“I’d always loved what I thought of as Oxbridge comedy,” smiles Robinson. “I was 15 when That Was the Week That Was came out and thought it was created for me! I also felt that way about Monty Python and Not the Nine O’Clock News. But I knew I’d never be in those shows because I’d never been to university, so wasn’t part of that charmed circle. So when on my first day of rehearsals everybody started talking, I knew I was home.”
His life was changed, he says, by the proximity of these “clever boys”. “I felt such ease with their wit, amused by their intellectual competitiveness, interested in their conversation. But they were all 10 years younger than me, so I had experience on my side. Stephen Fry [aka Lord Melchett] used to say to me, ‘The card you consistently play is someone who studied at the university of the streets.’ And it’s true. I’d say, ‘I can’t use the language you’re using to describe what I’m feeling, but I am actually right, because of this, that or the other.’ There’s something about their confidence, the fact they all knew each other and all had the same girlfriends, mostly at different times. It was very Brideshead! It could have been quite intimidating, but I was so beguiled, I didn’t notice.”
The expanded cast, of course, is top-notch. Blessed, Fry, Peter Cook, Rik Mayall (“the only actor I’ve ever known who, at the end of a scene, would say, ‘Did I win?’”), Miriam Margolyes, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Laurie, Miranda Richardson, Patsy Byrne and countless others offered sublime support. But there was no corpsing, “We were all paranoid perfectionists,” admits Robinson. “We’d laugh when a formulation was finally right, but then move on to scrutinising the next line. Hugh would be suicidal, thinking that nothing he said was funny. He was the most sensitive, but we all felt that to some extent. By the time we said the lines, we had funnied them out the window.”
It’s clear why Robinson was brought back as Baldrick. He and Atkinson work so well together; his deadpan humour (inspired, he says, by Stan Laurel, Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin) is the perfect match for Atkinson’s facial gymnastics and constant sarcasm.