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

by J. F. Roberts

  These final fraught plumpening sessions may have bruised some egos, but Tony insists that Richard’s presence was the reason that nothing ever spilled over into full enmity. ‘He’s such a loving bloke, and because of him that deep competitiveness was swathed in affection, the sort of environment where everyone remembers everyone else’s birthday.’ And while paying tribute to the writers, Lloyd himself was happy to tell journalists at the time, ‘The producer is basically someone who has no talent whatsoever, except the talent to criticise everyone else’s talent … I have to say that the writers are saintly men who put up with an awful lot of brutality.’ However, he was also to admit, ‘The key to Blackadder is that it’s about the writing: that is where all the difficulties come from. Because Ben and Richard are professional writers, I’m a writer pretending to be all the other things, and pretending not to be a writer … and there were more writers in our rehearsal room than would be in any sitcom. The scripts had always been the source of passionate disagreement between both the writers themselves, and between them and me, but when this widened to include the actors on a regular basis, it became clear that the team would not survive another series.’

  A united front was put on when the team decamped to Cavalry Barracks in Colchester, in full regalia, walrus moustaches and all, to be joined by the 3rd Battalion the Royal Anglian Regiment (‘the Pompadours’) for the first Blackadder location shoot in four years. As ever, Lloyd’s credits were to be meticulously crafted, with the full cast on parade in the opening credits, marching to Goodall’s new military arrangement of the theme – which pleasingly resulted in the melody becoming a permanent favourite with brass bands across the nation. ‘It was all very last minute,’ Howard recalls, ‘and it’s quite hard to get a military band from the army at two weeks’ notice, virtually impossible. We just happened to get in touch with someone who was a friend of a friend, and they managed to sort it out with a band which doesn’t now exist, the Royal Anglian.’ The end credits, which were originally to feature the ranks whistling the theme, convincingly recreated mottled archive footage, complete with militarised credits courtesy of Prd. 597602 Lloyd, J.

  The march past of Blackadder’s regiment, however, was to have featured the top brass mounted on horses – a plan foiled by Fry’s extreme discomfort as an equestrian. ‘Stephen Fry on a horse is one of the least convincing sights you will ever see,’ Atkinson laughs, but Fry recalls the reality being more serious than his chums could conceive: ‘The Colonel said, “Oh, I think my mount will do for you very well. Meet Thunderbolt!” This enormous horse, twice the height of me … I walked once around the parade ground, but then the band of the Royal Anglian Regiment strikes up “The British Grenadiers”, and my horse went vertical. It was like some painting of a rampant horse. And it started to charge and go round and round the parade ground. Hugh and Tim got off their horses – not to help me, but so they could roll on the ground wheezing and barking at my predicament, which was horrific! I was screaming! I was twelve foot off solid parade ground, I was going to die!’

  ‘We got on very well with the army,’ John remembers, ‘I think they thought we’d all be a bunch of communist poofters, and we thought they’d all be chinless wonders. We had lunch in the mess, and they made Baldrick sit on a stool – he had to eat baked beans out of a tin helmet.’ In fact, thanks to Goes Forth, despite UK troops’ entertainment usually being the domain of Jim Davidson, an obsession with Blackadder became the norm in the military. Rowan says, ‘You can see why they enjoy Blackadder so much, it’s such an enjoyable teaching tool for them, as a representation of hierarchy and humanity, which I think is what the army is, you can see how it rings all the right bells.’ As Lloyd is proud to repeat, around half of all regimental goats tend to be called ‘Baldrick’, and in the first Gulf War, all the British lines were named after characters from the series. One week after the filming, a serious IRA attack on the Colchester barracks nearly forced a last-minute change of credits, but the team decided to go ahead with what they had, as they left the ‘North Acton Hilton’ once again and went into the studio.

  Who’d Notice Another Mad Man Round Here?

  One surprise for this final series was that with Elton busy putting together his first solo TV vehicle, The Man from Auntie, for producer Geoffrey Perkins, warm-up duties fell to his partner Richard Curtis. Having a style more like a jolly holiday rep than a stand-up comedian, Curtis’s patter centred on the show, their plans to release a scratch ’n’ sniff Baldrick poster for Comic Relief (or maybe even speciality Baldrick coffee), and a regular airing of past Blackadder scenes on studio monitors every time the audience had a long wait for a scene to be set up.

  Equally surprising was the extent to which the first episode, ‘Captain Cook’fn9 served as a real series opener, establishing a peaceful status quo with the Captain contentedly puffing on his pipe before becoming embroiled in the latest laughable scheme from the top brass – it’s no coincidence that this was the first time that a series recording had begun with the first broadcast episode since ‘The Foretelling’. This first plot meanders amiably without ever really tackling any one subject, and the eventual pay-off was not only hastily put together by the team on the Saturday night before recording on 20 August, it was even simplified further from the suggested scene, which would have required a special set in addition to Blackadder’s dugout, No Man’s Land and Melchett’s chateau:

  In a hot kitchen, all with Italian moustaches, Blackadder supervises Baldrick. Taking it easy.

  GEORGE:

  Bally well done, Geraldine!

  EDMUND:

  One thing puzzles me, Baldrick – how did you manage to get so much custard out of such a small cat?

  BALDRICK:

  I’d rather not say, sir.

  EDMUND:

  Fair enough, well, it only remains for me to say – Bon appétit, mon Général!

  Warming up for a later episode, Curtis would tell the audience, ‘The line was, “How did you manage to get so much custard out of such a small cat?” but when we got the cat, it was absolutely enormous, it could have filled a whole crate full of custard bowls! So we found this absolutely tiny terrified little kitten, who I think you’ll notice gives a spectacularly good performance. It doesn’t do anything else though, it can only find kitten work.’

  Less frivolous peril awaited the Captain in the second story broadcast, pitting him against the inhumanity of the military justice system after his shooting of Melchett’s precious pigeon, ‘Speckled Jim’. Fry claims it to be his favourite episode for the Lear-like extremity of the General’s emotions, but its popularity did lead to some terror for the actor years later when he found himself being hounded through the streets by a fan who he thought was screaming that he was a ‘fucking pigging murderer!’ – rather than excitedly quoting Melchett’s denouncement of Captain B as ‘the Flanders Pigeon Murderer’.

  One inevitable result of the increased cast input was that every episode had a higher rate of excised dialogue than in previous series, be it extra references to ‘gobbledegook’, or Darling’s demolition of Baldrick as a character witness:

  DARLING:

  Sir, I must protest! Not only is the witness a mental defective, he’s a famous long-term accomplice of the accused, and his general bolshy demeanour and extraordinarily unpleasant turnipy sort of smell have undermined morale right across the Western Front!

  MELCHETT:

  Quite right! We don’t need your kind here, Private, get out.

  Or a much longer drinking session between the victorious Lieutenant and the Private:

  GEORGE:

  I think a toast, don’t you? To Captain Blackadder and Freedom!

  BALDRICK:

  Captain Blackadder and Freedom, sir! (They drink.)

  GEORGE:

  Oh yes, and to my sister Celia as well!

  BALDRICK:

  And her lil horse. (They drink again.) And your Uncle Rupert!

  GEORGE:

  And Auntie Madelein
e! (They drink more.) Oh and I’ll tell you who we’ve missed out – Toby Barraclough!

  BALDRICK:

  Aw, Toby Barraclough! (They drink yet more.) Who’s Toby Barraclough?

  GEORGE:

  He used to be my fag at school. Remarkable fellow, he used to make wonderful eclairs. He’d drink milk, and blow whipped cream out of his nose.

  BALDRICK:

  Whipped cream up his nose, sir! (They drink deep.)

  The trickiest edit of all, however, was the need to dub the name ‘Massingberd’ to cover up the prisoner’s praise for the high-flying lawyer who supplied his sponge bag. Just as Curtis smuggled in a reference to his neighbour William Greaves in ‘Money’, the name of Atkinson’s lawyer friend Bob Moxon-Browne was sneaked into the script, only for a last-minute change to be required when this was deemed to be advertising.

  There was also a blast from the past present in the cast for ‘Corporal Punishment’, with Blackadder’s firing squad (including Corporal Jones and Private Fraser, in a deliberate Dad’s Army tribute) very nearly comprising the whole Wow Show team, with Jeremy Gittins standing in for Mark Arden. Jeremy Hardy joined them as the chirpy northern prison guard named, irresistibly, Perkins, and recalls, ‘I can’t remember why I was cast but I was very pleased – I think there was some surprise that I decided Perkins should be slightly camp and northern, like a young Tom Courtenay. The Wow Show guys were used to improvising in comedy clubs and were very happy to bring ideas, but the full-time actors were more serious, and Rowan was very painstaking. I had a scene with him about an omelette, which he got nervous about because it was quite strange and tangential. I thought it was going to be really good but he seemed to panic rather and said, “Let’s just cut it,” rather than take a chance on it. I suppose it was very much his show and he wanted to be certain about everything. And I was biased because the scene featured me very prominently.’

  Having Steven Frost taunt the prisoner Blackadder just as he did in ‘The Witchsmeller Pursuivant’ highlights one of the features of this fourth incarnation – the ability to show history repeating itself from series to series. John may have only suggested in jest that the programme only ever had seven plots but, more than ever, Goes Forth would prove that Edmund and his cohorts were inextricably linked in a series of repeated sticky situations, described by Lloyd as ‘some ghastly karmic prison sentence, being trapped in a cycle, yoked to this scrofulous servant’. Consider Blackadder, usually with Baldrick, languishing in a cell waiting to hear about a fate worse than a fate worse than death from some mad foreigner; standing trial on a laughably unjust charge; being compelled to mastermind a theatrical entertainment against his will; having to risk death and undertake a lethal mission to prove himself against a tiresomely popular brave hero of the hour; Baldrick relishing the chance to get into a dress and possibly marry into the aristocracy; and of course, one or both of the duo ultimately facing an all-but inevitable bloody death.

  Two episodes which made extensive use of this reincarnation loop were ‘Major Star’ and ‘Private Plane’, which may have been recorded two weeks apart, with ‘Corporal Punishment’ in between, but which told a single story: the elopement, once again, of Lord Flashheart and the beautiful cross-dresser Bob. As Melchett’s unconvincingly disguised driver Private Parkhurst, Gabrielle Glaister made a welcome return to the team, even though it was George’s dragging up as ‘the Gorgeous Georgina’ which won Melchett’s heart, cuing an excess of double entendres when the General requests an assignation:

  EDMUND:

  As her director, I’m afraid I could not allow it …

  MELCHETT:

  I could always find another director who would allow it!

  EDMUND:

  … Before a show. After a show, why not?

  Um, however, I should warn you, sir, that she is a shy and delicate flower, who needs careful nurturing.

  MELCHETT:

  You can rest assured, Blackadder, that I shall pluck her gently.

  EDMUND:

  Quite. Well, I’ll see what I can do …

  ‘Major Star’ also allowed for a roasting of Charlie Chaplin akin to Lord Blackadder’s damning of Shakespeare’s comic powers, as the writers rushed to make the most of all the twentieth-century inventions and references, from aeroplanes, telephones and gramophones to suffragettes, limbo dancers and music hall, which comprised the latest fads in Blackadder’s world. Although Atkinson was to portentously insist, ‘If I had been a contemporary of Chaplin I feel I might have been able to exploit myself to the full. I am a visual animal,’ in his 1992 mock lecture for BBC2, Laughing Matters, he argued that Chaplin’s popularity was a mystery to most modern audiences, while Buster Keaton’s comedy continued to be as funny as ever, suggesting some sympathy with Edmund’s view of the Little Tramp.

  Rik Mayall’s typically bombastic re-entry into Blackadder lore showed that the Flashheart family remained everything that the Blackadders weren’t, and the Edwardian Flash was even more famed and adored than his Elizabethan forebear – to Blackadder’s disdain, but Atkinson’s joy. ‘In the fourth series, when Rik played the Royal Flying Corps pilot, I thought it was the performance of his career actually, I thought he was absolutely hysterical. And even though a lot of it was me just putting on a sarcastic face while he did his extremely funny stuff, I just loved it. And when I look at the episode now, I really do think, from Rik’s point of view, it was one of the best things he ever did.’ Mayall paid as much attention as ever to his character’s look, and praised the costume and make-up staff: ‘The First World War – you don’t kind of think of it as sexy, but Flashheart comes on and his gear is just so sex! Total, two hundred per cent sex! It just made me move … With Rowan and me fighting in the trench, the only thing that worried me was my moustache. But the make-up operative who fixed that moustache – it doesn’t move an inch! And my face is going all over the place, and I’m cascading with sweat, because the costume was so gorgeous I didn’t want to take the coat off.’

  Mayall raised the bar for everyone in the studio that Sunday night, but besides a cameo from future comedy writer Hugo Blick, ‘Private Plane’ also gave Rik’s best friend Ade Edmondson his one chance to join the Blackadder team, playing the legendary Baron von Richthofen, one of only two historical figures to pop up in the series, albeit without any attention to historical accuracy.fn10 Between Flash’s derring-do and the quality of the guest stars, ‘Private Plane’ is surely the most exciting episode of the series, with an audibly electrified audience cheering on the ensemble. Robinson, however, remembers this being as much down to everything that went wrong, as what went right. ‘Things went wrong in front of the live audience all the time, it was torture for them! None of us ever knew our words, because we never did any rehearsing, all we ever did was argue about the script, all week long! So poor old Rowan, when it came to the night of the performance, he was just winging it really, and he used to dry about forty-seven times per half-hour. He had every justification for doing so, but it can’t have been much fun for the audience.’ In this episode, Rowan says, ‘I remember the one we had trouble with was “Battersea Dogs Home”. In the live recording, in front of the audience, I had trouble saying … well, I’m having difficulty saying it now …’ With the on-heat Bob and Flashheart loudly letting off woof-woofs at every turn, Blackadder’s bitter observation that ‘It’s like Battersea Dogs Home round here’ ground the recording down as the star stumbled on the B on every single take until, within a hair’s breadth of losing the atmosphere altogether, Lloyd called down from the gallery. ‘Tell him to say Crufts!’ ‘Of course it got this huge and totally disproportionate audience response,’ Atkinson says, ‘an absolutely astronomic laugh because they loved the fact that I’d finally found a way round the stammer.’ ‘The audience went insane,’ Fry laughs. ‘But isn’t that brilliant of John? What other line is there, except for “Battersea Dogs Home”? Superb on-the-wing producing.’

  Their time on Blackadder completed, Rik and Ade were j
ust on the verge of launching their own massively successful, typically revolting comedy juggernaut, Bottom, while Glaister was only months away from a celebrated stint on the soap opera Brookside. Some of the regular cast had no day of rest, though – despite being a Monday, the evening immediately following the recording of ‘Private Plane’ was earmarked for the filming of Hysteria II, and Rowan and Hugh were required for Richard’s non-canonical return to Tudor times.