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

by J. F. Roberts

  The penultimate caper ‘Beer’ (rated as least favourite by the team, but highest rated by viewers) was another ramped-up farce, introducing a new branch of the Blackadder family to make Edmund’s life a misery – and providing a celebrated return for Miriam Margolyes, as the violently Protestant gorgon Lady Whiteadder. ‘For a Jew, as I am, to be covered in crosses was a complicated experience,’ Margolyes says sweetly, neglecting to acknowledge the pleasure she gained from treating Atkinson and McInnerny to repeated physical abuse without recourse to stage-fighting, the latter laughing, ‘I think that she would say that there was no way of faking it … but it really hurt, actually.’ Fletcher adds, ‘In rehearsal, Rowan got a bit fed up with this, and actually it was very funny. He said, “Would it be all right, Miriam, if you just didn’t do it quite so hard?”’ But as the original directions called for the mad Puritan to hit Edmund rather than slap him, perhaps they got off lightly. Margolyes insists that people still request slaps and cries of ‘Wicked child!’ from her in the streets, to her bemusement, but above all, she says, ‘I remember being quite surprised that the director was a woman! Mandie was very good; I hadn’t been expecting a woman to be directing comedy, I don’t know why, I suppose I came from that world where comedy was always completely dominated by men. It was just terrific to see the authority she had. We laughed all the time, and worked very hard.’ ‘I used to crave the times when we had women performers on, like Miriam,’ Fletcher returns, ‘not that we had many, we were terribly outnumbered, but we were often at the lunch table together.’ Margolyes’s screen husband Lord Whiteadder would of course have been a fitting return for Jim Broadbent – almost entirely silent where his Interpreter had found it impossible to shut up – but Jim’s unavailability gave the part to the stony-faced Daniel Thorndike, nephew of Dame Sybil, who would go on to feature in A Bit of Fry & Laurie.

  The episode’s real place in history, however, comes from the Blackadder debut of Hugh Laurie, stepping in to fill the minor role of merrymaker Simon Partridge, alongside William Hootkins and Spitting Image’s Roger Blake. ‘I had the strong feeling at the time that someone had backed out at the last minute … But of course it was thrilling, because by that time Stephen had been doing the second series, Melchetting and all that stuff, and I had pangs of jealousy! And it was a real thrill to get a ticket onto that ocean liner.’ This characteristic self-effacement belies the fact that Hugh was already in place to be the final guest star of the series, providing our anti-hero with his ultimate nemesis, Prince Ludwig the Indestructible. It’s interesting that Laurie’s first involvement also coincides with an emphasis on cast-led script enhancement, defined by Lloyd as ‘plumpening’. Fry says, ‘The first four scripts which Richard and Ben presented were simply perfect, we barely changed a word, they really were marvellous. I guess, flushed with the excitement of working together and doing something completely new, they really honed them. I’m not saying they got lazier for the last two, but maybe we were more confident with our characters so we were adding a bit more.’ Whether it’s therefore fair to apportion blame or not, ‘Chains’ is perhaps the one episode which most betrays the writers’ avoidance of historical logic – in a time when Elizabeth was constantly fending off either France or Spain or both, our heroes are finally brought down by a German (albeit with a Spanish torturer). For once, Edmund got to swing into action Flynn-style and save the day, even if it was only his own hide that concerned him …

  And there Curtis & Elton were content to leave the Lord, victorious and adored by his Queen (not to mention finally managing to catch the taunting minstrel and give him a dunking), until John Lloyd put his foot down, and decided, ‘No, let’s not get stale, let’s move on another two hundred years!’ As a coda, where every other episode was to sign off with a jolly cha-cha-cha, once again a royal court was piled high with bodies, for a tragic ending which allowed the producer to note in the Radio Times that ‘Chains’ was a ‘very funny last episode in which the court get horribly murdered at the end again’.

  The Filthy Genes Resurface

  Despite the long delay between the end of recording in July and the eventual first broadcast of Blackadder II the following January, the slickness of the studio recordings, thanks to the simplicity of Fletcher’s direction, made for a far smoother post-production job for Lloyd and his team. Any slight flabbiness was tweaked as career-defining performances from the extended family of performers played out on the edit suite: Baldrick doing favours for sailors; Bernard the Nurse wearing her dead lover’s beard; Melchett’s glorious golden comedy breasts (as presented to Fry for the twenty-fifth-anniversary tribute); Edmund’s attempts to finish the song about goblins; the alchemist Percy’s miraculous discovery of how to make a splat of the purest green;fn11 Lady Whiteadder chomping on a turnip ‘as nature intended’ … Lloyd had no doubt that the finished series had been well worth the distraction from the pressures of Spitting Image – the new show was cheap, sexy, and windingly funny.

  A full quarter of a decade after Edmund’s debut, the official press release would warn, ‘The filthy genes of the Blackadder family have resurfaced in the melting pot of history,’ as the rogue landed in the same slot, Thursdays at 9.30 p.m. on BBC1. Atkinson busily went to work to remind the British public about his historical alter ego, recording special trailers for the seriesfn12 and telling the Radio Times, ‘I’m actually happier with this series and believe it has wider appeal. It’s zappy and anarchic.’ On Wogan, he mulled over ideas for future incarnations of his acerbic noble, positing the World War I flying ace the Baron von Blackadder, and the space-age adventurer Star Adder.

  But though he was open about his hopes for the show to catch on, Atkinson had already gained the most important thing in his life from his time on Blackadder II. Sunetra Sastry was the make-up artist detailed to glue on the Melchett beard for every recording and, Fry admits, she had quite an effect on him: ‘From a Brahmin-caste Indian family, she was bright, funny and as captivatingly alluring as any girl I had met for years.’ Although describing himself as ‘90 per cent homosexual’, Fry had created a rod for his own back when he wrote a short article for the Tatler admitting that sex was one of the things he ‘didn’t do’, but despite his self-imposed evasion of romance, he claims that the make-up artist gave him pause for thought. ‘I was quite seriously considering asking her out on a date, when Rowan timidly approached me one morning during rehearsals for the second episode and asked if I would mind swapping make-up artists with him. Since he had grown his own beard for the part, unlike me, who had to have my large excrescence glued on with spirit gum every week, I thought this rather odd: his make-up sessions lasted as long as it took to powder the tip of his nose …’ Fry eventually decoded his diffident co-star’s meaning, and with his blessing, Atkinson finally plucked up the courage to ask Sastry out. Despite taking her to a Dire Straits concert on what was reportedly a disastrous first date of Bean proportions, Sastry was smitten, and Rowan’s bachelor days were over. Fry continues, ‘They now have two children and twenty years of marriage behind them, but I still sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had been bold enough and quick enough on my feet to have asked Sunetra out straight away.’

  The critical response to Blackadder II was markedly warmer than it had been for the first series, but still the praise was not entirely thunderous, Ronald Hastings in the Telegraph begrudgingly admitting, ‘The first series was so variable, all right, so awful, that the BBC must have been reluctant to make a second. It is good that they did, for this is a great improvement.’

  John, Rowan and the team were certainly vindicated for fighting for Blackadder’s return and yet, especially for its mainstream slot, the second series was no breakthrough hit on its first broadcast, with ratings as modest as the critical appreciation. Tony recalls, however, ‘It was around about the repeat of the second series that I began to get an inkling of quite how popular it was. It also coincided with the time I was bringing up my children in Bristol and so it wasn’t as if
I was popping in and out of the Ivy and the Groucho Club. I was dealing with things like queuing up outside primary schools and driving children to the next games field. I remember going to Alton Towers with my kids one day and we were unable to go round it. My presence there caused chaos. I suddenly thought, “I have to recalibrate what my life is!”’ These BBC2 repeats, at 9 p.m. during the glorious summer of 1987, opened up the Blackadder history to a whole new audience, not least the millions of children who would have been tucked up in bed for the first airing. A third series was already a certainty, but thanks to being prefaced by the triumphant repeat run, Edmund Blackadder was finally gaining the place at the heart of British society which he had always felt his absolute right.

  By this time of course everyone in the cast had moved on to different projects, in film, theatre and especially comedy. But the biggest project of them all, which would unite most of the cast for years to come, began to take seed right back in the summer of ’85. As Stephen recalled, ‘The Saturday after the taping of the last episode of Blackadder II Richard held a party at his house in Oxfordshire. It was a glorious summer’s day, and, as we all wanted to watch television, he unwound an extension cord and put the set on a wooden chair in the shade of an apple tree. We sat on the grass and watched Live Aid …’ Before the party was over, having witnessed the magnitude of what could be achieved in the name of charity, Curtis and his friends began to form a plan. By the time their newly wrapped series was actually broadcast, Comic Relief would already be a red-nosed, stonking reality.

  fn1 Historical drama was a speciality – the last play imagined the scene when Mussolini was captured by partisans, prior to being strung up in 1945.

  fn2 It was John Lloyd’s visit to one of the latter which led to Fry getting his Not credit, much to Laurie’s annoyance as it meant they had to cut the gents hand-dryer quickie out of their own show.

  fn3 Not that everyone in the room on that comedy time bomb of an evening was ecstatic – somewhere in the crowd was nineteen-year-old struggling street performer Eddie Izzard, who took one look at the bright young things on stage and vowed that he would be up there himself one day.

  fn4 They were beaten in the final by Merton College, Oxford, in a cerebral mirroring of Hugh’s Boat Race experience.

  fn5 Who described the protégé’s sudden ubiquity as ‘a whole cupboardful of Stephen Fries all doing things’.

  fn6 It was while recording a surreal commercial for Whitbread bitter, dressed up in military garb with excrescent moustaches, that Fry first encountered a pre-Percy McInnerny, playing a minstrel.

  fn7 On leaving the producer’s chair, he was presented with his own hideous Fluck & Law caricature, which eventually found a home in Curtis’s garden as a particularly horrifying scarecrow.

  fn8 Whose housekeeper happened to be the unseen ‘Mrs Miggs’.

  fn9 Which featured, among myriad comic turns, Hugh Laurie being date-raped by Dawn French’s character Amanda in only his second sitcom appearance.

  fn10 Ben was to dub John ‘Mad Jack’ for the passionate, epic nature of his annotation, which sometimes extended beyond the length of the scripts themselves.

  fn11 ‘We could probably have made a fortune by creating lots of bits of green and selling them to the public,’ rues McInnerny. ‘Maybe I could still do that now …’

  fn12 ‘He lived rough, he talked rough, he wore … a ruff’.

  PARTE THE FOURTH:

  THE GEORGIAN BASTARD

  WHILE IT’S NOT surprising that Ned, the Lord Blackadder, sired bastard issue, it does seem unlikely that any kind of continuity in the Blackadder inheritance should have been possible. With Ludwig in drag on the throne, no Blackadder heir would have dared to claim their title, and so there is no notable clash with monarchy for much of the early Stuart reign, until the ennoblement of Sir Edmund Blackadder by Charles I.

  The Blackadder Chronicler not only insists that Sir Edmund was the Privy Counsellor, Royal Master of Revels and a close friend of King Charles, loyally hiding him from his enemies, but also that he was his friend and monarch’s executioner. Once again, the mysterious historian has seized on one of the greatest questions in British History and answered it – there is no official record of who severed Charles’s head on a freezing January morning in 1649. When the chief executioner Richard Brandon publicly refused to behead his King, the streets of London were scoured for an anonymous replacement, with two masked men being paid £100 for the job. Although the most likely suspect remains Brandon himself (letting it be known that he refused to commit regicide, but then doing it anyway), Sir Edmund Blackadder may as well join the roll-call of the accused.

  Sir Edmund’s confession to betraying the infant Charles II and cosying up to Cromwell did not apparently dent the dynasty’s standing in the restored court – perhaps because Charles II was actually nineteen at the time of his father’s beheading. The Chronicles even insist that a dukedom was conferred on the family in the reign of Queen Anne, and yet little is told of the Duke, or why the title was so short-lived – and indeed, the next head of the family to be extensively biographised was nothing more than Mister Edmund Blackadder Esq. (1762–1830), butler to the Prince Regent in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He could lay claim to being a gentleman but, although closer to the seat of power than any of his ancestors had been in centuries, he was no nob. Volume XIV of the Chronicles, which details the exploits of ‘Mr B’, still qualifies for its claim to be ‘a giant roller coaster’ of a story (this is the first known use of the term in the English language) because, as well as being ‘crammed with sizzling gypsies’, the narrative also describes how this Blackadder finally achieved what Prince Edmund only managed for thirty seconds – he took the crown.

  The scandalous assertion that King George IV was a Blackadder in borrowed robes is perhaps the Chronicles’ most audacious, perverted and stupid claim of all. Even in the twenty-first century, George IV easily won a BBC poll to find the most hated monarch in our history, beating King John and Richard III thanks to a life of gorging himself on the nation’s wealth. So why would any Blackadder lie, to claim such infamy for themselves? Admittedly, an impostor taking on the duties of Prince George would have had to behave as like the pampered epicure as possible, but after centuries of waiting for a Blackadder to rise to power, and despite the Chronicles’ ludicrous suggestions that this ‘George IV’ ‘started the British Museum, the National Gallery, the Police Force’ and ‘legalised trade unions’, the fact remains that this Blackadder, if the rumour is true, proved to be a very bad king, leaving the worst legacy possible.

  The chronology of his mooted usurpation makes for one of the most tangled webs of impossibilities in the entire saga – the Chronicle places Pitts the Elder and Younger in direct succession as Prime Minister, while surrounding the great Dr Johnson (whose Dictionary was first published seven years before George’s birth) with Byron, Shelley and Coleridge – a prospect akin to H. G. Wells crossing Abbey Road with the Beatles. They also heavily suggest that this Blackadder was the same age as his royal master, born in August 1762 – but if the two had even a passing resemblance, Mr B must have been of the ‘extremely rotund’ school of butlers. Everything about George Augustus, Prince of Wales, was rich and bloated. Escaping from a childhood of sadistic austerity imposed on him by his father George III, who then cruelly prevented him from pursuing his dream of a military career, ‘Prinny’ could only rebel by diving into a life of excess, becoming celebrated and pilloried for his passion for life’s richest bounties, with an egregious penchant for food, wine and laudanum, outrageous military fashion and amply girthed ladies,fn1 not to mention a bad reputation for gilding everything in sight in his ruinously expensive architectural projects, especially his home for much of his life and Regency, Carlton House.

  That famed mansion was pulled down by George (or Edmund) himself in favour of Buckingham Palace in 1825, however, and there are no existing records to show that an Edmund Blackadder was ever in the Princ
e’s retinue. Prince George had a number of extremely close aides throughout his life: Colonels Gerald Lake and John McMahon were both prized private servants, entrusted with the Regent’s most secret affairs – paying off mistresses, bribing publishers to throw unflattering cartoons on the fire and so on – but both were father figures to the Prince, not contemporaries. Either the butler Blackadder knew too much for his existence to be known to the general public or, of course, the first thing he did when taking his master’s place was to destroy all evidence of his former life (his dogsbody S. Baldrick was immediately sent to Australia), only revealing the truth to his own bastard offspring for posterity on his deathbed.

  The ostentatiousness of the proposed usurpation is heightened by the suggestion that the real George was shot by the Duke of Wellington – a war hero and future prime minister who was on record as a staunch opponent of duelling. If their duel took place before the Battle of Trafalgar, as is claimed (Trafalgar being a battleground allegedly suggested by Blackadder himself), then Arthur Wellesley would still have been several years away from becoming a field marshal, let alone a duke. By this time Prinny had been compelled to marry and impregnate – and subsequently become instantly estranged from – the equally repellent Caroline of Brunswick, and their only daughter, Princess Charlotte, would die in childbirth a few years after the official start of the Regency. With no issue from ‘George IV’ therefore, Blackadder may have made himself King, but failed not only to secure the throne for his family, but even to raise the bastards he had sired to their previous nobility.