The finale’s one other special appearancefn15 came from Gertan Klauber as Mad King George III – the veteran Czech-born actor being another regular (though minor) player in the Carry On series, as well as Up the Front. Mention of the porphyric monarch also gave a presentiment of things to come, as Fry’s week with the old team saw him instantly settling into the old style of ‘plumpening’. Given the line ‘The King, your father, is mad,’ he politely sidled up to Lloyd and Curtis to posit whether the line ‘Your royal father grows ever more eccentric and at present believes himself to be a small village in Lincolnshire with commanding views of the Nene Valley’ might be slightly more delicious. The tragic denouement of the episode – and in a way, the final achievement of all the Blackadders’ aims, the taking of the throne – was ridiculously revelatory and rapidly tied up at least partly due to the extent of the ‘plumpening’ which was to be expected with the finicky Hugh and Rowan being backed up by their loud comrade – although it was already decided by the writers that, for the first time, Edmund would escape destruction and prove the real villain.
Sadly Miggins’s presumed death up on a lonely Scottish crag signified the end of Helen’s time on the show, with her character reduced to just a vague mention in a music-hall song in the following series. The actress, however, would soon be starring in KYTV, John Byrne’s Your Cheating Heart, and in 1992 her own historical sitcom, Tales from the Poopdeck, in which she played terrifying female pirate Connie Blackheart. Further members of the Miggins family would have been a treat, but she says, ‘I was always just so dazzled by the construction of the scripts, it’s fair to say I didn’t give a thought as to what was going to happen to Mrs Miggins next, it was just such a delicious twist for her to be setting off with MacAdder.’
The last day of filming was only the beginning of Lloyd’s crucial packaging process, comprising the exquisite literary credit sequence in which the butler stalks through a library to Goodall’s baroque theme, rejecting books such as the Encyclopaedia Blackaddica, Landscape Gardening by Capability Brownadder, From Black Death to Blackadder, Blackadder’s Book of Martyrs and Blackadder’s Bedside Cockfighting Companion in favour of the lurid romance novel bearing each episode’s new name, with the dashing Edmund caught in a different passionate embrace on every cover. Howard’s desire to surprise came to the fore again in the end credits, where, the final tableau frozen into a historic engraving (a familiar convention from BBC costume dramas such as 1985’s Pickwick Papers), the composer delivered an exotic Empire-inspired interpretation of his melody, which Elton suggests ‘might have been because Paul Simon had just come out with Graceland …’ ‘John likes making credits more than he likes making shows,’ Robinson says, and the series’ painstakingly detailed Regency playbill sequence, ‘For the benefit of several viewers’ and ‘To conclude with Rule Britannia in full chorus, No money return’d’, accompanied by Howard’s nautical beat, suggests Tony might be onto something.
A MUCH ADMIR’D COMEDY
Some producers could have been tempting fate by calling their programme ‘much admir’d’ in their own credits, but Lloyd knew there was little risk of calumny – Blackadder the Third debuted to widespread delight in the autumn of 1987, with audiences still warm from the Blackadder II repeat. It was accompanied by the first academic investigation into the Blackadder Chronicles, written for the Radio Times by Lloyd himself, the ‘loafing Professor at the University of Camelot’. This early appraisal of the dynasty lost no time in damning the entire family, from prehistoric times to the most recent achievement: ‘A dinner party in Chelsea in 1968, where the present Edmund Blackadder had the distinction of being the first man to scoff at flared trousers.’
With such instant acclaim, Blackadder and Baldrick were to become entrenched in the national consciousness as the Regency duo for some time, the despicable schemer and the pitiful dungball becoming a kind of British Don Quixote and Sancho Panza – quite fittingly, as Curtis had written a successful theatrical adaptation of Cervantes’ novel in the early eighties. Atkinson would muse, ‘It’s odd where the inherent comedy of his situation is rooted, because basically he’s a bright and able man and yet things go wrong for him in a way that we try to make funny. He wasn’t a buffoon, he just tended to over-think things, didn’t he, to out-think himself. Or maybe it was just bad luck! And of course, fatally, he always allies himself with Baldrick. It’s strange, that inter-reliance, you’d think someone as bright as the Black Adder wouldn’t spend any time with Baldrick, and yet he does. It is like Basil Fawlty and Manuel, why doesn’t he just sack Manuel? There is some way in which they need each other. And the Black Adder and Baldrick need each other – not only to allow us to make jokes about him.’
Of the two, it was Baldrick who would be most likely to pop up on his own unexpectedly, spreading his stench in the CBBC broom cupboard for Comic Relief, throwing custard pies at himself on Blue Peter or even going so low as to appear on-screen with Noel Edmonds, showcasing a package of Blackadder bloopers on Noel’s Saturday Roadshow in 1988, defending the errors in Noel’s ‘Clown Court’.
JUDGE:
I have before me one of the most repulsive individuals that has ever appeared in this court.
BALDRICK:
Hello, Mr E!
JUDGE:
Name?
BALDRICK:
Baldrick, Your Honour.
JUDGE:
First name?
BALDRICK:
Drop-dead.
JUDGE:
I beg your pardon?
BALDRICK:
That’s my first name. I think it is, anyway, ’cause when people see me they shout out, ‘Drop dead, Baldrick!’
JUDGE:
Do you have any explanation as to why [Blackadder] has failed to appear?
BALDRICK:
Er, no, Your Honour, but he did give me this note …
JUDGE:
‘From Edmund Blackadder to Lord Chief Justice Edmonds. Dear Sir, the reason I can’t be present is because I’ve got far better things to do with my time than turn up at your stupid court, you overdressed beardy weirdy.’ … Mr D. Baldrick, of 17 Rubbish Row, London – I condemn you to death.
BALDRICK:
Thank you very much, Your Honour. It’s too good for me.
Thanks to Tony’s performance, somehow the stinking plotter had actually become cute, and, as he observes, developed something of a cult all of his own. ‘It took me a long time to realise just how successful the series was. Then it hit me – Baldrick had become this little comedy god. People would send me turnips through the post. Believe me, I’ve tried every turnip recipe known to man.’ Lloyd goes so far as to say, ‘In my opinion it’s Baldrick rather than Blackadder who gives the show its enduring mainstream appeal. Baldrick is everyman – the decent, sensible downtrodden drudge saddled with a boss who is both too clever by three-quarters, and nearly always wrong.’ ‘He’s a pretty dim everyman,’ Atkinson laughs, ‘I’m not sure I’d like Baldrick to represent me in the canon of human existence. But he has an attitude to life which is uncorrupted by expectations or class structures or education or anything, he just takes things at face value and deals with them as he finds them.’ ‘A lot of people say they see Baldrick as an everyman,’ Robinson concedes, ‘and, if that’s true, then I don’t think it says much for the British character.’
The double act was back together the following autumn, to support the BBC’s Children in Need appeal, not just on the telethon itself, with Baldrick offering the kiddies his own beloved childhood toys – an old stick and some clumps of mud:
MR B:
For those of you who enjoy laughing at the afflicted, here is your host, Mr Wogan … to introduce his next guest. Thank you.
WOGAN:
Thank you very much.
MR B:
Um, you’re very welcome, sir. If I may just make a suggestion? I will ring this bell if I feel that the interview ought to terminate, or if I feel that the public are tired of your discutatory p
eregrinations … your ‘chat’.
WOGAN:
Ladies and gentlemen, it’s now my great pleasure to introduce to you a young man whose popularity seems to increase with every passing century. The man they simply call – Baldrick!
BALDRICK:
(Enters, chewing on a rat.) Evening, Mr T!
MR B:
(Steps in, rings bell.) Right, I think that’s enough, don’t you?
The pair even fumbled their way through a whole special hour of fund-raising on Radio 4, violently taking over Woman’s Hour to link a series of items looking at the struggle for sexual equality through the ages:
MR B:
Right, Baldrick, stick the gag on. Good afternoon, ladies, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Edmund Blackadder and this is my servant …
BALDRICK:
(Muffled.) Baldrick!
MR B:
Baldrick, the gag goes on the women … As I was saying, ladies, today I am trying to raise money for Children in Need. So far I have myself generously donated the entire contents of Baldrick’s wallet. As you know I am very fond of lovely little children. I’ve even brought a poor, sweet, needy little tiny child to the studio here today.
BALDRICK:
Goo goo.
MR B:
Oh for heaven’s sake, Baldrick, stick your back into it. Cheques can be made out to ‘Edmund Blackadder’s Children in Need Appeal’, but right now I want you to phone in and pledge lots and lots and lots of money. Major credit cards welcome. Give them the number, Baldrick …
BALDRICK:
Right, and the number is zero, two, big number, two, three, big number, big number, three, big number, big number.
MR B:
Oh good grief … Right, start coughing up, ladies. Meanwhile I’m sick and tired of continuously hearing whingeing women whining on about the problems of life in 1988 so we’re going to take you back in time to see how really awful life could be …
In sound only, the duo transcended their most recent incarnations, becoming a strangely immortal pair who seem to have been bickering for centuries – but then, this was just for charity.
FORTUNATELY, I AM NOT A MAN OF HONOUR
Blackadder and Baldrick’s appearance for Curtis’s own special cause several months earlier was an altogether more cogent offering – after two years of preparation, the first Red Nose Day and Comic Relief telethon was ready to go, and nothing was more likely to get folk tuning in and reaching for their credit card details to give to Mike Smith up the Post Office Tower than an all-new tale from the Blackadder Chronicles, plugging a gap in the lore by leapfrogging back a century and a half to witness the skulduggery of Mr B’s great-great-grandfather.
The audacious pilot scheme went ahead on 5 February 1988, with millions of schoolchildren and charitable grown-ups encouraged by the young comic generation to buy red noses and do something stupid to raise funds, with the reward being a whole evening of non-stop comedy on BBC1 – a celebration of laughter in the depths of winter. These jolly, ragged early marathons, presented by Lenny Henry, Griff Rhys Jones and Jonathan Ross, were nowhere near as slick and glamorous as the titanic Comic Relief nights of the twenty-first century – that first evening even devoted a whole prime-time half-hour to a repeat of Dad’s Army – but it’s because of that rudimentary quality that those first Comic Reliefs were more exciting and, indeed, funnier. With Richard devotedly scribbling the hosts’ scripts as the evening wore on, the several hours of that evening’s proceedings (when not taken up with flubbed studio links, unexpected invasions from Ken Dodd and heart-rending documentary features) were filled with brand-new sketches and skits from every corner of Curtis’s comedy fraternity and beyond. A huge stockpile of sketches had been pre-filmed a few weeks before transmission, but two bastards provided the highlights, with Rik Mayall facing Thatcher as Alan B’Stard for one persona-bending New Statesman skit, and Blackadder: The Cavalier Years forming the centrepiece of the evening.
Covering one of the single most epochal events in British History, and managing to do it in a fifteen-minute slot involving a grand total of two sets and four speaking roles,fn16 Cavalier Years is a masterpiece of disrespectful brevity. Baldrick’s kitchen at Blackadder Hall and Charles’s cell at Whitehall provided the meagre backdrops to yet another dastardly Blackadder lie, as Sir Edmund hides and then double-crosses and executes his old friend Charles before handing Baldrick and the doll-like infant Charles II over to the Roundheads and, as ever, switching to the winning side. Presumably there was Melchett blood in the Stuart family, allowing Fry to have his turn on the throne, albeit briefly, as one of his numerous appearances on that night’s bill (which also included dunking Philip Schofield in a gunge tank, abetted by Hugh). Fry portrayed Charles as a kind of dithering tree-hugger (a blatant mimicry of the King’s namesake great-to-the-power-of-eleven-grand-nephew), while Warren Clarke was perfectly suited to take on the mantle of his warty republican counterpart Cromwell, managing to convey a unique brand of manic perversity – even going so far as to caress Baldrick and call him ‘My proud beauty’ – in a slight and sketchily written role. ‘They are jolly tricky, these short sitcom specials,’ Curtis says, ‘we’ve done about fifteen of them on Comic Relief. But that one just found its own natural rhythm. I suspect that had we ever done the period officially, we wouldn’t have wanted Stephen to do the Charles impression – one of our big things being not allowing any anachronisms …’
The Cavalier Years was only a small footnote, a few months after Blackadder the Third, not in any way eclipsing the Regency comedy’s popularity with the public, and the characters of Blackadder and Baldrick remained much the same – in fact, Tony says, ‘All I remember about it is the damn wig, I was fighting the wig for the entire recording. It was the wig of the oldest hippy in the world.’
So resonant was Edmund’s Regency incarnation that the 1990 ITV sitcom Haggard, following the antics of a despicable squire with a grotty servant, came in for criticism for aping Blackadder the Third, even though it was based on a character created by the journalist Michael Green more than a decade earlier. Similarly, media myths about an uncredited American ‘remake’ of Blackadder, the short-lived 1992 CBS sitcom 1775, centred on comparisons to Blackadder’s third series more than any other, through historical necessity if nothing else. Ryan O’Neal starred as cowardly Boston innkeeper Jeremy Proctor, with a stupid lackey called Bert and a regular customer in a twittish British governor played by Jeffrey Tambor – plus Adam West as George Washington. But this Proctor is a pretty decent family guy surrounded by sassy daughters, so even if the show had been a hit, there would be no grounds for Atkinson to sue. Another US show to be dubbed ‘the American Blackadder’, 1998’s Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer, fared even less well, with only four episodes broadcast detailing the ‘hidden history’ of Chi McBride’s eponymous character, a black English lord who becomes valet to Abraham Lincoln (and who also has a dungball for a lackey). The show was rapidly pulled after mass complaints about slavery gags, as well as a scene in which Lincoln pioneers sex chat via telegraph, but the episodes that do survive have more of a flavour of Blackadder the Third than any other Blackadder.
So no US equivalent of Blackadder ever took hold,fn17 but the four series remain popular among comedy connoisseurs in the USA, not least thanks to Atkinson’s encouragement to the ex-colonies to buy the real thing, back in 1988. Interviewed for the programme’s first run on the A&E channel, he suggested, ‘Certainly from series two onwards, the hero is quite a cool character, and most English comics or comic heroes are not cool at all, they’re kind of gimpy, middle-class suburban put-upon husbands and putting-upon wives, uncool characters. Whereas Americans I think like their comedians to be quite cool – Eddie Murphy and Steve Martin – all these kind of guys, they’re cool, they’re in charge. They get into sticky situations, but they get out of them in a fairly cool way. And Blackadder is a pretty hard, cool, cynical character.’ He also assured colonial viewers that there was still mor
e to come, revealing plans for a Victorian series four, before a fifth series in the twentieth century. ‘We are already projecting actually, we’re doing a Christmas special soon in which we momentarily look into the future of The Black Adder, and we see Frondo Blackadder, who’s dressed like some kind of ice warrior with lots of muscles and long black ringlets of hair, who has basically killed everyone else off in the universe and is having a very good time in AD 3000. I think there is a major future for the Black Adder.’
The True History of the Blackadder: The Unadulterated Tale of the Creation of a Comedy Legend Page 27