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

by J. F. Roberts

  Naturally, this first meeting between the two pop addicts brought up the subject of the regular bands who played in The Young Ones lounge every week – a clever ploy designed to make use of the bigger budgets doled out for BBC Variety programmes. Both were big fans of the north London ska outfit Madness, who had made the most memorable musical appearance in the first series episode ‘Boring’ (‘You hum it, I’ll smash yer face in’), and would be back for a musical street riot in the second series. Geoff Posner had shared with Ben his admiration for the witty musicians’ style, and had an idea. ‘I felt that there was a bit of a lack of a youth-orientated comedy programme, and when Madness were in The Young Ones, although they were a little ill-disciplined when they recorded their bit, it was quite clear that they generated a lot of excitement, they were the group that everybody wanted to have on. And I thought that this could be the eighties equivalent of The Monkees.’

  Curtis leapt at the chance to try and create a musical sitcom with Elton, but at this stage any spin-off had to wait, as Elton had second outings for The Young Ones and Alfresco to write, and perform. There was a final attempt to rejig the latter to find the right chemistry for a break-out hit – the original mournful credits were replaced with a jaunty comic-strip intro, setting up a zany return to the sitcom-style framing device of the first pilot. Taking their own advice to the Blackadder team, the cast returned to performing in front of a live audience in their new comic personas, who congregated in Bobza Coltrane’s ‘pretend pub’. Stephen became florid kindly aristocrat Lord Sezza, Hugh the right-wing Huzza, and Ben gave his persecution complex a physical manifestation as the prole-like Bezza. The show was edging from strength to strength, but after another six episodes it was clear that this cast couldn’t be kept together for more regional engagements, and they called it a day after two series. Thompson was especially unable to commit to further shows, due to starring in the massively successful revival of Noel Gay’s thirties musical Me and My Girl, masterminded by the composer’s son, who invited Fry to pen the new book – making him a millionaire by his mid-twenties in the process.

  Alfresco may not have caught on, but having failed to beat The Young Ones, the Granada gang elected to join them, as the sitcom’s second series overlapped with the end of their run in the summer of ’84. Where the first series of The Young Ones had built up a cult following, the second became a national sensation, not just with the students in the firing line, but their younger siblings drawn to the cartoony anarchy of Rick, Mike, Neil and Vyvyan’s escapades – aided by the sudden boom in the home VCR market (‘YES, WE’VE GOT A VIDEO!’) which allowed fans to memorise every episode with endless re-viewings. The first outing, ‘Bambi’, finally brought the Alfresco cast, aka ‘Footlights College, Oxbridge’, face to face – or panel below panel – with the Scumbag University students, for a University Challenge contest which had originally been suggested to Ben by Stephen since they recorded in the same Granada studios as the long-running quiz show. Where The Young Ones had quite viciously swiped at Footlighters in the first series, the right-on anti-Oxbridge sentiment of ‘Bambi’ was toothless, having been suggested by a Footlighter, and Balowski family star Alexei Sayle was beside himself with repulsion at the infringement. ‘I thought, “These are the enemy!” I was out there sawing through the brake cables of Stephen Fry’s car, saying, “These people are the Devil and you’re inviting them onto my show!” Of course nobody else knew what I was talking about, you know – “Stephen’s lovely! Emma’s gorgeous!” I was a twat to go on about it really, but that’s how I felt.’ Sayle ultimately played a smaller role than usual in the episode, and had no need to interact with the interlopers, even though the studio for that recording was packed with one of the richest crossovers of comic talent in a generation – Griff Rhys Jones and Victorian doctors Coltrane and Robinson included. On the other hand, Tony says, ‘It’s only in hindsight that you are aware of the fact that it was a bit like playing the England team against Brazil or whatever, that’s not what you’re thinking of at the time. What I was thinking was, “I hope that fucking elephant isn’t going to drag me all the way across the studio.” You cannot take an elephant where it does not want to go …’

  The end of that summer saw an even more priceless blend of comedians congregating together in the unlikely genteel surroundings of the Hampshire village of Nether Wallop. A thatched and gabled time warp that doubled as Miss Marple’s home of St Mary Mead in the BBC series, Wallop became the site of an attempt to stage an arts festival to rival Edinburgh, when journalist Stephen Pile complained about the need for an overflow from the crowded Fringe. Professor Stanley Unwin, author Gore Vidal, poet Roger McGough, artist Ralph Steadman, musicians Jools Holland and Bill Wyman, and actors Michael Hordern and Jenny Agutter were just some of the artists to stand alongside the village’s local talents in the festivities – and Bamber Gascoigne, coincidentally, hosted a special village quiz. The zenith of the weekend was the Sunday-night gala in a marquee, overseen by Paul Jackson and starring the cream of the Secret Policeman’s Balls, Pythons aside. As well as Billy Connolly, new boys Fry & Laurie repeated their ‘Shakespeare Masterclass’, Rik Mayall brought along Kevin Turvey as well as appearing in person for a nostril-snorting rendition of ‘Trouble’, and Rowan Atkinson was reunited with Peter Cook – albeit not onstage. Rowan slipped back into his native Geordie to harangue the local football team’s performance at that morning’s match, while a glowingly inebriated Cook and Mel Smith giggled their way through a one-off display of dry-land lesbian synchronised swimming which had been hammered out with Lloyd over several pints, and half forgotten by the time they reached the stage. These top-drawer bookings were drawn to the festival largely by the sheer eccentricity of the event, but also by the fund-raising aspect – partly in aid of the church spire, but mainly for Charity Projects, an organisation set up by Jane Tewson to help the homeless in Soho. Although dyslexia prevented her from getting any qualifications, Tewson had attended lectures at Oxford while working as a cleaner, and her reunion at Wallop with Oxford graduates Atkinson and especially Curtis, there to lend his friend humorous support, would yield extraordinary charitable results.

  With Rick and his bachelor boys burnt to death in a double-decker bus in the valedictory ‘Summer Holiday’, Posner decided it was time to put his spin-off idea into action, and Ben and Richard gladly got together to posit a sitcom format which could contain the anarchic Madness while giving them room to get into all sorts of comical scrapes. The group set up their own cabinet in a cafe in Camden Town, with lead singer Suggs as the new Prime Minister of Great Britain, and their arch-nemesis would be the cartoonish villain Dr. Maniac, played, like his nerkish henchmen, by the band themselves. The lads had a grand day out messing around with the idea, with Elton himself filling in any extra lines.

  ELTON:

  (v/o): And now, a party political broadcast on behalf of Madness.

  SUGGS:

  As the Prime Minister, I’ve been asked to give an address to the nation. And the address I’ve chosen to give is Mrs Hilda Carmichael of 104 The Old Kent Road, London N3. Hilda lives alone, and hasn’t received any letters for ages. It would be lovely if you could just drop her a line and wish her well. By the way, thanks for voting Madness – the party that actually cares!

  The resultant rough ten-minute caper (in which Dr Maniac steals some secret bomb plans just as the boys expect a visit from their mums) didn’t give much room for the Curtis/Elton partnership to show what they could do, Posner admits. ‘It wasn’t quite what I thought it would be. The most important thing is, it wasn’t a pilot, it was a taster. We did it on a shoestring, with the most simple kind of camera that there was – I couldn’t afford to hire any actors, it was just Madness, everything was really basic. And of course it doesn’t really hang together very well, but I thought that somebody was going to turn round and say, “I think there’s a germ of an idea here.” With Ben and Richard writing, we could perhaps create a teatime programme on Saturday th
at people would love, with Madness playing two or three numbers in the middle. I thought the people viewing it would be a little more adventurous, but it fell by the wayside.’

  Luckily Curtis & Elton weren’t holding their breaths for BBC Variety boss Jim Moir to jab a thumb either way, as they had already decided to collaborate on the even more thorny problem of how to reanimate the corpse of the Black Adder, and make his cunning plans funnier than ever.

  Cowpats from the Devil’s Own Satanic Herd

  There was no question that Curtis knew he had to start from scratch, having slaughtered the entire Plantagenet dynasty in ‘The Black Seal’, but there was never any possibility of the small matter of all the main characters dying standing in the way of Atkinson getting a second series. John Howard Davies had already recommended some form of reincarnation, as Curtis admits. ‘That was John’s suggestion, he said, “Well, you’ve probably done enough in that era, do another one, then another one!” Which was one of the reasons it was so delightful to work on. I think the public liked it because it kept changing.’ Howard Davies also compared Edmund’s journey to Flashman, and although that literary saga only follows the exploits of one man, George MacDonald Fraser’s extrapolation of one character from Tom Brown’s Schooldays to create the whoring, dishonourable coward Harry Flashman certainly provided an admirable blueprint for how to establish a believable fiction, interwoven with comically distorted real history.

  If the Blackadder Chronicles traced the family tree throughout British History, then Curtis & Elton had at least half a millennium left to play with for their second entry in the series. ‘It might have been in the back of our minds that we would change it, but obviously it was very convenient to change it, after the first one clearly needed mending,’ Curtis says, ‘and thereafter, it was just such a great thing to be able to jump and deal with new jokes, rather than being stuck in the same time.’ Elton – who at first had been keen to make an even cleaner break, changing the characters entirely – was already enthusiastic about the era for Edmund’s next incarnation, returning the show to the century of the original pilot, albeit this time rooted in fact. He may have enjoyed the first series, but admitted to Lloyd, ‘I hate that period, it’s muddy and filthy and horrible, and we should do the Elizabethan thing, which is dead sexy.’

  ‘We kind of talked the Elizabethan period through,’ Ben says, ‘and came up with a number of things – discovery, disease, tobacco, beheading, that sort of thing – and we felt instinctively we were sort of on the right track; touching on a certain sort of half-remembered school history memories for people, and yet actually, you know, playing very fast and loose with them.’ Elton was already steeped in knowledge, which was only natural for the nephew of the author of England Under the Tudors, G. R. Elton; but still, Curtis admits, ‘We wrote the whole second series without ever reading a book. After we’d written Blackadder II, I gave Ben a Ladybird book of Elizabethan history for Christmas and it turned out we’d covered twelve of the thirteen chapters. Somewhere in your bones, you know there was exploring, beheading, religious corruption, the invention of the cigarette and so on.’ If Elizabeth I was their monarch this time round, the only status worthy of a prince’s bastard descendant, which would give free rein for them to experience all that the times offered, was one of the Queen’s infamous favourites – the missing link between Dudley, Raleigh and Essex.

  History was one thing, but getting the laughs right was the most important element. Elton says, ‘My sort of memory of it is Richard basically saying, “Look, it sort of only half worked, we think we got a lot of it right and a lot of it wrong, and would you like to come in, and we’ll write it?” And of course, I thought “Fantastic!” The opportunity to write lines for Rowan Atkinson!’ ‘The very first lesson was to pick Rowan’s character, to get it exactly clear what it was he was going to do,’ Curtis remembers. ‘There was a whole imperious, sarcastic, posh side of Rowan which we both loved, which we knew how to write, it came very naturally to both of us … Ben and I went through the vocabulary of the first series, and went through what Rowan could do, and decided that someone that sarcastic would be fun. We just sort of made him simpler, and he could then become increasingly complicated through the episodes and through the series.’ Most important of all, however, was the agreement to return to the studio. Talking from experience, Ben urged, ‘Let’s get into the studio and have two wooden, cardboard sets, because the money’s in Rowan’s face. Rowan falling off a horse at two hundred metres is not really funnier than anyone else falling off a horse at two hundred metres, but get the camera in close, and he’ll make you laugh.’

  With their blueprint laid out before them, Elton had to call time yet again on the process to see to the weight of projects he had on the go. His workaholism was fuelled by two primary bosses at this point – Paul Jackson in TV and Phil McIntyre in the live arena. McIntyre was a top rock promoter, but soon saw the appeal of putting comedians on the road in much the same way that bands like the Smiths and New Order were touring under his mantle. Elton had developed a live show originally to star Mayall, with Andy de la Tour supporting, but it soon became a fifty–fifty affair: ‘Rik and I both wanted to tour, and Rik was a big star so we were able to play 2,000-seaters; he wanted me to go because we wrote together, and because I was a good support act – and because we were mates. Rik said we must have equal billing and equal money, which was probably the only time a star has ever done that! It’s very difficult to write for Rik’s live act because it’s really an excuse for him to be brilliant, to be a hilarious person. It was astonishing to watch him do so much with so little.’ Through ’84 and ’85 they honed their live show, even taking it to Ibiza for Club 18–30 holidaymakers, with support from Peter Bennett-Jones. ‘Rik was doing Kevin Turvey in a rabbit costume,’ Ben recalls. ‘It was a hundred degrees in that club, and he had his Rik suit, the Kevin Turvey furry bomber jacket on top, and on top of that his rabbit suit for the first half of the set. The man was mad.’

  While his stand-up career continued to flourish, Elton was put to work by Jackson on two comedy series. His script-editor role on ITV sitcom Girls on Top was simply a guiding hand for main scriptwriters Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders and Ruby Wax, as they pieced together an all-girl sitcom which was openly inspired by The Young Ones. Happy Families, however, was the 25-year-old’s first solo creation for the BBC, planned for broadcast on prime-time BBC1 in the autumn. This time a live audience was specifically rejected in favour of thirty-five-minute filmed episodes of such blackly perverse comedy it’s little wonder that critics had no idea what to make of it. Elton’s style of humour remained as grossly cartoonish as The Young Ones, but within the context of a dark comedy serial telling the story of the dysfunctional, incestuous aristocratic Fuddle family, and the cocktail was an acquired taste. In a way, Happy Families was intended as something of an Alfresco spin-off designed to exhibit Emma Thompson’s versatility, as Paul Jackson recalls. ‘Ben had been sitting at home one rainy afternoon, watching Kind Hearts and Coronets, and he thought to himself – very Ben at the time – “Why shouldn’t a woman get the chance to do a comedy like this?”’ Me and My Girl of course put paid to any hopes of Thompson taking part, but one major link to the Granada show remained – Fry’s return as the misogynistic, arrogant bastard of a family physician, Dr De Quincy.fn8

  Jackson hadn’t worked with Thompson before, so the loss of the star simply meant that he could offer the challenge of playing a host of strange characters to a comedian whose talents he already trusted, Jennifer Saunders. With Ade Edmondson starring as Guy, a mentally damaged cross between a Wodehouse Drone and the ultimate farty, his then girlfriend Saunders played a quintet of wildly different roles completing the family. When Guy’s hate-filled grandma is told by De Quincy that she has nine months to live, she sends the idiot round the world to reunite his four long-lost sisters: Hollywood star Cassie, French beauty Madeleine, loopy nun Joyce and the incarcerated youngest, Roxanne. The structure of the series ga
ve Jackson great scope for experimentation, with each sister’s tale taking on different filmic forms, from the soft-focused pornography of ‘Madeleine’ to the Ealing-style larks of ‘Joyce’, but there was even greater scope in the ensemble casting, encouraged by Elton’s ability to give great lines and rounded characterisations to even the most minor of characters. As with Girls on Topfn9 and The Young Ones, no role was too small for some bright new star of eighties comedy to take; the shared casts of all three shows practically exhaust the entire checklist of the ‘Alternative’ fraternity. Naturally, several were also Blackadder players, with Helen Atkinson-Wood as a tour guide, Jim Broadbent once again displaying an outrageous accent as French pornographer Dalcroix opposite Rik Mayall’s Nazi priest, and Elton himself playing the groovy governor of Roxanne’s prison, the boss of a drug-dealing warder played by his old school friend Gabrielle Glaister. This was only a brief job for Ben though – while filming continued, the writer went back to crafting his submissions for the Black Adder’s new adventures. Although not suited to its BBC1 slot, Happy Families did well enough to be offered a second run by the Corporation, and remains a unique creation, its pervy malevolence (surely an inspiration for The League of Gentlemen and others) exemplifying the freedom given to Jackson and Elton at this time.