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

by J. F. Roberts

  As ever, this way of working was highly testing for all the guest performers, but if any of them were up to the challenge, it had to be Robbie Coltrane. Keen-eared viewers of ‘Chains’ may have been perturbed by one insistent grating guffaw from the audience – a sound not unlike a pirate forcing someone to walk the plank. This was Coltrane, supporting his Alfresco comrades in their new venture, and it was no surprise that he was to become one of the extended Blackadder family, with two memorable roles. However, the week of pernickety rehearsals for ‘Dictionary’ left him little time to really get under the skin of the noted man of letters, Dr Samuel Johnson. This first story to be recorded was in a way the spark for the whole series, inspired by a visit to Robbie Coltrane’s one-man show about Dr Johnson – as Elton recalls. ‘I can remember Richard saying, “I’ve had a great idea. Did you know it took Dr Johnson twenty-five years to write his Dictionary? How about he finishes it, lends it to Blackadder, Baldrick puts it on the fire, Blackadder’s got a weekend to rewrite the Dictionary?” And I just thought, that is such a brilliant conceit. A lot better than writing three knob gags, which is what I was sort of trying to do.’ Curtis says that the scripts were bound to be considered open to suggestion when he admits, ‘With Ben and me it was absolute bliss, because you could be irresponsible, you could be a lazy writer. You could say, “Well, I’ve got some scenes here but I don’t really know how to make the plot work.” And you’d basically give up on the plot and write some funny stuff. Or you’d get the plot right, but put in brackets “Must be lots of jokes about a party here.” So each one would be like a challenge to the other person to fill in the bits that you hadn’t bothered with.’

  However, the writers never bargained for the battles awaiting them – and with such a literary plot, the text was to be debated more than ever. ‘People fought for their patch!’ Laurie says. ‘Nobody just toed the line and stood where they were told to stand and did what they were told to do, everyone stood up for themselves and for their characters. Let’s just say it was very free. “Just read it out!” Richard said …’ At such times, as Fry puts it, ‘Richard, who finds it very hard to be anything other than extraordinarily nice, would look slightly miffed, which for him is like a real temper tantrum, and then we’d start again.’ McInnerny remembers that in his time, ‘Richard was there all day every day, writing, rewriting, taking it on the chin when everybody said, “Well, that’s not very funny though, is it?” You weren’t allowed to rewrite it, Richard always rewrites.’ And Tony adds, ‘John, Richard, Hugh and Stephen conduct themselves in a very affable way and when they talk about Blackadder now it all seems like it was a bit jolly: slightly sticky sometimes, but basically fine. I don’t really remember it quite like that, it was hard. Everything took a lot of work, every day, huge numbers of ideas would go by the wayside. The tension that there was between the writers and the performers was that we had gone too far in excising stuff that they thought was very good – because the writers would be there on day one and not back again until day five. And the further we went, the more that tension grew.’ He argues, however, that it was an inevitable part of the show’s growing popularity. ‘By the time we got to series three, Blackadder II had been such an enormous success that I don’t think it weighed heavy on us, but it gave us a great deal of confidence, that our vision for how Blackadder could be was right. So we just worked very, very hard on making it as perfect as we possibly could. By that time, I don’t think any of us could have articulated it, but we knew what felt right.’

  As a result, Lloyd regrets, ‘Robbie had this huge part which he had to learn in the last few hours really, because we never got the script perfect until late. But what we didn’t do with him was think of what his character was! He’d come in and do the lines, and somehow make something of them. He never complained about it though, he’s such a nice bloke.’fn10 ‘That was always the lot of any actor who came in to play the supporting roles, if one can describe it as that,’ Atkinson adds, ‘that they had very little time or rehearsal, and they had to sort of cope. And Robbie coped extremely well!’ By the Sunday-night recording on 5 June (with warm-up this time provided by Clive Anderson, in Elton’s stead), the cast may have been flying by the seats of their breeches, with rudimentary scene-blocking and improvised physical business, but every one of the episode’s memorable slews of linguistic nonsense was perfect to every syllable – ‘compuntious’, ‘contrafibularatories’, ‘interphrastically’ and so on, Blackadderisms designed to drive Johnson mad, described by Rowan as ‘Complete codswallop, and yet you can see the Latin or Greek roots of all the words.’

  The appearance of Shelley, Byron and Coleridge in Mrs Miggins’s coffee shop provided a chance for a different duo to step into Arden & Frost’s guest spot – pioneering comic improvisers Jim Sweeney and Steve Steen, with the trusty Lee Cornes (who originally stood in for Frost in ‘Chains’) completing the ‘romantic junkie’ trio. Cornes recalls, ‘I found it very interesting to watch these two very fine comedians at work – Rowan very precise, very meticulous, both technical and analytical, whereas Robbie is just a great comic force, a raconteur and storyteller and a funny bloke generally, not just on set. It was interesting to see them using very different techniques to come up with equally superb performances on the night.’ The poets’ appearance also highlighted a quirk of the series which perhaps lends credence to Tony’s claim that the Regency period was a blank to most viewers – the apparent need for copious historical guest stars. Where every other period of Blackadder history relies surprisingly seldom on showing real historical figures, with only one or two per series, Blackadder the Third would put Edmund up against eight historical icons – nine, if you include Phil Pope’s return as Nelson in Christmas Carol – to which Robinson responds, ‘That’s intriguing. I don’t know what that’s about, other than that we really wanted to root it in the times, and help people understand what that historical period was all about.’

  With such a small regular cast, there was room to fill the series with more guest stars than ever, Helen recalls, ‘It was a very thrilling thing to be part of. Every rehearsal was full of your favourite people or those you admired. It drew together, I suppose, the cream of all the comedy talent at the time.’ The famous faces gave each plot a certain epic scope, but as Lloyd was continually keen to impress on the writers, the best sitcoms tended to be confined, and more character-based. The Third, if anything, was proving to be the freest, silliest series of all, sneaking in anachronistic gags aplenty. It has been argued that all historical productions belie the times in which they were made, but this is largely untrue of Blackadder – most episodes, if shown to a media student with no knowledge of the programme or the actors involved, could be deduced as the product of any decade since the arrival of colour television. And yet shades of topical humourfn11 were more in evidence this time than in the other series, while an even more blatant wink to the modern audience was Edmund’s lament that he deserved to have his life dramatised and played out weekly at half past nine.

  The second recording would give Elton his one cameo appearance in Blackadder, sending up his reputation as a radical ranter by playing a Luddite revolutionary who disrupts the actors Mossop & Keanrick’s play (which seems to be a revival of Prince Edmund’s ‘The Death of the Pharaoh’) to try to blow up the fat, stupid Prince. The thespian duo themselves continued the show’s deference to the comedy old guard, giving Carry On stalwart Kenneth Connor and Round the Horne star Hugh Paddick a chance to show the youngsters how it’s done. As Julian and Sandy, the openly gay Paddick and Kenneth Williams were one of the most loved comedy duos of the 1960s, their campery suggesting a fine fit for the frilled pretensions of the villainous Georgian actors. However, Williams’s old comrade Connor made a fine alternative, and became one actor to bridge the gap between the historical japeries of Blackadder, Carry On and ’Allo ’Allo.fn12

  A neat and drastically historically incorrect joke about the adolescence of ‘Pitt the Younger’ (who actually entered
high office at twenty-four, fifteen years after Pitt the Elder’s ministry) inspired the third recorded episode, fated to introduce the series on broadcast, as ‘Dish and Dishonesty’. Being recorded just one week after another Thatcher victory in the 1987 elections, the team could be forgiven for throwing in more anachronistic topical material, including the casting of the late political commentator Vincent Hanna as his own ancestor, a town crier who was originally intended to be seen only through the hustings window frame as a form of eighteenth century TV. Satirising the complexities of Whig and Tory politics at the turn of the nineteenth century was such a tall order that few Blackadder scripts were as heatedly wrestled with in rehearsals as ‘Rotten Boroughs’ – particularly pertaining to the perennial issue of filth. ‘The great thing about putting knob gags in Rowan’s mouth,’ Curtis says, ‘is that he’s the cleanest spoken, most puritan person one knows, so he had this profound sense of disapproval at all the jokes.’ Lloyd adds, ‘Rowan has not had to compromise, he’s done pretty much exactly what he wants to. The compromises he’s made have generally been so’s not to upset his mother, you know, not to say too many rude words because she might not like it.’ ‘I am not prudish,’ Atkinson protested in 1989, ‘but I tended to be the one to say “Keep it clean.” The others know some extremely rude jokes and I had to step in occasionally, but I was nearly always overruled by the rest of the cast – they would mock me and tell me not to be such a wimp. My mother was certainly a factor. I think she finds Blackadder a bit rude and a bit harsh. She hasn’t really been pleased with my work since I was Mephistophilis in the school play in 1970. Like any good mother, she defends me to the hilt, but deep down I know she would rather I was doing something she could discuss over tea with the vicar.’ In the case of ‘Dish and Dishonesty’, a Mrs Slocombe-esque line concerning Blackadder’s cat-skin ‘ermine’ robes caused a notable stand-off, as rehearsals ground to a halt over the star’s refusal to say, ‘Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think that one day I would be up to my neck in Lady Hamilton’s pussy.’ ‘And he wouldn’t say it!’ Tony Robinson rues to this day, adding, ‘I would have!’

  A NEW FRECKLE ON THE NOSE OF THE GIANT PIXIE

  Since the Emmy won by ‘The Archbishop’, gongs had eluded the Adder, with Yes, Prime Minister riding high and the Comedy Performance category at every BAFTA ceremony seemingly proving to be an embarrassing race between Nigel Hawthorne and Paul Eddington. This was to change partly thanks to the Silver Rose of Montreux-winning ‘Highwayman’ episode – first entitled ‘Cape and Capability’, and ultimately ‘Amy and Amiability’.

  Miranda Richardson had no more desire to let a regular sitcom role stand in the way of her acting career than McInnerny, but was very happy to return for one week, leaving Elizabeth behind and finding a whole new way to depict dippy sweetness, as the wealthy industrialist’s daughter, Amy Hardwood. Her bluff idiot father was Warren Clarke,fn13 largely recognisable at this stage in his long career as a supporting player in serious drama and films as well as a regular on Shelley, one of ITV’s superior sitcoms, and Lloyd says, ‘I think he really dropped into it, Warren, of all the people who came from nowhere, he really got the spirit of it quickly.’ Clarke had recently played screen husband to Atkinson-Wood in the pessimistic ‘state-of-the-nation’ drama series Tickets for the Titanic (a collection of self-contained stories, one of which starred Tony Robinson as a vicar embroiled in trouble at Greenham Common, in a script by Andy Hamilton), and as with most of the Blackadder players, his involvement came tangentially. Helen says, ‘I’m not bigging up my part in becoming a casting director for Blackadder, but I would go so far as to say that I suggested Warren Clarke to John – we were having lunch, and I mentioned that Warren and I were working together, and the thought germinated that he would be a wonderful addition to the company.’ As for the character of Mr Hardwood, ‘They just left it to me,’ Warren remembers. ‘I do a lot of overacting most of the time anyway. Les Dawson was a mate of mine, so I thought I’d do it like Les. I can still be in the middle of nowhere in some strange town and somebody will come up to me and say, “I love my daughter more than any pig, and that’s saying summat!”’

  Another notable feature of the episode was John’s increasing delight in the use of ridiculous sound effects, with the squeak of a dead squirrel (or the squelch of a large ripe frog) so pleasing that he edited in reprises at the end of the closing credits. ‘I love sound effects, and radio in general. People may tell you that anyone can edit film, but the really tough thing, particularly with studio audiences, is the sound. Making a hundred radio programmes over five years, I got very good at it, and very concise. I do think in sound a lot, and it’s very funny, it’s another dimension – there’s words, performance, the visual side, and there’s sound. I think everyone should be trained to work in television by working in radio first, and they rarely are today.’

  By referencing both Dick Turpin and Cyrano de Bergerac, Curtis & Elton ticked off two historical heroes in one episode, but basing their French Revolution yarn on Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel was to backfire to some extent, with the character’s complicated copyright preventing ‘Nob and Nobility’ from being broadcast in America, and requiring the removal of Baldrick’s quoting of the famous Pimpernel rhyme for many repeats. It did, however, supply a chance for another old friend to play a flying visit, with McInnerny escaping Percy by effectively crafting three characters at once – the foppish Lord Topper, Le Comte de Frou-Frou and, after a fashion, the Pimpernel himself.

  By striding in to show up Blackadder for the coward he is, Topper could have been the closest Regency successor to Flashheart (especially with Nigel Planer turning up to play his best friend Smedley), but there was no chance of Mayall showing up for this run – he was already in cahoots with Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, cooking up his own sitcom vehicle, which brought his particular perverse charisma to the world of Yes Minister via the creation of scruple-free Tory sleazeball Alan B’Stard in The New Statesman, which began airing on ITV only four days before Blackadder the Third’s premiere. By giving Marks & Gran carte blanche to delve into the darkest recesses of his personality in creating the evil backbencher, Rik created a monster which made the murderous Edmund seem almost affable, and the attacks on Baldrick were slapstick where B’Stard’s methods of torture for his own dim-witted sidekick, Michael Troughton’s lovable Piers Fletcher-Dervish, were twistedly sadistic. But then, unlike Blackadder, B’Stard’s sheen of charm only enhanced his hatefulness, and the modern, yuppie context made the Tory’s every crime doubly despicable. The ITV series continued well into the nineties,fn14 but thanks to theatrical revivals, B’Stard remains a terrifying splinter of Mayall’s persona to this day, a kind of anti-Flashheart, with all of the caddishness and boorishness of the Lord, but none of the redeeming heroism.

  With Francomania rife in Miggins’s coffee house, garlicky cuisine and all, the stage was set for Blackadder’s first Francophobic jamboree. Baiting the French had been a regular motif in Atkinson’s work from the very first, and with Blackadder reflecting English history, our Gallic neighbours, England’s closest sworn rivals for centuries, were never going to get off lightly – ironically, seeing as the programme had been created on French soil in the first place. The team were carrying on a strong English tradition by suggesting that the French are smelly, effete, snobbish, and – worst of all – Anglophobic, with Goodall even going so far as to record a single of the Curtis/Goodall/Atkinson song ‘I Hate the French’ in 1980:

  They’re pretty cocky ’bout their games in the dark,

  They think with girls they light a special spark,

  But look what the bastards did to Joan of Arc,

  That’s why I Hate the French …

  But as the lyric ‘All I resent is that they’re so good in bed’ suggests (though furthering another stereotype), the song – just like any withering reference to the French, and even the Belgians – is intended to mock the nation’s long feud with Continental types. Good
all says, ‘It’s on YouTube, with a lot of rather angry French people making comments about it. I think what a lot of people have never quite got about that song, which English people do get, is that it’s a song that makes fun of xenophobia. A lot of French people saw it as a purely racist song – I love France, and the French! The reason one makes jokes about them is that they’re our neighbours.’

  Representing the Rosbif-hating Frog, ‘hung like a baby carrot and a couple of petit pois’, was Chris Barrie – another stellar talent shared by Lloyd in Spitting Image and Paul Jackson in everything else. Within a few months of playing the Ambassador in ‘Nob and Nobility’, the talented mimic would land the job of completing the unholy trinity of eighties sitcom bastards alongside Blackadder and B’Stard, being chosen by Jackson, Rob Grant and Doug Naylor to play the neurotic, bitter hologram, Second Technician Arnold J. Rimmer in their sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf. The programme only made it to screen by using the BBC Manchester slot earmarked for Happy Families 2, but rapidly became an international sensation – and for Barrie, the opportunity to craft a true icon of sitcom bastardry was a well-deserved coup considering the wealth of talent who auditioned for the role of Rimmer, which even included Hugh Laurie.

  The final reunion of the broadcast series was the appearance of Fry as Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington – a truly irresistible casting choice, despite the historical anachronism required, and the difficulty of arranging a date for the guest’s availability. ‘It probably was due to Me and My Girl commitments that we did the Wellington episode when we did. It was pleasing though, as it was the last of the series anyway and ended in a great heap of bodies.’ Despite the inconvenience, Fry continues, ‘I was delighted, especially as it involved hitting Hugh, which was a thing that I’d become very expert at. As anyone who’s done that kind of slapstick knows, the skill is not in the person punching or throwing a slap, it’s always in the person receiving it, and Hugh is an absolute genius at being hit. Something about those enormous blue lagoons of eyes and their sorrowfulness makes it all the funnier, because he doesn’t really understand why he’s being hit. Both Rowan and I had a great time punching him in one scene, and kicking him and generally yelling at him. Very enjoyable.’ ‘I remember him arriving to do the violent slapstick stuff with some trepidation,’ Laurie says, ‘because I’d done things with Stephen before, physical things, where he’s had to act punching me, and his acting … well, how can I put it? He’s punched me, basically, he’s just punched me. There were scenes where you had to judge your distance quite carefully, and be looking at the marks on the floor, thinking, “Well, he’s got quite a lot of reach, if I just dip forward here I could catch one in the chops.”’