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

by J. F. Roberts

  The weekly production process was more like going to a youth club than a BBC rehearsal – the team even had their own pinball table. ‘It was amazing,’ Curtis recalls. ‘The energy and the fire and creative enthusiasm in the room when they were playing pinball was devastating. And then they’d say “we’d better get back to the sketches”, and everybody would go “ugh …” just waiting for something funny to be said.’ For Rowan, with his natural abilities never allowing anyone to forget who the star of the show was, this period seemed idyllic. ‘My job on Not, I always felt, was quite straightforward – I just learned the scripts, and turned up on Sunday and recorded them! It seemed like a very simple job.’ But what was simple for Atkinson was a revelation to everybody else – his gobbledegook rendition of the poem ‘Abou Ben Adhem’, for instance, left his colleagues aghast at where it was all coming from.

  Led by Mel Smith, a naturalistic style of performance was established which marked Not out from everything before it, and everything around it, Curtis attests. ‘It was definitively negatively influenced by Monty Python. So the thing we took particular joy in was naturalistic performances, because the Python style had been so high.’ Atkinson agrees. ‘It was something that I’d never done, because even then I tended to do characters that were rather extreme, either extremely old or extremely silly, or facially very active.’ Figures of authority were still a speciality, of course – the senior policeman in ‘Constable Savage’, numerous politicians, judges, vicars of all descriptions and even a gorilla called Gerald, who managed to maintain an air of ineffable superiority despite having a mouth patently incapable of accommodating bananas.

  Not’s line in inspired musical pastiche – be it punk, ska, heavy metal, country or Olivia Newton John – also gave a helping hand for the third member of Atkinson’s regular team: as well as being Rowan’s housemate, Howard Goodall became the show’s musical director and formed a house band for the show, often including himself on the organ.fn12

  Goodall shared composition duties with future TV music greats like Peter Brewis and Philip Pope, while the latter became Curtis’s musical collaborator on Radio Active – the Oxford Review show which transferred to radio in 1980 at the behest of budding producer Jimmy Mulville, showing that his original violent reaction to the gang had long since dissolved. In the same year, Pope and Curtis’s Bee Gees hatchet job, ‘Meaningless Songs in Very High Voices’ (as performed by Phil, Angus and Michael as the Hee Bee Gee Bees), may not have troubled the UK charts, but it did get to number 2 in Australia, where the team had enjoyed a successful tour.

  Not’s success was really brought home to everyone by the massive sales of the first tie-in book (a magazine spoof simply entitled Not!), and indeed the first album, both released hot on the heels of the second series and snapped up in unexpectedly astronomical amounts. When the team agreed to do a signing session in Oxford, the queue stretched the length of the high street and lorry loads of extra books had to be sent for to meet with demand. The first album went double platinum, knocking Queen off the top of the charts, and the following year the show won the Smash Hits TV award – even Monty Python hadn’t reached such heights of youth appeal, certainly not so quickly.

  Lloyd had always wanted his own hit comedy franchise, and here it was – TV, books, albums, all hits, not just artistically, but commercially. Rowan Atkinson and his retinue were the biggest thing in UK comedy, and the decade had only just begun. There was also the financial reward to be considered, Atkinson recalls. ‘Suddenly the royalties started to come in, because the record sales were quite bizarrely large. And my predominant thought was probably “Which model of Aston Martin will this buy me?” I suspect that was my priority – when looking at a large cheque it was always immediately cars that would sort of flash in my head.’

  Having turned away from his technical ambitions, and completed one of the most impressive rises to greatness in British Comedy history, he remained, at heart, a petrolhead, only happy when behind the wheel or under the bonnet. It had taken him a few attempts to pass his driving test, but despite all his achievements, the greatest moment of his life came in the same decade as all these glorious comic successes, on the day that he received his HGV licence. ‘The thrill of making two thousand people in a theatre laugh is but a light breeze compared to the tornado of excitement that I felt at that moment,’ he admits. ‘I’ve always been a bit of a loner and lorry driving is a loner’s dream. I love the sense of power and responsibility. I suppose it reveals a suppressed megalomania …’

  fn1 The Oxford Revue had been in good hands with Geoffrey Perkins in the early seventies and, if nothing else, his surname provided them with a multitude of sketch characters – ‘Come in, Perkins!’ becoming a meme shared by a whole generation of sketch writers (albeit one piloted a generation earlier by Beyond the Fringe).

  fn2 She was also a close friend of Ian Curtis, who was morbidly drawn to the girl who had cheated death – though by the time Helen arrived at Oxford he was back in Manchester, performing with his new band Joy Division.

  fn3 Rowan told theartsdesk.com ‘it was called After Eights because the Eights are the rowing race in Oxford. I think it was a pun.’

  fn4 The campaign has to date included the sex-mad gawd-help-us played by David Haig in Four Weddings and a Funeral, Alan Cumming’s naive loser in Bernard & the Genie, another no-hoper played by Hugh Bonneville in Notting Hill, and of course, a bear-baiter and a celebrated Tudor nurse.

  fn5 One of the few major comedy bosses to have escaped would have been Peter Bennett-Jones, who was present with the Footlights the year before just in time to wonder at Atkinson’s first show, but by 1977 had moved into theatre production.

  fn6 A script which, ironically, he had to personally wrench out of the tardy writers to meet their deadline.

  fn7 Who would crop up in other Curtis/Atkinson projects, most notably as the barking doctor in The Tall Guy.

  fn8 The future Marlene Boyce in Only Fools and Horses and The Green Green Grass, at that time starring in the aforementioned End of Part One, the TV incarnation of The Burkiss Way.

  fn9 Named in honour of Not the New York Times, a parody printed during US print strikes in 1978.

  fn10 Generally Not avoided period sketches, unless they were sending up BBC costume dramas – perhaps the only exception being a Stone Age quickie featuring Rowan as a caveman who gets to clobber Griff with his club.

  fn11 Originally written by Cleese & Chapman with Marty Feldman and Tim Brooke-Taylor for At Last the 1948 Show, but since sucked into Python lore.

  fn12 The rest of the cast mimed along as best they could but besides Atkinson’s passion for percussion, the quartet’s ability as a band may have been one thing which inspired Douglas Adams to opine: ‘Not the Nine O’Clock News is to Monty Python what the Monkees were to the Beatles.’

  Parte the Second:

  THE TUDOR BASTARD

  HENRY TUDOR WAS a very clever bastard – albeit one who was, strictly speaking, born in wedlock. John Lennon claimed that ‘You have to be a bastard to make it, and that’s a fact,’ and if ‘making it’ comprises ending the aristocratic civil war that would come to be known as the War of the Roses and establishing a new royal dynasty in the back-stabbing environment of medieval England, then Henry, Earl of Richmond, more than deserves the bastard crown.

  When the Black Prince, eldest son of Edward III, succumbed to illness in 1376, leaving his infant son Richard on the verge of inheriting the kingdom, a course was set which would lead to the end of centuries of solid hereditary rule, in favour of the worst culture of crown-grabbing among the big nobs since King Stephen took on the Empress Matilda. Henry Bolingbroke, son of the Black Prince’s powerful kid brother John of Gaunt, felt compelled to flex his muscles and usurp the rightful but inept monarch Richard II, and in the process opened up a whole new world of opportunity for blue bloods – not just in warfare, but propaganda. Terry Jones has made it his business to try and see through the lies, and reveals, ‘There’s a co
uple of Northern Chronicles where at some point somebody takes over and says, “There’s a lot of stuff written here that shouldn’t have been written! Henry’s a jolly good man!” I’m sure it’s ex-Archbishop Thomas Arundel who creates this propaganda, to make out that Richard was a tyrant, and Henry was welcomed by the majority of English people. And he rewrites history! He puts out this spin, he wants the chroniclers to fall over backwards to write propaganda for Henry.’

  By the time Henry’s soppy namesake grandson was barely balancing the British crown on his head in the mid-fifteenth century, the extended British royal family were embroiled in a vicious loop of ambition, treachery, bloodshed, exile, invasion and murder, with each move awaiting a write-up from some chronicler or other, for some faction or other. Grabbing the crown was one thing, but keeping it safe from an uppity third cousin with a chip on his shoulder and an army on his payroll was quite another. Convincing all posterity that you are the one and only true King of England required a hugely impressive flair for lies and obfuscation.

  As has become apparent only in recent times, few people could deny that in the 1480s no man more deserved the throne than Richard III. Thanks in many ways to Richard’s own military skill, his elder brother Edward IV had maintained a pretty strong grip on the kingdom for twenty years (bar several months in exile at half-time). Having finally seen off John of Gaunt’s Lancastrian descendants (securing his claim as grandson of Gaunt’s little brother Edmund), Edward proved to be a whore-mongering yob of a despot. However, crucially, a discovery made by Dr Michael K. Jones during the filming of Tony Robinson’s Channel 4 documentary Fact or Fiction – Richard III in 2004 makes it rather fanciful to dispute that Edward IV, and therefore his children, the ‘Princes in the Tower’ and indeed every monarch for the last five hundred years, were all complete bastards, without any genuine hereditary claim to the throne at all. Records at Rouen Cathedral made the ancient rumour that Edward was the result of his mother’s knee-trembler with a Welsh archer while her husband Richard of York was away on campaign far more than gossip. When he died (quite possibly poisoned by his ambitious in-laws) in 1483, at last a true-blue descendant of Edward III could rule – the handy younger son whose personal motto had always been ‘Loyalty Binds Me’.

  Ricardians have worked tirelessly (and indeed tiresomely) to point out the justice of Richard’s claim and the injustice of his defamed legacy for so long that the jolly depiction of the King in the Blackadder Chronicles no longer seems at all outlandish. It’s universally accepted that the hunchbacked bloodthirsty baddie so indelibly glued into the nation’s psyche by Shakespeare, to the delight of Henry VII’s ginger granddaughter, is a bad joke. A lick of black paint on the shoulder of an official portrait here, an imaginatively damning reconstruction of his reign by Sir Thomas More there, and Dirty Dick became an official bogeyman, By Royal Appointment. Admittedly, Richard did himself few favours PR-wise by putting himself in the frame for the murder of his nephews in the Tower, but then his one fatal error was to be killed at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. Until then, he had done all he could to secure the crown, and clear away all false claimants.

  Henry Tudor himself had only the most pitiful claim to the throne, being a Welsh descendant of Henry V’s widow on his father’s side, and from a line of Plantagenet bastards, the Beauforts, on his mother’s. He got round this by marrying Edward’s daughter Elizabeth, but as the daughter of a bastard herself, she also had about as much claim to the throne as the privy-scrubbers, making the entire Tudor dynasty – right of conquest aside – illegitimate. To have thrived as King on such laughably shaky credentials, fighting off pretenders from all sides, is remarkable – but could Tudor have been hiding more? Was even his right of conquest a forgery, having simply strolled into an empty castle stacked high with the poisoned bodies of every Yorkist in line to the throne (bar the easily overpowered Lord Percy, Duke of Northumberland), and just taken over? Is it conceivable that his propaganda skills extended to convincing the whole of Christendom that an entire reign had not taken place, and that there had been no Richard IV at all?

  Being a royal child in the late Middle Ages was far from being all larks. Even resembling a blue-eyed legitimate Yorkist could earn you the attentions of some disaffected nobleman, ready to claim you as his own puppet King, one of the two Princes miraculously saved from execution – and Henry VII would make mincemeat of you in the end. Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, both famed pretenders to be demolished by Tudor one way or another, established legends of their own despite the propaganda machine. It’s generally believed that the sickly uncrowned Edward V may have died in youth anyway, but his hale and hearty monkey of a little brother, Richard of Shrewsbury – twelve years old at the time of his disappearance, by existing records – became a prime target for treasonous romance. It’s also alleged that a bastard son of Richard III could have been legitimised on Dick’s triumph at Bosworth (he is said to have lived out his life as a bricklayer in Essex), but if Tudor had been vanquished on 22 August 1485, and Richard III subsequently died, the teenage Shrewsbury would have been a cert for the crown. Had he been alive.

  That this theoretical Richard IV could conceivably have had two sons in their early twenties (born a decade before him, by official record) is an undeniable complication. The historian J. H. W. Lloyd suggested that Henry VII’s management of the switchover to the Gregorian calendar at the end of the fifteenth century explained away the apparent inconsistencies of the Blackadder Chronicles, but to imagine the ramifications of deleting at least a couple of decades of British history does tend to make the brain ache.

  But then, why would the Blackadder family falsify this claim? The figure of Edmund, Duke of Edinburgh (1461–99), that emerges from their Chronicles is hardly a dashing Hotspur of an ancestor to crow about – even his famed nom de plume is accredited to a peasant, Baldrick. This naming in itself causes problems for the Blackadder history, which also records that Edmund was the bastard son of Donald, Third Duke of Argyll,fn1 and took on the ‘Black Adder’ moniker independently. This is clearly at odds with the family history, which claims to trace the Blackadder bloodline back to pre-Roman Britain, and includes the Domesday compiler the Duc d’Blackadder and inept crusader the Baron de Blackadder. Unless Argyll was a Blackadder bastard himself, it seems safe to assume that one of the few Blackadder kin who were not hiding from the dangers of the Yorkist/Lancastrian wars was also intimately acquainted with Edmund’s mother, Gertrude of Flanders.fn2 It can only be presumed that the servant Baldrick had heard of such gossip, and cunningly gave his master his true birth name by stealth.

  The question remains as to why this forefather of the Blackadder who either commissioned or wrote the Blackadder Chronicles was clearly shown to be such a loser – arriving late for the Battle of Bosworth, ignored by the royal line into which he had been falsely sown, and presumably only managing to pass on his genes and create his own bastard due to some freak moment of passion involving mistaken identity. The only reason for the record of his exploits can be because, by sheer default, this Edmund was indeed King of England, although for only thirty seconds.

  As the first academic to gain access to the Chronicles, J. H. W. Lloyd admitted that the endlessly revised history is an exhausting tangle of self-aggrandising lies and exaggeration peppered with embarrassing moments of candour and unintended confession, thanks to what the historian termed ‘long-winded tirades where the various authors furiously insist on absolving themselves from any blame for such events as the crash of the R101, the Indian Mutiny, the loss of the American colonies or the sinking of the Lusitania. Since no such involvement had ever occurred to one, one can only assume that all these things were in some way the fault of the Blackadder in question.’ It’s fair to assume, then, that the Blackadder Chronicler was not overly occupied with constructing a wholly believable series of hagiographies, or lacked the skill to do so. But if these Chronicles have any one aim, it is to try to establish a strong case for the family’s rightful claim
to the English crown. Perhaps the undeniably unflattering biography of the original ‘King Edmund III’fn3 was written in such a way as to add credence to his place in the annals of our history. Certainly, all subsequent Blackadders celebrated in the family journal would be depicted in a far more flattering light.

  So is this one central claim as much a sham as so many of the Blackadder Chroniclers’ boasts? Professor Justin Pollard, as well as being the History elf for QI, is one of cinema’s most in-demand historical experts, having built a career on sniffing out fact from fiction for movies such as Elizabeth and Atonement, and when faced with the ‘alternative history’ of 1485–99, states: ‘The political intricacies of the Wars of the Roses do pose substantial problems to qualified historians, problems which take on yet more gargantuan proportions when placed in the hands of the writers and putative “keepers” of the Blackadder Chronicles. The characterisation of Edward IV as “a huge, whoremongering yob of a despot” is somewhat at odds with what we know of this brilliant military leader and sophisticated statesman. Furthermore, J. H. W. Lloyd’s contention that the otherwise wholly unrecorded Blackadder monarch can be fitted into the royal chronology by docking twenty years from that century fails to account for the fact that centuries have a relentless habit of lasting a hundred years, or that the Gregorian calendar did not exist before 1582 and was not adopted in Britain until 1752.’