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

by J. F. Roberts

  Of the main cast, only the men were needed for location shooting, so the central trio were soon joined by Blessed and East – the latter playing the boyish heir to the throne at the age of forty, only seven years the junior of his screen father. Perhaps as a response to The Young Ones’ surreal dimension, in much the same way that many of the jokes were now far more outlandish (the dog which Edmund kept in a cage in the pilot had now become his pet dwarf, for instance), the central characters had also taken a definite turn for the peculiar since the pilot, with Curtis making the most of Blessed’s bombastic capabilities to have the King roaring, in another unused scene: ‘CHISWICK! FRESH HORSES! I want to strip naked to the waist and ride round and round the castle shouting, “I AM HE WHOSE PECTORALS FRIGHTEN THE MOON!”’

  Sitcom was a departure for Blessed, but, he recalls, a pleasing one, to be working with such fresh comic talent. ‘They were a team, and they had their rules. Rowan, it’s fair to say, is an incredibly serious comedian. He always reminded me of the famous Russian clown, Auguste, who was quiet and serious and sad, and would have audiences roaring with laughter. I don’t know that Rowan is sad, but he seemed somehow out of place, light years ahead of everybody mentally. He has a face that belongs to all periods, from the modern age right down to the Stone Age. I would call him the History Man. And he likes mechanical things and speed, speedy rehearsals, speed of thought.’ However, Blessed would soon establish his own way of working. ‘Richard IV is the power base. Without the King, you cannot have a Kingdom! Rowan would be directing and giving very serious notes and so forth, scratching his head all the time – and everyone was very obedient to this except me! I was therefore like a sore thumb, and I used this, because I have an animal cunning. I felt it was my job, as the King, to fuck up every scene, to which Rowan was rather taken aback. I love him, he’s wonderfully clever, but I had very strong ideas about the King – like he must be a man who never opens the door. So he knocks one down, you build another – if I could, I would have liked to walk through doors like Tom and Jerry! He’s in a world of his own, he’s utterly fearless, he has a wild, strange imagination, an astonishing capacity for blood, and rumpy-pumpy! And a wonderful, healthy loathing of the Turks.’fn15 East got on famously with his screen father, but recalls that Blessed took his psychotic characterisation to such great lengths, remaining in bloodlust mode at all times, that the cast learned to keep their distance. ‘The BBC rehearsal rooms at that time (long since sold off, rehearsal now deemed superfluous for TV acting) were full of poles on circular bases that were used to mark the boundaries of the various sets and corridors etc. They were about six foot high and quite substantial. We were rehearsing the scene where Brian comes back from the Crusade and bursts through the door of the castle, and in order to create the appropriate effect Brian thought it entirely appropriate to hurl one of these poles across the room. It cannoned into several others and about ten poles dominoed to the ground around the room, felling several elderly actors in the process. Never one to do things by halves, our Brian.’ This headstrong autonomy set Blessed up for a fall. He merrily recalls, ‘The camera crews, for the fun of it, made one of the doors really solid, and bolted it and God knows what. I was breaking into the door, to get to the Bishop. You only had one take, and I had to literally break down this three-inch steel door – and I’m powerful, I bench-press four hundred pounds … Rowan nearly lost the use of his legs with laughter as I had to actually fucking break open the door and half of the set to get in.’

  King Richard’s milder elder son had his own eccentricities, being secretly afraid of spoons and openly obsessed with drains, which Blessed is sure was partly down to the actor himself. ‘I always thought it was a mistake that they didn’t carry on with Robert; he was a very inventive man, a lot of the things Harry did, 10 per cent of it was his own creation.’ Despite being every bit the fine son that Edmund wasn’t, the Prince was already a fully realised irritant, judging by these external scenes, edited out of the finished version of ‘The Archbishop’:

  HARRY:

  Now that you are to be primate of all England, I feel that we must really grapple with the problems that are facing the Church today.

  EDMUND:

  Yes, of course …

  HARRY

  For instance, where do you stand on the torture of talkative women, hm?

  EDMUND:

  Well, I thought …

  HARRY:

  Which side of the fence are you going to come down on as regards the castration of talented choristers? And above all, how are you going to get the youth involved? Burning questions, Your Grace, burning questions!

  EDMUND:

  Yes, I think I may need to meditate on this …

  HARRY:

  Ah!

  EDMUND:

  … Alone.

  In the same sequence, a more concerted attempt to channel Shakespeare was also attempted (in order to justify the Bard’s ‘additional material’ credit), but had to ultimately be cut as it held up the plot to have our hero soliloquising while his flunkeys hurriedly pack to flee uncertain death, Becket-style.

  EDMUND:

  Farewell, sweet England, and noble castle; first watering place in the desert of my life. And torture chamber, playroom of my youth, adieu! Farewell, gentle gibbets and sweet crenellations … and best of luck to you, noble turret! From which I once tossed kittens in experiments to do with weight. And farewell …

  BALDRICK:

  My Lord?

  EDMUND:

  Yes?

  BALDRICK:

  Are you sure it’s gonna fit on?

  EDMUND:

  Yes, yes, on the horse, on the horse! And farewell, dearest gutters, down which all sorts of business has daily made its way. And farewell, spiky gates, the final resting place of the heads of thieves, murderers, Great-Aunt Isabella, and all those who forgot my father’s birthday …

  A huge crash, and a neigh, off.

  BALDRICK:

  My Lord?

  EDMUND:

  Yes?

  BALDRICK:

  The horse has died.

  EDMUND:

  Well, get Percy’s horse!

  BALDRICK:

  It was Percy’s horse.

  Only selected guest stars were chosen to make the pilgrimage to Alnwick, and when Frank Finlay – a major name to feature proudly in your opening credits then, as today – came up to film the complex tragedy of ‘Witchsmeller Pursuivant’, he fared little better than the chilly regulars. Hilary Bevan-Jones is embarrassed to recall: ‘I made a terrible mistake – it was a Friday night and one of my responsibilities was clearing up afterwards and making sure that everyone had gone, and I thought that Frank Finlay had gone home with the person that normally picked him up. And in fact he hadn’t, and he was left behind on this snowy location. I was already back in the hotel, having a brandy, and some of the make-up people came in and they’d found him wandering, in his costume, on the way back to the hotel. I thought my career was over …’

  A co-financing deal had been struck with the Seven Network, the Australian company which had for decades been paying big money to the greatest UK comics to defect Down Under (from, tragically, Tony Hancock, to Cook & Moore and, of course, Frankie Howerd), but Lloyd tried to be very careful with how the money was spent. Bevan-Jones remembers Finlay’s episode being one of the bigger deals. ‘There were certainly times during the first series when you’d turn up and it felt more like a huge feature film than a BBC comedy! Stunts and animals and lots of make-up effects as well. We built a whole village for “Witchsmeller Pursuivant”! And we set fire to it, so we weren’t pussyfooting around.’

  Curtis’s scripts were confidently adapting to the styles of the cast as shooting continued, and it was clear by Finlay’s episode that they had a catchphrase. As we’ve seen, the ‘cunning plan’ was already a central part of the pilot, but at first nobody had seen it as especially resonant. Tony Robinson, however, was all for a spot of repetition: ‘I said, “Could I no
t say ‘I have a cunning plan’?’” “I have a plan” is rather a flat line, but “I have a cunning plan …” – you dwell on it, it’s so exciting, it’s so sexy this plan, that it’s bound to be fantastically good. I think even then, I thought, “Well, maybe it could turn into a bit of a catchphrase …”’ The design of Baldrick’s sack-like livery and dishevelled appearance did mark him out as the most proletarian character on-screen, but he still sparkled like a new pin in comparison to the rest of his filthy family tree. Certainly, something was needed to give some life to ‘the short one’ of the trio. ‘He was just the servant, the kind of everyman servant. And it was only as the episodes went on, and I was after all surrounded by the greatest comic writers of their generation, that gradually his character matured and developed. And then that whole character was thrown completely out of the window, and we started again …’

  McInnerny was in the more confident position of playing a well-known archetype – the foppish fool. It was a role he already knew well from Oxford, and would eventually get to reprise when Griff Rhys Jones directed Twelfth Night for the RSC in 1991. ‘I loved Percy because he was extraordinarily loyal, I mean, to the point of it being dangerous to his health. What Percy reminded me of most was Sir Andrew Aguecheek, from Twelfth Night. He’s a very similar character who’s mocked and derided by Toby Belch but is immensely loyal to him throughout.’ He did, however, have the pressure of history weighing on him more than most, as they were filming in the very castle which had for centuries been the seat of the real Percy family, the Earls of Northumberland – albeit as a Lancastrian stronghold, rather than Yorkist.

  Despite the progress, stylistically there was still some degree of floundering – Baldrick’s now familiar cry of tactical inspiration when he, Percy and Edmund (or ‘Grumbledook’) are seconds from being burnt at the stake for witchcraft was met with a blunt ‘Oh, fuck off, Baldrick!’ from the Black Adder in the recording, a lapse of wit which had to be covered up in the edit with a hasty cough. The finale had also yet to be completely straightened out – a sequence was filmed in which Patrick Allen’s Hawk bloodily murders Prince Harry as he smells a rose, which would have made the series’ conclusion far blacker than it already was. The original epic plot also gave Percy his big scene, trying to bravely but ineptly defend the castle from the terrifying Black Seal, but though this sequence was filmed, it had grown too dark to use the footage.

  Peter Cook’s journey north to play the King came along when the land had thawed even further and everyone else in the cast was well settled. In these excised lines Cook, Blessed and East’s incitements to the Yorkist army at Bosworth Field seem a case in point – Cook channels his own perversion of an arch Olivier, Blessed barfs pure bloodlust, and East simpers like a country priest.

  RICHARD III:

  Arms which used to wave at you, whip ’em off! Eyes that used to blink at you, whip ’em out!

  RICHARD:

  Hands you have shaken today, cut off! Heads that have nodded, CUT THEM OFF TOO!

  HARRY:

  Now, obviously a lot of you are going to get killed. But then, others aren’t, so that’s something to look forward to, isn’t it?

  Coming off the back of a miserable period in Hollywood making US sitcom The Two of Us, and also being up to his neck in another historical romp at the same time, Graham Chapman’s Yellowbeard, Cook didn’t especially need a trip to the North-East. But for the chance to play royalty with his favourite young comicfn16 he agreed, to Lloyd’s delight. ‘Peter was his usual modest self when we asked him – “I don’t think I’ll be good enough” – when of course he was, he was perfect.’ ‘He was very nervous,’ Blessed agrees, ‘he had a lot of Shakespeare speeches to do, and he liked just being himself. He kept saying to me in the make-up room, “What do I do, Brian?” I said, “Just play him slightly mad. Get out there as if you’ve got a temperature all the time, and you’re almost hallucinating. As if he’s got some disease.” And I relaxed him … I think the reason Peter then made such a success of that episode was because he was so fucking scared. I think that Rowan was frightened as well. It’s healthy. The best performances come from people who are vulnerable, within an inch of failure. It makes you do exciting things.’

  McInnerny says the guest did go some way to make Richard III his own. ‘Rowan had to be on his toes quite a lot, because Peter wasn’t content with doing the lines as written on the page, there was quite a lot of improvisation going on. So Rowan had to get over his shyness quite quickly with Peter!’ ‘He got on well with all of us,’ Lloyd says, ‘and he’d known Rowan for a long time. But like so many actors who came to do cameos on Blackadder, we treated them appallingly because we wanted a “house style”, a sort of revue way of performing rather than Great Acting.’

  Cook owed Atkinson a cameo anyway. Rowan had been invited to guest-star in several programmes in his short career (giving a memorable lecture on one of his favourite topics, church organs, for The Innes Book of Records), but one of the unmissable offers had been to feature in Cook’s own solo vehicle in 1980, an LWT special made for Humphrey Barclay called Peter Cook and Company. Atkinson stepped into Cook’s traditional role of playing exasperating freaks in public areas without any trouble at all, but the special never led to a renaissance for the elder comic’s career.

  Once they returned to the BBC studios, many more hugely respected actors, what Blessed terms ‘people of substance’, were drafted in to feature in episodes, often with only tiny roles – Richard ‘Stinker’ Murdoch and the legendary ‘Man in Black’ Valentine Dyall only get brief lines as part of the King’s council, but not all egos were as forgiving, and Wilfrid Brambell’s similarly minor role, which would have been the final comic performance of a sitcom icon, had to be recast when the veteran walked out after waiting three hours to get to his line, carping about ‘bloody amateurs!’.

  The Vile Turnip of Sweet Richard Slain …

  With the onerous location shooting finally complete, there was only a short break before decampment to the capital for rehearsals and studio recordings. Ordinarily the BBC would be dispensing free tickets to see the live recordings at the end of each week, but the Adder team had to make the decision to do without an audience – the lavish production which they envisaged left too little room in their allocated studio to fit in the bleachers where the audience sat. It wasn’t an exercise in ‘comedy realism’ to do without a laugh track, however; the edited shows would be shown to audiences laterfn17.

  In the rehearsal studios in North Acton, Rowan and the cast could really begin to shape their half-hour comic tragedies, and the rest of the crew could witness how the master craftsman worked. What Chris Langham termed the ‘mental chemistry’ of Atkinson’s approach, the clinical cerebral engineering of every line and look until it is deemed amusing enough to him, could seem like procrastinating perfectionism to less tolerant co-stars, and Atkinson himself admits, ‘I’m just a perfectionist, which is good in some ways because it makes you strive harder, but it’s not something of which I’m particularly proud. I would agree with anyone who suggests that perfectionism is a disease, not a quality. It reduces you to a person who worries too much and that isn’t healthy for anyone … I don’t like to take it home with me. That’s why I’m so keen on my sports cars, because they are a simple, boyish interest. They relax me.’ But with the equally exacting and tenacious Lloyd by his side, and the perfectionism of Fawlty ringing in his ears, Atkinson was clearly aiming high. ‘They all put up with the interminable wrangling in rehearsal as we paced about struggling to think of a vegetable beginning with C funnier than courgette,’ John recalls. ‘Mostly they just sat quietly listening to the debate with a kind of aghast bemusement.’ Once again, poor Frank Finlay suffered on his brief sojourn with the Adder team. After many hours of laboured fine-tuning holding up the proceedings, with Shardlow’s and Atkinson’s backs turned, Finlay crept over to Lloyd and begged, ‘For God’s sake, will someone tell me what to do?!’

  Tony Robinson adm
its to feeling overawed by his co-star on first impressions. ‘From my point of view, quite crudely, when I joined it, Rowan was a big famous person! And in his own way, though very confident, he was a very shy person, quite a stroppy guy in some ways, and very bright. Not somebody who you’d want to tangle with. But also he’s a kind of omnivore in a way, he watches everything that’s going on all the time, you know that whatever you’re doing, or the lighting director’s doing, or the prop man, he’s always kind of running through that as well … So for me it was like, “I’m going to have to keep some way away from this guy.”’ He soon found, however, that perfectionism didn’t extend to egotism. ‘I can remember very early on, Rowan had a very funny line, and John said, “We ought to cut away to Baldrick after that and get his reaction.” I can remember thinking, “Oh Christ, that’s not going to stay in, there’s no way he’ll allow it to happen.” But the extraordinary thing about Rowan, as far as I was concerned, was that he was so incredibly generous, he allowed me to have the kind of reactions and cutaways that most stars wouldn’t have.’