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

by J. F. Roberts

  fn1 In which Vyvyan Basterd’s ‘History of the World’ claimed that after the Vikings’ exit, ‘The world was now a pretty boring place apart from a few wars, and even some of those were about stupid girly things like roses.’

  fn2 And also co-author with Curtis and Simon Bell of the 1987 book Who’s Had Who, a guide to famous infidelity, well worth a reprint.

  fn3 The eventual seasonal lucky dip contained input from Curtis, Atkinson, Lloyd and Fry, though items such as ‘The Young Ones’ Nativity’ nearly caused the book to be uncharitably pulled from shelves, thanks to Christian pressure groups.

  fn4 A Spitting Image protégé of Lloyd’s, Enfield’s rise was augmented by the support of two witty neighbours, East Anglia University dropouts Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson – their plastering work on a house in nearby Dalston, occupied by Stephen and Hugh, led to the creation of zeitgeist-collaring monster Loadsamoney. Hugh admitted, ‘They were so funny that it actually made me think, “Well either they’re really funny or I’m just simply not, and I ought to now become a plasterer.”’

  fn5 With Rowland Rivron, they had just completed their own joint Comic Strip movie, Mr Jolly Lives Next Door, taking their ‘Dangerous’ chemistry into even darker territory as two hideous alcoholics, neighbours to Peter Cook’s titular blood-spattered hitman who is hired to ‘take out’ Nicholas Parsons.

  fn6 Elton in turn invited Corbett to revive his armchair monologues on The Ben Elton Show, following in the footsteps of Spike Mullins and David Renwick by penning Ronnie’s shaggy-dog stories himself.

  fn7 Comic Relief provided a brief hiatus during the run – some proceeds from all the performances went to the charity.

  fn8 Where he originated the aged characters of the unworldly Professor Donald Trefusis and the wistfully barking Rosina, Lady Madding.

  fn9 Completing the connection, while performing at the Edinburgh Fringe with the Radio Active Roadshow, Helen had befriended Ben Elton, there as part of his Mayall tour, ‘in an airing cupboard during a game of sardines’.

  fn10 Six years later, Coltrane would finally get a chance to put more meat on Johnson’s bones, with John Sessions joining him as Boswell for a BBC2 dramatisation of their Tour of the Western Isles.

  fn11 From Murdoch’s takeover of The Times to David Steel’s 1981 exhortation to the Liberal faithful to ‘Go back to your constituencies, and prepare for government’ being mangled as Edmund’s order to Baldrick, ‘Go back to your kitchen sink, you see …’

  fn12 Mossop & Keanrick’s painfully repeated superstitious incantation, every time the impertinent butler says ‘Macbeth’, has been a bone of contention for a quarter of a century, even being misquoted on DVD subtitles, but let the record show that any thespians hoping to exorcise Scottish demons should say the following before tweaking each others’ noses: ‘Hot potato, Orchestra stalls, Puck will make amends!’

  fn13 He also provided the voice of the notorious Shadow, modelled on James Mason in The Wicked Lady – the 1945 film that inspired the episode.

  fn14 Fry & Laurie popped up in the first series, as a moral vacuum of a City boy and the waiter he reduces to destitution.

  fn15 Besides Atkinson himself, echoing the plot’s ‘duality’ and keeping the Scottish bloodline alive by guest-starring in a pre-recorded sequence as Mr B’s equally crown-coveting Highland stereotype cousin MacAdder.

  fn16 Not including Harry Enfield, who gets his one Blackadder credit as Patrick Allen’s stand-in for the historical introduction.

  fn17 Although many felt that a French spin-off was discernable in the 1993 film Les Visiteurs, its sequels and remakes, all following the time-travelling antics of a medieval knight and his filthy servant.

  Parte the Fifth:

  LIONS LED BY BASTARDS

  IN THE AFTERMATH of Mr E. Blackadder’s alleged usurpation of the Hanoverian throne, little evidence is given to suggest that the family benefited from the ruse, and the nineteenth century saw the descendants of ‘George IV’ snaking off into disparate, more lowly areas of society, often as awkward cogs within the almighty mechanism of British Imperialism. Besides obscure references to non-eminent engineers, physicians and scientists, pictorial evidence has been discovered of a likely family member in the Empress Victoria’s service at the Indian Raj, but who this was and what cunning plans they were cooking up behind the scenes remains a mystery (although a Dr Blackadder is also cited as being present at Victoria’s death). One popular black sheep of the family was music-hall performer ‘Elegant Eddie’ Blackadder, but no footage or notation of his celebrated song ‘Let’s Shove, Shove, Shove (a Bayonet Up a Frenchman)’ has survived.

  The only remaining book of substance in the Blackadder Chronicles covers the final years of rather a lowly descendant, a Captain Edmund Blackadder (18??–1917), whose war diaries form an extensive part of the last Chronicle. But what was it about this middle-class officer that marked him out for such emphasis in the family history? When the Archduke of Austria–Hungary got shot in 1914, a relay of international aggression was unleashed which resulted in the untimely deaths of a still incomprehensible 35 million people, so even though the Blackadders had a reputation for cowardice stretching back for centuries, why should the sacrifice of this one obscure officer have become such a major event for the Chronicler?

  The Captain’s war diaries, after all, contain little to turn the accepted history of the Battle of the Somme on its head – the official record admittedly places the conclusion of action on the Somme in 1916, but it is still the case that most World War I front-line operations inspired tales of suffering, filth, incompetence and tragedy, and Blackadder’s is no exception. The odd stray unswallowable detail may be littered throughout his memoirs,fn1 but Captain Blackadder generally paints a picture that is by now the largely accepted image of the horror of trench warfare in World War I.

  There are historians who seek to deny this consensus, to argue that the Great War was not only inevitable given the balance of power between the royal houses of Europe in the early twentieth century, and therefore beyond lamentation, but that Field Marshal Douglas Haig (who was actually known to friends as ‘Dougie’) has been libelled by generations of military historians, who have portrayed him as tantamount to a heartless strategic simpleton. Blackadder’s primary source would be no help to these revisionist historians – for once, the Blackadder take on history chimes entirely with the accepted version. The military record contains such startlingly bestial displays of insanity in that environment (from the well-documented and widespread shooting of innocent shell-shocked men, or even teenage boys, for ‘cowardice’, to court-martialling soldiers simply for refusing to wear a helmet) that nothing the Captain could invent could be more mind-boggling than the truth. Some innocent conscripts, executed on the strength of Earl Haig’s signature, have only begun to receive their pardons now, one century later.

  Lies, however, remain central to the mysterious figure of the Captain himself. He claims to have been a professional soldier for fifteen years by the time of his arrival at the Somme in the autumn of 1914, and yet this soldier’s one badge of honour, his reputation as the Hero of M’Boto Gorge, receiving the Military Medal for ‘selfless action in blowing up a heavily defended mango dump when under fire by a hail of wortleberries’ (also described by some military historians as ‘massacring the peace-loving pygmies of the Upper Volta and stealing all their fruit’), was alleged to have taken place in 1892, seven years before he joined up, while the Chronicles insist that he entered the army in 1888. Given that he could have been no younger than fifteen at the time, that would put him in his mid-forties at the time of his apparent death in 1917 (neither he nor any of his named fellow soldiers were mentioned in dispatches, or ever identified among the dead).

  A Lt Blackadder was also quoted at the Battle of Rorke’s Drift, dying with the words ‘Oh, just keep the bloody place then!’ on his lips, so the family had experience of the Anglo-Zulu war, but clouds of mystery still surround the details of M’Bo
to Gorge – which is another way of saying that no geographer, cartographer or military historian has ever heard of the place. It’s possible that military code disguises the battle’s real location, but the only lead we have is the suggestion that the young Edmund became hero of the hour by saving the life of Haig (then only a squadron commander) from a native with ‘a viciously sharp piece of mango’. Haig’s biographers may quibble with this suggestion, due to him beginning his soldiering in India, where he spent most of 1892 – it would be several years before his infamous career took him to the Sudan and, by the turn of the century, fighting in the Boer War, both possible battlegrounds for Blackadder’s brave fruity encounter with the junior officer. The open-minded historian can only surmise that the dates in Captain B’s war diaries were smudged and mud-spattered, and the Chronicler simply took a punt.

  Other historians would beg to differ, however, and Professor Pollard is one of them. ‘One of the defining characteristics of this section of the Chronicle for me is the copyright symbol and legend “Property of the BBC” which appears at the top of every page much in the way one might expect if the Chronicle were actually a BLOODY TV SHOW. I shall be dealing with this and every other historical travesty promulgated by these frankly fake Chronicles in my new book The Blackadder Chronicles: The Anatomy of an Historical Fraud.’

  Like Pollard, some historians question the validity of Blackadder’s experiences on the Somme front line altogether or, even further, the ultimate conclusion that the sacrifice made by hundreds of thousands of British soldiers in No Man’s Land was a travesty, and an avoidable tragedy. However, even with a hundred years between us and World War I, to visit the final reputed resting place of the Captain in northern France, to gaze across the overwhelming lines of white gravestones stretching out as far as the eye can see in every direction, each one denoting a human being wiped out in the prime of life on the whim of the ruling and upper classes, such historical revisionism seems distastefully beside the point. When it comes to the futility of warfare, Captain Blackadder was telling the truth, if ever any Blackadder was capable of such a thing.

  fn1 There is no evidence that Oscar Wilde was ever officially the Heavyweight Champion of the World or wrote a book entitled Why I Like to Do It with Girls, for instance.

  Chapter 5

  BLACKADDER GOES FORTH

  If I should die, think only this of me … I’ll be back to getcha.

  As John Lloyd has established, the end of each series of Blackadder was the cue for everyone to go off into individual frenetic displays of creativity. Elton’s career as a novelist began with the publication of Stark, an Australian odyssey that took him ten weeks to get down on paper: ‘In 1988 I sort of decided I’d try and write a novel, I’d have a bash at it – that’s how I do everything, because I feel like doing it … Stark was my first piece of extended prose, and I found that I enjoyed storytelling very much, it gave me a chance to concentrate more on the story than the gags.’ Stark’s setting was no surprise – when touring Down Under with Mayall in 1987, Elton had met Sophie Gare, saxophonist with the boys’ support act, the Jam Tarts, and they were married a few years later with Mayall as best man, beginning a lifelong association with Australia which led to Ben’s gaining of dual citizenship in 2004.

  The tale of a farty Pom caught up in an ecological conspiracy theory was an instant hit, launching a long and fruitful career, as well as a 1993 BBC TV adaptation, starring Elton himself (although he had to audition). The continued topicality of Elton’s subject matter has been a defining element of his career as a novelist, but he insists, ‘be it Stark on the environment or Dead Famous on the nature of unearned fame, it’s not that I’m desperate to exploit or prove my point or say something, it’s just that the stories come to me, the jokes come to me. I’m just interested in the world! I think most people are, actually …’

  It Must Be Love

  Richard Curtis, meanwhile, had finally made the step into cinema that he had been coveting for years. After regrettable early experiences,fn1 he made the decision to keep his film career as British as possible, and would go on to work closely with UK film-makers Working Title, helping to propel them from modest critical triumphs such as My Beautiful Laundrette to being one of the most successful production companies in the world.

  Admittedly, Curtis’s first script to make it to the big screen did make some concessions to a US audience, with Jeff Goldblum given the central role and the name being changed from Camden Town Boy to The Tall Guy to appeal as far afield as possible. Despite this, he says, ‘The Tall Guy was not autobiographical, but pretty close to it. I wanted it to be not misinterpretable, not something that could be taken out of my hands and turned into something else. I wanted it to be just a small, acute observation of things I absolutely knew, and I think I’ve stayed in that mode.’ To that end, trusted friend Mel Smith made his directorial debut, spending the summer of ’88 shooting Richard’s personalised romance of Dexter King, the eponymous lanky Yank – a love-struck comedy stooge forced to kowtow to a self-professed ‘major comic talent’, the star of a West End hit entitled The Rubberface Revue, called Ron Anderson. ‘When I first sent Rowan the script,’ Curtis says, ‘the character that he eventually played was at that point called Rowan Atkinson, just as a joke, and he rang me up and asked me which part I wanted him to play.’

  Rowan had been playing around with the idea of a villainous alter ego for a long time (the programme for The New Revue laid all blame for any signs of ego on Rowan’s twin brother Mycroft), but nothing could be nearer to the knuckle than his fictional depiction in The Tall Guy. Smith explained to Film 89, ‘Ron Anderson is a loud, foul-mouthed, bigoted nasty person, which Rowan certainly isn’t … but he’s having a fairly good crack at it.’ ‘People will realise my part is grossly exaggerated,’ the star said, which his old partner Richard only partially backed up, admitting, ‘The only true bit was where Jeff gets sacked, and in the interval they have a party for him, and Rowan’s character produces a sort of quarter-bottle of champagne. I remember we did seventy-two dates around England, and at the party afterwards Rowan had bought one of those cherry slices that you used to get on British Rail – for eight of us … fn2 But I never heard Rowan shout in all the years we were together.’ Alternatively, he said, ‘The only thing in which Row was naughty during the stage show, was that he did have a lot of trouble describing it as anything but a one-man show …’ Angus Deayton once stood alongside Atkinson on Shaftesbury Avenue as they sized up the hoarding for The New Revue, and as he noticed that not one mention had been made of himself, despite his being onstage for most of the time, his suggestion to the star that ‘something wasn’t quite right’ was met with complete agreement – the lettering should be in green, not yellow.

  Angus would eventually get some reparation via his Tall Guy cameo as an actor mulling over offers from Steven Spielberg while Dexter has to make do with adverts requiring a tall American (that is, until the hero gets the title role in the musical version of The Elephant Man, entitled Elephant!), but even then he gets no actual lines in a film bristling with great cameos and comic performances, with Emma Thompson providing the main love interest and Curtis getting a walk-on/walk-off role as ‘Man Coming Out of Toilet’, besides finally having his chance to work with Madness when the band provided a surreal musical interlude performing their version of ‘It Must Be Love’ – an anarchic sequence unlike anything in Curtis’s subsequent mainstream hits.

  The Tall Guy proved to be only a minor success on release in the spring of 1989, but in the UK at least it was Atkinson’s daringly villainous turn that drew the crowds, and got many of the best lines:

  RON:

  Listen, Dexter, is there something troubling you? Something you want to talk to someone about?

  DEXTER:

  Well, yeah, actually, as a matter of fact, there is.

  RON:

  Then for fuck’s sake talk to someone about it, will you? And sort it out before I sack you and hire a lobotomised
monkey to play your role, OK?

  DEXTER:

  Thank you, my friend!

  Jerry Lewis’s turn as Jerry Langford in The King of Comedy had nothing on Atkinson’s willingness to satirise his own career, creating a monster who dresses as a gorilla to advertise chocolate, bores everyone to death about his friendship with Prince Charles and even dares to steal the hero’s girl, requiring Dexter to kidnap and imprison his ex-boss as part of a mad climactic dash to declare his love (a Curtis movie staple in the making), provoking the trussed-up major comic talent to whine, ‘This sort of shit never happened to Charlie Chaplin!’

  Compliments of the Gorging Season

  Atkinson’s one other major job that year was a return to theatre, playing several roles in a staging of Chekhov sketches, self-confessedly undertaken to feature in something that his mother could discuss with the vicar. But by the autumn, any thoughts that the Blackadder team had about a Victorian series were diverted by the upper echelons of BBC Comedy. ‘There is a sense in which a Christmas special is a kind of accolade,’ then-Controller Michael Grade said. ‘Your series has made it if you are asked to do an hour-long Christmas special. You may not do it, but you just want to be asked to do it. They did deliver in fact, which was great.’

  As was understandable, considering his devotion to Oliver! and love of everything Dickensian, Elton was already sketching out ideas for a nineteenth-century murder mystery directly spoofing Dickens, just as Shakespeare had got it in the neck in earlier Blackadders. ‘For a long time I kept thinking about a Victorian setting, with Dawn French as Queen Victoria. Like Queen Victoria, she is very small and round … ish. But unlike Queen Victoria, she is very amusing.’ Although Curtis wasn’t keen on the direction Elton was taking, he did note that there was a certain inevitability about exploring the most wonderful of Christmas-special clichés by retelling Dickens’s greatest story once again, except with one cunning alteration: ‘Again, a brilliant Richard idea,’ Ben acknowledges, ‘why don’t we play A Christmas Carol in reverse? Make him start off good and turn horrible. A brilliant plotting idea, and I think we wrote a great script.’ Dickens’s basic set-up of a detestable misanthrope who abuses his lackey and travels backwards and forwards in time was just too uncanny for the partnership to ignore, with the idea of Rowan playing a soft-spoken, virtuous Blackadder, sunk so low as to be barely scraping a living selling fake face fungus, being an undeniable draw.