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

by J. F. Roberts

  Your Country Needs YOU

  Having begun the entire dynastic saga by chickening out of active service at Bosworth, finally a Blackadder was going to war, whether he liked it or not. This didn’t actually make Captain B brave, just in the wrong place at the wrong time, although Atkinson did sense a change with each dynasty. ‘In the first series, Blackadder was just an idiot. In the second series he was dashing but weak. As the butler, he became cleverer and nastier. This time he is less cruel and more careworn.’ In his Flashman-esque pomp, fighting for the Empire, the Captain may have been as villainous as ever, but faced with heavily armed Germans, all he had left was what Fry calls ‘a strong belief, almost raised to the pitch of religiosity, that his skin and well-being were more important than that of anybody else’. The anti-hero’s traditional contempt for his surroundings was magnified by peril, in Boden’s view. ‘He was the person that could see the madness all around. He saw the madness in his own trench, let alone what was going on outside and in No Man’s Land.’

  Curtis penned special service history profiles of all the regulars for Radio Times on the series’ broadcast, which detail how far from power the Blackadder family had fallen: ‘Captain Blackadder is a lifelong soldier, pipe-smoker and moustache-grower. He joined the army to escape the rigours of civilian life, and distinguished himself sitting in armchairs and ordering drinks across three continents, making it his particular business to avoid enemies who actually possessed guns …’ Baldrick, however, had fallen still further: ‘Christian name uncertain, Private Baldrick is a graduate of the Turnip Street Workhouse, where he majored in gutter-sweeping and potato peeling … It is impossible to pick up any textbook on rare skin diseases without coming across pictures of him.’ Despite the batman’s devolution to ‘amoeba level’, though, Fry identifies how the change of context lent a new kind of nobility to the fetid dwarf: ‘Baldrick makes his absolute apotheosis as the Tommy; he can make the best of everything, he can turn things to his advantage however ghastly, he can find a better puddle to go to.’ ‘One of the things I love about series four,’ Curtis says, ‘is that strangely I think Baldrick gained meaning. You know, he’d just been a fool and a butt the whole way through, but there was a remarkable thing that happened right at the end of that series, when he did suddenly seem to represent the working man.’ ‘I had the privilege of performing a part that represented the ordinary lives of the grandfathers of an awful lot of people in the country in which I live,’ Robinson says, ‘but really it was for them to imbue Baldrick with that notion rather than me – I was just a bloke who couldn’t make coffee.’ Baldrick’s signing up also gave Robinson inspiration from a new quarter: ‘There’s a character called the Good Soldier Svejk, in a novel which came out in the First World War, who is as stupid as Baldrick. And you never actually really know whether he is incredibly stupid, or whether he’s just pretending to be stupid. That was kind of my inspiration. But rather than “I have a cunning plan, sir,” he says “Beg to report, sir!”’

  Hugh Laurie says, ‘Baldrick is the hero really, because wherever you go, every school or organisation, every shop or whatever has got a Baldrick. They just loved that character.’ The audience were used to Hugh completing the central trio, and so George had to be reincarnated, with the Prince’s oafishness depleted, but not one ounce of brain being inherited along the way. ‘I think the kinship of stupidity between Baldrick and George was a very heart-warming one. They were companions on the great road of idiocy.’ Lt George the Hon. Colthurst Barleigh was conceived as a Woosterish silly ass (Hugh even experimented with a monocle until he discovered how hard it was to keep on), but his lack of guile made him perhaps the most sympathetic character of all. The actor suggests: ‘George’s sort of happy-go-lucky, “home in time for tea” attitude was especially tragic. His ideas about war come from games; George could only see real warfare in those terms. He genuinely was a lamb to the slaughter.’ In Curtis’s own words, George embodied the innocence lost in World War I, ‘Dying for a good scrap, he’s always the first to volunteer for a tricky escapade, and the last to duck.’

  In taking over the all-important role of Blackadder’s death-dealing superior, Laurie’s partner, despite the General’s surname, had far more of the Wellington about him than Lord Melchett, and though he had no short supply of mad military commander forebears to inspire him, Fry became the first of the team to craft an all-new character – General Sir Anthony Cecil Hogmanay Melchett, although undeniably Colonel Blimp-ish, would go on to personify the dangerous ignorance of World War I high command like no other comic creation. Despite mistaking Cambridge for Oxford, Curtis’s service history for the General encapsulated the bullish buffoon perfectly: ‘Cousin of the Melchett who sent off the Light Brigade, Hogmanay Melchett is described by an uncredited captain as “having a skull that is such a perfect vacuum, it’s a constant surprise his moustache doesn’t get sucked up his nose”. Educated, using the word at its loosest, at Oundle, where he was one of the great fag-beating team of 1877, he went on to break wind for his college at Oxford, and then joined the army to protect the British Empire and shout at the lower classes in a very loud voice.’ It was the thirty-year-old Fry’s portrayal, however, that made this crusty old dinosaur such a memorable monster. With characteristic modesty, Fry says, ‘Young people playing old people are funny. Because I was young and I was playing a General, it was somehow funnier than if I’d been the right age to be a General, which I am now … Most of what I do isn’t terribly hard. I don’t have to “disappear” into a character in some terrible way. With Blackadder the last thing you want is to take it too seriously. The audience relishes the sight of an actor enjoying himself. They like to see the gargantuan imbecility of it.’ He adds, however, ‘The Melchett in series four was a very different character to the one in two, he was much, much more aggressive, much more insane, much more powerful. He was really, for almost the entire series, the source of power. And he represents the absolute insanity of the war. Without being too pompous about Blackadder, it does I think illustrate perfectly the nature of that grotesque war, the genuine insanity if you like, of the way the war was practised, which however much it may have been justifiable, to us it is now clear that it was a moment of madness in human history that one would never want to repeat again, so it’s wonderful to concentrate some of that madness into a single being.’

  Since the Cambridge days, when his Shakespearean kings tended to incorporate extraneous senile noises into every speech, Fry had entertained his friends with his own unique loud bleating, which could act as a greeting, an agreement, or even a threat. ‘It was done as much as anything to amuse Rowan and Hugh, this rather bizarre way of speaking, and barking. You knew he was coming just because you heard a “Beh!” noise somewhere in the background. I would try and make Rowan laugh by sometimes sitting down and going “Ach!” and only Rowan knew it was because I had these apparent piles.’ The haemorrhoidal subtext to Melchett’s madness was gifted to Fry by Brian Blessed – an apt gesture, given that the General was the closest thing to Blessed’s Richard IV in three series.

  McInnerny was brought back into the fold with the promise of the series’ second all-new character, essentially filling Fry’s previous role, of Blackadder’s weaselly and sycophantic equal. ‘Darling and Blackadder are kind of the same really,’ Elton says, ‘lower-middle-class sort of semi-gentlemen. But obviously one of them has managed to connive his way onto the staff, and the other one’s bad-lucked into the trenches.’ As Tim recalls, this was about the size of the role. ‘The whole idea of doing the fourth series … I mean, it took a great deal of thought, as far as I was concerned, but doing Darling was a kind of way of hoping that everyone might forget a little bit about Percy. To play Darling, who hated Blackadder, and throughout the series wanted him to go on the front line and be killed, was quite extreme.’ However, he adds, ‘In the initial rehearsals, he wasn’t even called Darling, he was called Captain Cartwright, which is kind of dull. I mean, I didn’t even know who
he was and couldn’t get an angle on him.’

  With only a partial twinkle, Rowan says, ‘Tim, unlike the rest of us, is a proper actor … I like to think,’ and it’s certainly the case that of all the cast, he took the job most seriously. Lloyd says, ‘Tim, as well as being a very funny guy, is a real actor’s actor. He wants to know what the haircut is, what kind of walk the character has – he’s brilliant at it … Darling is, I think, one of the great comic creations, and it came from an actor’s determination to carve himself a place here. Tim said, “I’ve been dragged in here for this teeny weeny part, and where’s me laughs?” And then Stephen chimes in, “Yeah, and Cartwright’s a really boring name, isn’t it?”’ Fry continues, ‘Tim was a bit distressed because his character seemed to be nothing. He was called Cartwright, and I suggested, in a rare moment of brilliance, that maybe he should have a really silly name that was a constant torment to him … And suddenly this character was born out of nowhere, just because of the name! For the next three days, his name was changed to Darling, and we all fell about. Then I remember we actually had a vote, and said, “Look, is this Darling joke going to run very dry, and is it going to seem really embarrassing after the third episode, or will it sustain?” And Tim said, “Oh no, please let me keep it!” Because Tim being the wonderful actor that he is, he knew how to play someone who all his life had been called Darling in a sarcastic way.’ ‘We thought the name Darling was funny,’ Tim admits, ‘but it really didn’t occur to us that people would pick it up in the way that they did. Which was very stupid of us, obviously. We just thought it was a silly, embarrassing name, we didn’t realise what it would mean for the other characters … The scene where Melchett is getting ready for dinner with “Georgina”, and the whole misunderstanding of him practising his speech to her, and calling her “darling”, but at the same time I think he’s talking to me, I think is brilliant, it’s a fantastic piece of writing.’ ‘The character punches way above his weight. You watch him acting his socks off when Stephen’s doing the talking, it’s wonderful. Because acting isn’t just about delivering lines, it’s about being there and being real,’ John says, adding, ‘Darling hates Blackadder because he’s jealous of him. He’s a real man, a front-line soldier.’ But there was more to Kevin Darling than that, with a bizarre homoerotic undertone to his hatred of Blackadder being just one ingredient which made up the neurotic ‘sort of spotty squit that nobody really likes’, his frustration betrayed by the pulsating squint in his left eye. ‘The twitch stayed with me for months actually,’ McInnerny says, ‘I did get quite scared that it was never going to go, and that I’d have to start writing my own spin-offs, because I wouldn’t be able to get rid of the twitch and I’d never get another job.’

  McInnerny’s transformation into the Captain completed the strongest line-up of any Blackadder series, but as the writers may have reflected even at that very early stage, Darling’s genesis did not augur well for a smooth production from their point of view. When The Times visited the team in rehearsals, the first inkling of the finality of the new show came when Richard told them, ‘If you’re making a lemon sauce, all you need is a bit of lemon. But if you’re making chilli everybody can shove bits in, and Blackadder is a very rich chilli. Everybody on the show thinks they can put in good jokes, despite the fact that Ben and I think there are already quite a few good ones in there to start with. It does usually end up funnier, but it’s time to do something over which I have more control.’

  Pack Up Your Troubles …

  ‘One of the great things about Blackadder was you used go whistling in to work, because it was so funny in rehearsal. What would happen was just so very, very entertaining, and the rehearsals were often funnier than the shows,’ John Lloyd remembers through rose-tinted spectacles, but Stephen has a clear memory to the contrary: ‘I remember saying to Hugh and Rowan and John, “What will happen in six months’ time when a taxi driver says to you, ‘Oh, those Blackadders, I bet they’re fun to make, aren’t they?’ Will you go ‘Yes, marvellous fun!’?” And they all said, “No! We’ll be honest and say they’re absolute hell!”’

  ‘The producer is supposed to be the person who makes sure that inspiration doesn’t turn into complete filthy anarchy. Unfortunately, we had John …’ Tony Robinson says. ‘We were workshopping all the time, we workshopped every bloody word, every exclamation mark! Although we didn’t have the twelve writers that you would have for Taxi or Cheers or whatever, actually, you had people in the room who were doing exactly the same kind of thing that those writers on an American show would do. So by the end of the week the whole thing was really lean and spare. Everything, any ounce of fat on it, would have been challenged and hacked away. Virtually all of us who were involved in the performance were writers and, outrageously, we decided that we knew just as well if not better than Richard and Ben what the words ought to be. So we were constantly challenging every single gag, the structure of every scene – we even put additional characters in sometimes! So there was a lot of tension between the writers on the one hand, and the producer on the other, who was, as it were, the representative of what the actors were saying. And it was very healthy and very good, but it could be quite upsetting sometimes.’

  Robinson continues, ‘The legendary coffee scene is an example of the improvisation that we all used to do in the rehearsal room. Because in the original script, the only line was about the fact that the coffee was made out of mud. And then somebody said, “Why don’t you add sugar? Dandruff!” and we all giggled like the naughty late adolescents we really were.’ A glimpse of the tweaking/plumpening process was captured by the BBC series Behind the Screen, which bearded the troublemakers in their lair, agonising over Captain B’s struggle with telephonic communications in the last episode. Rowan’s dialogue is perfected word by word, to group frustration – what colour should the mis-ordered curtain material be? In which direction is the taxicab meant to travel? As the diatribe is painstakingly recited in full by the faltering star, Fry and Robinson egg him on with a desperation born of hours of sluggish progress, and cheer when he reaches the end … only for Lloyd to then cause groans of misery by apologetically griping: ‘I hate to raise this, having worked on it for three hours, but do you think it’s a very good joke?’ To which Atkinson admits, ‘I’m still labouring under the belief that no one ever ordered anything by the phone in 1917!’ During the same tortuous session, the Radio Times reported Rowan sitting with two pencils up his nose (a piece of grotesque tomfoolery which had long been in his armoury), occasionally plucking one from a nostril to make further notes as the brainstorming continued.

  By this point, Blackadder’s skill with an extended simile was something of a trademark-cum-millstone, and a definite trap for the team when rehearsing. John says, ‘It was an area where real creative madness could go on and on, and then it was the trick of trying to find which were the best aspects of that simile, and pull it back so it wasn’t over-weighted.’ The writers could hardly quibble on this point either, as Curtis admits, ‘The most difficult thing was definitely thinking of the similes. Ben and I used to put that off forever, so Ben would send it to me and the line would say: “You are as stupid – as my knob.” That’s what it would always say. We couldn’t use “my knob”, so I’d have a go at it, and then he’d have another go at it, and when we got into the rehearsal room everybody would have a go at it.’ ‘John, Hugh and I in particular would rewrite until the final moments,’ Fry adds, ‘we endlessly had “epithet moments” as we called them, “Sticky the stick insect”, all those sort of jokes. Somehow there was never enough time to get them absolutely right. We used to wriggle about screaming with adolescent laughter whenever we did those.’

  Tony was not to be put off by his comic company, and admits, ‘I love them all, but when I’m with them, I suddenly want to win. I don’t want them to put me down … I can’t tell you how profoundly competitive that environment is, but I contributed like mad. I think whenever I’m in a corner I always get noisy. Bei
ng the only grammar-school boy among that incredibly talented group of highly articulate performers, and having left school at sixteen, and not having been to university, there was a sense in which they always felt very different from me, really rather exotic, and yet in a way, not really kind of tuned in to the real world, because they all talked so elaborately. And I think that probably helped me with Baldrick – in a way it doesn’t matter to Baldrick whether or not a hierarchy exists, because they’re all up above him, dancing around in some way or another, and I suspect there’s a bit of me that felt like that myself.’

  ‘We were working with an extraordinarily creative group of people, and you know, to expect Stephen and Hugh not to chip in “wouldn’t this be a good idea?” or “wouldn’t that be a good idea?” would be madness, obviously the actors had a real part to play,’ Elton said many years later, but as ever, he was seldom there to take the hard knocks, while Curtis says, ‘I’ve never been able to understand non-involved writers. I think they have much happier lives – those who don’t go to rehearsals all look younger than me. But I’ve always gone to every part of the process, right up to the edit … John was never happy unless everything was fabulous, so it was a very argumentative and passionate rehearsal room. But in some ways it always was – Ben and I were used to arguing about what was funny, so already by then it had been through lots and lots of drafts. We always had a read-through a month before, and two or three episodes would just be wiped because they weren’t funny enough, so it was no surprise that we kept on arguing until the final moment … It was very difficult and testing, but the pain in the arse about it was that it was effective.’ Ben, however, says, ‘I think I was able to maintain friendships more consistently, because Richard did all the bloody work – he went in and I didn’t. I just couldn’t handle it. Sometimes lovely ideas emerged on the floor and they were marvellous, and sometimes they were completely ridiculous! Like, “What are you all discussing?” I said to John. “This sort of relentless anal worriting over each syllable can sometimes mean that you miss the whole.” They’d end up doing the line as written in the first place anyway, and half a day would have been wasted, in this sort of pained panic. I thought it was nearly as counterproductive as it was productive.’