The True History of the Blackadder Read Online Free PDF Page B

had been 90 per cent study to 10 per cent performing (and that included his stint as drummer in a hard-rock band). But after this first revue, the ratio was switched.
    Remembering his earliest acclaim in 1988, he outlined the original formation of a plan that was to have immediate success: ‘I’d got a very good notice in the Oxford Mail , that redoubtable publication of the Midlands. It really was an extremely good crit. It was very much one of these, you know, “the next John Cleese” sort of things. I remember asking this other man, who was doing Zoology or something, what you did if you wanted to be in show business and he said, “Try and find out who the agents of the people you admire are and write to them.” So Idid, and I wrote to nine agents that summer before I went to Edinburgh, saying, “Now look, I’m going to do the Edinburgh Fringe,” and I enclosed a photocopy of the review. Nobody replied, except Richard Armitage. He flew up especially to see me and we worked together from the day that he came.’
    The son of the composer Noel Gay, Armitage was a theatrical legend who had played with the Grades when they were children, taken over Noel Gay artist management in 1950, and had showbiz running through every major artery. He was also John Cleese’s agent, which made Atkinson all the more overjoyed to be scooped up. Armitage claimed that he was first drawn to Atkinson by his letter, which humbly began ‘Dear Sir or Madam’, but one sight of the 1976 revue was enough for Armitage to add the 21-year-old to his personal stable. This was also good news for Mrs Atkinson, who was terrified for her youngest son, making his way in the seamy world of showbiz. ‘She thought it was full of bouncing cheques and homosexuals and nasty men in velvet bow ties, so I got a really well-dressed middle-class agent who looked like a bank manager and that reassured her a lot. She found that not everyone wears bow ties, so her view was modified to an extent.’
    The 1976 Edinburgh show, staged at St Mary’s Street Hall (just round the corner from where Lloyd was performing in The Unpleasantness at Brodie’s Close ) was a semi-refined hotchpotch of the best of the Oxford Revue, but the production basically amounted to Curtis and Atkinson travelling up in Rowan’s VW camper van – this ‘Oxford Theatre Group’ only had one star, already tooled up to take the comedy scene by storm.
    However, there was the matter of actual study. Returning for their second year at Oxford, Rowan and Richard moved into a house together on Woodstock Road, and began to revel in being the driving force of the university’s comedy scene. Rowan naturally found himself on the revue stall at that year’s freshers’ fair – just in time to meet a musical master, and make a friend for life.
    Howard Goodall was born in Bromley, but the family moved toRutland, and then Oxford, when he was still small – and music was the younger son’s obsession from the very start. He became a chorister aged eight while attending New College prep school, then began to master the organ at Stowe school in Buckinghamshire, before forming a band (featuring his older brother Ashley) at Lord William’s school in Thame. When he landed a place studying Music at Christ Church college in 1976, it would have been little surprise to anyone to learn that he was headed for a first.
    ‘In my first week at university I went to the freshers’ fair and I had decided that I wanted to be involved, as a musician, with the revue. So I went to the desk, and I said to the guy, “Look, I’d really like to be involved musically, I don’t know how.” We talked for a little bit, and he said, “Well, someone will come and see you.” It turned out the guy behind the desk was Rowan Atkinson, and then when I went back to my room that afternoon, Richard Curtis came to see me, and he said, “Me and Rowan are doing a show, like a student revue, in three weeks’ time at the Oxford