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

by J. F. Roberts

  It’s something of a fallacy that the studio-bound format of Blackadder II was a miraculous development, as the original pilot is stylistically far more akin to the later series than The Black Adder would be – even the character of Edmund, the witty, vicious bad boy in black leather, is a clear taste of things to come. But it seems clear why this pilot was kept under wraps for so long – it wasn’t really Blackadder at this point, and as Lloyd himself would observe, ‘It kind of wasn’t about anything. It had a Game of Thrones feel, not rooted in real events.’ The wooliness of the central conceit is underlined by Geoff Posner: ‘They decided that they didn’t want to tie themselves down to one period. They just thought they’d make it a medieval/Elizabethan period. I remember having a discussion with the costume designer, and thinking, “This is a pilot, we don’t have much money for costumes, so where shall we set it, and when shall we set it?” The timing of the setting was more decided by what there was available in the costume store than Richard saying, “It has to be set in 1523” or whatever. It’s very vague … I won’t say we immersed ourselves in months of historical research, because we were more concerned with getting the jokes right.’ No clearer sign is needed that they were not quite there yet than to point out that in the pilot, Edmund is ultimately saved by the King’s solemn interdict to spare the life of his son (whose name he actually knows), once he has begged for forgiveness. ‘I know that we thought it was going very well,’ Curtis says, ‘and I remember sitting down in front of about six friends and watching it, and realising it hadn’t quite worked. There was something there, but …’ Tony says, ‘It’s like a signpost pointing in a particular direction, but certainly not getting there.’ Posner recalls that it was felt, given the epic nature of the setting, that it seemed a shame not to expand their horizons and film some ambitious external sequences, allowing for more spoofery of BBC costume drama of the time.fn12

  Posner would not play a part in the series again, however, as he had already signed up to direct episodes of Paul Jackson’s new sitcom about a student household, and was soon preparing to start filming in Bristol. When editing the final episodes of Not, Posner had been bothered by the screeching coming from the next booth, found Jackson immersed in cutting together the pilot of The Young Ones, and grabbed his chance to get involved with an extraordinary new branch of sitcom. It looked like Rik Mayall (with his girlfriend Lise Mayer and an old pal from Manchester University) had finally found the right TV format for the Comic Strip’s manic anarchy, and with the start of Channel 4 heralding the first ever episode of The Comic Strip Presents (thanks to Young Ones renegade Peter Richardson and producer Michael White), the BBC quickly demanded another five episodes to be recorded as soon as possible.

  For the full series of The Black Adder, however, Atkinson and Curtis would have all the time they needed – they just needed a hands-on producer. ‘By that stage I’d had a bit of a rest,’ John Lloyd says, ‘and I remember Richard and Rowan sent me a dozen red roses and a case of champagne, saying, “Please come and do this,” so I saw the pilot, and it was very funny – but it was somehow not rooted … I couldn’t see the point of it really. My sort of contribution, if I might call it that, was to try and say, “This should be set in real history, so that you’ve never heard of Blackadder and Baldrick, but you’ve heard of the people around them.” It was a missing bit of history which had been written out. Interestingly, there’s a theory from Germany doing the rounds that the years 600–900, the darkest of the Dark Ages, never existed. Because there was a guy called Otto IV who wanted to be Holy Roman Emperor at the time of the millennium, so he just fast-forwarded about three hundred years, and changed all the dates. I’m reliably informed that it’s bollocks, but it’s a very amusing theory. As we know, Henry VII did a lot of propaganda. So I wrote all this genealogy and so on …’

  ‘We thought we did quite well,’ Curtis says, ‘John thought we did quite badly.’ After a period of pondering, and with The Times at that time promising extraordinary extracts from the newly discovered Hitler Diaries (and questions about their authenticity being raised by all the other newspapers), the air of conspiracy inspired Lloyd to cook up a whole new angle for the writers.

  What Happened to Bernard Fripp

  The task of reworking The Black Adder in time to start production in the new year, of course, still fell to Rowan and Richard, but first of all they had another original half-hour to film before the year’s end. Dead on Time (also known as Whatever Happened to Bernard Fripp?) was a short film that could be seen as the first of Curtis’s boy-meets-girl movies, but is more of an extended sketch, like one of Atkinson’s live skits, on celluloid. Michael White once again stepped in to fund the film, with his girlfriend Lyndall Hobbs directing, and, of course, Howard Goodall provided the insistent, plaintive soundtrack to accompany the dynamic action. Once again, getting laughs out of death was very much the theme.

  It was the tale of another Bernard, in this case Fripp, a personable but shallow bespectacled gawd-help-us who discovers in his lunch hour that he has contracted a rare disorder called Hirschman’s disease, and has less than thirty minutes to live – and so, in near-as-dammit real time, he decides to try and experience everything he possibly can before his life is over. This is the natural cue for a frantic race across central London to make up for his wasted existence, but with surprisingly little in the way of visual humour by Atkinson’s usual standards. Bernard is more of a sufferer of verbal diarrhoea, which isn’t cured by his new desire to seize life.

  BERNARD:

  Shut up, all of you! What are you doing with your lives that’s so damn important you can’t even find me a pen? I mean, suppose you died tomorrow? Funnier things have happened – I’m dying today, for example. Then St Peter, at the Pearly Gates, asks you what you’ve done with your lives, and you say, “I’ve worked in the bank at the corner of Glossop Street for fifteen years,” will he then say, “Oh my son, you have exceeded my expectations! Step royally into the house of heavenly peace”? Will he hell. He’ll say, “You complete prick! What do you think I gave you a brain for?” … Life is a sweet: suck it!

  What the short does contain, however, is an alarmingly star-studded cast, largely made up of actors yet to make their mark – although the doctor who sends Bernard off on his quest was Nigel Hawthorne, already the winner of two BAFTAs for his transformation into Sir Humphrey Appleby in Yes Minister. As Bernard streaks around, trying to cram in all the art and music he should have appreciated, find the spiritual solace he desires, and even hopefully find love in the last few minutes of his time on Earth, there’s a famous face on every corner, few of them given enough screen time to make the slightest impression – Ade Edmondson, Nigel Planer, Jo Kendall, Rupert Everett, Christopher Biggins and Rowan’s girlfriend Leslie Ash all pop up, with Greta Scacchi as the love-interest nurse who saves the day. The Blackadder cast was also well represented, with Curtis himself belying his retirement from acting by playing a tough in a cafe, plus McInnerny, Alex Norton, Joyce Grant, and Jim Broadbent as one of the few characters with enough time to register: a slow, syrupy clergyman who fails to understand that Bernard’s in a bit of a hurry.

  Curtis and Atkinson’s brief experiment in film-making came and was forgotten with little ceremony, and the autumn of 1982 brought them back together with Lloyd to start the scripting of the full series of their sitcom. Just as with Hordes of the Things, Lloyd suggested a strong framing context for their epic comedy, a real world surrounding the swashbuckling gag-slinging to give every laugh an entirely new level of pathos, a depth which would mark it out in the world of early-eighties sitcom, if nothing else. He could not have picked a more perfect moment in our island’s history to focus on, as few periods were quite as entangled by vipers as the roots of the Tudor reign, just a generation earlier than was suggested in the pilot. The five-hundredth anniversary of Richard III’s coronation would coincide exactly with the eventual first broadcast run, with ‘Born to Be King’ marking the day on 6 July 1983. If eve
r a bubble of believable alternative history could be floated it was in that dark period, one ruthlessly vilified by Tudor propaganda for centuries, set in stone by Shakespeare, and only recently revised by committed Ricardians. Making the hero of the sitcom the son of one of the Princes in the Tower, whose entire reign was stamped out of existence by Henry VII, took the Ricardian cause to absurd lengths.

  Not that a vast amount of scholarly research was conducted, of course. Lloyd is quite open about the level they were aiming for. ‘There’s a book that I had when I was nine or ten, called Looking at History, by R. J. Unstead – “In the Middle Ages, women wore wimples, and in the seventeenth century, gentlemen wore wigs!” So pretty childish, but about what anyone except a professional historian can ever remember.’ They had a checklist – witchcraft, torture, sedition, Shakespeare, killing archbishops and, of course, plague and death. ‘We took it back another hundred years to the middle of the fifteenth century when it could be harder and even more vicious and people were very mean and hundreds were murdered every day,’ Atkinson told the People. ‘In The Black Adder nearly everyone suffers and humour is about human suffering and hurt. In any humorous situation someone is always having something terrible done to them or rude said about them.’ ‘Real jeopardy was fun,’ Curtis confirms. ‘The fact that death was always around the corner was a delicious thing to be cracking jokes about. What I wouldn’t give now to be able to have some deaths in my romantic films …’ Now it was just a case of the partnership setting off to a ‘hideous house’ in the south of France to hammer it all out together. Or rather, as Curtis told the audience at the Cheltenham Literary Festival in 2008, ‘It was a sort of, um … what’s another word for “lie”? It was a myth that Rowan wrote. He was going out with Leslie Ash, so I was keen to go on holiday in the same house, with her in her bikini, so I was allowed there on the understanding that we’d write together … It didn’t make any difference, she was repelled by me anyway.’

  When they returned from rewriting British History in France, the pair found that Rik Mayall’s new sitcom had begun, gradually but surely, to blow minds on Tuesday nights on BBC2. It was hugely rough stuff even given the wealth of untrained talent involved, but The Young Ones was at that time Curtis’s big treat after a day of trying to get laughs out of fifteenth-century politics – the blend of fresh comedy with live bands was catnip to such a pop music obsessive. Lloyd too was impressed, given that he’d had an early peek at what Jackson was up to. ‘I was sent the script of The Young Ones, and this thing arrived, you know, covered in Marmite stains and half written in pencil and full of Ben Elton’s terrible spelling … and I could not make head nor tail of it. It was full of brilliant ideas, but so incompetently put together, you’d think, well, if I did this I’d just try and structure it, make it neat, and … that would have destroyed it really.’

  The Young Ones gave first appearances to a huge number of comedians who would go on to establish their own legacies in the coming decade. ‘It just happened to have lots of people who were at that point in their career where they were just starting out,’ Geoff Posner reflects, ‘most of them had stood on the stage at the Comedy Store at some point and wanted to start their own career, so getting a break was probably what it was all about, really.’ Many future Blackadder players, from Helen Atkinson-Wood to Robbie Coltrane to Tony Robinson himself, would be happy to add The Young Ones to their CVs as the series continued.

  By the start of 1983 Curtis had pieced together the alternative history, and the group knew where their series was headed, even if some scripts were still perfunctory. Lloyd had recalled as much of the original cast as he could, with the added bonus of John Howard Davies managing to give Tony Robinson another chance. Philip Fox was dealt a bad hand with his brief time in the Baldrick role, though Atkinson insists, ‘He was very good, but when we eventually got to make the series Tony was available and we opted for him.’ The Prince of Wales would now be played by seasoned theatre actor Robert East, and for the King, a revelation. Brian Blessed had been a household name for two decades, since starring in Z Cars in the early sixties, and had developed his craft in an array of successful roles year after year, from historical drama to cult science fiction, his scene-stealing bellowing as Prince Vultan in Flash Gordon sealing his reputation as a bombastic, captivatingly histrionic actor, a man to be feared and to obey in so many roles. Who better to take on the mantle of Richard of Shrewsbury, hitherto thought of only as a tiny weak golden-haired child doomed to die by an uncle’s hand, than a large hairy 47-year-old with a voice that could drown out the apocalypse? Despite this being his one foray into sitcom, Blessed acknowledges, ‘I can’t tell jokes, but I myself, as an individual, when I’m talking to other actors, usually leave them asthmatic with laughter because of just being me. I do see life with a big smile. And even in Shakespeare, you have to find the comedy.’

  Now is the Winter of Our Discontent …

  The following February, the cast and crew of The Black Adder arrived in the frozen Northumberland countryside to begin bringing Atkinson’s alternative history to life. Alnwick Castle had been selected as the perfect site for the filmed inserts, being already a regular on-screen from movies such as Mary, Queen of Scots and Becket, and fated to star in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (a return for Blessed), Elizabeth and Harry Potter. The wintry location would provide everyone with a crash course on the sufferings of the medieval way of life. As Atkinson recalls: ‘Alnwick had this sense of openness and bleakness, particularly in the snow in February – genuinely Northumbrian winter weather of the mid-twentieth century, very, very cold and snowy. I just remember sort of the sense of difficulty of everything, the scale of what we were trying to do, and the number of animals, and children, and extras, most of whom you felt had a slightly miserable couple of weeks … And us not quite knowing what we were doing.’

  The very first scene to be filmed exemplified just how up against it the fledgling sitcom-makers were. Director Martin Shardlow was admittedly an experienced pair of hands, having steered Only Fools and Horses through a bumpy first series as well as helming Then Churchill Said to Me, but at the time he was suffering from a painful slipped disc which meant that he could only direct the scenes while flat on his back. Blessed recalls that every time the director’s pain dissipated, the cast would soon make him laugh and out would pop his disc again – often requiring the mighty King Brian to walk up and down his spine until it clicked back in.

  The bitingly frosty weather posed challenges not just for Shardlow and the cast, but the entire crew were witness to Atkinson’s first appearance as the reborn Black Adder. Rowan had gone so far as to inflict a harsh Henry V haircut on himself for the role, which made him look like he’d ‘just been let out of the Belgian army’. ‘Certainly the costumes got more flattering – and the haircuts in particular – after the first series. This extraordinary pudding-basin cut that I really had, my own hair was cut that way for the first series. For the three months we were rehearsing and shooting the programme I remember it was very difficult to go into shops and unselfconsciously ask for Mars bars and things.’

  The series’ first shot was actually for the final episode, where Prince Edmund takes leave of the loyal Baldrick (offering him a reference, in an exchange which was cut for broadcast) before setting out to take the throne by force.fn13 Robinson recalls, ‘I can remember on the very first day, Tim and I started to get the giggles, because in the previous hour we’d been subjected to five different kinds of snow. It was everything the North-East had to throw at us.’

  As the flakes fell and the prone director called for action, Atkinson leaned over in his saddle, nose dripping in the icy air, beckoned Lloyd over, and hissed, ‘What voice should I use?’ Lloyd, taken aback, hadn’t a clue, and deferred to Richard Curtis. ‘On the day we were going to start shooting, John came over to me with Rowan and said, “What’s Rowan’s character?” And we all thought, “Oh God, we don’t know! We’ve written some funny lines but we don’t how he’s m
eant to perform them!”’ The ridiculous design of Edmund’s costume already marked out this Duke of Edinburgh from the earlier Duke of York, but the inbred grotesque that came to Rowan on that first day of filming was an entirely different Adder. As he admitted on-set, ‘I love characters that are extreme and larger than life and very peculiar. But I like them to read consistently and real. You think this guy is a lunatic, but you are convinced you’ve seen him somewhere … He thinks he is a great swordsman and seducer. In fact he is just the reverse – a loud and arrogant failure in both departments.’fn14

  A whole day was spent filming footage of the Black Adder proving his ineptitude as a swordsman, equestrian and adventurer for the opening titles. With no sound or dialogue to worry about, Rowan built on his character, scowling and leering as he fails to waylay a merchant’s cart, trying to pull an arrow out of a trunk and bringing the entire tree down on top of himself, and tumbling from the back of his oblivious stallion, Black Satin. Even when just creeping along ramparts, or trying to run up cramped castle staircases in pointy shoes, Prince Edmund and his two friends couldn’t hide the beating they were taking from the elements.

  Despite the freezing conditions, the comics soon began to thaw to the extent that their producer felt that he could be cautiously hopeful, writing in his diary for 12 February 1983: ‘On Monday and Tuesday, worried dreadfully that Rowan’s character was a disaster, but it seems to be gelling well. Tim McInnerny is brilliant, as is Tony Robinson – quite splendid juices being squeezed from a rather shrivelled selection of lemons … Filming has been fantastically slow and tedious; the snow comes down on the words “Turn over” as if summoned by an incantation, and a remarkable variety of textures … The hailstones are as fat as mint imperials and it’s so cold we had to wear our long johns in the bath.’ This wasn’t quite like making the epic Hollywood romps which inspired The Black Adder, with Errol Flynn and pals battling under the Californian sun. Creating a sitcom on this scale was drudgery, Lloyd admits in hindsight. ‘The first series was by far the least enjoyable to make; we were all absurdly disorganised and overambitious. Rowan was sacked from any actual writing quite early in the series – he was far too busy trying to learn the lines which we pushed under his hotel-room door at four in the morning for the next day’s shoot.’