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

by J. F. Roberts

  Turnips, Cabbages and Queens

  ‘With the second series, we started to establish the repertory company,’ Atkinson says, ‘not only a sort of claustrophobic and dramatic setting, but also quite a small and neat group of people who had a lot of natural creative empathy with one another, which continued until the end.’ Perhaps the simplest reincarnation in Blackadder II was that of Percy Percy, whose Elizabethan guise just made the Sir Andrew Aguecheek comparisons blatant. McInnerny’s long, lissom form seemed made to personify the Renaissance dandy, with ostentatious ruffs bringing to mind ‘a bird swallowing a plate’. ‘I think one of the things that made Blackadder so superb was the amount of research that went into both the props and the costumes. There were real absurd fashions at the time, where things were taken to huge extremes, so it’s not so outlandish an idea.’ Percy’s role as Blackadder’s emotional punchbag was to earn him the viewers’ love, and Glaister nails the appeal: ‘He’s like the runt of the litter, you want to kick him, just because he’s so desperate to please, you want to say, “Oh, go away!”’ ‘I remember people asking me at the time whether Percy was based on anybody,’ McInnerny says. ‘He just naturally grew out of the rhythm of the writing. Every time you looked at Richard’s writing, it was just there and very clear.’

  Tony’s return was as much a transformation as Rowan’s, albeit in the opposite direction – Baldrick was about to embark on a course of devolution that would make him the nation’s favourite dullard. ‘In order to make Blackadder’s character work,’ Robinson recalls, ‘he needed to be surrounded by people who were clearly much stupider than he was. And the problem with having a Baldrick who was brighter than he was, was that everyone was brighter than him, so where’s the comedy? There was no subtlety about it, no duality about it. So one of the ideas they came up with was that Baldrick should be the stupidest person there’d ever been in the history of the world. And it took me a long time to get him as stupid as was required – he was still fairly bright in series two, he was quite chipper in many ways. By series four, he was the living dead, but I’m not quite sure that that was in some ways as good as he was in Blackadder II.’ Both writers had a deep love of sitcom idiocy, admits Curtis. ‘The very, very stupid character is a sitcom tradition, it’s a lovely thing to have total idiocy.’ This new Baldrick balanced out his loss of mental agility with a whole new level of Curtis-inspired cuddliness, and the stirrings of a crucial trait spearheaded by Elton. ‘I can remember Ben bouncing up to me and saying, “I’ve got a great idea, Tony – Baldrick loves turnips!” I said to him, “What’s so funny about turnips?” And he said, “You know, they’re shaped like that, and they go to a point at the end …” And I said, “Ben, that’s parsnips!” And he said, “Whatever, it’s really funny, believe me.” I said, “Ben, really, it’s not going to get a laugh, it’s like the most unfunny thing in the world.” Which proves how little I know about comedy, and how much Ben knows. But on the other hand I do know much more about root vegetables.’

  ‘It’s rather impressive, I always think, how both Tim and Tony manage to be stupid in different ways. Usually stupidity is rather a one-note song, but they have their own brands,’ Stephen Fry says admiringly. But his own entry into the Blackadder brethren, though hardly the shrewdest nob in Christendom, would provide some contrast. With Edmund and his two friends back in the saddle, a new court had to be built up around them, and Elton always intended the Black Adder’s new nemesis to be played by his Alfresco comrade, even named Melchett in honour of Fry’s famous monologue. Elizabeth needed ‘a sort of William Cecil, Lord Burghley figure, all forked beard, forked tongue and fur-lined cloak’ to cheaply personify the extensive council who would have filled the royal court, and Fry lost no time in accepting the role, even though he recalls his friend apologising, ‘I won’t lie to you, it’s not like the greatest character in the world – he and Blackadder hate each other. He’s a kind of chamberlain figure, you know?’

  With Melchett as the Queen’s right-hand man, a space was reserved on her left for that Shakespearean staple, the jolly Nurse, and the Ashford-born seasoned actress Patsy Byrne perfectly fitted the role. Though proud to prove to everyone that she could still do the splits on command, the 52-year-old diminutive, cuddly Byrne was the real veteran of the team. Her time with the English Stage Company at the Royal Court under George Devine in the fifties saw her originate roles directed by Lindsay Anderson and John Dexter, and Aunt Mildred in N. F. Simpson’s comedy One Way Pendulum. ‘We were all theatre-trained. I remember Tony Robinson’s Feste in Twelfth Night at the Chichester Festival, it was very good – he was a classical actor!’ Byrne’s own theatrical experience dovetailed perfectly with requirements, with roles including Twelfth Night’s Maria for the RSC, plus I, Claudius and historical epic The Devil’s Crown, and most fittingly of all, playing the Nurse in an ITV production of Romeo and Juliet a decade earlier, giving her a trial run at Bernard the Tudor Nurse’s combination of matronly dotage and treacly idiocy. ‘I played the Nurse about three or four times – it followed me around, that character. So Nursie was a good part for me! I added just a little kind of colouring. She’s an earthy character and I think you’ve got to have a certain roundness – perhaps to the vowels, though she’d probably think more of the bowels than the vowels … I was completely at home right from the start with Nursie – innocent, scatological, and most incredibly stupid with a very warped and weird view on life, and just so sweetly gormless, but a rather loving creature. I mean, I liked her.’

  The producer was delighted with the new trouper, and her ability to be ‘naughty and saintly by turns, and utterly lovable on screen and off’, and for Byrne the public’s love for her character would be the cherry on top of a long and successful life in the business. ‘It was six weeks’ work in, I’m quite happy to admit, a fifty-year-long career, but that six weeks made an enormous difference. For years I’d done some not high-profile but very interesting, rewarding work, and I’d done quite well. Suddenly I became almost, even in the very small part of Nursie, a household name! I still now go to Sainsbury’s and about eight times, every time I go, people say, “Hello, Nursie!” I enjoy that … I’ve often been asked, “Could you come to a party and bring your udders with you?” I say, “I don’t keep them in the wardrobe!”’ Miriam Margolyes says, ‘I’m still great friends with all of them – particularly Patsy Byrne, for whom I’m often mistaken! People often think that I played Nursie but I have to say, somewhat sadly, that I didn’t, but that I know Nursie and I will pass on the good wishes. She was a glorious fixture in Blackadder, I was just a recurring guest artist.’

  The budgetary restraints had turned an opulent royal court into a cosy family, but with Blacky, Percy, Melchy, Nursie and Balders all signed up, the team still faced the biggest challenge of all – it seemed impossible to find a Queenie, the all-important authority figure for the Black Adder to slither over. The most startling suggestion was Brian Blessed, who had early talks with Martin Shardlow about sticking on a red wig and playing the Queen himself – the idea being that where he never knew Edmund’s name in the first series, in the second he would be so obsessed with Blackadder that the star would be in constant terror of sexual attack. Luckily (or tragically), however, Blessed’s availability did not match with the recording dates, though he would remain friends with Rowan, who appeared on Brian’s This is Your Life in 1984, bowing and scraping. In lieu of Blessed, at least forty female actors (including many famous names who can of course never be specified) were rigorously auditioned, but found wanting. Curtis and Lloyd were in despair, until ‘a scruffy, slightly distracted-looking girl with unwashed hair’, a redhead of the exact same age as Elizabeth herself in 1560, changed everything.

  MIRANDA JANE RICHARDSON

  BORN: 3 March 1958, Southport, Lancashire

  Miranda was the younger of two daughters born to Marian and marketing executive William Richardson, coming along several years after the birth of her sister. Growing up in a cosy corner of the N
orth-West, young Miranda discovered the two all-pervading loves of her life while still very tiny – performing, and four-legged friends of all varieties.

  Her original hopes of becoming a vet, however, were abandoned, thanks to the undeniable skill she showed onstage and in the classroom as a talented mimic. After her O levels Miranda’s first port of call was the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, where three years of study were followed by the then indispensable training ground of repertory theatre. Glowing notices from her work at the Library Theatre, Manchester (where she was also assistant stage manager), led to a West End debut in the play Moving, in 1981. In the same year, she had a small role in the ITV sitcom Agony, and further success in television roles had by 1985 led to her first starring role in a film, playing Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain, in Dance with a Stranger.

  ‘Miranda seemed very willing to muck in,’ Rowan reflects. ‘She did effectively become a member of the repertory company. She had such a sort of brave and eccentric creative curiosity to her, it meant that she didn’t really care what she did or how she did it, she was going to enjoy exploring all the possibilities, and that’s where her Elizabeth came from.’ In the summer of 1985 Miranda Richardson was already mulling over the lead in Hollywood thriller Fatal Attraction, but having recently had such success playing one romantically deranged murderess in Dance with a Stranger, she felt that historical sitcom would offer a greater challenge. ‘I had a glorious opportunity to go off at a tangent, you know? I hate being boxed and labelled, so if somebody had just gone, “Oh, serious drama!” I’d have been a bit disappointed. I’m an actor and I like to be as flexible as I possibly can be, so I was given the opportunity immediately to go and do something really quite wild and wacky … The scripts were very detailed and arcane. It was the combination of, if you like, Ben the yobbo and Richard the scholar. The same elements are all in Monty Python. It was scholarly, wide-ranging and mentally adept as well as wild and woolly. That sort of anarchy is very English.’

  Curtis was delighted with the new addition. ‘Everybody did it in a very two-dimensional way, and then Miranda came in and she was just completely bizarre – a strange mixture of sort of woman–child– nymphomaniac–tyrant. And I remember that, in a way, every line got changed afterwards. She could do what we wrote, but we actually then wrote something much more in her direction.’ This is not to say that the completed core cast instantly gelled. Tony Robinson remembers the crisis in the air: ‘For the first week we were really, really frightened, because Richard and Ben didn’t know how to write for women. I don’t think they’d met a woman until that time. It was only when Miranda came in and did this fantastic performance that they knew how to write for her. Miranda is an extraordinary actress, and Richard knew that she was, and brought her in because of the quality of her acting, he was so captivated by it. But the part that had originally been written was half baked, and if the Queen Elizabeth character didn’t work, then the show wasn’t going to work.’ The situation wasn’t helped by Lloyd’s admission that ‘her well of creativity is so bottomless and so brimming with such mysterious liquids that directing her is pointless’. It was down to Richardson herself to find a way to play the Queen, a world away from Glenda Jackson, Bette Davis and a hundred other Elizabeths. ‘I think I knew that this was somebody with a lot of power but far too young really to deal with it. I thought of her like an infanta, somebody who everybody was kowtowing to and saying “yes” to, while politicking like mad in the background … It’s within court, which is a very small, bejewelled world, you know, and there are these little people in there who think they rule the world, but of course it was only me that ruled the world. I thought of her as someone with too much, too soon, far too young. She’s quite prone to sending people off to be trimmed – a small nip and tuck, involving their head usually, if she feels a bit moody that day … and she’s a girl. Girls get moody.’ But that wasn’t the whole picture, this was a young Elizabeth, freshly crowned, and not entirely virginal. ‘She was obviously somebody who had crushes – because I mean, let’s face it, I don’t think she did anything of great significance with boys. It was sort of like the pony club and men in tights – perfect combo for her … big bulbous tights. But nothing ever came to fruition, so she was always in that sort of suspended state of not-quite-adolescence.’

  The eureka moment came when Richardson discovered the exact lisping delivery to convey this weird infantilism, a voice which had made the cast of Dance with a Stranger howl in between takes. ‘I know I was referencing a friend I had at school, we’d talk in this sort of silly language to each other, and go into a sort of exacerbated sweet, slightly girly sort of baby voice.’ ‘Midway through that first week,’ Robinson says, ‘suddenly Miranda discovered this young woman who’s on the cusp of ponies and sex, as it were. And I remember the scene when she got it; John Lloyd was leaping up and down with excitement, going “Yes, that’s it! That’s it!” And from that moment, that series took off. Miranda has this ability to make what she does look entirely spontaneous but it’s virtually always really thought through. And it’s as though by thinking it through, she can then allow herself internally to have a whole kind of 5 November firework display going on inside her head, because she’s confident in the structure that’s she’s already created.’

  The rest of the cast were bowled over by Richardson’s transformation. McInnerny admits, ‘It was very frightening what Miranda did with Elizabeth – turning her into this kind of psychotic.’ And her sidekick Byrne would concur: ‘She gave a performance of sustained imagination – and she’s just so clever!’ ‘It ought to have been deeply weird, pervy, peculiar, wrong, Queenie’s relationship with Nursie, but instead of making the Queen less dignified, it somehow made her more so,’ Fry says. ‘The essence of caprice in a monarch that Miranda played is one of the most joyous experiences of my life, to be standing next to her watching these incredible contortions and writhings, and hearing these phenomenal squeaks and squeals and noises coming out of this incredible woman.’ To complete the circle of mutual admiration, Miranda was eventually to pay tribute in return, in her own way: ‘Stephen is fantastic … much older than his years, he had this extraordinary gravitas and maturity, that’s what I remember. And his marvellous height! His presence added to the extremes, you know – you’ve got Nursie who’s sort of practically spherical, then I’m like this little firework or something in the middle, and Melchy’s this wonderful lugubrious long streak of piss next to me. His character reminded me a bit of something I used to watch all the time, Noggin the Nog. He reminded me of Thor Nogsson, so I was very taken with him.’

  All this extraordinary backslapping, however, was in the future, as the Blackadder company repaired to the ‘North Acton Hilton’ for rehearsals, preparing to go into Studio 6 at BBC TV Centre, for the show’s first exposure to a live audience.

  Tweaking the Nose of Terror

  ‘It’s a bit like doing Shakespeare in front of an audience – it’s not at all like doing sitcom,’ Mandie Fletcher was to claim about those Sunday-night recordings, but to the returning trio from The Black Adder, this stressful new system came as a shock. Early summer 1985 was given up to this recurring nightmare, six intense performances, each the result of a week of equally intense rehearsal and argument. In The Fry Chronicles, Stephen traced the process: ‘On Tuesday morning we would read through the script, with Richard and sometimes Ben in attendance … Mandie would make notes and build up her camera script, and John would grimace and sigh and smoke and pace and growl. His perfectionism and refusal to be satisfied was part of the reason Blackadder worked. Every line, plot twist and action was taken, rubbed between his fingers, sniffed and passed, rejected or pulled in for servicing and improvement.’

  Close proximity to this gaggle of perfectionists had caused problems for guest stars in the first series, but now the stakes were higher. The scripts had already been feted as the best Lloyd had seen, but greatness could be polished further, and even at this relativ
ely early stage in Blackadder’s evolution, the wrangling could become fraught. Fry says, ‘Hours would pass and packets of cigarettes would be got through and huge quantities of hideous polystyrene muddy coffee would be drunk, in an effort to try and get the scripts right.’ ‘I remember Stephen at one point just scraping his chair back and striding around the room,’ Richardson adds, ‘this enormous person striding round, and he came back to the table, grabbed a pencil and piece of paper and put it in front of me, and it just said “Fucking hell!”’ Amid this comedic ruck, while sharing tea-making facilities with David Jason and Nicholas Lyndhurst, Atkinson must have occasionally envied them their straightforward approach to John Sullivan’s Only Fools scripts. ‘Sometimes it was very tense,’ he says. ‘I remember some very difficult times when we appeared to be just sitting around for two and a half hours bemoaning the lack of writing clarity in a particular scene and desperately trying to think how that might be reorientated to work.’ On the other hand, Fry says, ‘Only Fools was a success because it was real and not trying to be anything other than set in a world Sullivan and his cast knew – a kind of antidote to our smart-arse “Oh look at me I’ve been to university” school of comedy.’