A more apposite forefather of Atkinson’s sitcom would be the 1959 Beyond the Fringe sketch ‘So That’s the Way You Like It’. As masterminded by future celebrated Shakespearean director Jonathan Miller and medieval historian Alan Bennett, the sketch is of course a lampoon of Shakespeare’s Histories rather than History itself, taking a step back from the text and recognising its inherent silliness and pomposity – or rather, the difficulty of performing the text effectively without sounding like an idiot.
MILLER:
Get thee to Gloucester, Essex. Do thee to Wessex, Exeter.
Fair Albany to Somerset must eke his route.
And Scroop, do you to Westmoreland, where shall bold York
Enrouted now for Lancaster, with forces of our Uncle Rutland,
Enjoin his standard with sweet Norfolk’s host …
I most royally shall now to bed,
To sleep off all the nonsense I’ve just said.
One young fan of the sketch who would have the honour of taking over Dudley Moore’s Fool role when it was wheeled out for the Secret Policeman forerunner Pleasure at Her Majesty’s was Terry Jones, an English scholar at Oxford when he first saw the revue. His writing partner Michael Palin was the one studying History when they met at the university in the early sixties, and as the fledgling Oxford Revue gave way to budding careers in TV comedy, getting laughs out of British History was often on their minds. In 1967 the pair were hired to create filmed inserts for the live BBC comedy show Twice a Fortnight, one of which was the Battle of Hastings in the style of a boxing match. When given the chance to make their own comedy vehicle in between series of Humphrey Barclay’s children’s show Do Not Adjust Your Set, they expanded the idea to a whole series for LWT, The Complete & Utter History of Britain. One series in early 1969, posing as a History magazine programme with reports from different epochs, received short shrift from viewers and broadcaster alike, and by the end of the year Palin and Jones were glad to accept the invitation to sign up for the Flying Circus.
It would be several years before they would return to a similar clash of ancient Britain and modern manners, with Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which is in essence a series of typically silly medieval sketches, made funnier by the gravitas of Jones’s pedantic eye for period direction, and Terry Gilliam’s muck-encrusted art direction. ‘I don’t think I ever wanted to take the piss,’ Jones insists. ‘I didn’t see Holy Grail as being a parody of Knights or anything. I just saw it really as doing silly things in a context that you recognise – and I was very keen on History, because I was into the fourteenth century at the time … You had to feel the period. But I think it’s exactly like Blackadder, we’re not making fun of History, it’s making comedy within a historical context.’ Richard Curtis admits that it was this approach which guided him from the start with his historical sitcom idea. ‘I suppose if there was any precedent for what we were doing it was Carry Ons and Up Pompeii, and that must have been something we didn’t want to do, to make it look as though it had just been knocked up.’
We Need Something … More Cunning
Having taken their cue from the Technicolor romps that fuelled a writer’s procrastination on daytime TV in the early eighties, Curtis and Atkinson had no real historical spur in plotting out their swashbuckling sitcom. ‘It was those sort of medieval Hollywood-type movies that seemed to have the word “black” or the colour red – The Black Shield of Falworth or whatever – in front of it. And then … God knows where “Adder” came from,’ says Curtis. Where these movies starred a handsome hero fighting for honour, it was the twisted bastard anti-hero of Jacobean tragedy that piqued Atkinson’s interest – the swaggering murderous wit of Middleton’s Vindice, and the ugly ambition of the bastard Edmund in King Lear. ‘Villains are always more fun to play than good guys,’ he says. ‘That’s a well-known fact. And I enjoy characters who have a vindictiveness in them. I always have done. In the end, it’s just more fun … You only have to go through a fairly mild public-school education to have witnessed cruelty. If you tried to do what I did, which was to establish your individuality, you become a loner and to some extent I experienced bullying and cruelty. I am a really meek person and keen to please, so I grew up terribly conscious of cruelty. Comedy may well be my way of taking revenge all these years later.’
There was only one person the duo could imagine taking their new script to – the man Curtis at that time considered ‘the oldest person I know’, their long-time fixer Lloyd. But he was still recovering from the rigours of producing Not. ‘I worked far too hard on that show; I felt about eighty years old. Then Richard and Rowan came up with this pilot. The original title was Prince Edmund and his Two Friends – a rather weedy thing.’ John was already producing Pamela’s own comedy pilot, Stephenson’s Rocket, with video director David Mallett, and couldn’t commit to both projects – although Stephenson’s show would fail to get beyond a pilot. ‘I got big-headed,’ John recalls, ‘thought I was a genius because I’d got a BAFTA Award. We all thought we were geniuses and, of course, the show was absolutely awful.’
Rowan and Richard’s pilot script clearly played up to the idea of going beyond the trad sitcom set-up, showing the ideal historical royal family in its very first scene: the almighty King reading scrolls, the ditsy Queen making lace, the foppish elder son Prince Henry … painting an apple. But somewhere in the castle, fermenting in his bedroom like any dissatisfied adolescent, is the younger son with eyes on the throne. Like Lear’s Edmund, this Duke of York knows that he could take the reins of power far better than his idiotic elder brother, or anyone else for that matter. Atkinson stipulated that this dark plotter was ‘a tall, dark, satanic (but hopefully comic) figure in studded black leather, scowling villainously’. His bedroom was packed with horrific instruments of torture, very like the coat of arms that had been designed to open the pilot.fn8 By the Prince’s side were the two friends of the original title, idiotic sidekicks completing a trio of treasonous hoodlums. Neither part was at all well developed beyond the fact that both were fall guys: the base clown Baldrick, convinced of his own cunning despite his lowly position, and the more inbred Lord Percy, who doubled as the family retainer. Together, their inept plotting and squabbling would bring to mind a medieval Will Hay movie more than anything else: three clods with sliding scales of idiocy, getting caught up in scrapes of their own devising. So many hoary old gags could be done with this set-up: Edmund being cornered by Harry, with the other two miming answers to get him out of trouble, and of course, Baldrick’s plans being dismissed and then instantly proposed by his master, to great approval.
Rather than worrying about the boss coming over for dinner or getting into a tricky situation over a pound note, however, this gang would be facing the worst that the Middle Ages could throw at them: battles, duels, the block – an extreme farce indeed. Basil Fawlty may have frequently been wound up, but he never had the option of hacking his customers to pieces.
Ed opens up a cupboard stacked floor to ceiling with every shape and size of sharp instrument – swords, daggers …
EDMUND:
Thieving Scots rat. I’m going to stab him.
BALDRICK:
Where?
EDMUND:
In the great hall, and in the bladder. (He is sifting through the selection.)
PERCY:
But if you stab him in front of everyone, won’t the finger of blame point rather firmly in your direction?
EDMUND:
I don’t care. (He is now toying with one dagger, making stabbing movements, feeling its sharpness, etc.)
BALDRICK:
I think your father likes McAngus and, if he suspected you had harmed him, he’d cut you off without a penny.
EDMUND:
Yes, perhaps you’re right, we need something … more cunning.
BALDRICK:
I have a cunning plan.
EDMUND:
Yes, perhaps, but I think I have a more cunning one.
BALDRICK:
Mine’s pretty cunning, my Lord.
EDMUND:
Yes, but not cunning enough, I imagine.
BALDRICK:
Well, it depends how cunning you mean, sir.
EDMUND:
Well, I mean pretty damn cunning, how cunning do you think I mean?
At the recommendation of John Howard Davies, the first adventure for this Black Adder to face – involving a drunken Scots lord, a Royal Command Performance and a cache of dirty letters which throw the King’s issue into question – took the catholic route for sitcom of not wasting any time setting up the situation, but jumping right in (Edmund is never even referred to as ‘the Black Adder’). The script was undeniably perfunctory, but there was clearly something there, and the two creators persevered without the aid of Lloyd. Luckily they had the patronage of Howard Davies, and together they mounted a pilot, with a studio date set for May.
Some elements of the casting were no-brainers – Percy was written with McInnerny in mind, and even though Tim had embarked on a promising career as a straight actor since Oxford, Curtis knew how to play to his friend’s comedic strengths almost as well as he did Atkinson’s. Throughout his time at university, Tim was usually in about three plays per term, as well as joining in the revue, and despite any formal training, his career in theatre was blossoming. He once admitted, ‘When I left college, there were three parts I saw as benchmarks: Hamlet, Gethin Price and Jack in The Ruling Class’ – and he played them all before he hit thirty. Nevertheless, Richard has been known to insist that ‘Tim has the mind and the voice of Laurence Olivier, but he has the face and the neck of an ostrich,’ and his pale, high-browed, stringy-limbed form was just what they wanted for Edmund’s snooty foil. McInnerny found that the set-up was entirely to his taste, and snapped up the part. ‘It was all skullduggery, swords and poison. It was like Jacobean drama, but funny. One of my favourite episodes was about executing people, whether they’re innocent or not … It’s very sick!’
Noel Gay’s artist roster provided freshly graduated Footlighter Robert Bathurst, who was a natural fit for Henry,fn9 while John Savident brought his bulk and comic dourness into play for the King, and for the Queen, Scottish actress Elspet Gray was ideal – an undervalued, ditzy performance from a consummate comedienne. The wife of famous farceur Brian Rix (he would make her a Lady when given the title of Baron Rix a decade later), Gray would be the only other supporting cast member with McInnerny and guest performer Alex Norton to survive into the actual series. Sadly Lady Rix passed away in February 2013, aged 83.
This still left the rather thankless role of Baldrick – the short serf who balanced out McInnerny’s lanky fop – apparently impossible to fill. The long struggle to cast the part wasn’t made apparent to jobbing actor Tony Robinson, however, to whom the eventual offer came as manna from heaven. ‘I just got a script dropped through my letter box in Bristol, and it was for this new project called Black Adder, and there was this part for a servant in it – he only had eight lines, and none of them were funny. But it was an offer! No one just offered me parts at that time, I used to have to go up to London and do about nineteen auditions and interviews – and I was terribly flattered … All that had happened was that John Howard Davies had seen me a couple of years previously, playing a part I think for BBC Bristol, and had written me down in his book as “small and vaguely humorous”, and he was so near the end of his list that he’d suddenly found me and offered me the part because otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to make the thing.’
TONY ROBINSON
BORN: 15 August 1946, Hackney, London
In his one-man show, Cunning Night Out in 2007, Tony Robinson paid tribute to his late father Leslie, a talented jazz pianist from Essex who at seventeen had the dubious honour of being the Assistant Beadle in Britain’s very last workhouse, before his life was changed by World War II. The diminutive Leslie was a hard-working member of the RAF ground crew, but was regularly sneered at by the lofty airmen whose lives he helped to maintain. ‘He wasn’t one of “the few, we happy few”,’ Tony revealed. ‘My dad thought “the few” were tossers.’ The war did, however, bring Leslie together with the equally musical Phyllis, and a year after VE Day, their only son was born – they were determined that he would not lack the nurturing which their own talents were denied. Ostensibly, young Tony was educated at the local Wanstead High School, where he eventually passed four O levels, but as a child actor, anything academic was precisely that.
Lionel Bart’s musical Oliver! opened in the West End in June 1960, and there as part of Fagin’s gang of ruddy urchins was the teenage Tony. Young Robinson impressed the management so much that he was swiftly made understudy to the actor playing the Artful Dodger, and illness soon led to him taking on that very role at short notice: ‘I shouldn’t say this, but I was bloody good … for the first four minutes.’ Tony’s own understudy at the time was Steve Marriott, a fellow child actor and model who was grinning alongside Tony in Fair Isle knitting pattern magazines just a few years before he founded the Small Faces – ‘Itchycoo Park’ was allegedly inspired by the days the two of them played truant, learning to smoke in Little Ilford Park.
Tony had a busy, successful career in his teens, appearing in the Judy Garland film Judgement at Nuremberg in 1961, and in the same year making his BBC debut as Stubbs in The Man from the Moors (earning twenty-one guineas, plus another thirteen for his chaperone). Eight years later, after many more theatrical and television roles, training at the Central School of Speech and Drama (where his tutor was Eric Thompson) and four years in rep, a BBC bigwig annotated his file: ‘A comic personality. Easy and relaxed and holds one’s attention and interest – a young man with a future.’
By this time Robinson, after a short stint as artistic director at the Midlands Art Theatre, had moved to Bristol, tuned in, dropped out, formed a commune and smoked prodigious amounts of weed. He had also settled down with his first serious girlfriend, Mary Shepherd, and their twenty-five-year union produced two children. Their lifestyle was not just about free love and soft drugs, however – Robinson was a highly politicised socialist and activist, with a fervour that was reflected in the work created by the Avon Touring Company, which he co-founded.
Further accolades came from his appearances at the Chichester Festival (which included Feste in Twelfth Night), but despite small movie roles, appearing with John Wayne in Brannigan in 1975, soon Robinson would become most recognisable as a star of Children’s TV, part of the gang on Play Away and also Words and Pictures, with Miriam Margolyes playing his mother when he took the title role in Sam on Boffs’ Island. As the eighties arrived, the family man and jobbing actor could be forgiven for feeling that he had gone as far as he could in his career.
One fillip had been the friendship of Terry Pratchett, who had heard Robinson in a spoof show for Radio Bristol and asked him to be the first narrator for the audiobook versions of his Discworld novels, which the actor had grown to love as his daughter helped him through a period of depression by reading them aloud to him. Pratchett’s worldwide popularity would have made Robinson a footnote in comedy history – but at the age of thirty-six, he still wanted more.
By the eighties, Robinson hadn’t had an uneventful acting career. ‘I’d had the lead in comedy pilots, I’d done good bits in television plays – there was a drama-doc called Joey, a true story about four guys who were incarcerated in a mental hospital during the war and were still there in the fifties, and they didn’t have a mental illness, they just had cerebral palsy. We won the Golden Rose of Montreux with that.’ But there was no denying, with a young family to support, that a central role in Rowan Atkinson’s new sitcom was a very desirable job, and well worth the commute from the West Country …
All of which made it all the more annoying for him when industrial action by BBC technical staff that May wiped out any chance of the pilot being filmed. Of course, a vehicle for Atkinson was only ever going to be postponed, but by the remounted pilot’s
recording date, Sunday 20 June, Robinson was already in Greece performing Tragedy with the National Theatre. ‘For me at that time to be asked to go to the National anyway was such a pat on the back that although I was gagging to do the Blackadder pilot I just couldn’t get out of it. And I thought my chances of working with those guys was gone.’ In the event, young actor Philip Fox would be thrust into Baldrick’s jerkin, and have to make the best of it.
Fox wasn’t the only new boy in the remount, however. Geoff Posner – who had been a fledgling director on the fourth series of Not – was drafted in to put the show together with little notice, a task which made him, in his own words, ‘scared shitless. I got the script and thought, “Blimey, I’ve bitten off more than I can chew here!” It was a very complicated thing, and it all had to be done in the studio. But I remembered Rowan, John and Richard talking about the show towards the end of Not, and what it would be, and it sounded really interesting, and a great challenge.’
The BBC were not given to paying for sitcom pilots which weren’t up to broadcast standard, and Posner and his crewfn10 turned round a very impressive half-hour which, while not canonical and miles from the quality of the eventual saga, is packed with unique highlights. Atkinson’s penchant for visual tomfoolery demanded two complicated set-piece sequences: a climactic duel with a trick blade (though this dashing Black Adder is famed for his swordsmanship), and ‘The Death of the Scotsman’. When the plot was recycled for the second episode of the series, ‘Born to Be King’, the play put on for St Leonard’s Dayfn11 was quite swiftly dealt with by Edmund, as he struggled to prevent the live stabbing of the Scots enemy he had just doomed to death, having heard that he carried letters proving Henry’s bastardy. The original concept was far more complex – an entertainment for the Queen’s birthday with Percy and Baldrick in ridiculous costumes trying to kill the enemy, and Edmund’s desperate attempts to prevent the Scotsman being hanged live onstage (yes, there is a ‘well hung’ joke) go on for ten times the length. Atkinson and company rehearsed this violent pantomime to a clinical degree, creating a frantic dumbshow of dizzying proportions – the director’s script for the pilot has several pages painstakingly breaking down even the smallest movement, to tune the farcical ballet to perfection.
The True History of the Blackadder: The Unadulterated Tale of the Creation of a Comedy Legend Page 10