter how athletic, supple, graceful, fast and skilful the players are – if you can’t see the ball all their athleticism is just so much meaningless gesture, inexplicable running and swiping and stroking; the moment you see the ball it all makes sense. The problem with
The Black Adder
, I thought, was that you never saw the ball. Wonderful and delightful were the mad shouting, conspiratorial whispering, machiavellian plotting, farcical hiding, dramatic galloping and wicked sword thrusting, but the ball of what was at stake from moment to moment,
what the characters were thinking or saying or intending, was lost in the wealth of background: sentries at every gate, sweeping vistas, busy pages, squires and stewards busily paging, squiring and stewarding and, without meaning to, all taking the audience’s eye off the ball. Ben wanted the whole thing stripped down to the essentials and he felt it imperative that the shows should be performed in front of an audience and taped in the true multi-camera studio-based sitcom style that had given us
Fawlty Towers
,
Dad’s Army
(which he venerated) and all the great classics of television comedy.

I do not go so far as to claim that I was instrumental in the series going forward, but I do know that Richard Armitage’s influence over the BBC was enormous – aside from anything else his boyhood friend Bill Cotton, the Managing Director of Television and Kingmaker in General, was one of the most powerful men in the corporation. They were both children of 1930s music stars. Billy Cotton the bandleader and Noel Gay the tunesmith were best friends who ran Tin Pan Alley, and their sons were best friends who ran much in the succeeding world of popular entertainment. Rowan and Ben were my friends, and I could not have been more pleased that the idea of a historical comedy series using their unique talents would be given another chance. I thought no more about it, other than nursing to myself the happy thought that I might have been responsible for persuading Richard Armitage that Ben was a good choice.

It came as a great surprise therefore to be asked if I would consider playing a regular character in the series. The first I heard about it was during the course of what Ben liked to call a ‘crusty’.

For all his (utterly mistaken) reputation as a joyless, puritanical socialist Ben has always been, since I first knew him, inordinately fond of old-fashioned and very English style, manners and grandeur. He adores P. G. Wodehouse and Noël Coward and has a passion for English history. I share much of this. I love the world of clubland, old established five-star hotels, the streets of St James’s and mad traditional institutions from Lord’s cricket ground to the Beefsteak, from Wilton’s to Wartski’s, from Trumper’s of Jermyn Street to the Sandpit of the Savile Club.

Perhaps, as we were both from European Jewish families who escaped Nazi persecution, the ability to penetrate even occasionally and tangentially the fastnesses of the Establishment makes us feel more strongly anchored to the codes and culture we could so easily never have known. Perhaps, as with my insane collection of credit cards, being recognized by the hall porters and headwaiters of London’s smartest institutions helped convince me that I was not about to be arrested.

Since leaving university I had been a member of the Oxford and Cambridge Club in Pall Mall, a classic St James’s palace of smoking rooms, dimpled and winged leather armchairs and grand marble staircases. Fiery torches on the outside wall throw their flames upwards in the evenings, and in the courts below can be heard the thump and clack of racquet and billiard balls. You had to be a member of either of the universities to join, of course, but more surprisingly, given the seventy-year co-educational status of both establishments, it was a male-only club, with women grudgingly being allowed to visit in a special wing and drawing-room reserved for them. Perhaps the greatest privilege of membership for me was
the availability of other clubs in London and around the world. Reciprocal arrangements came into force during August when the Oxford and Cambridge closed for staff holidays. During that time the Reform Club (forever associated in my mind with Phileas Fogg in
Round the World in Eighty Days
), the Traveller’s Club (home of the private oratory of the mysterious and sinister Monsignor Alfred Gilbey), the RAF Club, the Naval and Military (usually referred to as the ‘In and Out’), the absurdly named East India, Devonshire, Sports and Public Schools Club in St James’s Square and half a dozen others opened their doors to bereft Oxford and Cambridge members in need of clubly pampering. The Carlton Club, a High Tory edifice in St James’s Street, more or less opposite the triple ancient glories of wine merchants Berry Bros and Rudd, Lock the hatter and Lobb the boot-maker, was also on the list of establishments offering us August and august hospitality.

I had taken Ben Elton to the Oxford and Cambridge, and he had revelled in the wonders and absurdities of it. The lecterns on the dining-room tables for those solitary lunchers or diners who wanted to read, the strange brass and mahogany weighing machines with an ancient book next to them in which members could record their weight, the library, the barber shop and the billiard-room had all appealed to his fondness for the dottily traditional. His word for it all was ‘crusty’, crusty as in old port and crusty as in the crabby and cantankerous old men that infest such places.

I called him up one day in the late July of ’85.

‘Ben, time for a crusty.’

‘You’re on, Bing, and that’s perfect because I want to talk to you anyway.’ Ben always called me Bing or Bingable and does so to this day. I cannot quite remember why.

‘If we make it next week,’ I said, ‘I can offer you all kinds of clubs, but the one I think we’d enjoy most is the Carlton.’

‘I love the name already.’

We met for a preliminary gargle at the Ritz on the evening of the following Thursday. You may think it wrong, or hypocritical, or snobbish, or grotesque, or pathetic for two such figures in their twenties to swan about as if they were characters in a Wodehouse or Waugh novel, and perhaps it was. I would try and ask you to believe that there was an element – I won’t say of irony – of
playfulness
perhaps, of self-conscious awareness of the ridiculous nature of what we were doing and the ludicrous figures that we cut. Two Jewish comics pretending to be
flâneurs
of the old school. Ben was more obviously a visitor to this world, I more inexcusably connected to it or more successfully, and therefore more creepily, giving off an air of belonging. I was a genuine member, after all, of a London club and over the next decades I was to join at least four more as well as half a dozen of the new kind of members-only media watering holes that were about to burst into the world of Soho bohemia.

We strolled down St James’s Street, and I told Ben about Brooks’s and White’s, the Whig and Tory bastions that glowered across the street at each other. White’s was and is the most aristocratic and exclusive of all the London clubs, but the Carlton, which we were now approaching, remains the most overtly political.

We crossed the threshold, and I waved what I hoped
was a nonchalant hand towards the uniformed porter in his mahogany guichet.

‘Oxford and Cambridge,’ I said. ‘I have my membership card somewhere …’

‘That’s all right, sir,’ said the porter, his eyes taking Ben in without flickering. Ben was, as he knew one had to be in such places, dressed in a suit and tie, but there are suits and ties and there are ways of wearing suits and ties. My charcoal tailor-made three-piece, New and Lingwood shirt with faintly distressed silk Cherubs tie looked as if they belonged, whereas Ben’s Mr Byrite appearance suggested (and I mean this warmly and lovingly) a bus-driver reluctantly togged up for his sister’s wedding.

We ascended to the first-floor dining-room. Ben nearly exploded as we passed the bust of a woman at the foot of the stairs.

‘Bing,’ he hissed, ‘that’s Thatch!’

‘Of course it is,’ I said with what I hoped was blithe ease. ‘This is the Carlton Club after all.’

As we sat down I broke the news that I had brought him to the very citadel of modern Conservatism, the club where the present-day party had been born and constituted. Margaret Thatcher’s image was certainly represented, as were those of all the Tory leaders since Peel. Ben was dazed and delighted to find himself right plumb spang in the centre of the enemy’s camp. We both felt childishly mischievous, like children who have found the key to their parents’ drinks cabinet.

‘Not many people about,’ said Ben.

‘Well, being August, most of the members will be out of town. They’ll be returning from the Riviera in time for the grouse.’

‘We shall go up to the moors ourselves next week,’ said Ben. ‘I shall be your scamp.’

Scamp was the word Ben used as a generic term for a mixture of Oxford scout, Cambridge gyp, manservant, old retainer and loyal page. We maintained a peculiar fiction of myself as a crusty old country squire and Ben as my trusty scamp. Crusty and Trusty.

‘Anyway,’ I said. ‘Here it is, the Carlton Club. The beating heart of the Establishment. But when I called you up, you said you wanted to talk to me?’

‘That’s right. Thing is, Bing. As you know, Dickie C and I have been working on this new
Blackadder
.’

‘Indeed,’ I said.

‘Well, there’s a part in it for you.’

‘Really?’

‘I won’t lie to you,’ he said. ‘It’s not like the greatest character in the world. He’s called Lord Melchett and he stands behind the Queen and sucks up to her. He and Blackadder hate each other. He’s a kind of chamberlain figure, you know?’

‘Ben, of course I’ll do it,’ I said.

‘Yeah? That’s great!’

I could see out of the corner of my eye that an ancient gentleman a couple of tables away had been having difficulty accepting Ben’s vowel sounds as they ricocheted off the portraits of Wellington and Churchill and into his disbelieving ears. For the past ten minutes he had been spluttering and growling into his soup with growing venom. He looked up at Ben’s last exclamation, and I recognized the blotched, jowly and furious countenance of the Lord Chancellor, Quintin Hogg, now Lord Hailsham. He had his napkin tucked into his shirt collar
like Oliver Hardy and his mixed expression of outrage, disbelief and reluctant desire to know more put me in mind of a maiden aunt who has just had a flasher open his raincoat at her in the church tea-rooms.

All in all, our Carlton Club adventure was one of the happier and more memorable evenings of my life.

As Lord Melchett in
Blackadder II.