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

by J. F. Roberts

  In addition to their scripting feat, the first series of ABOF&L, which began on BBC2 only a few weeks after Blackadder’s Christmas Carol, only relied on one regular third hand for sketches, with Yes, Prime Minister’s Deborah Norton as their female foil. Their return just over a year later was even stronger and more ambitious, with a number of guest stars, including Atkinson (credited as ‘Nigel Havers’), who offers his condolences after Stephen punches Hugh to death for repeatedly singing about lost coffee-jar lids:

  ROWAN:

  He was an immensely dangerous man. A very dangerous actor. Whenever he was around, there was always this feeling of, ooh, anything could happen! … Hugh Laurie, on the other hand, was one of the dullest men I’ve ever met.

  Hugh was probably the most voluble nit-picker in the Blackadder cast, and in their own programme he and Stephen chiselled away at their own comedy with the same level of perfectionism. Though their show would come to an abrupt end in the mid-nineties, ABOF&L amassed a multitude of obsessive admirers, with its ‘vox-pop’-punctuated comedy world which, unlike so many other shows, made no great attempt to skirt around the Pythonesque, being packed with surreal skits, cross-dressing, ‘amusing and unusual names’ such as Ted Cunterblast and Peter Cuminmyear, and sketches which regularly dissolved into punchline-free silliness. There was also, inevitably, a memorable emphasis on the sesquipedalian, Fry positing, ‘I thought language for language’s sake was funny. That simply saying certain words at speed and with a kind of rhythm could be entertaining.’ ‘Stephen has the most terrific facility with the English language,’ Hugh says, ‘I mean, he takes a genuine poetic pleasure in the feeling of a good sentence.’ Nevertheless, the scripts were a fifty–fifty affair, and Laurie’s half of the equation is too easily forgotten. No matter how successful an actor he may become, he remains one of the most under-sung writers of completely barking comedy this country has produced.

  Alongside the new series, Fry had also taken a leaf from Cleese and Curtis’s book, to become a fund-raiser for a timely cause of particular import. His Hysteria benefits for Aids charity the Terence Higgins Trust in some ways capitalised on the Saturday Live fan base (with Enfield’s Stavros a highlight of the first show and both Posner and Jackson getting involved), but his style of revue also took its cue from the good work still being done by the Secret Policeman’s Balls. In lieu of Rowan’s appearance, Fry, Laurie, Coltrane and Elton were mainstays of the 1987 and 1989 Amnesty benefits, witnessing Cook & Moore’s final live sketch performance together. Rowan was, however, game for all Hysteria shows, performing new vicar monologue ‘Tom, Dick & Harry’, acting as a human prophylactic for Hugh and Dawn French, and for the second outing, performed at Sadler’s Wells on 18 September 1989, even starring in a brand-new historical sketch with Laurie. Author Richard Curtis was so proud of this piece he could only hand it over to Stephen saying, ‘That’s yours. From me. But take it now so I’m not tempted to use it for Comic Relief …’

  Veni Vidi Non Vincere

  The Who Dares Wins team were also regulars at the Hysteria shows, though Tony was only with them for the first outing, playing a director who has to coach Julia Hills on how to have an orgasm. The final series of WDW aired at the start of 1988, and elsewhere Tony’s storytelling skills remained to the fore, with series on Boudicca and Bible stories, and plans for writing a children’s comedy series all of his own – which meant breaking his deal with Curtis. ‘I phoned him up and said, “Richard, I don’t need to schlep up to Oxford, because now I’ve heard your voice so often that I know what you’re going to say before you say it, so I incorporate it. So would you mind if I stepped out on my own?” And he said, “Don’t you realise that this is the moment that I’ve been waiting for since we started doing this work together?” So I was given tutorage from the best possible comedy writer I could have, without even being aware that I was doing the learning.’

  The first series of Maid Marian and her Merry Men, written by Robinson for Children’s BBC, was filmed in the leafy environs of Exmoor National Park in Somerset in the summer of 1989, and followed the heroine’s silly struggle to free the muddy peasants of Worksop from Norman oppression. The inspiration for the sitcom came from the writer’s own daughter, Laura, star striker for her school’s football team and a spirited girl who had nursed Tony through periods of depression earlier in his career. Feeling that there was no female role model on TV with even a fraction of Laura’s pluck, Tony created his own ‘secret history’, turning the medieval legend of Robin Hood on its head by showing the hero to be nothing more than an idle, vain tailor who took all the credit for Marian’s freedom-fighting. After years at the bottom of the heap as Baldrick, he bagged the role of Marian’s despicable nemesis, the Sheriff of Nottingham,fn6 for himself. ‘It did cross my mind that I might like to be Robin Hood, but quite honestly I’ve always thought that Robin was a bit of a wally, so I decided that what I’d like to do most was be the baddy. Having played sweet little Baldrick for so long, it was wonderful to be sarcastic and vitriolic.’ But although this was a departure for Tony, the Sheriff was still ultimately the most put-upon character in the show, outwitted by Kate Lonergan’s spirited Marian, let down by his moronic henchmen Gary and Graeme, and browbeaten by the infantile bully King John. John was played with terrifying abandon by Forbes Collins, who had been a peasant in The Black Adder (a complete coincidence, Robinson insists), but besides Collins, The Black Adder’s Mr Applebottom, Howard Lew Lewis, as brainless beast Rabiesfn7 and Ramsay Gilderdale playing a Guy of Gisborne even wetter than the pathetic halibut Ralph in Christmas Carol, there weren’t many links to be made between Maid Marian and Blackadder – at least not until Patsy Byrne cropped up as Marian’s embarrassing mother in a later series, a deliberate piece of casting by her old colleague which saw his dastardly baddie seducing the cuddly old lady via a romantic samba. He says, ‘There was never anyone I wanted for that role other than Patsy, I knew she would be perfect.’

  Despite being aimed at a teatime audience, part pantomime, part playground-style rough and tumble, Tony says, ‘We got away with murder, we said things we could never say on children’s television nowadays. I remember there was one line Marian has, which was: “Men: they promise you the world, then you end up flat on your back servicing their muckspreader.”’ The writer had extensive experience of children’s TV, and would soon be hosting his own cartoon compendium, Stay Tooned, but Robinson had learned from Baldrick’s popularity with kids that there was no point in writing down to the viewers. ‘I think I knew that I was writing for an audience who would be very au fait with The Young Ones and Blackadder and Dawn and Jennifer and Alexei’s programmes. I knew a lot of nine- to eleven-year-olds at that time, and that was their world, that was the television they really cared about. They didn’t care about children’s television at all really, apart from cartoons. So I knew that if I was writing out of my experience of Blackadder, there was no need to shake that off, I just needed to write it in my own way, and I knew that my target audience would get what I was doing. I couldn’t help but be informed by the comic rhythms I had been working on over the previous ten years or so.’

  Being warmly remembered for its many pop-music pastiches, as befitted the anarchic nature of the show, a constant stream of modern-day allusions which the kids would get made it clear that the twelfth-century setting was not to be taken seriously – the Sheriff’s expostulation, ‘Wait a darn-tootin’ minute! I have an idea so tasty you could coat it in sugar, stick a raspberry on top and serve it up on MasterChef!’ not only exemplifies this, but shows that the writer had no problem with throwing in the odd Blackadder-esque extended metaphor, usually reserved for his own character’s long speeches, which made up for years of Baldrick’s monosyllabism. Despite the silliness of it all, however, Maid Marian complemented its gleefully childish spirit with an overtly political stance, mocking Wayne Morris’s woolly royalist Robin and packing every story with suitably right-on rhetoric – a foreshadowing of Robinson’s move into part
y politics.

  While Tony was only just beginning to sketch out Marian’s exploits, the Hat Trick team were branching out into sitcom themselves. Mulville had starred in the Humphrey Barclay-produced sitcom That’s Love, but he and Rory McGrath had their own idea for a sitcom vehicle – and it was historical. Chelmsford 123, as the name suggested, was set in second-century Essex, and followed the frayed relations between new Roman Governor Aulus Paulinus (Mulville), and Trinovantes Chieftain Badvoc (McGrath). As a Who Dares Wins spin-off, a part was earmarked for Robinson, who was at first invited to play Gracientus, Aulus’ slimy brother-in-law, but Tony recalls, ‘I think Denise O’Donoghue said, “Actually everyone thinks it would look too much like Blackadder if you played that character, so we’re going to ask Phil to play it.”’ Philip Pope ultimately put in perhaps the best performance in the show, but he wouldn’t be the only Blackadder player to feature – the bestial Emperor Hadrian, who spoke almost entirely in Latin, was played by Bill Wallis; Helen Atkinson-Wood was a British housewife; Howard Lew Lewis’s Blag allowed him to portray yet another moronic man mountain; Robert Bathurst got his sitcom pilot hat-trick; and Angus Deayton and Geoff McGivern also joined the roster of Oxbridge guest stars littered throughout the two series. Although Britain was firmly in the firing line,fn8 one other similarity between the two historical sitcoms was a taste for Frenchie-baiting. Indeed, the entire saga ended on such a dig, after Gracientus’ despicable suggestion to Aulus that he displace Hadrian as Emperor lands everyone employment as galley slaves:

  AULUS:

  If you hadn’t suggested going back to Rome this would never have happened!

  GRACIENTUS:

  It would never have occurred to me to have gone back to Rome if Badvoc hadn’t kidnapped the Emperor in the first place!

  BADVOC:

  Listen, don’t blame me, if you Romans hadn’t invaded Britain in the first place, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to kidnap the Emperor.

  AULUS:

  Hang on, if you Britons had put up a better fight in the first place we wouldn’t have invaded you!

  MUNGO:

  Oh no, you can’t blame us for that. If the French had put up a better fight in Gaul, you’d never have got the chance to invade.

  ALL:

  … Bloody French.

  Although unfairly damned by comparison to Blackadder, the knockabout Chelmsford 123 took a wholly different approach to historical comedy, using the set-up to make every anachronistic gag imaginable, with Blag regularly making ‘they haven’t invented it yet’ gags, the whole cast turning up in a modern-day sequence as their schoolboy descendants, and even a brief cameo from the Doctor, as the Tardis materialised in the background during the very first episode. Nevertheless, Mulville and McGrath knew that they were bound to be compared to Atkinson’s team – and, of course, felt they were more than equal to taking them on. While insistent that there was never any bitter division between the two Oxbridge camps, Robinson admits, ‘As with any ambitious people in their twenties, there’s always petty ambitions and cattiness, but I think that’s just part of the deal.’ Besides, Blackadder was not such a sitcom Goliath for the WDW team to face when they first piloted their Roman comedy in 1988 …

  By early 1989, Curtis & Elton had already agreed on the setting for Edmund’s fourth full incarnation, moving into the twentieth century, and the team were contracted to begin recording in late summer. With McInnerny back in the fold, as well as Fry & Laurie being full-time players, the new line-up was just one way in which the latest series would be the ultimate distillation of everything that had gone before. There was no question of this being a finale, and yet by bringing the Blackadder family so close to the modern day, everybody involved knew that this would not just be any other series.

  One of many differences for this all-new passage from the Chronicles was the fact that, with the World War I in their sights, the writers decided that historical research was a necessity, for the first time. ‘With Blackadder two and three, we weren’t particularly respectful of the periods, but I don’t think we were really into any blatant howlers,’ Elton says. ‘Obviously, with World War I we had a very different approach.’ Ribbing the attitudes of centuries gone by was one thing, but finding humour in the deaths of 35 million people within living memory was not a task that anyone connected to Blackadder Goes Forth could countenance taking lightly. ‘We read lots of books about it,’ Curtis says, ‘Ben knew it all, I read a few books. They were interesting, because all the stuff we wanted to write about, which was sort of the clash of the classes, and getting stuck in a small confined space, was funny. All the people coming from communities where they’d never bumped into posh people, and vice versa, and all being so gung-ho and optimistic and enthusiastic … The first hundred pages of any book about the World War are hilarious – and then everybody dies.’

  ‘Of course there was a long tradition of World War II comedy from The Army Game, with Bootsie and Snudge, through to Dad’s Army,’ Stephen says, ‘with the American equivalents Bilko, Hogan’s Heroes, M*A*S*H, etc. Radio too, with Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh and the Navy Lark.’ In World War I terms, however, besides Up the Front, and perhaps the greatest pacifist treatment of the tragedy, Joan Littlewood’s Oh What a Lovely War, the Great War had featured in sitcom format in Dennis Pitts’s 1972 comedy No Peace on the Western Front. This Comedy Playhouse one-off began with genuine archive footage, prefacing a farce starring Warren Mitchell and Ronald Fraser as ‘the original odd couple’, a German and a Scots soldier who share a dugout on the Somme in 1916 and help each other to shirk their duty.

  But the younger generation were far more cautious about causing offence. Laurie says, ‘It was a really peculiar and bold thing to try and make a comedy out of, but I think ultimately a very sympathetic and respectful one. Even though the characters were absurd and moronic at times, it never disrespected their courage or their sacrifice.’ ‘It was a big gamble and we did get some complaints,’ Atkinson adds, ‘but of all the periods we covered it was the most historically accurate. We may have exaggerated the characters and what happened to them but it is very difficult to exaggerate the absurdity and horror of World War I. People thought we were really going over the top … It may sound ridiculous for someone to face a court martial for shooting a pigeon, but madder things happened in reality. Towards the end of the war thirty soldiers were court-martialled and shot in France by our own side for not wearing a hat in the trenches. It is so absurd nobody would ever believe it.’

  Blackadder’s raison d’être from the start was to draw humour from death and tragedy, but Elton for one was concerned that the closeness of the Somme bloodbath required caution – and nobody in the team was more aware of the seriousness of the subject matter than him, as both his grandfathers had actually been there, fighting on opposite sides (his father’s father had even won the Iron Cross, which was hastily buried in the back garden when the family migrated to Britain). But he was adamant that the war was ripe for comic treatment. ‘I was very anxious to do World War I; it’s a period I’m very interested in and have read a lot about. From the beginning Richard and I were absolutely committed to being extremely respectful, and aware of the unimaginable human tragedy … I hope no one was left in any doubt of the respect I think everybody on the team had for the sacrifices made and the honour of the people involved. But it was a damn silly war, and if ever there was a subject requiring satire, it’s people, no matter how honourably and how nobly, blindly going to war. Those awful policies, of what were called the Pals Brigades, because in 1914 people joined up together, whole gangs, the pub, a cricket team – or the tiddlywinks team as we said in Blackadder – would all march to the recruiting station, they’d all go together because the idea was that they’d fight together and for each other. And of course this industrial war didn’t really have a lot of time for people who’d fight for each other because people would be mown down in an instant … It was respectful to all. Yes, we had some fun with the old “lions led by
donkeys” idea, but that’s legitimately part of our world experience as Britons and Europeans inheriting the memories and the history of our forefathers in that war.’

  Lloyd goes further: ‘People don’t stop making jokes because somebody was killed just round the corner. In many ways – as people who’ve actually been fighting in real wars say – life becomes very precious and pumped up … I think it’s manifest right from the beginning that nobody’s making fun of people. Quite the reverse, it’s entirely sympathetic to the poor bastards who were put in this appalling situation.’

  But John had an extra reason for being glad of the setting. As Robinson says, ‘We’d always said that more than anything what we’d like to do would be to create a series that was very claustrophobic, where the five or six of us who were the performers were trapped in a space. And what better way to feel that notion of claustrophobia than to set it in the trenches?’ ‘We wanted a place and a time that could reproduce, to a certain extent, the claustrophobia and the sordidness of medieval England,’ Atkinson says, ‘and the best way to do that is to set it in the middle of a war.’ ‘Good sitcoms, so the wisdom goes, are set in places where people can’t get out,’ Lloyd continues, ‘Porridge in prison; in Fawlty Towers, Basil’s trapped with a ghastly wife that he can’t escape from and a business which is obviously going bust but which is his only livelihood. And we set ours in a trench dugout where there’s only two ways to escape – one is forward to the German machine guns, the other is backwards to the British firing squads.’ However, he adds, ‘I used to bang on to Richard and Ben that to do a proper sitcom, it has to be a situation in aspic, with a set number of characters who interact, and you find out more and more about them. So when they came along and said, “World War I, that’s the idea – three people in the dugout, two people in headquarters and that’s it, there are no other people,” I said, “That is brilliant.” But when the first three episodes came in, one was set in a flying school, one was set in hospital and the other one was set during a concert party. I said, “Guys, what’s happened to this three in the dugout, two in the headquarters idea? Where’s that gone?” And they said, “Well we couldn’t do that, it’s too difficult.”