The True History of the Blackadder (2 page)

When a new king is crowned, what he says is the True History, becomes the True History. This is the True History of the Blackadder Chronicles.

Chapter One

THE FORETELLING

‘I want to be remembered when I’m dead. I want books written about me, I want songs sung about me. And then hundreds of years from now I want episodes from my life to be played out weekly at half past nine by some great heroic actor of the age …’

Three Great Universities – Oxford, Cambridge and, not Hull, but Manchester – provided the breeding grounds for the work of comedy excellence we are preparing to celebrate. This is the story of several highly driven men, and supremely talented women. In fact, there are very few people featured within this book who are not very, very talented – if a series of brilliant artists pointing out each other’s brilliance is the kind of thing likely to inspire uncontrollable spurts of fluids from your body, read no further. Without that mutual respect, without the arrogance of youth allied to that Oxbridge expectation of greatness, the 1980s would have been a dramatically less amusing period in our nation’s history. Oxford and Cambridge of course have a great tradition of collaborating to hilarious effect, but in the eighties, as the stranglehold of Oxbridge began to slacken, it was the cream of the alumni of this
trinity
of institutions who would discover each other and merge to forge the finest comic half-hours of the decade – a television programme which would have its own distinct, lasting and devastating
effect on the nation’s funny bone for generations to come.

In terms of sheer logical chronology, however, it must be Cambridge that gets the first word in edgeways – sometime in the early seventies in fact, with the relative flop of that year’s Footlights outing,
Every Packet Carries a Government Health Warning
.

R
OW
, R
OW
, R
OW
Y
OUR
P
UNT
…

Peter Cook and his chums burst the dam of vociferously amusing jokers waiting to explode out of the university’s Footlights club at the end of the fifties, triggering a relay of comic brilliance which flowed from year to year, through Frost, Cleese, Brooke-Taylor, Garden, Idle, Greer et al. But by the year 1973, when a tall, handsome yet frazzled-looking undergraduate with piercing blue eyes called John Lloyd found himself in his last year studying Law at Trinity College, that exciting comedic flow had long since given up any pretence of being even a trickle. Despite this, ten years on from the Footlights’ biggest international revue success,
Cambridge Circus
, 1973’s wacky funsters were certain that they’d found the right formula to recapture the greatness of Cook, Miller and the Cambridge Pythons. ‘The worst thing about
Every Packet
’, Lloyd says, ‘was the title.’

The cast included his friend, the limelight-stealing budding director Griffith Rhys Jones, but, oddly, also Lloyd himself. Not that John Lloyd performing comedy should be odd, but for him to be a Footlighter was never part of his plan when signing up for further education. Like his even taller friend Douglas Adams (who only scraped into the club with the aid of Simon Jones), John enjoyed getting laughs, but wasn’t really accepted by Footlights.

Forty years on, Lloyd laughs, ‘Footlights was a joke. None of us worth our salt would have gone near the place. People who ran the stall at the freshers’ fair we thought were a bunch of wankers.’ Nevertheless, he auditioned simply to please his girlfriend of the time, and was
begrudgingly welcomed into the club. ‘The first thing I did was the Footlights panto. If you got in the panto, then you’d try and get in the spring revue, and if you got in that then you’d probably get into the May Week revue, which was the big one. It had to have good jokes in it, but it didn’t have to have anything particularly radical or satirical to say, so it was a good testing ground for people who just wanted to be funny, which suited me down to the ground, really.’

JOHN HARDRESS WILFRED LLOYD B ORN : 30 September 1951, Dover, Kent

It’s fitting, in this history of a great British dynasty, that many of the central team have a singularly detailed knowledge of their own ancestry that comes from generations of meticulous marriage and breeding. Lloyd is descended from an illustrious Anglo-Irish family, and says, ‘John and Hardress are family names that have attached themselves to firstborn male Lloyds since at least the beginning of the seventeenth century. My father’s genealogical research goes right back to the town of Ardres in northern France and (or so he claimed) a bloke called D’Ardres, who came over with William the Conqueror. Or possibly,’ he adds with all humility, ‘it’s from the ancient Welsh “hardd”, which means handsome.’ When John was born, the family already had one celebrated member, his namesake great-uncle being a brigadier general rewarded with the DSO and the Légion d’honneur for his bravery in the First World War, as well as an Olympian polo player.

Lloyd was a late starter in formal education, his father’s career in the navy making any kind of stability impossible during his early years (on retirement, Lloyd senior was offered the post of Admiral of the Ethiopian Navy). His formative years were a blur of troop ships and exotic locales, particularly Malta, where the young John
grew up speaking English and Maltese, before he faced the shock of being sent to prep school at West Hill Park in Hampshire, and then the King’s School, Canterbury. While attending the latter, it was school policy for every pupil to undergo an IQ test – John was the only child in his class who was not allowed to know his own results, for fear of complacency.

Lloyd paints his school years as being all but inspired by the Lindsay Anderson film
If
, a grey existence after his globe-trotting infancy, and he grew up seemingly cut off from popular culture – while his contemporaries were glued to TV programmes like
Not Only But Also
, Lloyd remained blisslessly ignorant of the great developments in British comedy, until his arrival at Trinity College, Cambridge, to study Law coincided with the first wave of Python-mania, and Comedy began to suck him in.

‘I literally went up to Cambridge not knowing what the Footlights was, I’d never heard of it – I was that ignorant!’ John admits today, ‘And although I loved jokes, I never thought of joining the club until I was in my last year in ’73, because I did college revues. Douglas Adams and I both had a slightly strange relationship with Footlights, because they never put Douglas in a revue, they always thought he was too arcane, even though he was a big star of the St John’s revue. But at that time, Footlights was seen as kind of superannuated and hopeless. There hadn’t been a really, really funny show since
Cambridge Circus
. And so our revue, in ’73, was considered not in any way the most innovative offering, but a return to that old tradition of great jokes, lots of fun and larks and all that kind of thing.’ The result of their labours was a very silly brew, consciously harking back to the pun-slinging of the sixties, kicking off with the cast singing a reggae song while dressed as fag packets and ending with a jungle-based panto.

The show did not prove to be the Access All Areas pass to media greatness that critics of Oxbridge would assume. Just as the revue
was set for the Edinburgh Festival, there was bad news for John. ‘I was sacked from Footlights for fear that I would ruin the serious play they were taking up, but in a way I was allowed to go and do the Footlights radio show as a consolation prize. At first I was completely horrified and heartbroken because it looked like the other lot were all going to go into television, but then I remembered that the comedy I really loved were those Sunday lunchtime radio shows like
The Navy Lark
and
I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again
.’ When told that Edinburgh was out of bounds for him because he ‘couldn’t act’, Lloyd burst into tears. Despite this being a deliberate spot of thespianism, it made no difference.

Lloyd’s saviour had been a champion of great comedy since joining the BBC ten years previously: ‘David Hatch came to see the Footlights show in ’73 along with Simon Brett, and recruited me. We got on really well, so when I got offered the radio show, I already knew these guys and liked them.’ Hatch had been one of the original
Cambridge Circus
cast, celebrated as ‘Boring Old Kipperfeet Announcer Hatch’ in Humphrey Barclay’s radio spin-off
ISIRTA
until the start of the seventies, as well as being an inspirational producer, launching indestructible radio institutions like
Just a Minute
and
I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue
. Now Hatch was the boss, and continued to search for talented types at his alma mater just as he himself had been headhunted a decade previously, and he struck gold when he tapped on John’s shoulder. The new boy began his first day at BBC Radio on 2 January 1974, sleeping on the floor of a council flat rented by two banker friends.

Did Lloyd feel honoured to be snapped up by Auntie? ‘One forgets – well, I don’t forget – the appalling arrogance of people who come out of Oxbridge. Most people think at that age, because they’ve done a revue or whatever, that they’re stars, that they’re
going to be
stars. Cocky, and not very experienced. All I wanted to do was something that I enjoyed. I got a terrible law degree, I couldn’t get on with the law at all. I had a fierce sense of justice, and wanted to be a kind of John
Mortimer defence barrister, an advocate. And they beat that stuff out of you at Cambridge, they laugh at you if you think the law is anything to do with justice. It’s just a lot of facts and case law and so on, so I sort of clocked off very early on, and started doing other things – university journalism, politics, all sorts. Then I discovered in my last year that writing jokes was what I liked doing more than anything else. I said I’d give myself a year to see whether I could make a living at comedy, and if I didn’t make it in a year I’d go and take my Bar exams and settle down to a tedious life. But it can’t have been much more than six months later that I got the job.’

Besides, it could have been worse. While Lloyd was in the early stages of his tutelage under Hatch, that year’s Footlights show (still with Rhys Jones, but this time also featuring Clive Anderson and Geoffrey McGivern) was taking a spectacular dive. Lloyd had a writing credit, and was there to witness the nightmare. ‘The next year,
Chox
, looked like it was going to be huge, and that had a London premiere, plus they did a pilot for a television show. They had this gala opening, all the Pythons went, and it was a complete disaster. It closed within days, I think. Oddly enough I was stranded on the safe beach of radio, because it was going very well. I was doing a lot of writing with Jon Canter and a guy called Gerry Brown, which led to a commission for a Footlights radio series called
Oh No It Isn’t!
We dubbed it that because we were fearful of getting bad reviews – nobody could say anything more negative than that!’ Produced by Simon Brett as Lloyd learned the ropes, the radio show could have taken off, but a perfectionist even at this stage, John decided it was time to move on after one short run.