The True History of the Blackadder: The Unadulterated Tale of the Creation of a Comedy Legend

by J. F. Roberts

  CONTENTS

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Jem Roberts

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Maps

  Parte the First

  Parte the Second

  Parte the Third

  Parte the Fourth

  Parte the Fifth

  Parte the Sixth

  Acknowledgements

  Appendices

  Picture Section

  Picture Permissions

  Epilogue

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Book

  The True History of the Black Adder is the very first in-depth examination of the creation of a brilliant British institution like no other, arguably the greatest sitcom of all time, Blackadder.

  Using existing archive footage and rare literature, plus new revelations from personal interviews with the makers including John Lloyd, Rowan Atkinson, Tony Robinson, Richard Curtis, Ben Elton, Stephen Fry, Brian Blessed and many more, J. F. Roberts relates the full scope of the tale of how the 1970s alumni of three great universities – Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester – discovered a unique chemistry that would see them build a timeless comic masterpiece.

  At last Blackadder enthusiasts can now uncover THE cunning plan, in all its hideous hilarity.

  About the Author

  Jem Roberts was born in Ludlow and studied English, Film & Television at Aberystwyth University. A lifetime in magazines led to the honour of writing his first book, the acclaimed Clue Bible, The Fully Authorised History of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, whereupon a life-long adoration for Blackadder made this follow-up a must. He lives in Bath, where he runs the comedy gang The Unrelated Family, writes strange tales for young readers and works on his third work of comedy history when he can.

  JEMROBERTS.COM

  Also available by Jem Roberts

  The Fully Authorised History of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue

  For My Own Dark Dynasty

  This True History would remain villainously repressed if it weren’t for the kindness and support of many, many people who gave me their time. Most particularly Rowan Atkinson CBE, Brian Blessed, Richard Curtis CBE, Ben Elton, Stephen Fry, Sir Tony Robinson and especially John Lloyd CBE.

  Parte the First:

  OUR BASTARD HISTORY

  Enter EDMUND.

  Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law

  My services are bound. Wherefore should I

  Stand in the plague of custom, and permit

  The curiosity of nations to deprive me

  For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines

  Lag of a brother? Why bastard? Wherefore base?

  When my dimensions are as well compact,

  My mind as generous, and my shape as true,

  As honest madam’s issue? … I grow; I prosper:

  Now, gods, stand up for bastards!

  King Lear, Act 1, Scene 2

  HISTORY HAS KNOWN many great bastards, but it has been chronicled by almost as many. For the majority of the history of History, the ever-so-humble scribe who picked up the quill and positioned the vellum for any form of ‘factual’ chronicle generally sat down to begin work with a cry of ‘Payback time!’ ringing in their ears. Terry Jones – noted medieval historian, author of Who Murdered Chaucer and Python – puts it best: ‘Propaganda’s nothing new, it’s always been there, and historians just use whatever they’ve got at the time.’

  The story of our governance is by its very nature one of the gaining and retaining of power, and power is fuelled by propaganda, the facts be damned. Once power was obtained (certainly in antiquity), the ruler’s word tended to become law anyway, and it was difficult for any medieval conspiracy theorist to offer so much as a ‘Hang on …’ without it being taken as a request for voluntary physical dissection.

  It’s only when there’s an unexpected transfer of power that the mechanism behind the forging of History becomes apparent. One scribe’s gospel truth becomes pernicious tittle-tattle, while the heresy of a traitor can become state-approved fact, if it suits the tenant of the throne and his or her friends. This doesn’t just involve textual gainsaying like a sundered celebrity couple in competing tabloids, either. For new histories to be written, old ones were necessarily burned, ripped, expunged from existence, and the keepers of the closest thing to ‘the facts’ silenced.

  This political vandalism would be bad enough, if priceless archives and precious artefacts hadn’t also fallen victim to the more freakish forces of nature: fire, flood and Vikings with no appreciation of the value of a good monastic library. The Roman Catholic Church may not have been the most moral of organisations (and the Romans themselves had hardly been that bothered about preserving the culture and history of the ancient Britons they crushed under foot – not to mention that nasty business in the library at Alexandria), but when the executives of Henry VIII’s Reformation watched the scriptoriums of Britain’s monasteries crumble into ash, did they spare a thought for the knowledge being theoretically scattered to the winds?

  One of the few early historians whose particular jumble of events has survived, Geoffrey of Monmouth, wrote in his Historia Regum Britanniae of figures like Arthur, Lear, and many other possible flesh-and-blood Britons since consigned to the world of myth, and insisted that his evidence came from an ‘ancient book in the British language that told in orderly fashion the deeds of all the Kings of Britain’ – a source which has never been identified, presumed destroyed. Some modern historians even happily claim that Geoffrey’s story of working from existing sources is a fantasy in itself, but in the realm of hearsay why deny the more interesting version of events? The party line that tends to begin the History of Britain with the Roman Invasion, many millennia after the country was first settled, is the result of centuries of academic party-pooping and cowardly clinging to the state-approved propaganda machine. If a new version of our history could be found, one not told by the Powers That Have Been, but by the little man, the underachiever with perhaps an eye but barely a buttock on the throne, then its retelling of our country’s story should be taken in and digested fully, for the healthiest record of our evolution as a nation to be regurgitated.

  This is why the Blackadder Chronicles are such a precious primary source for anybody with even the vaguest interest in British History. Although it’s now three decades since word first emerged of the Chronicles’ discovery, they have remained unexamined in any scholarly depth. Yet they tell us of an entirely forgotten epoch, an undocumented reign in which the Wars of the Roses became but a memory. The propaganda commissioned by Henry VII successfully silenced the sworn statements of the Blackadder family for five hundred years, but now is the time for the Truth to be heard. Or a truth, at least – an unlikely truth perhaps, and a bastard’s truth, but a more entertaining story than the official rubbish invented by King Henry’s hired hacks, anyway.

  Primary sources backing up the Blackadder family’s claims have remained impossible to identify since the Chronicles’ discovery – and it is true that only one academic has ever been allowed direct access to the documents themselves, J. H. W. Lloyd (putative Professor of Loafing at the University of Camelot) gaining the exclusive honour thirty years ago, since when the priceless volumes have remained behind locked doors. But in this history, with the help of one of Britain’s foremost historical experts, Professor Justin Pollard, we will be revisiting Lloyd’s research, and holding his findings up to the li
ght of established history, to see just how much water the Blackadder version of our nation’s narrative can hold – or, indeed, how far existing British History has been perverted in order to keep the noble family out of the limelight, and promote the version of events approved by each successive royal winner.

  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.

  ROW, ROW, ROW YOUR PUNT …

  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

  BORN: 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 Bret
t, 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.’