ROWAN ATKINSON RECORDING AND TRANSCRIPT

Rowan Atkinson's interview was conducted over the phone - given the resulting sound quality, a complete transcript is provided alongside an edited version of the conversation.  Extracts included in the 'exhibit' page are highlighted. Interviewer quotes are presented [as so]. Additional notes and clarifications are marked with N.B..

 

The interview begins with Atkinson describing when he first began to perform comedy in Oxford and met his future writing partner Richard Curtis.

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‘…1975? That I met Richard Curtis, who I’ve worked [with] ever since.’

 

[So where did you guys meet?]

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‘We MET at … do you still have a thing called ‘Daily Information’? It’s probably not a major…’

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[It doesn't ring a bell for me.]

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‘Er, what, sorry?’

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[It doesn't ring a bell for me!]

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‘Okay, ‘Daily Information’ was a big sort of broadsheet bit of paper that went up on message boards and that was the only way of communicating, y’know, communication between students. And it went up on every noticeboard in and around the university. Anyway, it was like a posted newspaper, if you like, and on a column I saw invitations to anyone who’d be interested in getting involved with comedy revue to go to a guy called John Albery’s room at ‘Univ’, University College, for a meeting. John Albery was a fellow… I think in chemistry or science? Science fellow of some sort at ‘Univ’. And he was organising a revue, which would be put on in eighth week, in May ‘76. So I thought “Well, I’ve done comedy revue or tried to…”. I didn’t do anything in my first term generally, but towards the end, once I could find a gap in between the organ recitals, I thought “I’ll go along to this meeting.” And there were a number of us there, and Richard was one of those. Richard described me as being like… a cushion! He described me as being like a cushion, because I sat on the chair and said nothing at that particular meeting. Anyway, that was how we met. John Albery organised - I don’t know if he directed, I think it was another of Richard’s called [?Andrew Rissik] who might have directed the show…

 

‘Anyway, John Albery was a slightly powerful figure in Univ, he was a fellow and then he went away to Imperial College or something, and then he came back and was master of Univ, and he sort of stayed in strange and unbreakable ways and I think the governing body tried to de-bar him, or whatever the term is, from being master of Univ. Anyway, it was through him, and through him harbouring whatever talent wanted to meet in his room that evening in late 1975, was how I sort of connected with Oxford and Oxford Revue and in particular with Richard Curtis.’

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[So what did you guys work on initially?]

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‘Erm I think we did… well, we were working on sketches for the show staged in May ‘76. But I remember doing- there was an off-show, a one night show at the Oxford Playhouse. The revue we did in MAY was called the ‘After Eights Revue’, I remember, and there was an added relation to after-dinner chocolate. But anyway, we did this one night I think much earlier, maybe in February or March, Hilary Term, which was- yeah, I can’t remember. I was asked to do something and I remember in order to prepare for it, I just stood in front of a mirror and started to pull faces. It was the first time I’d ever engaged in such an exercise. Anyway, I thought what I was looking at looked quite funny to me, so I concocted some rather substance-less sketch about a man coming on stage with a piece of paper and trying to give it away to the audience, but just spouting gobbledygook as he was doing it. And if any member of the audience tried to take it, he then got rather annoyed. It was a simple but also slightly complex, slightly surreal thing. But anyway, I went down very well and that I think was the first sketch I actually performed in Oxford. And then as I say, me and eight or nine of us performers gathered to put on this revue at the Oxford Playhouse in eighth week in 1976.’

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[I was interviewing Howard Goodall the other day, and he mentioned how you continued to work on Mr Gobbledegook, as he called it.]

 

‘Continued to work on it? Yes yes, he did reappear occasionally. He did appear in the one-man comedy revues that I did for many years afterwards, that I did at the West End. He was a sort of peripheral kind of linking character I think rather than a stand alone sketch character. He was a very simple man. We continued to do him as long as we did the live show, but it was in the live show that he featured the most.

 

‘And then Howard came along the end of my first year, so that would be October ‘76, when I was sort of hanging around the freshers fair, the ETC stall, I guess it would be, or the Etceteras stall… do you still call them Etceteras? The revue?’

 

[No, the Etceteras got absorbed into the… it’s just called ‘The Oxford Revue’. The whole troupe is called the Revue.]

 

 ‘ Okay, fine. Anyway, Howard, who was a very young muso, had just come to Christchurch to study music and anyway he seemed very enthusiastic about the idea of being involved in comedy revues. So we got him onboard. I remember at the Fresher’s Fair in Michaelmas ‘76.’

 

[So where are the kind of places in Oxford where you guys would hang out? What were the local haunts so to speak? Howard mentioned that your place on Woodstock Road was a common place for people to congregate.]

 

‘Yes that’s true! …And yeah we used to congregate there. [?] Howard would come by… I remember going to Browns a lot. Does Browns still exist?’

 

[Think so? [N.B. It does!]]

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‘Erm, we were there a lot, that was a sort of eatery. Apart from that, yeah that was about it really. Apart from that, it was just where we would rehearse. I remember the building, y’know, the rehearsal room on the back of the Playhouse [N.B. the BT studio]. But pubs were generally where people met but we tended not to.’

 

[What was the Edinburgh fringe like? When did you first go up there and how was that when you first went with this lot?]

 

‘There was a play at school so that would’ve been about 1973, was when I first went up there with a strange satirical play called ‘We Bombed in New Haven’ by Joseph Heller. And I was only 18 at the time. Then I didn’t go in ‘74 or ‘75? But then in ‘76, I think we took - I seem to remember unless I’m remembering this wrongly - I think we took a version of the ‘After Eights Revue’ that we’d done in May ‘76. We took it to Edinburgh for the Fringe in 1976. And then I think I went again in…1977 or did I? I’m trying to remember now. Oh well. I ACTUALLY went to the Fringe before that again, I think in ‘74 or ‘75, to do a production of ‘Measure for Measure’, playing a serious role of Angelo in ‘Measure for Measure’ but rather confusingly with the Dundee University Theatre Group, which I knew from friends from school who went to Dundee University. And they asked if I wanted to be in their production, so I was doing that.

 

‘But then the third time I went with the Oxford Revue, I think was in ‘76. I think we took the Oxford review up again in ‘77?… Yeah. And then I did a show in London in summer seventy…And then I think we went to the Wireworks [Theatre on High Street Edinburgh] again, which is what we called the ‘Oxford revue’ [N.B. this was Rowan’s show, not the ‘official’ Revue - R. Atkinson discusses this later] in ‘79. The Wireworks is a venue just off the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. Sorry, these dates may not be 100% accurate but as far as I tell, in ‘73, ‘74, ‘76, ‘78, ‘79 and I think ‘80, I went to Edinburgh Fringe in all those, on all those years. I think 1980 was the last time, when we didn’t go with the ‘Oxford revue’, we sort of did a version of a show which we eventually took into the West End in 1981. We went to the George Square theatre [N.B. now Assembly George Square], was that what it was called? Generally with Oxford we were at the St Mary’s Street Hall, which I don’t think is a venue anymore… I think it’s still a venue but it’s not used during the Fringe.

 

‘…One or two of the later shows were more like- I mean, certainly 1980 was a virtual one man show, as you say, but so was ‘79. I don’t know if ‘79 was officially the Oxford Revue, or whether we’d split from the official Oxford revue thing? I think it was still the official Oxford revue in ‘79 but then 1980, I think there was an Oxford Revue going on as well as what we were doing in the George Square Theatre. And that was the last time I performed on the Fringe in 1980, until I went back 1986, after we did the second version of the one man show on the West End with Angus Deayton. We went back. I remember doing four or five shows in the Playhouse, a big barn in Edinburgh. And I think it was during the Fringe, but our show definitely wasn’t a Fringe show.

 

‘Yeah I think, generally speaking, I was in the vanguard, for good or ill, of people who went to Edinburgh not just to have fun or show their wares, but actually to make money. Y’know to go there with a commercial head, and to the fore. I think the Assembly Rooms and the Pleasance and all that sort of highly commercialised presentation of the Fringe - they were rooted, I think, in what we started to do at the end of the seventies.’

 

[Were there any instances where comedy ideas that appeared in your professional career had their origin, originated from the Etceteras or the Revue days? Were there any instances where that was the case?]

 

‘Well it was certainly when we were developing the - as I say, I wish I could remember whether it was officially the Oxford Revue in 1979, but I THINK it was officially the Oxford Revue. And certainly when we were preparing for the ‘79 show, that was where Mr Bean was rooted, because I know we were rehearsing in a theatre in the Midlands - at Uppingham, at the Uppingham School Theatre. And that was where Richard said he had always been a great admirer of Jacques Tati and purely visual comedy - "Why don’t we try and encroach some sketches without words?" And that was where the ‘Beach’ sketch and the ‘Falling Asleep In Church During The Sermon’ sketch which eventually became live action Mr Bean sketches. They are all rooted in that particular show in ‘79.  Certainly the start of my sort of state of playing priests and vicars, that certainly started in a show we did in ‘76. Yeah that first ‘After Eights Revue’…

 

‘Yeah there was an awful lot of sort of… let’s say, themes and styles were established in the Oxford revue when we were doing it. And as I say, one character in particular, Mr Bean, was definitely developed while we were still students.’

 

[Was it a straight line from Mr Gobbledegook, so to speak, to Mr Bean? Or were they different entities?]

 

‘They were different really, yes. I mean, Me Bean, he didn’t have a name, we didn’t CALL him Mr Bean. He was just the person I naturally became when I was denied words to express myself with. But he did rather curiously wear a tweed jacket...

 

‘But Mr Gobbledegook was a different thing. He was physically more extreme and, as I say, spoke nonsense. He had a guttural, a sort of strange throaty guttural way of talking which might have something in common with Mr Bean - but they were a separate thing, really.'

 

[You were involved with the Secret Policemen’s Balls at the end of the seventies, weren’t you?]

 

‘Yes, yes! ‘79? Yeah that was… when we… ‘79, I think we actually did the pilot of a sketch show called ‘Not The Nine O Clock News’ that the BBC did which I then ‘79 to ‘82. Yeah that’s right. In ‘78 was when I did this revue in the Hampstead theatre called ‘Beyond A Joke’. And I seem to remember we might have used that title [?already]… no, I can’t remember. I think it was maybe a title that we used the previous year but we used it again in some cases of there being a revue at a theatre! And John Cleese saw me in that show at Hampstead theatre in ‘78 and that’s when he said that ‘I’m putting together another Secret Policeman’s Ball” and asked if I’d like to be in it. And obviously I jumped at the chance. So that’s how that happened, because Cleese saw me, but NOT in Edinburgh. But he did see me in Hampstead in ‘78.’

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