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

by J. F. Roberts

  Nevertheless, there were still six episodes slated to begin broadcast in February, so it was time for everyone to watch their backs, look to their own futures, and get back to work. It was more than a year since the third series had closed on a muted note – being broadcast a week after the murder of John Lennon, the screen had finally cut to black and ‘In My Life’ played as the credits rolled.fn4 Despite this long time away, the fourth and final series of Not hit the ground running, every episode packed with sketches which were soon to become classics.

  Most people nowadays only know Not the Nine O’Clock News as an array of differing compilations or, of course, audio highlights (many taken from the fourth series). It may be that the rights holders fear that twenty-first-century sensibilities might be offended by some of the gags in uncut episodes, which could be construed as racist or homophobic. There’s no denying that everyone on the team was happy to offend, but what is naughty in one decade can seem scandalous in another (such as Toby’s order to the sodomites in Hell, or the free use of the term ‘spastic’ in much of British comedy at this time). On the other hand, perhaps it’s considered that a full DVD release would be a commercial flop because the topical references would mean nothing over thirty years on – as if a Britain in which a Tory government were making ruinous cuts in public spending, provoking zooming levels of unemployment and mass protest, and having a royal wedding to help distract the populace, would seem to be an alien world to modern Britons. But the original broadcasts still stand up, peppered as they are with celebrated moments (the final series’ opener concludes with Curtis and Goodall’s epic New Romantic lampoon ‘Nice Video, Shame About the Song’) and forgotten jewels (Mel Smith running a company which offers job creation schemes for human sofas, hatstands and pencil sharpeners). By the time the final sketch (the Youth TV spoof, ‘Hey Wow’, featuring a leotarded Atkinson as the mime artist Alternative Car Park) had descended into bedlam, there was no doubt that the Not team were going out on a high. The punning finale, the valedictory ballad ‘Kinda Lingers’ (another Curtis/Goodall original), was filmed in the cold industrial atmosphere of Bankside Power Station, and closed with Atkinson quite fittingly cutting transmission with a hefty turn of a valve. After three years and twenty-seven episodes, that was the end of Not the Nine O’Clock News.

  John Lloyd had to let his empire kinda linger a little longer, however – a book covering the 1983 election was published, and with Douglas’s help, he put out two Not-themed calendars. Despite their late-seventies contretemps, Lloyd and Adams did some of their best work in the eightiesfn5, with the calendars giving birth to The Meaning of Liff comic dictionaries, rated by John as his favourite creations. The odd comedy book continued to surface under the Not banner, with Lloyd and Hardie collaborating on Prince Harry’s First Quiz Book as late as 1985. A vastly different US spin-off for HBO, Not Necessarily the News, on the other hand, ran quite successfully for several years without any input from either Sean or John.

  The final gasp from the original team was the live show Not in Front of the Audience, a farewell concert staged in Oxford and at the Drury Lane Theatre, where on 29 April a recording was made for the last Not double album. This theatrical swansong came only a month after the last episode was broadcast, and was necessarily boosted in topicality due to the Falklands War, which had begun in the interim, and would be over by June. Although constructed from brand-new material (albeit including the old joke about being ‘well hung’), the team allowed themselves the return of a few favourite characters and sketches, Rowan reprising his outrageous sex-obsessed French critic, an extra-foul-mouthed ‘Ranting Man’ and Zak, the friendly alien with a malfunctioning translator.

  With the last bows taken that night, the unusual quartet went their separate ways – although Rowan would remain close to regular collaborator Mel, whose years of comically successful partnership with Griff would also lead to massive financial success with the setting up (and flogging off) of their production company Talkback. Not was never a love-in, and both Smith and Atkinson would have difficult relationships with Stephenson, but three decades on, Rowan’s memories of the time tend towards the fond. ‘What I do remember about those days was the fantastic freedom you felt at that age to do and try anything,’ he reflects, ‘There was none of this sort of angst which one feels later on in life, where you think, “Now is this the kind of character I should be playing at this stage in my career?” You just sort of busked it. If it worked then everybody took the credit, and if it didn’t work then nobody took the blame.’ He adds, however, ‘I think it stopped at the right time. I think if you’re going to carry on with that idea, you have to do something a little different. Either you have to bring new people in, or lose some people, or take it in a different direction …’ His own new direction was sitcom, although taking on the might of a popular and artistic triumph like Fawlty Towers, even four years after its final episode, was a task which neither he nor Curtis savoured. ‘For some reason we started to think about the possibility of writing a sitcom together, for me to perform or be a major character in. And I remember we both felt the sort of scourge of Fawlty Towers, which was, and remains, fantastically funny. And it was sort of hanging over us as something to which we were bound to be unfavourably compared. We were fairly convinced that whatever we did, set in the modern day, was going to be described as a pale imitation.’

  Curtis was beginning to shape a contemporary crime series, pitched unpromisingly as ‘Fawlty Towers meets Starsky & Hutch’, centring on Atkinson as a lawyer’s clerk who turns detective after a spate of bicycle thefts in Camden Town. Not had already sent up the state of situation comedy back in its second series, presenting the BAFTA Award for Best Sofa in a cosy suburban sitcom, so something a little grittier than That’s My Boy was required. As Atkinson explained to the Sun in 1989, ‘We wanted to go the opposite way from the usual sitcoms and thought a bit of crime would give the comedy an edge.’ But after a series of wrestling matches with a rudimentary script, they had to agree that it wasn’t going to work. There was just something tawdry about such a low-key premise, and they thought that the more epic their idea was, the better chance it had of being a hit. Then, as Atkinson was to recall, ‘Errol Flynn came to the rescue …’

  A daytime showing of the 1938 film The Adventures of Robin Hood lit a spark for the duo: if it was murder and skulduggery they wanted, after years of topical sketches, what could be a cleaner break than a medieval tights-and-codpiece spoof? ‘I remember the Robin Hood movie was a touchstone for us,’ Atkinson revealed twenty years later. ‘We thought it was definitive in terms of its way of presenting – albeit in a slightly Hollywoodesque way – the excitement of that time, of the fifteenth century.’ Not that the powers that be offered them any encouragement. ‘We were very strongly advised that the two things that absolutely never, ever worked – and everybody tried – was sitcoms set in heaven, and historical sitcoms,’ Curtis remembers, ‘but, um, we ignored the advice. The reason we did the historical one was twofold. We did it because I just couldn’t imagine putting Rowan in a jacket and being anything but embarrassed by how much less funny he was than Basil Fawlty; and second, we liked the idea of big plots! Death and carnage and kings and princes and chaos, rather than just writing about your car breaking down.’ The duo had form with mocking historical drama – a regular part of their live shows was Curtis’s Shakespearean lecture, with all the laughs coming from Rowan’s mimed illustration of every point, while Richard droned, ‘At the centre of the Elizabethan world, sits the King. Upon the character of the King depends the plot, and so there are many different kinds of King. The benign King … The benign King with a physical defect … The benign King with two physical defects …’ and so on.

  Everything Rowan turned his talent to tended to emerge as a unique animal, no matter how many footsteps he was treading in, but he and Curtis must have been well aware of the rich tradition of which they were planning to become a part. What made historical comedy so verboten to comedy co
mmissioners in the early eighties, and how could they make it work this time, and keep the Atkinson star in the ascendant?

  Historical Comedy Through Comedy History

  Ever since the first nomadic hunter-gatherers swapped Neanderthal impressions around the fire, it’s been a reflex action, part of the subversive side of human nature, to laugh at the past. When Shakespeare depicted the fifteenth century Lollard Sir John Oldcastle as a drunken coward fit for the finest clown to play, he was writing historical comedy – although Oldcastle’s Elizabethan descendants were litigious enough to compel the playwright to change the name to Falstaff after the first run of Henry IV, Part 1, and before long the character became the Elizabethan equivalent of Alf Garnett, Del Boy and Alan Partridge rolled into one. Another titan of English literature, the big, bearded Yorkshireman Jane Austen, deliberately spoofed his own history tutorage in the posthumously published History of England by a Partial, Prejudiced & Ignorant Historian, written when he was just a fifteen-year-old girl. A hundred years later Mark Twain mocked the medieval idea of chivalry in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in much the same way that Cervantes had depicted the clash between antiquity and ‘modern life’ in Don Quixote in the sixteenth century. Maybe the single most comprehensive literary send-up of British History, however, came courtesy of Punch magazine, which gave rise to the publication of 1066 and All That in 1930. Combing through the annals of our island history (or ‘all the parts you can remember’), humorists W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman provided the template for historical piss-taking for years to come, with a combination of inaccuracy, anachronism and downright silliness which spawned a host of spin-offs.

  By this time, historical comedy had already found its way to the screen, notably in Three Ages, written, directed and performed by Buster Keaton in 1923. In separate strands designed to be split into shorts if necessary, Keaton showed the unchanging ways of courtship from the Stone Age through Roman times to the hectic city life of the Roaring Twenties – no matter what the period, each incarnation of the long-faced clown still had to fight the heavy and please his prospective in-laws to get his girl. Keaton intended the movie as a burlesque of D. W. Griffiths’s Intolerance, but then historical comedy is almost always respondent – if not a direct spoof of popular costume drama or historical teachings, then usually a suggestion that there’s been quite enough heavy emoting in tights, and it’s time to make a mockery.

  The first infamous example of this reaction to the kind of early Hollywood romps which made Errol Flynn a star was Danny Kaye’s 1955 musical The Court Jester, originally a huge flop, but rendered a TV favourite for its Technicolor (indeed, VistaVision!) spectacle and zippy crosstalk (‘the vessel with the pestle’ ad nauseam). But the setting was all that mattered, and the plot and characters were pure cheap fantasy – accurate English history didn’t sell tickets in the Midwest, but tap-dancing in brightly coloured jerkins was a winner. One consequence of the film’s total avoidance of existing lore was that the Robin Hood cipher, the brave fighter famed in song for his skills in battle, was known as the Black Fox – perhaps a tribute to Robert Louis Stevenson’s historical romp The Black Arrow, in which the hero takes his eponymous name when he becomes embroiled in the Wars of the Rosesfn6.

  To find the real flowering of home-grown historical comedy, we need to fast-forward to the late 1960s, when the Carry On franchise hired a new writer to replace the trusty Norman Hudis, and Peter Rogers snapped up Talbot Rothwell – a trusty joker who had taken up gag-writing as a prisoner of war twenty years earlier, staging noisy revues alongside Peter Butterworth to drown out the sound of tunnelling. Although his first film released turned out to be Carry On Cabby, the script which got Rothwell the job was a tale of eighteenth-century highjinks on the high seas, Carry On Jack, which triggered a whole new world of period sauce for the continually buoyant series. Rothwell had a passion for historical japery which steered the Carry Ons from being a strictly contemporary comedy franchise to a series of irregular period parodies, with the usual team in their familiar roles, transported through time in every other film. Again, these were almost always in reaction to great historical epics of the time, often even using the same costumes and scraps of sets at Pinewood Studios. Jack begat the hugely loved Roman epic Cleo, with genre spoofs Cowboy and Screaming to follow, and almost every second or third offering from Sid, Kenneth, Babs and the gang throughout the seventies was historical – the French Revolution, Dick Turpin, Edwardian England and the days of the Raj saw many of the same faces in the same positions no matter what the calendar said, each period lovingly brought to screen on the most economical of budgets.

  Henry posed an alternative Tudor history, prefaced with Rothwell’s apology: ‘This film is based on a recently discovered manuscript by one William Cobbler which revealed the fact that Henry VIII did in fact have two more wives. Although it was at first thought that Cromwell originated the story, it is now known to be definitely all Cobbler’s … from beginning to end.’ This gave them the licence to enjoy the same bawdy set-up as ever – King Sid dealing with battleaxe wives and lusting after pert ladies-in-waiting, while Williams’s Cromwell stalks the shadowy corridors, ploddingly plotting away. This being a Carry On, however, it’s all a fun anachronistic pantomime, as light as the flutes and strings of Eric Rogers’s score – when Charles Hawtrey’s Sir Roger de Lodgerly is forced on the rack to squeeze out an admission to a bit of slap-and-treason with Joan Sims’s garlicky Queen Marie, he stretches like toffee. The Tudor romps also extended to the TV spin-off Carry On Laughing, alongside a whole host of historical half-hours in the Rothwell style, which took in medieval England and the Cavalier years. The Dick Vosburgh & Barry Cryer-penned Orgy & Bess featured Hattie Jacques as a (naturally) matronly Elizabeth I, flirting with her favourites Raleigh, Essex and Sid James’s rascally Sir Francis Drake.

  So successful were Talbot Rothwell’s historical romps that, just before scripting Carry On Henry, he was commissioned by BBC executive Michael Mills to write a brand new vehicle for Frankie Howerd. Howerd had recently enjoyed great success stepping into the sandals of Zero Mostel for the West End run of Sondheim’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and on the plane back from his own holiday in Pompeii, Mills decided that a sitcom starring the comic as a Roman slave, tetchily interacting with the audience just as he did in all his shows, was a dead-cert hit. Up Pompeii was Plautus by way of Donald McGill, the desperate antics of Lurcio the British slave gaining handsome ratings and endless repeats of its two series – but it also started the ball rolling for a whole decade or more of further historical titters for Francis, with the bawdy farce spawning a cinema franchise of its own, long after Rothwell had written his last double entendres for unlikely hero Lurcio to quibble over. Ned Sherrin produced a series of movies transporting Howerd through time, from doomed Pompeii to Norman Britain, and ultimately the Great War, in Up the Front. Each setting saw a new incarnation for the scheming servant to get one up on his idiotic masters, though scripting duties fell to Sid Colin, backed up by the prime likes of Galton & Simpson and Eddie Braben. In 1971’s Up the Chastity Belt, the serf Lurkalot dreams of greatness, little knowing that he’s the elder twin of Richard the Lionheart, stolen from his cradle by evil barons and left to be brought up by pigs. During his epic tale, the fool Lurkalot dresses as a nun to avoid detection, is tried for witchcraft, meets a limp-wristed band of Merry Men led by Hugh Paddick’s camp Robin Hood and by the end of the narrative, the crafty coward finds his way into the royal bedchamber. Despite his royal blood, Lurkalot’s twentieth-century descendant Private Lurk was as lowly as ever, hypnotised into joining up to ‘Save England’, and getting embroiled in a series of lascivious plots which made Flanders during World War I seem like a swingers’ holiday camp.

  There were several less canonical entries into ‘Howerd’s History of England’ (which itself was the title of a 1974 TV special). Whoops Baghdad was an unsuccessful Babylonian attempt to repeat the success of Up Pompeii, and the
final offering, following the World War II exploits of Private Potts in Then Churchill Said to Me, was shelved in 1982 due to the Falklands War. There was even a brace of short-lived eighteenth-century spin-offs: the ITV pilot A Touch of the Casanovas, and Up the Convicts, made for the Seven Network in Australia, which featured Frankie as early colonist Jeremiah Shirk, who no doubt had close ties to the Lurk family. The details of the Lurk dynasty are never explored, though – after all, each incarnation was only an excuse for Howerd to get into period scrapes while enjoying the comedic beard of being surrounded by busty damsels.fn7

  The similarities between the Up franchise and Blackadder are glaring on the surface, but none of the Rothwell-inspired films and TV shows are tarred with the ‘undergraduate humour’ brush, belonging to a completely different comedy tradition – saucy music hall by way of the permissive society. The period sitcoms of David Croft, Jimmy Perry and Jeremy Lloyd also broadly belong to this comedy category, but programmes like Dad’s Army, It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, You Rang, M’Lord?, ’Allo ’Allo, Hi-De-Hi! and Oh, Doctor Beeching, as well as often being genre spoofs, more pedantically come under the heading of ‘Nostalgia’ rather than ‘History’.