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

by J. F. Roberts

  Lloyd was very happy to have Elton on board. ‘We became very good friends very quickly. Harry Enfield, Ben and I used to see a lot of each other, and get very drunk, because our girlfriends all gave us the sack at about the same time. Of all the people Richard told about Ben joining in the second series, I was the most pleased, because I thought he was a great guy and very talented.’ However, the degraded machinations of the Fuddle family were certainly not the stuff to win over a man like Richard Armitage, and the suggestion that Elton would become the new co-writer of his star comic’s big sitcom vehicle was not welcomed in the Noel Gay office. Atkinson knew that the stand-up had a track record second to none, but his agent’s misgivings could easily have called the whole project to a halt. In the end, it was Fry who stepped forward to vouch for his friend’s perfect suitability for the job. ‘You can’t not get on with Ben – whatever his apparent reputation may be as a bit of a yappy Jack Russell, he’s the most adorable and brilliant man you could possibly hope to spend time with. So I was utterly thrilled when he and Richard got on well enough to decide to write together, because I knew that together they would make something that was absolutely of the time.’ However, he was to note, ‘Ben is one of the most extraordinarily gifted people I have ever met. As much as he is gifted he seems cursed with a woeful talent for causing people to disapprove of him … he has never been a fool and knows this very well, yet the one accomplishment he seems not to have been granted is the ability to do anything about it.’ Luckily, Fry’s honeyed words did the trick, and it was full steam ahead for Blackadder II. ‘I was flattered to have my opinion so valued. My contribution to the success of Me and My Girl, which had made Richard the happiest man in London, and the fact that I could be taken to any weekend gathering or dinner party without letting the side down, had led him to rely on me as a kind of intermediary between his world and the brave new one that was springing up around him.’

  Besides, Elton’s style comprised two main threads: there was gleeful vulgarity, for sure – he admits himself, ‘I don’t dwell exclusively on the nether regions, but my comedy has plumbed a lot of orifices’ – but his other main strength was always his deep love of toying with the English tongue. ‘He was very good on the history,’ Curtis confirms, ‘and fantastic on the language. Ben has an extraordinary sort of Rabelaisian love of insane language … Blackadder is the fanciest thing I’ve ever written, and that came about partly because of Ben, and partly because we were allowed to be fancy because it was old.’ Elton agrees. ‘The character loves to form a fruity sentence, or to undercut a fruity sentence.’ But Tony Robinson has a different take on the programme’s move towards the sesquipedalian. ‘If you think about where Blackadder came from it is actually the comedy of adolescent boys trying to impress each other. And given that it was adolescent boys, most of whom, I would have thought, weren’t great on the games field, it was going to come through their banter and their competitive use of words. I don’t think it’s a surprise that that use of language should have been so strong in Blackadder.’ Mellifluent dialogue and anarchic smut just happened to be also central to the first series’ appeal, so it’s little wonder that Curtis & Elton found the construction of the new Lord Blackadder’s world surprisingly easy, resulting in a number of scripts which Lloyd claimed to be the best he had read. ‘Just completely brilliant. And I was jumping up and down, as any producer is when you get a great script through the letter box.’

  ‘Ben has this extraordinarily profligate talent when it comes to writing,’ Curtis continues. ‘So you say to Ben, “Wouldn’t it be a good idea if maybe … we do Elizabeth I?” And then you say, “Let’s meet again on Thursday and have another chat about it,” and by Thursday, he’d written three episodes.’ ‘Richard and I had, I think, the best imaginable writing collaboration,’ Ben adds. ‘We very quickly evolved a work method that stood with us through all three series.’ ‘The fantastic thing was that you end up morphing into each other,’ Richard says. ‘You end up actually trying to write to please the other person, so you might think that I was in charge of plots and history, and Ben was in charge of knob gags, but in fact I used to write jokes to try and make Ben laugh, and Ben used to try and write plots in order to impress me.’

  Curtis & Elton’s one golden rule was that neither could ever question the other’s edits, the junior partner recalls. ‘You wouldn’t fight for a line which had been cut, which was quite difficult, because often Richard would cut stuff which I thought was good, and often vice versa. The theory was, you don’t tell a joke at dinner and then if no one laughs, say, “Wait a minute, you weren’t listening, I just said something really funny!” You just move on. So that was very relaxing, not having to rake back through the stuff you did before.’ Richard did, however, have a habit of ticking jokes which made him laugh, frustrating Ben, who admitted to sifting through notes fuming, ‘What’s wrong with the rest of the stuff, you bastard? There hasn’t been a tick for three pages and it’s all brilliant!’

  ‘Once we’d finished the episodes,’ Curtis continues, ‘we’d then give them to John, he would give us all his notes, we’d take those into accountfn10 … Then we’d have a reading – and it’s a great and depressing surprise that no matter how hard you work on anything, some things just don’t take wing when they’re read. And there were always a couple – not necessarily the ones we thought were the best – which, because of the nature of the set-up, would just fly from the beginning, and people would laugh all the way through. And then there’d be other ones which were stodgy and incorrect, and then we’d take them off and get to work on those again.’ There were teething problems – a murder-mystery episode started by Elton soon ended up in the bin – but the fruits of the duo’s labours were well received, especially by the star himself.

  Since completing work on The Black Adder, Atkinson had taken the title role in Larry Shue’s West End comedy The Nerd, and among the usual round of Royal Variety Performances, there was a special birthday tribute for Bob Hope. Armitage had also teamed him with Fry to create a screenplay for a Jacques Tati-inspired crime caper, to be produced by David Puttnam. Stephen remembers, ‘The idea was an English M. Hulot’s Holiday in which Rowan, an innocent abroad, would find himself unwittingly involved in some sort of crime caper. The character was essentially Mr Bean, but ten years too early.’ But although Rowan had happily relinquished scripting duties, the return of the Black Adder remained paramount, as he told Time Out, ‘My future credibility with the BBC probably rests with the success or failure of this series.’

  However, the team hadn’t even had time to arrange a reading before news came through that the series was dumped. Michael Grade – TV high-flyer, sole inheritor of the Grade empire’s fame, and new Controller of BBC1 – swung the axe. ‘The Head of Comedy came in to see me, and he rattled through, another series of Only Fools and Horses, another series of ’Allo ’Allo, and another series of Blackadder…” And I said, “Stop right there.” And he sort of dropped his pencil and looked at me. I said, “No.”’ Lloyd, Atkinson, Curtis and Elton subsequently each received letters from John Howard Davies informing them that there would be no Blackadder II ‘for this season, and realistically that means forever’.

  It’s Spontaneous and It’s Called Wit

  The fact that Blackadder was nearly axed is hardly an astounding source of dramatic tension – its return from the brink has become a textbook case for TV bosses, warned to give fledgling sitcoms time to develop, even though The Black Adder was laughingly dubbed ‘The show that looked a million dollars, and cost a million pounds’ by BBC insiders. On the other hand, the manner of Blackadder’s saving remains a bone of contention. Grade insists, ‘I felt the show was kind of indulgent, and a bit lost. But I could see there was something there, and I wanted to do it again, and I laid down the condition that I would do another series, provided they came into the studio with the audience and got the show on its feet, shot it in sequence, and they’d find out what they had, which I don’t think they
did on location.’

  ‘My memory is that the scripts were written, they were basically finished,’ Elton argues, ‘and the decision to go into studio, and to avoid the big filmic vibe of the previous series was one that Richard and I took on day one. The idea that it was a financially canny executive that sort of pushed us back into the studio is not true.’ John, Richard and Ben quickly took the scripts, double-checked the excise of any sequence which required anything more ambitious than a polystyrene knoll, and rushed to show Auntie what they had in mind. Ben continues, ‘John ran to Michael Grade and said, “Look, I know exactly why you cancelled it, but we knew that too! That’s why we’ve done Blackadder II. This is the new thing – it’s different, it costs half as much and it’s three times as funny. You’re gonna love it,” and to Michael Grade’s great credit he read it and reinstated it.’ It couldn’t have done any harm that Richard Armitage (boyhood friend of that other son of a famous musical act, Bill Cotton Jr, then Managing Director of BBC TV), went into TV Centre all guns blazing to fight for Rowan’s return.

  ‘“Not enough laughs to the pound” was the phrase used at the time and I suppose it was quite a reasonable attitude,’ said Atkinson to the Mirror in 1990. ‘Grade could think of many worthier – and certainly cheaper – shows he could put on, so to him there was little point in persevering with Blackadder. What nobody bothered to mention was that the second series was going to cost a third of the first … It was a classic BBC cock-up. The Light Entertainment department failed catastrophically to represent our interests and it could have spelt the death of Blackadder there and then. It was a nerve-racking time, but, fortunately, after he was put in the picture he changed his mind.’ As the spring of 1985 rolled along, Lloyd was finally able to begin forming a cast and a crew, for this all-new bubble of historical slander.

  Publicising the show at the time, Atkinson said, ‘We really wanted to do the second series to make some of the failings of the first series into strengths and also because there was enough life still in the storyline to make it worthwhile. Edmund’s the great loser, but this time he’s not quite such a fool, he does get out of things in the end.’ And the new writing team had presented the star with a whole new challenge. ‘The two of them – rather bravely, I thought – decided quite consciously to make the central character less silly, less comic, less daft, and made him sort of rather cool and sardonic and cynical and even, in my bearded manifestation, some claimed, rather good-looking. And I think that was definitely a very important turning point, and started to provide the template of the sort of witty cynicism which so characterised the Black Adder through the remaining series.’

  The first day of production involved the shooting of the few scraps of actual film seen in the series, the team pitching up at the Wiltshire manor of Wilton House on 30 May. New director Mandie Fletcher had been drafted in to cover the technical side, an experienced theatre director fresh from learning her TV trade on suburban sitcoms like Butterflies and Three Up, Two Down. ‘Mandie was great,’ Robinson says, ‘but the role of a director varies from show to show; in Blackadder there were so many competing contributing forces that by and large the director was there simply to make it work for television, working out the shots and liaising with the various departments. Some directors contribute a bit more artistically, and I would say Mandie was one of those, but really John was driving an awful lot of the comic vision. In lots of other series I’ve been in, the producer’s hardly ever there and the director does that.’ ‘I was put onto Blackadder as some kind of punishment by the Head of Comedy, I remember,’ Fletcher says. ‘I wasn’t that experienced then, and arriving was like walking into a public school halfway through the second term in the middle of a pillow fight. They would arrive with a script that should be thirty-odd pages, but was under ten pages, which was then written during the week when I should have been rehearsing and blocking them. It was a nightmare, I’m surprised I didn’t get an ulcer! I just gritted my teeth and made bloody sure that we had a show that could be shot on the night. I’m grateful, because it put the steel into my soul for everything that came afterwards. We had T-shirts made, and they had on the front “I Survived Blackadder”, and on the back was a knife going in between the shoulder blades.’

  Much water under the bridge later, John pays tribute: ‘Mandie’s an extraordinary person, she became a director at a time when women never directed TV comedy. She’d been assistant floor manager on Not, and I was very keen on her, we were good friends. She had to fight her way up the system like crazy, and was very fiery and sassy – like a principal boy, swashbuckling, with big boots and hands on hips and, “Come on, lads, let’s be having you!” And the crew all loved it, because she was damn sexy!’ ‘We had a love/hate relationship – we had history,’ Mandie says. ‘He was funny and charming, and in those days I can’t tell you how attractive he was – he was blond and blue-eyed and just gorgeous, and that slightly put one on the back foot. But he was the creative force, and he did pull it all together. He did need to be draconian, with so many egos around.’ Lloyd continues, ‘I used to say to her, “You’re treating me like a disobedient puppy!” She’d snap her fingers and say, “John, come here!” Used to make me very cross. But she was the person who first started to bring a real visual style to Blackadder – I’d say, “That’s what you do, Mandie, you do the shots, but I’ve got to do the script because I know these guys, and you’re not going to get a better line out of them because you don’t know how to.” It was a co-production, but we squabbled like mad, like two naughty kids.’

  Along with new costume designer Annie Hardinge (who would stay with the show until the end) and Rowan himself, Fletcher helped to sculpt a louche anti-hero so closely modelled on Michael Kitchen’s charming Edmund in Jonathan Miller’s 1982 BBC King Lear that it could only be deliberate. Fletcher admits that the results were striking. ‘The moment that Rowan stepped out of the make-up caravan at Wilton House, dressed in all that garb, all us girls went “Ooh!”’ and Elton begrudgingly concurs, ‘I think we were all surprised at how well Rowan scrubbed up – particularly when he was in bed with the prostitute, nearly nude. Honestly, all the girls kept sort of whispering, “Gosh, he’s actually quite good-looking, isn’t he?” There was a lot of that going on. We made him sexy!’ ‘I deceived everyone into thinking I was half decent-looking,’ Atkinson laughs. ‘I thought I looked like the Yorkshire Ripper. It’s exhausting playing a great lover, but I must say I did enjoy it. As Edmund, I’m ambitious to have a good time – especially with Queen Elizabeth.’

  Despite the star’s modesty, the sequence they were there to film did cast him in the role of lover, in a rare instance of wilful anachronism, advertising Tudor love songs in a style defined in the script as a ‘very naff Woolies ad’. The writers promised themselves that the cheap laughs afforded by playing around with historical inaccuracy were off-limits. ‘We were not allowed to say, “What’s the time? Oh no, they haven’t invented watches yet!” That sort of joke,’ Elton says. ‘The whole thing was, basically, that Blackadder was the wristwatch that hadn’t been invented, he kind of had the attitude.’ Curtis adds, ‘That was resistant to the two traditions that there were at that point, the Up Pompeii and Carry On tradition, because whenever the Carry On people did the past, the whole thing was about anachronisms.’

  The ‘Tudor Love Songs’ insert did, however, highlight another boon of the Elizabethan period – more Shakespeare-ribbing. With the series set in the early part of Elizabeth’s reign, 1560–66, Shakespeare was mewling and puking in his nurse’s arms at the time, but that didn’t preclude digs at his crap jokes, and ‘Bells’ directly references Twelfth Night, as the dishy Edmund falls in love with his pageboy, Bob/Kate. The first character to accompany Rowan in the series therefore was Gabrielle Glaister, who had enjoyed success in the hit musical Daisy Pulls It Off, and the two of them echoed the quandary of Duke Orsino and Viola as they strode around the Earl of Pembroke’s gardens. For Glaister, the spoof element provided a clear t
emplate for her character. ‘Viola’s got everything Bob’s got really. Presumably Viola is quite sexy, as one hopes Bob was, and feisty, holding her own in a man’s world. And deceiving people.’

  While at Wilton House, Fletcher took the opportunity to make the most of the elegant surroundings. ‘I won’t take credit for much of Blackadder, but I will for the closing title sequence on series two. We had a day’s filming in His Lordship’s garden, so we put the camera back to the window, locked it off, and everyone came up with an idea of what the minstrel could do, and what Rowan could do to the minstrel, and it just worked a treat.’ Comic actor Tony Aitken had already been booked to mime the minstrel’s part, and would return to the studio for further Shakespearean spoofs, referencing Edgar’s madness for the episode ‘Money’, though he admitted, ‘I didn’t really understand the reference to King Lear and Poor Tom, the Fool and all the Shakespearean references. I could go back to university and spend three years studying Blackadder scripts and get a lot out of it.’

  Naturally, Howard Goodall had been given crushing deadlines to get the new music ready so early. ‘It was fun doing those songs at the end, although my memory is that Richard would give us the lyric about a minute before it had to be recorded, so it was always a bit tense to be honest, because we were never quite ready to do it … I feel slightly nostalgic about it, because these days you couldn’t do credits like that. First of all, you’re only allowed a tiny amount of time at the end of a programme, and second, they’re showing you the next programme over the credits and talking over them.’ The opening credits would also continue the sexy trend, blending period instrumentation with rock. ‘All the way through, I wanted to play with the idea of what you would expect to hear, and what you might then get, and I think I suggested a Renaissance-sounding band, and then a kind of crazy guitar solo. I actually wanted, rather like in Red Dwarf, for the guitarist to go madder, but it’s quite hard to get a really top session guitarist to play something that doesn’t seem to fit.’ With the original series’ opening histrionics replaced by a modest serpentine title sequence spoofing I, Claudius (although this adder needed more direction), the form of the new show was established, and it was time to fill in the gaps.