Blessed says, ‘I remember with I, Claudius, the first write-ups were quite derogatory. And within a week, they said, “Ah! I can see the style!” and apologised that they got it wrong. And I was in tears of laughter to see a review programme the night after the first Black Adder episode was shown, and they just thought it was a disgrace! Unfunny, silly, immature, and absolutely substandard. It’s making me laugh now, the shock on their faces … It was terribly misunderstood. The Black Adder has a magic of its own. It’s somehow more vulnerable, and varied in a strange way.’
‘We were very proud of it when we did it,’ Lloyd says today, but the general verdict on the historic first series has always tended towards the derisory from all concerned – largely in order to more grandly praise the series yet to come. Everyone has had their theories as to why it wasn’t the immediate hit that Atkinson’s reputation in 1983 – and of course, the unprecedented cost and ambition of the production – should have delivered. Much has been said about the lack of a live audience, which Lloyd feels ‘meant the cast had no focus. Rowan is used to performing to an audience; that’s what edits his performance and makes it real.’ Atkinson himself feels that it was a kind of hubris: ‘We were flattered to find someone willing to spend a lot of money on the project and got a little carried away. Instead of the three sets and five actors you get with the average sitcom we filmed in snowdrifts around Alnwick with a large cast, sixty-five extras and a dozen horses. It was misguided, naive thinking on our part. Someone should have slapped us down and said “No”, because it didn’t really work. The action got in the way of the humour.’
‘In many ways The Black Adder was the most ambitious of all the series,’ McInnerny says, ‘in that there was at least five minutes of film in every episode, there was no live audience … For that reason I think it should be cherished. Having said that, it was kind of rough and messy, and some things didn’t work. Rowan wasn’t entirely relaxed in the first series – none of us were, because we still weren’t quite sure what we were doing.’ To which Curtis freely puts up his hand: ‘We bit off slightly more than we could chew, is the truth of the matter. And with Rowan’s character we tried to do lots of things – we tried to make him sort of arrogant, scared, feeble, bullying … We tried to do a really rounded thing, and the truth of the matter is that it was too much for a character to hold. I think it was a conglomeration of quite a few funny things that we knew Rowan could do.’ ‘And an amusing costume and a daft haircut an amusing character doth not make,’ adds Atkinson, volunteering that they made Edmund ‘a little too despicable. Heroes of the classically successful British comedy series tend to have won a high degree of sympathy and affection from the British public, like Frank Spencer and even Alf Garnett. Basil Fawlty certainly did. To run a small business and hate your customers is very British.’
But after three decades of self-flagellation, it’s probably time to steady the whip. It’s difficult to appraise the show on its own merits, bearing in mind what was still to spill from the Blackadder Chronicles, but it seems highly unlikely, if The Black Adder had remained a stand-alone series, that it would be remembered as anything less than a lost classic by lovers of British comedy everywhere. The remarkable cast and their unforgettably silly performances would have earned the programme fans all round the world even if nobody involved ever worked together again after 1983, and despite the modest viewing figures both on first broadcast and when repeated in the autumn of 1984, the show did have the distinction of winning an International Emmy for ‘The Archbishop’. Blessed grins, ‘I remember Martin Shardlow rushing over here in a car – I didn’t know he knew where I lived! – with tears in his eyes, saying, “We’ve won an Emmy, Brian, we’ve won an Emmy!” just weeping with happiness.’
The scene in which Baldrick reveals the going rate for the Catholic Church’s pardons, curses and fake holy relics (including Jesus’ own waterproof sandals, knocked up in his carpentry shop) remains a favourite among all the cast, though Curtis admits that such high points tend to give away his background. ‘What used to be strong about British comedy is that people went from writing sketches to writing sitcom, and their sketch craft was carried through – some of the best things in series one are really sketches.’
The team knew that there were lessons to be learned for a second series, but their bridges were burned anyway – mutilated, tickled half to death and finally self-poisoned, King Edmund’s reign was definitely over. ‘That,’ snarled the Hawk in another sequence cut from broadcast, ‘will be the end of the so-called Black Adder!’ But if that really was the case, the show could proudly stand alone, and disgrace nobody. John Lloyd admits today, ‘I do think one of the hallmarks of it is that it seems better than one remembers it. On the odd occasions that I do see it, you think, “God, this is quite good, it’s slightly embarrassing …”’
His featured role was certainly a fillip for Robinson’s career, not only qualifying him for an appearance in The Young Ones, appearing alongside Robbie Coltrane as Victorian physician Dr Not the Nine O’Clock News (who cannot tell the difference between his elephant and the Elephant Man), but also introducing him to a completely different group of Oxford and Cambridge comics, who would welcome him into the team for Who Dares Wins. Being Rowan’s sidekick led him to roles in the first series of Alas Smith & Jones, produced and directed by Martin Shardlow, with Phil Pope and Jimmy Mulville also supporting the starring double act. ‘With those shows,’ Robinson says, ‘I had a big introduction to the entire comedy mafia of that time. Rather than playing for Dagenham & Redbridge, I was suddenly playing for Manchester United! Since That Was the Week That Was, before I left school at sixteen, I’d known that kind of TV was the place I could be happy and make a major contribution, but I thought it would never happen because I didn’t know anybody involved in it, and I’d written countless letters to directors of various comedy shows and nothing ever happened. Then I got this lucky break … Mel and Griff asked me to do some bits and pieces in Alas, which was enormous fun to do, and at the time I was as excited by doing that as I was by Blackadder – for a start it was much funnier than the first Blackadder! And it meant I was around much more for the creative parts – the first Blackadder series, by and large, we acted what was written down, but with Mel and Griff it was much more about workshopping comedy. The script editor was Jimmy Mulville, and we got on very well, so he suggested me for the Channel 4 series.’
Originally piloted in 1983 without Robinson, Who Dares Wins was another attempt to carry on where Not left off, with an Oxbridge bunch reacting to the foibles of 1980s life, spearheaded at first by ex-Not scribe Andy Hamilton and Denise O’Donoghue. With head writers Mulville and Rory McGrath joining Oxonians Pope and Julia Hills for the full series – broadcast late on Saturday night on Channel 4 in 1984, specifically aimed at boozy youths thrown out at closing time – Tony’s ‘theatrical university of life’ background made him an interesting performer to complete the quintet, and gave him plenty of scope for showing a little versatility after the less rewarding creation of the first Baldrick (even if he is mainly remembered as a panda, or for running around naked). ‘I think I learned more from the four series of Who Dares Wins than almost anything I’ve ever done. I was surrounded by incredibly talented people at the top of their game who were constantly creating comedy, it really was a comedy factory, and you either sank or swam.’
Although never a mainstream hit in the vein of Not, Who Dares Wins did boast some of its best writers, including Hamilton, Guy Jenkin and Colin Bostock-Smith, plus Tony Sarchet, all given specific licence to push as many boundaries of taste as they dared. ‘We got away with murder!’ Tony says. ‘And this was the time when Mary Whitehouse was watching every sketch show like a hawk.’
Luckily for Who Dares Wins Productions, latterly Hat Trick (the production company started by McGrath, Mulville and his wife O’Donoghue to make the programme), another sketch show on Sunday nights over on ITV was drawing far more flak from the nation’s moral watchdogs. With
the launch of Spitting Image, John Lloyd had moved on from Rowan Atkinson’s rubber face to a cast of thousands of them, and in the process he would inspire a whole new chain of collaborations and comic legacies – starting with an early writers’ meeting not long after the broadcast of The Black Adder, at which Richard Curtis’s paranoia about his sitcom’s popularity was calmed by his meeting a genuine fan, in the shape of Young Ones writer and budding stand-up Ben Elton.
fn1 At the same time, revealing the duality of Jackson’s career, Rik showed up as a guest on The Cannon & Ball Show.
fn2 McMillan was born in South Lanarkshire in 1950, although thanks to a public-school education at Glenalmond College (‘the Eton of Scotland’), paid for by his doctor father, he was ridiculed for his posh accent when he enrolled at Glasgow Art School in the late sixties. In truth, Robbie despised the public-school system and rebelled at every opportunity, even though he was also a popular figure, playing rugby for the school and becoming head of the debating society. Also, like Rowan Atkinson, at a young age he developed an insatiable passion for the internal combustion engine. His studies in Glasgow centred on painting and film, but before graduation he had already decided that the latter was his true medium, especially in front of the camera, and so began a long decade of working on the fringes of Scottish theatre and comic improvisation in Glasgow nightclubs, having taken his stage name in honour of his jazz hero John Coltrane. It wasn’t until the start of the following decade that Robbie Coltrane moved south and began to pick up bigger comic roles.
fn3 Plus a sublime forty-minute spin off, Kevin Turvey: The Man Behind the Green Door, starring Rik, Ade and Robbie
fn4 On the list was a first ever writing credit for one ‘Steven Fry’, who had supplied one of many quickies poking fun at the mind-blowing new technology of electric handdryers.
fn5 John had also sent the internal BBC memo which led to the H2G2 TV series, and was on standby to produce until Not filled up his schedule, though he received an ‘Associate Producer’ credit.
fn6 As Stevenson’s story was adapted into a rollicking TV drama in the seventies, The Black Arrow’s influence on Blackadder seems hard to ignore.
fn7 There was nothing new about a comic playing different members of one vast family tree either – the first star vehicle for On the Buses favourite Reg Varney was a children’s comedy series in 1964 called The Valiant Varneys, which ran for two series looking at a whole host of the cheeky chap’s historical ancestors, though sadly every episode was deleted and the show is now officially Missing Believed Wiped.
fn8 A frowning serpent circling a crown, with dragons rampant, a host of vicious weapons and emblems of skulls and torture, adorned with the motto Veni Vidi Castratavi Illegitimos (‘I came, I saw, I castrated the bastards’).
fn9 The part would bag him the odd distinction of having two central but short-lived roles in the pilots of huge eighties sitcoms – Blackadder and Red Dwarf.
fn10 Including production assistant Hilary Bevan-Jones, who had started her career on Not, and would stick with the Blackadder team for the series before becoming a successful producer, working again with Curtis on The Boat That Rocked.
fn11 A hastily rewritten version of The Death of the Pharaoh, featuring alternative comedy icon Malcolm Hardee.
fn12 Costume dramas themselves rarely had such luxury – by the time Atkinson was filming the first series of Blackadder, in another studio in Broadcasting House Ron Cook was covering the same period of history by playing Shakespeare’s Richard III with nothing but cardboard sets and painted backdrops. He only got a taste of the high-budget life when he resurfaced in the sitcom’s finale as Sean the Irish Bastard.
fn13 Baldrick’s fear that he would be lucky to get back up to dung-shoveller level was an unintended spot of historical accuracy: medieval dung-shovellers, or gong farmers, earned far more than most labourers.
fn14 His characterisation owed much to his insane performance as mercenary guerrilla Mad Mike Hoare in the last series of Not: ‘The enemy, soldier, are dedicated professionals, armed with 500 machine guns, dozens of tanks, flame-throwers, atomic bombs, Martian ray-guns, giant spiders and large sticks with spiky bits on the end, which they love to shove up your bottom and turn rapidly!’
fn15 Brian is quick to add that when climbing Mount Ararat with a Turkish party in 2008, his comrades would gleefully quote from the show, especially his line ‘Love your fellow man as yourself – unless he’s Turkish, in which case, KILL THE BASTARD!’
fn16 It is tempting to see the moment Atkinson lops off Cook’s head as symbolic of a torch being passed.
fn17 ‘Canned laughter’ being largely an invention of dim-witted critics, Hanna-Barbera cartoons aside.
fn18 Desmond continues to run the company to this day, but his time with Wallace signalled the height of NTOB’s popularity, presenting a very different kind of historical comedy, channelled through the gob-smacking amateurism of Dingle’s writing and direction.
fn19 Sadly, Nunn died in spring 2012, at the age of forty-nine.
fn20 They would be reunited a year later for one of John Cleese’s Video Arts training films, Oh What the Hell? – but then most of the comedians featured in this book would crop up in a Video Arts film at some point.
fn21 A voice that has been embedded in the national psyche for decades, not least thanks to the government’s official ‘Protect and Survive’ nuclear attack public information films and his apocalyptic narration for Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s ‘Two Tribes’.
Parte the Third:
THE VIRGIN BASTARD
WITH HENRY TUDOR establishing the most efficient internal government and secure royal line in late-medieval Britain, it’s not surprising that the system inherited by his granddaughter in 1558 should have been one of unprecedented sophistication and power. Elizabeth’s time on the throne would usher in revolutions in literature and warfare, but as a time of espionage and intrigue, the Elizabethan era also stands alone. Thanks to the machinations of her spymaster Francis Walsingham and the delicate balance of power between Protestant England and her Catholic neighbours, the Queen’s reign was a hotbed of secrecy, plot, murder, mystery and cunning planning. So many differing and unverifiable claims can be made about Elizabeth’s forty-five-year reign (Did she hide a bastard by Dudley or Seymour? Had she colluded with Dudley to kill his first wife? Was she Shakespeare? Was Shakespeare Shakespeare?) that it would be very easy for our Blackadder Chronicler to drop in a celebrated forebear, right in the heart of the Tudor court, in its first flush of post-Bloody Mary jubilation.
Especially in this early part of her rule, Elizabeth’s flirting with her favourites and teasing of both her council and the Princes of Europe with promises to wed and deliver an heir ensured that there would be so many posthumous claimants to the Virgin Queen’s deflowering that one more favourite (albeit one who has escaped any mention in primary sources of the period) would make little difference. However, what nobody would expect such a claimant to suggest is that Elizabeth I was, for at least the last two-thirds of her reign, a psychotic cross-dressing German called Ludwig.
The issue of Elizabeth’s sexuality has been so hotly debated for centuries that the question of her actual sex is seldom addressed. Until the Queen was approaching her fifties, her doctors regularly testified that her reproductive organs were still capable of providing a healthy child. Although medicine may not have been the most advanced of sciences in the sixteenth century, it would be hoped that a royal physician could recognise a Prussian package when he saw one – but then who could say that any quack, violently threatened by his monarch to keep well away from the crown jewels and to report that all was well, would dare to defy her, or him?
Certainly, the bulk of the history of the Lord Edmund Blackadder (1529–66), one-time Lord High Executioner and part-time explorer, depicts the sovereign as girly in the extreme. The Lord’s exact line of descent from Prince Edmund Plantagenet is never entirely settled in the Chronicles, with different claims th
at he was his great-, or great-great-grandson. But it’s easy enough to posit that any determined bastard spawn of Prince Edmund could have convinced the wily Henry VII that his silence on the little matter of Henry’s thrashing at Bosworth was easily bought, with a new title and perhaps a Blackadder Hall to call home. The next Edmund in line, identified in the Chronicles as Cardinal Blackadder, Keeper of the Privy Rolls, would have thrived in the debauched and dastardly environment of Henry VIII’s court. Any noble given licence to hang around the royal toilet was in effect the closest to the seat of power in the whole kingdom, and the family prospered, until Henry VIII’s death (here claimed to be murder at the Cardinal’s hands) led to Queen Mary’s reign of terror, and exile for the whole family, whereupon Cardinal Blackadder was said to have frittered away the family fortune on ‘wine, women and amateur dramatics’. This left his impecunious but dashing son ill-suited to dallying with Elizabeth when she took to the throne, and yet here he is claimed to be her real favourite, making all but daily visits to the Queen’s palace at Richmond.
Lord Robert Dudley has always been recognised as the closest thing to a real love in Elizabeth’s life, but it may be telling that the dates for Lord Blackadder’s time at the heart of the Elizabethan court begin in 1560 – two years into the Queen’s reign, and the same year that Dudley’s chances of ever marrying Elizabeth were nixed by the questionable suicide of his terminally ill wife Amy Robsart, in the summer. Perhaps with her hopes for Dudley dashed, Elizabeth turned to another intimate, the handsome Edmund, her ‘Ned’. Elizabeth’s numerous favourites are well documented, from Raleigh and Essex to poor Sir Christopher Hatton, who went to his grave unmarried, still proclaiming his love for the redhead ruler. Yet there is no Edmund on record – perhaps the most tantalising equivalent known to historians would be Thomas Butler, ‘the Black Earl’, a childhood friend of Elizabeth who grew to be a witty charmer, nicknamed ‘my black husband’ by the Queen. As an Irish noble, however, he is clearly not our man.
The True History of the Blackadder: The Unadulterated Tale of the Creation of a Comedy Legend Page 14