The True History of the Blackadder (24 page)

With hindsight, as with every single Footlights revue ever staged, it’s difficult to claim that
The Cellar Tapes
, at least as captured for broadcast by the BBC, could safely be regarded as a classic. With a title giving an early suggestion of Laurie’s obsession with espionage thrillers, the show was presented as a rather low-key assemblage of linguistically intricate pastiches – Victorian melodrama, Alan Ayckbourn – and darkly satirical musical spots, concluding with a haunting choral number about the National Front. There are, however, definite highlights that still showcase the revue’s original appeal even today – Thompson’s prophetic award acceptance speech as ‘Juliana Talent’, Fry & Laurie’s ‘Shakespeare Masterclass’, and Fry’s Bram Stoker send-up, ‘The Letter’:

Fry’s choice of name for the man who took on the Pope of course provides an early sign of how much influence he would eventually have on
Blackadder
. Perhaps the standout moment in
The Cellar Tapes
, this monologue, revised and extended – ‘I stooped, I recall, to pick a buttercup. Why people leave buttocks lying around I have no idea’ – remains Fry’s party piece for charity benefits and royal galas alike.

Reviews were unusually kind for a Footlights show – there’s a long tradition of critics showing themselves up with bad predictions when it comes to Footlights revues, but there was an irrefutable star quality in this cast that few could ignore. At the close of one performance, Fry recalled, the applause reached an unusual crescendo which mystified the cast – unaware that behind them, in his official role as a member of the Fringe board, the unmistakable figure of Rowan Atkinson had crept onstage, and was ineffectually holding his hand up for silence. Rowan had met the cast a couple of nights earlier, and sent them into paroxysms of embarrassed joy with his praise, but this was inexplicable. ‘For a moment or two I thought he had gone insane,’ Fry recalled. ‘His reputation for timidity was already established. It made no sense whatsoever for him to be there.’ Thirty years after the event, Stephen’s recollection of the speech that followed can be heard all too clearly in the
Not
star’s halting tones: ‘Um, ladies and gentlemen. Do forgive me for interrupting like this. You must think it very odd. You may know that this year sees the institution of an award for the best comedy show on the Edinburgh Fringe. It is sponsored by Perrier, the bubbly water people. The organisers and judges of the award, which is to encourage new talent and new trends in comedy, were absolutely certain of one thing – that whoever wins, it wouldn’t be the Cambridge bloody Footlights. However, with a mixture of reluctance and admiration, they unanimously decided that the winner had to be
The Cellar Tapes
!’ To be the inaugural winners of the most influential award in British Comedy was one thing, to have it sprung on you by
your new comic idol, in front of your own ecstatic audience, was an unlooked-for delight.
^fn3

Already a stablemate of Thompson’s, Rowan continued to play comedic Santa in Hugh and Stephen’s lives, as they received their own invitations to sign up to Noel Gay. Armitage had been deeply impressed with Stephen especially, and lost no time in laying out the deal. This impressive figure with the beautiful Bentley and enormous cigars eyed up the lofty pair and asked, ‘Do you see yourselves doing this kind of thing professionally? As a career?’ And on reflection, they realised that they did. They were shortly to pick up indifferent degrees, with Stephen accepting a 2:1 for English, and Hugh bagging a third. ‘He had been to one lecture, which gave him the material for a quite brilliant monologue about a Bantu hut, but otherwise had not disturbed his professors, written an essay or entered the faculty library. I think he would be the first to admit that you know more about archaeology and anthropology than he does,’ Fry says, and here was an unexpected consolation. They were lined up for a tour of
The Cellar Tapes
, with a run at the Lyric Hammersmith and heading as far as Australia with Bergman in charge, but after that? Stephen had only considered an academic life, and Hugh was almost entirely sold on joining the Hong Kong Police; but with Emma’s inspiration, the two new friends realised that whatever doomed musings about fame they may have had as undergraduates, here was a real old-fashioned, powerful agent who could make it happen for them. ‘Stephen was always destined for attention,’ Hugh reflected a quarter of a century later, ‘he was always going to get attention in this life. I was never sure attention was something I wanted …’

Both Stephen and Hugh had been on television before, two years
earlier – Fry in the Queens’ College team on
University Challenge
^fn4
and Hugh presenting scraps of
Nightcap
on BBC show
Friday Night, Saturday Morning. ‘
It was trying to be a sort of David Frosty-type thing, with tart comment on the week’s news; and so I suppose I was meant to supply some tart comment. I didn’t have any then, and I don’t have any now. It’s not my thing, tart comment.’ Their first joint engagement for BBC TV was a filmed version of
The Cellar Tapes
that was never broadcast – Geoff Posner had seen the show, and asked the team whether they minded being the subject of his Studio Direction Course graduation piece. As his incredible track record from
Not
onwards would suggest, it was good enough for the young Posner to pass with flying colours, but the revue was eventually restaged with a live audience when the cast returned from their tour in 1982, produced by the top man, Dennis Main Wilson.

The Corporation missed the bus this time, however, as by the time the remounted
Cellar Tapes
was broadcast, the cast – with a few adjustments – were packing their bags for an extended stay in Manchester, to film their all-new sketch show for Granada. ‘We were extremely lucky,’ Laurie says, ‘because
Not the Nine O’Clock News
was a great success, and very quickly other television companies were desperately scrabbling to get their own version of it, so suddenly young people doing sketch-comedy became a very sought-after …
product
is such an awful word, but that’s probably how television executives would have described it. We were sort of caught up in that scrabbling.’

Pretty Much a Case of the Game’s Afoot!

Congregating for the first time in the flat of Jon Plowman, then a researcher for Granada but eventually to become one of the most influential comedy executives in the business, the Footlights mob
could not help but be aware of the perceived gulf between them and their new co-stars. In truth there was little in it – Scottish actress Siobhan Redmond graduated from St Andrews with an MA in English and, as we have seen, both Elton and eventual cast member Robbie Coltrane came from very comfortable backgrounds. Elton’s confident prolificacy, however, was a real eye-opener, as Laurie recalls: ‘Ben was just a whirlwind, he sort of blew us away, really. We had one thing written on the back of an envelope, and we’d hold it up and Ben would just smack down this forty pounds of good com.’ ‘Our slow, mournful and insecure rate of writing had been trumped and trampled on,’ Fry confirms. ‘Where our comedy was etiolated, buttoned-up and embarrassed, his was wild, energetic, colourful and confident to the point of cockiness … Ben would perform his, playing every part, with undisguised pleasure and demented relish. Despite our complete sense of humiliation and defeat we did laugh and we did unreservedly admire his astonishing talent.’ For all the Footlighters’ fears to the contrary, there was no chance of Elton indulging in inverted snobbery, as might be expected from a Comedy Store compère from a red-brick university. Whatever genuine revolutionary zeal had been apparent in the original cabal of comics at the birth of the Store had been swamped almost immediately by wave after wave of talented and ambitious performers, and besides, as Fry was to argue: ‘As an old lag
I
might be said to be the most real and hard of any of them, a thought preposterous enough to show that the idea of there being a group of working-class comics threatening Castle Poncey was really quite misguided.’

Although Fry & Laurie’s writing naturally extended from
The Cellar Tapes
, with their revolting suburban ‘horror men’ Alan and Bernard (soon to mutate into greasy businessmen Gordon and Stuart) putting in an early appearance, Elton had crafted an entire Didsbury street full of characters for the first episode, in a way pre-empting
The League of Gentlemen
by setting interlinking (and rather sick) sketches within a community. His input also provided an unprecedented blend of social comment and
juvenile vulgarity, particularly in the role he crafted for Stephen – or rather, as he had rechristened his pipe-smoking new pal, ‘Bing’. ‘In me he saw a crusty relic of Empire and created a character called Colonel Sodom, who might, I suppose, be regarded as a rather coarsely sketched forerunner of General Melchett.’ This grey old buffer lived on the same street as a tribe of yobbish Brüt-swigging ‘Wallies’, a sickeningly earnest group of young Christians, a tiresomely right-on couple played by Ben and Emma, and Hugh’s tragic loser Mr Gannet. Colonel Sodom’s main characteristic on his introduction was an apocalyptic case of flatulence which blasted a hole clean through his trousers – and although the undeniably stilted, almost dreamlike drabness of the first of the three tryouts Granada had commissioned was self-contained, Richard Armitage made it clear that he hated the direction in which his new signings were being steered, dubbing their new collaborator ‘a foul-mouthed cockney street urchin with a sewer for a mind’.

These ‘Other Young Ones’ may have beaten Mayall and company to the screen by several months, but it wasn’t just to Armitage’s relief that their rudimentary offerings only ever aired in the Granada region, to a muted response. The try-out wasn’t considered such a disaster that a full series was out of the question, however, with the main alteration being the replacement of the blameless Shearer for Coltrane, fresh from threatening Kevin Turvey and on the verge of taking his place within the Comic Strip team. ‘Big, loud and hilarious,’ Fry recalls, ‘Robbie combined the style and manners of a Brooklyn bus driver, a fifties rock and roller, a motor mechanic and a Gorbals gangster. Somehow they all fitted together perfectly into one consistent character. He terrified the life out of me, and the only way I could compensate for that was to pretend to find him impossibly attractive and to rub my legs up against him and moan with ecstasy.’ There was also a change of name – with the crew taking advantage of the latest lightweight video equipment, they could eschew studios altogether and go out into Manchester to film anywhere a sketch dictated, shooting
Alfresco
.

Another perhaps telling change was the introduction of John Lloyd, on script-editing duty. In truth he only cast an eye over a few of the scripts, but it was inevitable that he and this later generation of Cantabrigians would be drawn together, professionally as well as socially. Since the exodus to London, Fry especially had quickly established firm friendships with many of his idols, becoming the darling of the most exclusive parties and a regular at the Zanzibar, the Covent Garden club where almost every figure in this book would meet and drink and schmooze. Fry had already encountered Peter Cook in a restaurant as an undergraduate, and painted the town red with him, and within a short time of ‘entering society’ he was similarly embraced by his fellow computer nerd Douglas Adams,
^fn5
and even became a confidant of his hero Vivian Stanshall. As Noel Gay’s new young, erudite favourites, Stephen and Hugh were securely set up as part of the graduate comedy elite as if their places had been reserved for them, leaving them free to pop along to Soho to discover a whole new world of riches: advertising. Stephen’s deep, warm tones and Hugh’s puckish intonations were clamoured for by advertising executives on behalf of everything from nappies to Mexican cuisine, while there were high-profile on-screen roles for Extra Strong Mints, Alliance & Leicester, and myriad consumer goods.
^fn6

Whether due to Lloyd’s limited influence or not, when the cast booked back into Manchester’s Midland Hotel that autumn to start on the new series, their scripts were quite drastically different to those for
There’s Nothing to Worry About
. In particular, the sudden explosion in the number of historical pastiches was noteworthy. Amid the twisted musings on the misery of Thatcherite Britain, the first episode cuts to
a World War II Stalag, exploring that perennial sketch cliché, the silly POW escape plan.
Ripping Yarns
had already got a whole half-hour out of the set-up, but there’s no denying that the cast – especially future Pipe Smoker of the Year Stephen – looked the part in their uniforms (both Allied and Nazi), and the sketch would be recycled for
Saturday Live
a few years later: