The True History of the Blackadder (4 page)

This called for drastic measures, and a switch from Drama to Comedy. ‘Finally, I had to take a pre-emptive strike. I decided, if no one else would give me decent parts, I would write them for myself. I wrote and staged a little revue and did get three or four laughs.’ At last, Curtis had found his calling. There was a fine tradition of comedy at the university stretching back at least as far as the setting up of the Oxford Theatre Group in the early fifties, with alumni including Alan Bennett, Dudley Moore, Michael Palin and Terry Jones – and Richard Curtis felt he could become the comic performer to top them all.
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But Perkins had left Oxford before Curtis’s arrival, and now was a time for a new generation. When Richard spied an advert for auditions for that year’s revue in the student newspaper, it must have seemed like fate – the cocky Harrovian knew that it was ‘my moment to shine, my moment to step forward, the best, the funniest, the actor’s actor’.

He threw himself into the early script meetings with unmistakable vim, standing out among the several faceless fellow students who gathered in a tutor’s study every Thursday evening to haggle over sketch material. He was discovering his voice as a humorist, with a knack for precise wordplay and an eye for characterisation that exemplified the frustrated actor, and he showed that he could easily run the whole show on his own. For two meetings he enthused about his ideas and became confident that the 1976 Oxford Revue would be his first big break.

At the third meeting, just as a running order was beginning to take shape, one curiously coy student arose to finally share his own ideas with the gang. Curtis had sized this fellow up in the first meeting, where he was to be found skulking silently in the corner, and had long ago dismissed him as part of the furniture – a cushion or, at best, some form of stuffed toy. He had a curious appearance certainly, bespectacled and
with black curls in such abundance that the two of them could have been negative reflections of each other. But nobody had paid him very much attention at all – until now.

The human cushion quietly explained that he had a couple of sketch ideas of his own, and proceeded to drop every jaw in the room with a transformation into a living cartoon, or some kind of creature from another dimension, in two astonishing comic turns. ‘He did a monologue about driving followed by the thing where he mimed and talked at the same time,’ Curtis recalls. ‘It was unlike anything else I had ever seen.’ There was no doubt who the star of the 1976 revue would be.

ROWAN ATKINSON B ORN : 6 January 1955, Consett, County Durham

As the youngest of three sons – Rupert, Rodney (subsequently a UKIP candidate) and Rowan – born to farmers Eric and Ella, Atkinson grew up in the shade of Consett Steelworks, among the rusting tractors of the family farm, midway between Durham and Newcastle upon Tyne (the home, Hole Row Farm, is now the Royal Derwent Hotel). Despite this agricultural upbringing, Rowan was aware that show business was in his family, thanks to his grandfather Edward Atkinson, proprietor of a whole chain of picture houses across the North-East – one of which had been run by Stan Laurel’s father, Arthur Jefferson – and as a boy Rowan would visit the Consett Empire for free movie shows, in lieu of TV.

Like his brothers, Atkinson was sent to board at the Durham Cathedral Choristers’ School (where he was a year behind Tony Blair), and then to St Bees School on the Cumbrian coast, within dashing distance of the Windscale nuclear power plant, latterly Sellafield. It was at St Bees that Atkinson had his first real
comic awakening, getting laughs from his friends, who dubbed him ‘Dopey’, ‘Zoonie’, ‘Green Man’ and ‘Moon Man’, as his distinctively animated features began to develop.

Atkinson was an upstanding student, joining the cadets and the school choir, and yet he still had plenty to rebel against at St Bees, where misdemeanours were punished with compulsory horse-dung-shovelling, for which, he recalled, ‘Only the privileged few were given shovels.’ Young Rowan soon developed a talent for facetiousness, once being punished for responding to one master’s assertion that he should pull his socks up by laboriously and pointedly following the order literally, and also reportedly teaching another master’s small child to parrot the phrase ‘fuck off’ at will. ‘I never meant any harm or offence to anyone,’ he was to insist, ‘I was just trying to enjoy myself. Because, make no mistake, life is short.’

Although Rowan showed a flair for science, having an obsession with engines (at home, he drove around the farm in his mother’s old Morris Minor, which he had saved from the scrapheap and rebuilt from scratch), the schoolboy’s most notable achievements were in the arts. As one of two pupils given the job of running the St Bees Film Society ‘with no democracy whatsoever’, Atkinson was thrilled to receive a print of Jacques Tati’s wordless classic
M. Hulot’s Holiday
, and besides the official showing on Saturday night, he and his friends gleefully sat through the entire film seven times in one weekend.

He had been in plays before St Bees, including an early triumph as the Dauphin in
Saint Joan
, but Atkinson’s initial involvement with the school’s theatrical side was predictably technical. However, as part of the lighting team for one school production, he remembers ‘looking down from the lighting gantry on to the stage during the performance and thinking, “I’ve made the wrong decision – I’d prefer to be down there.”’
His subsequent performances, including a notable Mephistophilis in
Doctor Faustus
, earned him the stunned applause of his peers, astonished that the odd-looking stammering lad had such a range of extraordinary characters brewing within him.

Atkinson’s headmaster Geoffrey Lees took a particular interest in his charge’s future, spurring Rowan on to pass his English O level by betting against him. Two years later, with Atkinson receiving top-grade science A levels and considering a Technical Drama course in Portsmouth or a BSc in Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Newcastle University, Lees broke the habit of a lifetime when he took the budding engineer aside and confided, ‘I have never recommended to anyone that they should take up a career in the entertainment industry, but it would seem silly for you, Atkinson, not at least to try.’ ‘I didn’t know quite what I wanted to do when I left,’ he admits, ‘but I certainly didn’t have very high expectations of the future …’

‘It was instantly clear that he was a real genius,’ Curtis recalls with mock chagrin. ‘He got every single laugh in the summer show. I did have one quite funny monologue, but just before opening we decided to give it to Rowan because he would be funnier … And it was downhill from there.’ The story of Atkinson’s apparent transformation from meek cuddly toy to comic master has always been somewhat disingenuous, though – by the time he knocked Curtis’s socks off, he was already more than familiar with the Edinburgh Fringe scene, and had even attempted a small revue there in 1975, before enrolling at Oxford for his MSc in Engineering Science.

Prophetically, his first Edinburgh experience had been as part of a group of ex-pupils and budding actors a year after leaving St Bees, playing the role of Captain Starkey in Joseph Heller’s anti-war play
They Bombed at Newhaven
, directed by English master Richard Elgood. Heller had based the action on the Vietnam War, but its message
about the madness of conflict was equally applicable to any hostility in history, and would set the young actor in good stead for future comedic clashes with the military. Rowan’s main experience of army life had been a period of guard duty with the cadets – forced to remain vigilant out on the Cumbrian moors from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m., in a foot of water, with nothing to comfort him but a soaking wet cigarette. Whether this informed his performance is debatable, but his portrayal of Captain Starkey – a quiet man who during the course of the play goes through a complete breakdown – singled Atkinson out for praise from the
Scotsman
when he was barely past adolescence.

It would be two years before he returned to the Fringe, during which time he was at Newcastle University. He was always drawn to the ‘sparks’ side of show business, harbouring thoughts of maybe making it as a BBC cameraman, or a sound engineer, but still the lure of being in the spotlight kept getting in the way. By his own admission, ‘There was something inside me crying to get out.’

Atkinson’s second Fringe experience was, via tenuous connections, with the Dundee University Theatre Group, who cast him in the central role of the sexually frustrated city official Angelo in
Measure for Measure
– a play with the dubious reputation of being by far the least amusing of all Shakespeare’s ‘comedies’. This one foray into interpreting Shakespeare was not a pleasant experience for young Rowan, who says, ‘It takes a hell of a lot of time and a lot of effort to get even the most willing audience to smile at someone like Touchstone (and I speak from bitter experience).’ So while in Edinburgh doing his best by the Bard, he took his chance to try something different with one of his friends, hiring the Roxburgh Reading Rooms for a lunchtime comedy revue. ‘No more than thirteen people came – probably because the show was absolutely diabolical. It was me doing impersonations of Denis Healey and things like that, so you can imagine how grim it was.’

Having got a 2:1 from Newcastle, you would be forgiven for thinking that it was the tug of stardom which took Atkinson to
Oxford for his Master’s, but on arrival at the historic university, his first time living in the south, away from home, it took a long time for this garlanded student performer to return to the stage, and he spent much of his first term ‘just relishing the whole slightly olde worlde privileged nature of the place, and going to endless organ recitals, I was a great lover of the organ’ – indeed, he was even compiling a book on the history of Oxford’s organs, and trying to design a synthesiser of his own.

So the explosion of comic invention Richard Curtis witnessed that Thursday evening had been bottled up for quite a long time. ‘I saw this little advert in the university newspaper saying, you know, “We’re thinking of getting a comedy revue together,”’ Atkinson recalls, ‘so I thought I’d beetle along, because I felt as though I had an interest. And Richard was there … So that was our first meeting – I said very little, and I’m sure Richard said a great deal.’

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There was, of course, a whole pantheon of future stars and media darlings at Oxford alongside Curtis and Atkinson in the mid-seventies. Older boy Mel Smith had just progressed from the Oxford Revue and OUDS to a budding career in theatre, and the new blood included Tim McInnerny and Helen Atkinson-Wood, with most of the rest of the
Radio Active
team, Angus Deayton, Michael Fenton Stevens and Philip Pope, arriving a year or two afterwards. McInnerny was one of the brightest stars of OUDS, but couldn’t shake off a natural comic flair, and became one of Curtis’s favoured performers – at least, for any sketch that wouldn’t have suited Atkinson.

Atkinson-Wood similarly filled her time with comedy performing when she wasn’t studying Fine Art at the Ruskin School, and came from the same part of the world as McInnerny, being from a well-to-do family in Cheadle Hulme, head girl of her school and crazy about
ponies, despite a near-fatal riding accident at the age of sixteen.
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Helen recalls: ‘I arrived a year after them. I was doing a show called
The Female Person’s Show
in my very first term – written by Marcy Kahan – which Richard saw, and asked if I would like to come and audition for the revue. It’s fair to say that even at that point, Rowan was becoming a legendary comedy figure, because there was nobody else like him … Tim and I also did serious drama – we were in a production of
Measure for Measure
at the Oxford Playhouse – so, very illustrious productions, alongside horsing around with our pals.’