1975-1982
'IN THE SPOTLIGHT'
Pictured - Carfax in Oxford, 1970s.
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N.B. The interview with R. Atkinson was recorded over telephone, and is thus of a lower audio quality. A full transcript of this interview, with clipped sections highlighted, can be found here.
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The Oxford life of Professor Wyndham John Albery [1936-2013] is decorated with his many achievements in physical chemistry, their variety a symptom of a magpie mind. It was inevitable that such a menagerie of interest extended beyond the discipline of his employment and into the theatrical world his family was famed for [source]. In 1962, Albery would write for the BBC programme That Was The Week That Was, part of the 'satire boom' initiated by Beyond the Fringe, before becoming a curator of the Oxford Playhouse and chairman of the BT Studio theatre [source]. He was also involved in the E.T.C. and the associated troupe, the Etceteras - for instance, he is credited as a production adviser in the programmes of 1965's Yours Etcetera and With All Etceteras [source].
A decade on and Oxford comedic performance was broadly unchanged in terms of its bureaucratic functioning. The E.T.C. still produced revues within Oxford with a industrial regularity, and the O.T.G. continued to produce a yearly Oxford Revue at August's Edinburgh Fringe. The Etceteras' output of 1975 included What The Proctors Saw and A Room With Revue [source], with the Revue that year directed and co-written by a Mr. Geoffrey Perkins [source][source]. Above all else, the E.T.C. and O.T.G. complimented each other, with many performers involved with both (Perkins, for example, had previously directed the Etceteras).
Pictured - the poster for What The Proctors Saw.
Towards the eve of 1975, Professor Albery began to construct the E.T.C.'s next summer revue - The After Eights Revue. An invitation to a script meeting in University College, open for all interested parties, was advertised in The Daily Information, a single-sheet publication which had relayed local affairs to Oxford residents since 1964 [source]. As unspectacular as it may appear, the meeting is worthy of mention here if only for the two students who would meet there for the first time.
The 20 year old Rowan Atkinson had spent his first term as an Oxford Engineering Master's student attending organ recitals (an ambition of his being to write a book called 'The Organs of Oxford University'). His previous degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Newcastle University [source] had already involved theatrical ventures - Atkinson's first Edinburgh Fringe show was a 1973 production of the anti-war metadrama We Bombed In New Haven at the Lauriston Hall. The summer of 1975, before his arrival at Oxford, saw him play the role of Angelo in Measure For Measure with the Theatre Group of the University of Dundee (Atkinson had friends at the establishment), as well as his first attempt at revue, a half-baked two-man show at the Roxburgh Reading Rooms.
"No more than 13 people came... Probably because the show was absolutely diabolical. I was me doing impersonations of Denis Healey and things like that, so you can imagine how grim it was." - Rowan Atkinson, reproduced in Michael Dale's Sore Throats and Overdrafts: an illustrated story of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, 1988 [source].
Pictured - Rowan Atkinson, backstage in the Edinburgh Fringe, 1977. Photo by Paul Yule/Berwick Universal Pictures (https://www.paulyule.com/shop/rowan-atkinson-book/).
Richard Curtis was 18 or 19 years old, reading an undergraduate degree in English Language and Literature at the college of Christ Church. His comedic leanings had been nurtured upon the previous rung of education - the boarding and single-sex Harrow School. Enthused encouragement from his classics teacher, James Morwood, had driven Curtis to contribute humorous articles to the school newspaper, with only occasional censorship - one tale about a boy getting impaled by an iron railing was banned outright by headmaster Michael Hoban [source]. The Harrow School staging of 1960s pastiche The Erpingham Camp [source] likely primed Curtis well for a future in the performing arts - he was already well-acquainted with Oxford student theatre by the time of Albery's script meeting.
"I've spent my whole career, in a way, trying to recapture in things that I write the hilarity of four friends, one drink down, aged 19, laughing at their jokes and all the new stuff that they find really funny..." - Richard Curtis, Eight Days A Week, 2016 [source].
Pictured - Richard Curtis in 1978. Photo by Paul Yule/Berwick Universal Pictures (https://www.paulyule.com/shop/rowan-atkinson-book/).
"I knew [Richard] could write, but you didn’t need much foresight – or indeed hindsight – to realise Rowan, too, was going to be a star, though few at the time could have predicted quite how world-conquering he would eventually become." - Robin Seavill (a fellow cast-member of After Eights, who attended the script meeting), 2023 [source].
"[After sitting silently, Rowan] did a monologue about driving followed by the thing he does now, where he mimes and talks at the same time. It was unlike anything I had ever seen. It was pure genius." - Richard Curtis, reproduced in The Stuttering Foundation Winter Magazine, 2021 [source].
The script meeting was Atkinson's first engagement with Oxford student theatre, but the After Eights Revue itself was not his first actual Oxford stage appearance. An unnamed sketch show at the Playhouse on February 29th 1976 [source], instead, holds such a distinction, for which Atkinson boldly debuted his now globally eminent approach to physical comedy and silent (or at least inarticulate) characterisation.
Openly inspired by the silent film star Buster Keaton and mime artist Marcel Marceau in his early performances, Atkinson first incorporated physical comedy into 'linking skits', comedic connective tissue between more verbose offerings. 'Mr. Gobbledegook' became the first of these - a vehicle for audience interaction, not the defined character his later persona 'Mr. Bean' would in time become.
The following May, when The After Eights Revue did eventually debut at the Oxford Playhouse, Atkinson would play another role for which he would become renowned - the eccentric priest, as also seen in Four Weddings and a Funeral, Keeping Mum, Wonka and beyond.
"...[Rowan and I] put together this energetic duet to Free’s ‘All Right Now’ in his room in Queen’s overlooking Teddy Hall... we ended up using [it] as the first-half closer. In fact, so popular did it become that from the middle of the run, we had to start doing it as an encore at the end of the show. No one had warned me; Thursday night I think it was, after the bows, the cast suddenly all cleared off upstage, ‘All Right Now’ started up again, and Rowan had to stand there waiting for me until I’d worked out what was going on." - Robin Seavill, 2023 [source].
"Quality undergraduate revue is back in Oxford. ...What is most impressive about it is its sheer good nature, its sedulous avoidance... of the sneering attitude to everything and everybody that has so marred recent offerings of the Cambridge Footlights. And what of the company? Spotting the names of ten years' time is part of the fun of Oxbridge revue: here there is an astonishing talent on display in the form of Rowan Atkinson of the Queen's College. Any man who can have an audience laughing nonstop for five minutes by doing nothing more than pulling faces (what a mouth!), purporting to offer a letter to people in the stalls and by making petulant growls when they refuse, has got to go far. When, furthermore, he can give as hilarious and well-observed a portrait of that stock comic type, the bumbling vicar, as I have seen... stardom does indeed beckon. ...Richard Curtis, [performing] as an up-market Michael Crawford, likewise." - Christopher Gray, The Oxford Mail, 1976 [source].
It was clear, even this early on, that Rowan Atkinson and Richard Curtis had comedic potential in spades. After his involvement with a sold-out 1976 Oxford Revue at the Edinburgh Fringe [source], Atkinson represented the E.T.C. at the Michaelmas Term Fresher's Fair (a yearly university event where students could sign up for extra-curricular activities), where he first encountered the music student Howard Goodall. Goodall had already spent his childhood steeped in an Oxonian shadow, singing in New College's choir at age eight [source], and was now an undergraduate at the college of Christ Church at age eighteen.
Contextually, it is not unexpected that Goodall's desire to modernise the sound of Oxford comedy would be met so positively by the E.T.C.. Richard Curtis had, even prior to the After Eights Revue script meeting, performed in Allswellthatendsrock!, a November 1975 performance described on its own poster as 'the first all-live-action Christmas Shakespeare rock spectacular revue'.
"...there seemed to have been an awful lot of student rock musicals around that year and we simply jumped satirically on the bandwagon. A couple of the sketches – mostly by Richard Curtis, an English scholar – were derived from Shakespeare, and that perhaps gave director Rob Orchard the idea of dressing the cast in Shakespearean costume throughout. ...My first time in doublet and hose. Thank God it was meant to be funny."- Robin Seavill, 2023 [source].
Within three weeks, Howard Goodall featured in his first revue - Tongue Tied, starring Rowan Atkinson [source]. Goodall and Atkinson had quickly bonded over their mutual enthusiasm for church organs and electronic music - the latter's pride and joy was an expensive reel-to-reel player, with his Master's thesis concerning (at least in part) voltage control mechanisms in synthesisers [source]. Soon, creations like 'Mr Gobbledegook' were enhanced by Goodall's musical inclinations.
Atkinson's goodwill, in turn, was invaluable for 'Half Brother' - a band founded by a 15 year old Goodall and his eponymous kin Jon Kermode [source][source], and continued into university.
The creative synergy between Rowan Atkinson the actor, Richard Curtis the writer and Howard Goodall the composer was now well established, and fed by a real friendship beyond their creative work. The trio frequented many Oxford eateries of the day - the burgers and milkshakes of 'Maxwells' on Queen Street, the greasy spoons of the Covered Market, the coffee and reportedly mediocre lunches of the 'Nose Bag' (which shut as recently as 2022 [source]). While restaurants were not a usual haunt of students, the 1976 opening of 'Browns' [source] (on the same road as Atkinson and Curtis's new shared accommodation) saw queues of diners spool from the door, awed by the novelty of its palm-tree decor and steak sandwiches.
However, in further developing their comedic collaboration, it became clear that a 'straight man' figure was needed in sketches to counteract Atkinson's sizeable array of characters and oddities. Furthermore, the act's extremely male skew was noticeable, limiting Howard Goodall's desire for richer vocal harmonies.
The 21 year old Helen Atkinson Wood (no relation to Rowan) had commenced study at the Ruskin School, the University's department for fine art, under the formal tutorage of painter and sculptor Margaret 'Maggi' Hambling (who would hold the London National Gallery's first residency in 1980 [source]). Such an environment facilitated encounters with many prominent figures in British art - once, when having lunch at the 'Nose Bag', she spotted a linen-suited David Hockney pass by the window and chased him down for an autograph. Yet the allure of theatre proved to be a real priority. Atkinson Wood first performed in Oxford student comedy on March 7th-12th 1977 in the BT Studio, in the Etceteras revue Celebration.
Pictured - the poster for Celebration. Pictured from left to right, Richard Curtis, a Persian student named Afshin (further information on this performer would be appreciated), Helen Atkinson Wood and Rowan Atkinson.
Pictured - Rowan Atkinson and Helen Atkinson Wood perform the sketch 'Bus Stop' in 1977, demonstrating the efficacy of their respective comic and 'straight man' roles. Photos by Paul Yule/Berwick Universal Pictures (https://www.paulyule.com/shop/rowan-atkinson-book/).
How did Rowan Atkinson (along with his associated contingent) become so popular in such little time? While the city had bore witness to many prominent comics before (especially in its storied cabaret circuit), its most renowned tales of success thus far had involved troupes - Beyond the Fringe, Hang Down Your Head and Die and the 1964 Oxford Revue being three notable examples. While the most obvious explanation for the velocity at which Atkinson rose to fame is the novelty involved with his act, of course, the entertainment landscape of the late 1970s reveals deeper potential causal factors.
"...the UK was on the cusp of massive change... pop music had been transformed by the emergence of punk in 1976, but comedy was still unreconstructed. ...In this context, the birth of alternative comedy in 1979 is as much a watershed as the election of Thatcher, a dividing line that challenged the previous orthodoxies in light entertainment..." - Oliver Double, Alternative Comedy: 1979 and the Reinvention of British Stand-Up, 2020 [source]
On Saturday 29th May 1979, Scouse comedian Alexei Sayle, having answered an advertisement in Private Eye [source], would compere the opening night of London's Comedy Store venue - an engagingly vigorous performance with furious disdain for incompetent stage-acts, audience sanctimony and political Conservatism alike, that many associate it with the beginning of British 'alternative comedy' [source].
"We were inculcated with the post-punk ethos that we wanted the crowd to be riled, so we wound them up. Then there were incidents at the Store like Keith Allen [alternative comedian] throwing darts at the audience. It was pretty combative." - Alexei Sayle, reproduced in Chortle's How the bland and the posh failed alternative comedy, 2014 [source].
"...comics with racist, sexist and out-dated jokes were often gonged off quickly making room for performers of the new “alternative” genre, whose material was considered fresher and more innovative. ...These were crazy, amazing formative years and The Comedy Store, smack bang in the middle of decadent Soho reigned supreme, as there was nothing like it in the whole of the UK." - The Comedy Store [source]
The British alternative comedy movement would involve few Oxford alumni, by design. Despite the acknowledged influence of Monty Python on their work [source], Sayle and others were openly contemptuous towards the ubiquity and overall insubstantiality of many Oxbridge-originated acts [source]. Nonetheless, it is at least tempting to hypothesise that Atkinson's early successes, though not alternative comedy by any means, were an early indication for the emerging audience tastes that would fuel the Comedy Store two years later - an appetite for stranger, more intimate, personality-driven performance.
The issue, though, with gestating a comedy act so conceptually different from a standard revue format is that the standard revue format still occupied considerable theatrical space. Rowan Atkinson, Richard Curtis, Howard Goodall and Helen Atkinson Wood did not operate within a vacuum of unchallenged innovation, but alongside colleagues with their own comic ambitions, including for more familiar sketch concepts. Reconciling such disparate comedic approaches within a single show would be tonally challenging, if not impossible.
Of course, periods of poor critical reception had been weathered by Oxford theatre before. Indeed, for most undergraduates, the objective quality of O.U.D.S. and E.T.C. productions was (and is) secondary to these societies being a place to have fun with friends.
"...undergraduates these days can be seen scurrying... on their way to the Etceteras... where they are putting in three years' serious tap-dancing and funny voices before sliding comfortably behind a desk at Whitehall..." - Jeremy Treglown, The Times, 1977 [source].
Atkinson, on the other hand, had a gestating public persona and ambitions to professionally pursue performance - he had invested considerable time to contacting nine potential agents ahead of the O.T.G.'s 1976 Oxford Revue (eventually snaring Richard Armitage from Noel Gay Artists for the task) [source]. From his perspective, if he was to realistically continue his upwards trajectory, he could no longer tolerate being a part of a bloated and mediocre student production. Unfortunately, the 1977 Fringe offering The Oxford Revue - Beyond A Joke was shaping up to be exactly that - its disjointed structure a far cry from a slick show like Celebration (which was almost transferred to Fringe intact as that year's Revue).
Pictured - the poster for Beyond A Joke, the 1977 Oxford Revue featuring Rowan Atkinson. Photo and design by Paul Yule/Berwick Universal Pictures (https://www.paulyule.com/shop/rowan-atkinson-book/).
"The first night was awful... It was full of long parodies of Brecht and the like which, if you're going to get away with it anywhere then Edinburgh will let you get away with it, but it wasn't really the stuff of popular entertainment. ...I thought it wasn't working, so I cancelled it for three nights and we rustled together a new revue. ...Just showing the audience over the road into the pub instead of into your theatre because you haven't got anything to do for them." - Rowan Atkinson, reproduced in Michael Dale's Sore Throats and Overdrafts: an illustrated story of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, 1988 [source].
Richard Curtis, Howard Goodall and Helen Atkinson Wood were already invested in another O.T.G. show at the 1977 Edinburgh Fringe - The Loved One, a musical based on Evelyn Waugh's satire of show business [source]. They also numbered among the few remaining crewmembers of Beyond A Joke. The 1977 Oxford Revue was, for the rest of its run, purely a showcase for the talents of Atkinson and his clique, as Celebration had been before it.
"CONDUCTOR
Rowan Enters
poises to start
Raises Hands
First two bars
Turns page
poises & raises Hands
Music Continues
FAKE BOW
Music ends - Ro stabs himself
B/O [Blackout]"
- Rowan Atkinson's Beyond A Joke script for 'Conductor', reproduced in Paul Yule's The Emerging Genius of Rowan Atkinson, 2020 [source].
"The Oxford Revue is always a distinctive event on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe; 1977 is no exception... deliciously and hilariously so, thanks to Rowan Atkinson whose extraordinarily inventive face can cause chuckles or cascades of mirth, seemingly at will." - The Stage, 1977 [source].
"For the second year running, Oxford's "revue" has been plucked from obscurity by the brilliant comic genius of Rowan Atkinson..." - The Evening News, 1977 [source].
The unique character of the regenerated Beyond A Joke was especially apparent when contrasted against that year's Cambridge Footlights Fringe revue, Tag!, directed by Griff Rhys Jones (Atkinson's future television co-star) under the presidency of Jimmy Mulville [source].
With the conclusion of the Edinburgh Fringe, Atkinson then performed his version of Beyond A Joke across the UK (including, on January 29th and April 23rd 1978, at the Oxford Playhouse [source]). While he had had an agent for over a year, the transformation of a typical Oxford Revue student show into a nationally touring one-man performance was the true beginning of Atkinson's professional life as an entertainer - it is no surprise that he abandoned his planned Oxford post-graduate studies around this time.
Pictured - the poster for Beyond A Joke, the 1978 one-man show starring Rowan Atkinson (Helen Atkinson Wood was not available to perform as the 'straight man' for the tour). The credit to both the Etceteras and the O.T.G., despite this being an independent professional show, is of note and will be discussed later. Photos and design by Paul Yule/Berwick Universal Pictures (https://www.paulyule.com/shop/rowan-atkinson-book/).
One (probably July 1978) performance of Beyond A Joke at London's Hampstead Theatre [source] was enjoyed by John Cleese, who invited Atkinson to participate in the Secret Policeman's Ball - the third in a series of high-profile charity performances co-formulated by Cleese to raise money for Amnesty International [source]. The Ball at His Majesty's Theatre on 27th-30th June 1979 [source] saw Atkinson rub shoulders with Peter Cook of Beyond The Fringe, and even perform the famous Monty Python 'Four Yorkshiremen' routine alongside fellow Revue alumni Michael Palin and Terry Jones [source].
1979 was the most high-profile year of Rowan Atkinson's career so far, starting with April's BBC Radio series The Atkinson People. Producer John Lloyd, another fan of Beyond A Joke [source], then facilitated Atkinson's first television role - Not The Nine O'Clock News, a BBC2 sketch show which began its four series run on October 16th 1979 [source]. The programme also featured the work of Richard Curtis and Howard Goodall, who were both involved Atkinson's Fringe show that same year - the venue for which had to be constructed from the wreckage of an old factory a mere month before the show's premiere [source].
"I tried to muck in, because I was very keen on truck driving at the time and I'd just got my heavy good vehicle licence, so I was very taken with the idea of carting 50 tons of scaffolding around!" - Rowan Atkinson, reproduced in Michael Dale's Sore Throats and Overdrafts: an illustrated story of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, 1988 [source].
Pictured - the poster for Rowan Atkinson and Richard Curtis's 1979 Fringe show at the Wireworks Theatre (Curtis is visible at the base of the lamp-post). Photo and design by Paul Yule/Berwick Universal Pictures (https://www.paulyule.com/shop/rowan-atkinson-book/).
In hindsight, the most significant aspect of the year was the first appearence of sketches that would end up featuring in the 1990-1995 ITV show Mr. Bean.
"As a comic representation of masculinity, Mr Bean presents us with a male character that is in a constant struggle to maintain some sort of balance in his everyday existence. All of his actions are tinged with the very real possibility of collapsing into chaos and with it the destabilisation of the social fabric around him. While the character would continually appear to be descending into an incredulous display of disorder and chaos, it is always interesting to find that the character of Mr Bean still remains intact and unscathed by these events at the end of every sketch." - Dr. Patricia Neville, Side-splitting masculinity: comedy, Mr Bean and the representation of masculinities in contemporary society, 2009 [source].
Contrary to popular journalistic opinion, the consolidated 'Mr. Bean' persona was only invented for the television show (the name 'Mr. White' was even briefly considered for the character) [source]. Atkinson played many 'Bean-like' characters, however, throughout the late 1970s and 1980s - one 1980 episode of BBC2's The Innes Book of Records, for instance, featured Atkinson lecturing about church organs (a tribute, perhaps, to his first Oxford love) [source] in a familiarly cartoonish voice.
The acceleration of Rowan Atkinson's career between 1977's Oxford Revue and 1979's Not The Nine O'Clock News had huge implications for the comedy industry. The 1977 Edinburgh Fringe was the first to exceed 3000 performances and 200,000 tickets [source], and Atkinson's shows headlined the festival's transformation from an informal collective of largely student productions to a highly profitable affair.
The Oxford Revue's public association with Rowan Atkinson and his close-knit clique also affected its connectivity with the Etceteras. The respective assemblages of actors involved with the E.T.C. and the O.T.G. were progressively diverging, and barely a year after Atkinson's departure, the Etceteras/Revue pairing that had once structurally framed Oxford student comedy was no more.
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It is frankly unsurprising that Angus Deayton and Philip Pope became friends so hastily - both were modern language undergraduates at New College, with a shared sense of humour and, most coincidentally of all, Scottish ancestry on their respective mothers' side. They were both also involved in student theatre, co-founding the New College Drama Society, yet their forays into comedy were initially somewhat limited - at least until their respective encounters with Richard Curtis. Unlike Rowan Atkinson, Curtis had not left the university yet, instead fronting the next O.T.G Oxford Revue, the first since Atkinson's departure - 1978's One's Company.
Pictured - the poster for 1978's Oxford Revue - One's Company. Richard Curtis's spoken opening to the show (reproduced at the beginning of this article) reflects the theme of romantic isolation, possibly inspired by the break-up with his Oxford girlfriend Carolyn Colquhuon (who had previously dated Rowan Atkinson) [source].
"The band's backing is once again of a high standard, but their own piece, 'I Wanna Hold Your Man', is depressingly unoriginal. If they want to laugh at gays they should leave it to Larry Grayson [British comedian]." - Review of One's Company by 'R.L.', 1978.
"The Oxford Theatre Group kick the Fringe post-pub, post-play, post-prandial performances off to a chirpy start with their assortment of pun, fun, music, dance and nonsense. ...a revue that is not tyrannised by a desperate preoccupation with current affairs... the cast's variety of face and form and presence along with the diversity in mode and material make a pleasantly light nightcap." - David Campbell, Scottish and Universal Newspapers [source], 1978.
Whereas 1977's Beyond A Joke was notable for its minimalist writing approach and reliance on Atkinson's physical humour, One's Company allowed Richard Curtis (along with Angus Deayton and the show's director Andrew Rissik) to relish a certain verbosity in their script-writing - sometimes to the press's annoyance.
"The sketches tend to be too long, searching for an ending rather than snapping out with a twist. The show palls somehow. Put it this way, I noticed how uncomfortable the seats were." - Review of One's Company by 'R.L.',, 1978.
The final sketch of the show was a behemoth - a 15 minute long comic dissection of Shakespearean works, parodically drenched in the tropes of medieval royalty and familial betrayal. To a modern observer, the fact that the piece would one day evolve into Curtis's critically acclaimed TV comedy Blackadder is grossly apparent. More specifically, the sketch's plot and characters show distinct parallels to those of the 1983 episode The Black Seal - 7 minutes and 14 seconds in, there is even a primitive forebear to the series's famous 'I have a cunning plan' running joke.
"Though I be a bastard, I am not slight of wit. And in my mind I have a plan most slippery-sly and yet most slyly slipper. Most cunning and yet most... cunning."- Richard Curtis's One's Company script for 'Shakespeare', 1978.
A recording of this 'Blackadder prototype' was uncovered and digitised in 2023 for the purposes of this Archive, and is published here in full for the first time.
Pictured - the 'Shakespeare' sketch, featuring, left to right: Helen Atkinson Wood, Tim McInnerny, Angus Deayton, Karen Rasmussen, Alan Halliday, Sue Swift and Richard Curtis. The house band is visible at the back of the stage. Tim McInnerny would later play the characters of Lord Percy Percy and Captain Darling in Blackadder - Helen Atkinson Wood and Angus Deayton would also feature in the show. Photo by Paul Yule/Berwick Universal Pictures (https://www.paulyule.com/shop/rowan-atkinson-book/).
"Minor Jacobean tragedy, brimming over with epithets of lust, intrigue and death, is the final uproarious sketch, ending with the whole company a pile of Renaissance corpses. ...One's Company certainly puts Oxford back at the top of the revue league, with the equal laurels to all the cast." - Review of One's Company by Brian G. Cooper, The Stage, 1978.
Many One's Company sketches were subsequently reprised for 1979's show Inferiors at the Oxford Playhouse. This O.U.D.S. production even included a one-off appearance of Rowan Atkinson himself, who had watched and presumably enjoyed the 1978 Fringe show - as part of Inferiors, Atkinson performed both extracts of his professional show and roles in One's Company material, including the 'Shakespeare' sketch.
While Atkinson's 'Shakespeare' performance is unfortunately unrecorded, Inferiors does foretell his starring role in Blackadder. Rowan Atkinson is also not only credited as a co-writer for The Black Seal, but may be personally responsible for the name Blackadder itself. Members of the real-life Blackadder family studied at the University of Dundee, the Theatre Group of which had facilitated Atkinson's 1975 Fringe appearance in Measure for Measure [source]. Coincidentally, a month after Inferiors, many Revue players, including Helen Atkinson Wood, performed a version of Measure for Measure themselves [source].
Pictured - the poster for 1979's Inferiors. Note that the production, despite being a comedy revue in Oxford, is unaffiliated with the Etceteras - the connection between the Revue and the Etceteras was severed. Photo and design by Paul Yule/Berwick Universal Pictures (https://www.paulyule.com/shop/rowan-atkinson-book/).
By the time of Inferiors, Richard Curtis had moved to London, graduating from Oxford with a first class degree and working alongside Rowan Atkinson fulltime. Even with his burgeoning professional career, however, Curtis still clearly valued his undergraduate days, not least in how his domestic environment remained similar to that at his Oxford accommodation.
"..[Curtis] lives in an unchanged student atmosphere with three friends in a London house. He reads his putatively humorous material to the inmates, testing reactions. 'If it requires them to be in the right mood, it is no good,' he says. 'You have got to interrupt in the middle of a severe financial crisis when the milk is boiling over and say, ‘Is this funny?’ Then I leave it for a day.'" - British Vogue, 1981 [source].
Angus Deayton was an obvious choice to produce the 1979 Oxford Revue at the Edinburgh Fringe, and was enthused to instil the themes and flavours of his personal fixations into the production.
Pictured - the poster for 1979's Oxford Revue - You'll Have Had Your Tea. Once again, the Revue shared their Fringe venue with the Footlights' show (Nightcap, featuring Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson [source]), along with four other O.T.G. productions (Sylvia Plath, Brecht & Company, Heroes and The Lorenzaccio Story).
"Fast and funny late-night entertainment to keep you up until well past your bedtime." - Oxford Revue poster, 1979.
One of the six cast members in You'll Have Had Your Tea, Michael Fenton-Stevens, holds a particular significance of the annals of Oxford student comedy. Formally credited as 'Mike Sterno' to placate potential Equity concerns, he was the first recorded performer in the Revue to hail from Oxford's other centre of undergraduate study - the 'Oxford Polytechnic', then part of a 30-year governmental initiative to re-categorise providers of higher education (usually down class lines) [source][source].
"During this period over 50 existing technical and other colleges were combined into 30 institutions in a nonuniversity, "public" sector in order to address the increasing need for vocational, professional, and industrial-based courses that could not be met by the universities. The polytechnics, which had more than 150,000 students by 1973, were unlike the universities; they had more undergraduate than graduate students, more part-time students, and more "sandwich" students (who alternate between jobs and courses)." - John Pratt, The Polytechnic Experiment, 1997 [source].
The Polytechnic had begun its existence in 1865 as the Oxford School of Art, occupying a floor within the city's Taylor Institution, and became Oxford Brookes University in 1992 [source]. To this day, Brookes students rarely interact with Oxford University student theatre, a recent exception being the 69th co-president of the Revue troupe. Michael Fenton Stevens was not only cast in You'll Have Had Your Tea in 1979, but also in the O.T.G.'s Sylvia Plath and The Lorenzaccio Story.
"This year called 'You'll Have Had Your Tea' - the traditional Scottish larder-saving welcome. Following in the footsteps of Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Dudley Moore - the same successful blend of sketches and songs." - O.T.G. St Mary's Hall programme, 1979.
The criterion for Michael Fenton-Stevens's Revue casting - the ability to replicate the famed falsetto of the Bee Gees [source] - reflected a comedic concept which had naturally evolved from One's Company's 'Disco Dance' musical opening (for which actors donned Grease-like costumes). Performances of a new parody music group - the 'Hee Bee Gee Bees' - saw Angus Deayton, Philip Pope and Fenton-Stevens acting as harmonic proxies for Bee Gees' frontmen Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb.
Such was the success of the 'Hee Bee Gee Bees' that the trio not only performed as the group for the 1979 Revue's finale, but throughout their post-Oxford lives - the recording below, for instance, originates from a live show in 1981. An official 'Hee Bee Gee Bees' single, recorded at Stockport's Strawberry Studios in 1980 [source], even managed to reach number 2 in the Bee Gees' native Australia [source], apparently frustrating the emotionally fraught Gibb brothers [source].
"Although such low-budget, one-off ventures usually sink tracelessly, this one looks like doing very well. The boys have performed... on television and, most importantly, Radio One has chosen it as a Record of the Week - possibly the best road to chart success. No doubt, we will be hearing much more of this in future." - Review of the 'Meaningless Songs (In Very High Voices)' single, 1980.
Richard Curtis's return to co-write 'Meaningless Songs' is scarcely surprising. He and Philip Pope had previously entertained rowdy crowds on guitar in New College's rustic 'Long Room' [source] during the esteemed Trinity Term Commemoration Ball. What was maybe more perplexing was Curtis's sudden directorial control over the 1979 Revue - all while remaining involved in Rowan Atkinson's Fringe solo show at the Wireworks (as detailed prior).
The theatre programme for You'll Have Had Your Tea lists 'Angus Deayton and the cast' as the Revue's director, with Richard Curtis and Eddy Canfor-Dumas delegated to 'special thanks'.
"Presented slickly and with strong musical backing in the breezily mindless format of a local radio disc-and-chat show, this year's Oxford Revue has many amusing moments, and some sheer hilarity, but is weakened by some uneven material." - Review of You'll Have Had Your Tea by Brian G. Cooper, The Stage, 1979.
"This Oxford Revue company opened their show very modestly. ...Then little bits of sparkle began to creep in until, latterly, the performance was raging with good fun. If there is any lesson here, it is that when you have an audience waiting at 11 pm, not at its most receptive and forgiving, you should start by beating them over the skulls, metaphorically." - Review of You'll Have Had Your Tea by Anthony Troon, The Scotsman, 1979.
"The show was long, over-long, with goodish music and a goodish audience. It also had this insufferable Edinburgh Fringe thing called 'enthusiasm'." - Review of You'll Have Had Your Tea by The Glasgow Herald, 1979.
Despite a broadly mixed reception, You'll Have Had Your Tea was appreciated by audience members Geoffrey Perkins and Jimmy Mulville, two former Oxbridge comedy players now employed at the BBC Radio Light Entertainment Department - the former of whom had recently produced The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy [source][source]. The 1979 Revue's framing device of a radio broadcast had naturally received particular attention from the pair, and the show's adaptation into a successful radio pilot was thus organic, especially when adorned with the now more marketable title Radio Active. Recorded on 26th January 1980 and broadcast on 8th April, the cast was largely retained from the show's previous iteration as a Revue, with the addition of Helen Atkinson Wood (who, as O.T.G. director, had not been directly involved in You'll Have Had Your Tea).
With his creation picked up for a full series, Angus Deayton was awarded a BBC Radio Comedy Writers' Bursary, keeping him with the corporation's remit until Radio Active's full-scale debut in September 1981 [source][source]. Deayton was swift to use his newfound financial freedom to develop a nationally touring stage iteration of the radio show (including a stint at Edinburgh) - directed by Eddy Canfor-Dumas, co-written by Deayton and Richard Curtis and starring Deayton, Helen Atkinson Wood, Philip Pope and Geoffrey Perkins. Michael Fenton-Stevens was absent, temporarily replaced by UCL student and 1979 Revue cast-member David Jackson Young.
"Revue is a notoriously difficult form of theatre to sustain. The actors must be highly versatile, the script must be sharp throughout and the production must be tight. With just one of these missing, all sinks. It is therefore with pleasure that I can say that I have just seen one of the most hilarious revues for years. Satire and wit have survived." - Review of Radio Active by J. Y. Simpson, The Scotsman, 1980.
"All the ingredients for a successful Fringe revue. So far, the highlight of a less than inspiring Fringe." - Review of Radio Active by The Jewish Echo, 1980.
Alongside its seven series on BBC Radio 4 between 1981 and 1987, as well as a later BBC 2 television adaptation KYTV [source], Radio Active maintained a semi-regular stage presence - often recycling Revue material, including the ever-popular 'Hee Bee Gee Bees'.
Pictured - Geoffrey Perkins [1953-2008], circa 1990.
***
Radio Active is certainly within the hallowed halls of Oxford-originated fame, loftily exhibiting its cast upon a nationally conspicuous pedestal. Indeed, participation in a successful Oxford Revue between 1953 and 1980 seems to have been a sure-fire procedure to be elevated as such. With this in mind, we must ask an uncomfortable question - why is the Oxford Revue (both the show and its associated modern-day troupe) so obscure to the layperson? Why does no one care about modern Oxford student comedy shows anymore?
Revues as a genre, while previously evolving from witty to satirical to surreal to stay relevant, were dealt a terminal blow by the triumph of alternative comedy and its associated stand-ups. Parallels can be drawn with the fate of the 1960s 'satire boom' projects - Beyond The Fringe, Hang Down Your Head and Die etc. - in terms of the influence of external political factors. The rise of Thatcherism altered the socio-cultural engagement of potential audiences - the more protest-driven alternative comedy was simply better adapted to this new landscape (even if said protest had little tangible effect on actual policy [source]). The election of Margaret Thatcher and Alexei Sayle's opening night of the Comedy Store were separated by a mere 15 days.
"Whereas the satire boom had touched upon politics through the nature of its targets and a wider public debate over whether it really changed anything, alternative comedy foregrounded a set of avowedly resistant concerns with anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-capitalism and ‘Thatcher’." - James Brassett, Alternative Comedy and Resistance to Thatcher's Britain, 2021 [source].
Regardless of their content or tone, Oxbridge revues were considered old-fashioned at best and repulsively state-aligned at worst - almost half of Conservative MPs in 1979 were Oxford or Cambridge graduates [source].
In this way, 1981 represented a palpable turning point - the Cambridge Footlights' Perrier Award at that year's Edinburgh Fringe remains, to this day, the only instance a student troupe has received such an honour [source]. Some critical commentary of Radio Active, though positive, alluded to its archaic nature when compared to more fashionable contemporaries.
"It is hardly a criticism of the show, but if there was anything wrong with Radio Active, it lacked the tinge of lunacy that I have come to expect of British humor, if not Britain, in recent years. The show puts British humor back about 20 years. It is cleverly put together, and very funny, but it is not as exciting as some of the country's more recent productions."- Review of Radio Active by Tim Lloyd, 1981.
Even Rowan Atkinson's solo career, championed as a brazenly unique spin on the art of revue, began to flag in popularity in the 1980s.
"In 1980, I felt the backlash. ...I didn't go back to Edinburgh until 1986, six years on, because there was incredible cynicism. You know, the Festival Times and all these kind of things populated by 18 year-old journalists. They will tend, like the record press, to praise anyone who's unknown and pour large buckets of excreta over anyone who is known." - Rowan Atkinson, reproduced in Michael Dale's Sore Throats and Overdrafts: an illustrated story of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, 1988 [source].
"["Have you ever invested?"] Yes, all a disaster, such as Rowan Atkinson’s New York show in the mid-80s. I thought he was super-famous, it can’t fail. It lasted three nights, and I lost £10,000." - John Lloyd (comedy producer), 2024 [source].
Yet the Cambridge Footlights and their shows have retained some level of fame up to today - why not Oxford's output? Maybe it's an overreliance on the word 'revue' in Oxford's branding. Once widely known, its usage in literature has been in freefall since the 1980s [source], with UK Google searches similarly falling by ~75% since 2004 [source] - its phonetic similarity to 'review' also complicates matters, making the Oxford Revue sound like a newspaper when described aloud (it's telling that the 1980 Revue had to be titled 'Revue With A U').
The issue also probably stems from the fact that the title 'Oxford revue' has not been exclusively tied to a single company. We have already discussed the Etceteras' Oxford-based revues and the Fringe Oxford Revue, along with the colleges' internal theatre groups [source]. The 1970s, however, additionally saw an unprecedented number of Oxford-originated Fringe revues, alongside the primary O.T.G. effort.
One example of these 'new revues' is 1977's Knockers by the 'Oxford Actors Company', a temporarily assembled coterie of those who had been involved in the Etceteras prior to the rise of Rowan Atkinson - including Robert Orchard and Robin Seavill (with even Professor Wyndham John Albery credited as a co-writer). Ironically, it directly competed against Atkinson's seminal One's Company.
"The Edinburgh Fringe has always been associated with comedy. …In 1977, it was our turn. …Rob Orchard, an old mate who had given me my first roles in revue, asked if I’d be interested in joining the little group he was putting together for a two-week run. Flattered he still remembered me, I started writing immediately. ...We played at St Columba’s by the Castle, a church hall in the shadow of the scaffolding holding up the seating for the annual Tattoo. We did two shows a day – at 1:10pm and 11:45pm – and spent the rest of the time enjoying the vibe, seeing other shows, and generally hanging out. The streets were packed and the weather was Scottish." - Robin Seavill, 2023 [source].
Many Fringe shows produced by recent Oxford graduates at this time were also confusingly marketed as 'Oxford revues'. As seen above, posters for Rowan Atkinson's first professional show still confusingly declared 'Etceteras present the Oxford University Theatre Group Revue', while the stage cast of Radio Active dubbed themselves the 'Oxford Revue Group' in early performances.
Pictured - the poster for 1980's Radio Active by the 'Oxford Revue Group', not to be confused with 1980's Oxford Revue by the O.T.G..
Perhaps the most brazen example of the genericization of the 'Oxford Revue' also represents the extent to which the O.T.G. and E.T.C. had socially detached from one another by the end of the 1970s. The Edinburgh Fringe of 1979 saw not only You'll Have Had Your Tea and Rowan Atkinson's solo show, but another separate Etceteras-run revue, operated by the troupe's Paul Twivy and Ian Hislop [source]. Hislop was already an established force of humour - producing comedic shows at secondary school with fellow pupil Nick Newman, with whom he then published the satirical Oxford journal Passing Wind [source].
"I can't act, comedy is all I can do - so I put on reviews [sic] with The Etceteras, which is not a formal organisation like the Cambridge Footlights, but is basically a bank account which you could get your hands on." - Ian Hislop, The Independent, 1998 [source].
The magnitude of active animosity between the O.T.G. and Etcetera revues is not clear - Paul Twivy is listed in the 'special thanks' of the former's 1979 theatre programme - but a hypothetical student rivalry between Angus Deayton and Ian Hislop would forecast the two's later professional relationship [source][source].
"I went up to the Edinburgh Festival, performing two shows [in 1979 and 1980] which I'd written or co-written. Imogen Stubbs was the girl in the shows; she could act, which rather shocked us." - Ian Hislop, The Independent, 1998 [source].
Imogen Stubbs was a last minute addition to the Etceteras' 1980 Fringe show (titled Spaced), following the drop-out of another cast-member. In fact, at that point she had already been cast with the O.T.G.'s Oxford Revue - Revue with a U - via an audition for Angus Deayton - and so had to juggle the effectively competing revues at the same time (along with a dramatic role in the Doug Lucie play Poison).
"I had done a lot of revue shows at Oxford, and was hoping to become Emma Thompson. Somehow I ended up being cast as simpering blonde girls who cry a lot." - Imogen Stubbs, The Guardian, 2013 [source].
"I was the Duke of Kent and had to skate around my mate as I said ‘Come not between the dragon and his wrath'. ...We obviously received a rapturous reception." - Ian Hislop, Ox In A Box, 2022 [source].
Compared with the obscure oddities of Spaced, Revue with a U grew from more satirical sinews, with parodies of American TV show Dallas and the Sex Pistols' 1976 hit 'Anarchy in the UK' - but to little in the way of success.
Despite an underwhelming beginning, Stubbs's stage life in Oxford progressed throughout the next two years, a frankly exhausting balance between comedy revues and more serious drama - including a part in Privileged, a lavishly costumed and sexually charged 1982 independent film which also starred the then-unknown Hugh 'Hughie' Grant [source][source].
"It was in the middle of my exams... It was a real blur because meanwhile I'm trying to learn all about the Scottish medieval poets. And we were filming at night. I do remember thinking, 'I don't need this'." - Imogen Stubbs, The Telegraph, 2023 [source].
Oxford revues were on a back foot, stuck between the extremities of alternative comedy and shameless Footlight-adjacent charm offensives. Yet, as is usually the case, the simplest solutions are often the best. Imogen Stubbs recalls a small-scale show at the BT Studio in the summer of 1982, the players of which also included English student Frank Boyce - who would marry the following year under the name 'Frank Cottrell Boyce' and pursue a decorated writing career (becoming the Children's Laureate in 2024) [source][source].
The small-scale production was populated with unusual sketch conceits, including one involving a ripcord that could turn a nun costume into a penguin (which may well have appealed to Boyce's Catholicism [source]). Its stripped-back approach was arguably its greatest asset, shedding any self-indulgence and decadence which had hitherto stoked the negative public opinion of revues. The individual performers were forefront, matching, at last, the true allure of the alternative or stand-up comedian - honesty and perspective. In a way, the show had relearned the same lessons as Celebration - the BT Studio show that had codified Rowan Atkinson's act five years before.
This was how the art of revue was to survive in Oxford in the 1980s - little in any pomp or pretence, and large in personality. This was not without cost - the name 'Oxford Revue' was still an exploitable asset, and around this chapter of the narrative, for whatever reason, the Etceteras were fully absorbed into the mythos of the O.T.G. Revue. By 1988, the two entities were being readily confused.
"The Oxford Revue was originally set up by the Experimental Theatre Club (E.T.C.) in Oxford as The Etceteras." - Oxford Revue - Waving At The Pigeons programme, 1988 [source].
While the E.T.C. remained, nothing did of the Etceteras - only the Oxford Revue survived. As the 1980s continued, Oxford student comedy was suddenly smaller than ever, and ripe for invention, or for disaster. Perhaps the best way to stay toe-to-toe with alternative comedy was to become more like it - but was this even possible?
Pictured - a slightly obscured (and subsequently reconstructed) poster for the 1982 Oxford Revue, Dinosaur Can-Can.