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

by J. F. Roberts

  Parte the Sixth

  A BASTARD ON THE THRONE

  IT SHOULD GO without saying that the twentieth-century descendants of Captain Blackadder were to enjoy a considerable upswing in their fortunes, as the inheritors of the ancient bloodline continued to navigate the ladders of the British Establishment. Numerous relatives bagged themselves important roles in the military and the civil services, and built up a greater family fortune than ever before – all during a period when most aristocratic families were losing all power, relevance and, of course, cash, as deference died and the modern United Kingdom evolved. The details of the family’s latter-day history, and the biographies of living and more recently deceased family members, however, remains the private business of the present inheritor of the Blackadder legacy, which is as it should be.

  Nevertheless, even with the admittedly meagre sources available for research purposes, it is hoped that this history of the family has at least shown that British History is essentially a dialogue, with one half of the equation silenced, and only the winner’s voice remaining on record. Henry Tudor, the primary villain of the piece, was surely only ever to be trusted in exact ratio to the distance he could be thrown, and his granddaughter Elizabeth equally thrived on secrets and lies, while perhaps the Hanoverians were, it is fair to argue, equally unfit to rule over this sceptered isle.

  The history of Britain is infinitely studded with forgotten heroes, but perhaps it is time, in the twenty-first century, to finally give the four Edmunds kept alive by the faithful documentation of the Blackadder Chronicles and their 1980s BBC TV dramatisations, whose sad lives all ended with true victory just beyond their grasp, their rightful places at the heart of our nation’s story. Propaganda may have always been the greatest weapon in any ruler’s armoury, but occasionally the suppressed truth can be re-established for all to see – and especially under today’s modern, open administration, under a monarch of such honest nobility as our own current sovereign.

  So while it’s fair to conclude that lies and propaganda may be history in modern Britain, I remain considerably indebted to those whose historical researches and philosophies have enriched my examination of how such lies have malformed our understanding of the past – the great Terry Jones, the venerable J. H. W. Lloyd and, of course, the brave Professor Justin Pollard.fn1

  The truth remains that when a new king is crowned, what he says is the True History, becomes the True History.

  GOD SAVE THE KING!

  fn1 To whom this True History is at least partly dedicated, he having very sadly accidentally beheaded himself flossing his teeth, before publication. He is a great loss to outlandish historical conspiracy theorists everywhere.

  Chapter 6

  BACK AND FORTH

  Chaos theory tells us that if a butterfly so much as breaks wind, it could cause a cataclysm …

  You have to hand it to Rowan Atkinson, his career has been exceedingly punctual, with new challenges and projects clicking into gear with precision engineering. Mr Bean had a long and complicated gestation period, and at one point John Lloyd was down to be producer of the irregular series, but by the time the original programme went out on the first day of the 1990s, Atkinson had flitted to the third channel, with John Howard Davies directing and producing the debut. It was a coup for Thames TV, who had enjoyed great success with Benny Hill’s internationally popular variety shows, but with Hill’s brand of saucy humour finally judged to be officially past its sell-by date by Howard Davies himself, Atkinson was poised to step into the vacuum. His own company shared the production credit, Tiger TV – and, latterly, Tiger Aspect – being founded on the basis of an agreement between Atkinson and Peter Bennett-Jones, made in the wake of the loss of Richard Armitage.

  Some remnants of Rowan’s original idea of using the Blackadder powerhouse for his new creation survived for the first special, with old Curtis material like the ‘blind man on the beach’ and ‘falling asleep in church’ sketches being recycled, alongside an exam sequence by Elton which had its roots in a sad monologue from Neil in The Young Ones about wasting his entire examination time arranging a selection of good-luck gonks. With that being Ben’s sole contribution to the Bean legacy, the core Blackadder team dissolved. Curtis himself would step back from being Bean’s primary puppeteer as the awkward disaster magnet’s career flourished throughout the decade, his burden gradually relieved by regular Smith & Jones player Robin Driscoll, as Bean’s five years of TV specials began to lead to international acclaim.

  The Ever-Growing Bean

  Despite the debacle of his Broadway debut and turning down a multimillion-dollar offer to star in a US sitcom, Atkinson continued to make more modest inroads into the transatlantic market, with a successful tour of the Not Just a Pretty Face show being captured for posterity live in Bostonfn1 but it was the unearthly overgrown schoolboy in the dilapidated green Mini who changed everything. Obviously the near absence of dialogue in Mr Bean’s world would be a major part of the character’s huge success all around the planet, and within just a few years Rowan could genuinely be said to have attained the status of international comedy icon – even, finally, in the USA. In fact, the one country where Bean always garnered a mixed reception is back home in Blighty, where Atkinson’s fan base missed the verbal gymnastics of Blackadder, and despite the popularity of the shows, British critics could never bring themselves to applaud Atkinson’s move towards all-inclusive family entertainment with as much aplomb as their foreign counterparts: ‘I have to say that it is difficult to think of examples where the gulf between popular perception and the media’s perception is as wide as it is with Mr Bean,’ he was to muse, rejecting the elitist critics who sneered at Bean’s proletarian popularity. ‘It’s because it has no intellectual conceit, or irony or subtext whatsoever. It’s the sheer manifestness of it, I think, which is sort of irritating to those who tend to look for more depth in comedy.’

  Atkinson took on the form of Mr Bean more devotedly than any other character as the decade wore on. ‘I did strange things – like appearing on chat shows in character. I remember going to a book signing as Mr Bean, and I just wrote “Mr Bean” in the book rather than Rowan Atkinson … it was a fantastically kind of freeing experience, because I could just submerge myself in this character and behave however I liked.’ Videos, books, a hit number-seven single, ‘I Wanna Be Elected’, Easter eggs, lunch boxes, video games, toys – Bean became, and remains, a major industry, the weirdo’s life extended far beyond the run of TV specials by his becoming almost a mascot for Comic Relief, regularly featuring in most Red Nose Night marathons, until Atkinson relinquished the role’s taxing physical demands and Bean joined the highest echelons of comedy characters, like Laurel & Hardy and Inspector Clouseau before him, by becoming a cartoon. Mr Bean was certainly no angel, but Atkinson could hardly have got further away from the arch, cool sesquipedalian character of Blackadder in the decades following Goes Forth.fn2

  With Atkinson having already co-starred in one Oscar-winning short film, Steven Wright’s The Appointments of Dennis Jennings in 1988, Mr Bean first began inching his way into the American consciousness via cinema shorts based on the TV show – but despite Bean’s tongue-tied nature, a move into features was always on the cards, with 1997’s Bean: The Ultimate Disaster Movie and the following love letter to Jacques Tati, Mr Bean’s Holiday, doing great business on release. There was a mooted UK invasion when the shorts were made, with Lenny Henry starring in Disney’s True Identity and Rik Mayall on fine form in Drop Dead Fred, but although the latter film can claim a cult following, neither comic shared Atkinson’s doggedness in making it big in the States, persevering even if it meant playing smaller roles in films such as Hot Shots! Part Deux, Scooby Doo or Rat Race. It was unexpected, however, that Rowan’s movie triumphs would not come along until after his long-time partner had already been feted by Hollywood.

  Four Weddings and a Funeral would not set Richard Curtis on the road to becoming a romcom ‘brand’ until 1994,
and then Atkinson would only have a cameo, once again donning the vicar’s surplice. A couple of years earlier, however, perhaps the writer’s most charming feature had once again cast Rowan as the bad guy – though it remains a sadly uncelebrated part of his oeuvre, being made for TV, broadcast on BBC1 on 23 December 1991, and never repeated or commercially released in the UK. Bernard & the Genie was co-produced by Talkback and directed by Paul Weiland, who had helmed Alas Smith & Jones after Martin Shardlow’s exit, before moving into movies with a turkey of disastrous proportions, Leonard Part 6, starring Bill Cosby. Alan Cumming made his heroic debut as the sweet loser Bernard Bottle, whose life begins to fall apart on Christmas Eve until he discovers an ancient lamp containing the bombastic good-time genie Josephus, played by Lenny Henry on full throttle. Atkinson’s weaselly millionaire art dealer Charles Pinkworth – ‘a very large turd in a horrible pink shirt’, in the Genie’s summation – is another exemplary bastard, a heartless boss in need of a Scrooging which never really comes, with a bizarre line in camp, florid abuse. Having discovered a priceless collection of Old Masters belonging to two sweet old ladies (and then offered them half of the proceeds), the promising young art dealer with the suitably alliterative name receives the first of many Christmas surprises:

  CHARLES:

  I like the cut of your jib, Bottle. I’ve been watching you, and I’ve been thinking about your future with the firm … I’m already assessing the prospects for the staff, and so naturally, my thoughts have turned to you … and I’ve made a big decision.

  BERNARD:

  What’s that, sir?

  CHARLES:

  You’re fired.

  BERNARD:

  Sorry, sir?

  CHARLES:

  Fired, Bottle. I sack ye! I want you and your philanthropic little ARSE out of this building pronto, or I’ll arrest you for loitering, and probably throw in a charge of sexual harassment into the bargain.

  BERNARD:

  I’m not with you, sir?

  CHARLES:

  Not any more you’re not! And if I have anything to do with it, you won’t be with anyone else either … Farewell, Bottle, and never darken our doors again. This is a profit-making organisation, not Help the Aged.

  BERNARD:

  Wait a minute. This isn’t just a lovely joke before you promote me to Head of Department, is it, sir?

  CHARLES:

  (Pause, smiles.) No. Bugger – ye – off!

  Curtis’s own brand of warm-hearted wonder made the TV movie a Christmas treat which would be fondly remembered by many, perhaps only slightly marred in hindsight by the instantly dating topicality of the pop-culture references (when the Genie grants real wishes to children disappointed by a drunken store Santa, one young boy’s transformation into Gary Lineker made perfect sense in 1991, but has jarring connotations for the modern viewer, while a line from Howard Goodall’s opening music, when Bernard is on top of the world – ‘He’s higher than high, if he was a girl he’d be Princess Di’ – seems grimly inappropriate in retrospect). Unsurprisingly, Curtis has kept the screenplay in circulation ever since, with other writers including Linehan & Mathews reworking the script from time to time, to no avail – but then the chances of hitting quite the same note with a new cast are slim. Certainly there’s no replacing Denis Lill’s show-stealing performance as Bernard’s compulsive liar lift attendant confidant, Kepple.

  But as Curtis learned the hard way, a hit screenplay is not something you can rush – by the time Bernard & the Genie was on TV, he was already years into agonising development on the follow-up to The Tall Guy, entitled Four Weddings and a Honeymoon, the ultimate manifestation of the writer’s irritation with Saturdays spent throwing confetti and listening to drunken speeches. Emma Freud was now her boyfriend’s script editor, and proved to be a hard taskmaster. ‘She’s a very ruthless, almost unpleasant script editor. The thing I dread is the bloody letters CDB, which stand for “Could Do Better”. I used to think: “But I’ve worked on that for a week!”’ However, it was his old collaborator Helen Fielding who first steered him away from the whimsical fluffiness plaguing his second film script, urging him to cut a sequence where the hero Charles stalks the object of his affection on her honeymoon, and advising the writer that it was ‘time to grow up’. The injection of tragedy into what was otherwise a light romance revolving around a gaggle of toffs was perhaps the strongest elementfn3 which turned Four Weddings and a Funeral into the smash-hit romcom of 1994 – at the time the highest grossing British movie in history, released in America with a publicity budget of zero cents, but ultimately grossing nearly a quarter of a billion dollars, besides garnering Oscar nominations and BAFTAs. Rowan only had a small role as Father Gerald, but his popularity still made him prominent in all the movie posters that summer – while the only film to rival Four Weddings’ success that season was The Lion King, in which Rowan played Zazu the pompous Polonius-styled hornbill, duetting on the pleasingly Adder-ishly titled ‘I Just Can’t Wait to Be King!’

  Despite the popular estimation of Curtis as a romantic comedy writer fit to stand alongside Nora Ephron, Woody Allen and Neil Simon, he says, ‘I didn’t know what a “romcom” was! It wasn’t like it is now, a form which every young actor has done three of. I thought I was writing an idiosyncratic, autobiographical film about a group of friends, with a bit of love in it … but it transpired it was a textbook romantic film. Then I did write a textbook romantic film with Notting Hill, but then it was because I wanted to; I’d always wanted to turn up at a friend’s house with Madonna. Then Love Actually was a kind of joke with myself, trying to write ten of them at once.’

  From Dibley to Gasforth

  Not content with becoming the UK’s most successful screenwriter in 1994, a few months after Four Weddings’ release, Curtis’s first solo sitcom debuted on BBC1. With the long overdue ordination of women vicars by the Church of England becoming official in 1993, French & Saunders were the first comics to capitalise on the news, with a sketch in which Dawn donned the traditional garb of dog collar, bad teeth and dandruff – and as Saunders had recently launched her own solo vehicle, Absolutely Fabulous, French was the ideal star of Curtis’s new series, even if it took the natural clown a long time to accept what was for her a relatively straight role.

  During the usual interminable relay of wedding Saturdays, Curtis had reflected on how women registrars seemed to be far more suited to the job than crusty old male vicars, just as he felt that it was the women in his life who had steered him through his most emotionally fraught periods, and he decided that if he could do something to further the cause of women priests, he would. The eccentricities of his own rural Oxfordshire home had already struck him as ideal sitcom material, and marrying the two ideas presented him with his first domestic sitcom set-up, after years of rejecting anything remotely cosy in favour of death, battles and rewriting British History.

  Like the majority of the Blackadder team, Richard had no religious faith to inspire his new venture, telling the New Humanist in 2007, ‘I stopped believing before university. This is going to sound facile. But I thought if God is worth worshipping then he must be at least as intelligent and knowledgeable as my own dad, and yet Dad would always forgive me for the mistakes I made. There is no way in which he would look at all the pressures and temptations on a person and then still say that he should be punished. So I thought, well, either God doesn’t exist or he is thoroughly nasty, in which case I am not interested in worshipping him.’ But The Vicar of Dibley’s brand of Anglicanism was more concerned with humanist charity than theology, and as the years went by, the series would double as a mouthpiece for the writer’s social conscience and campaigning spirit. Curtis has also admitted that Dibley was a specific reaction to years of perfecting Blackadder’s lip-curling cruelty. ‘I was very interested in writing about the problem of niceness. A lot of sitcoms are about nasty people losing their temper a great deal. And I think most of us in life come across more comedy by attempting to be nice; we�
�re endlessly caught attempting not to offend this relative, or that person, making arrangements we don’t want to make, going to places we don’t want to be … You write a play about a soldier going AWOL and stabbing a single mother and they say it is a searing indictment of modern British society. It has never happened once in my entire life. Whereas you write a play about a guy falling in love with a girl which happens a million times a day in every corner of the world and it’s called blazingly unrealistic sentimental rubbish. It has always been that way. Nobody has really written anything intelligent about Shakespeare’s comedies. People prefer to write about tragedies because they can’t get to the bottom of happiness or comedy.’

  On the other hand, being presented with a flock of such incredible freakishness as the pillars of the Dibley community (Hugo the lovable posh dimwit, Jim the stutteringly negative geriatric babe magnet, Owen the creepy livestock lover, Frank the world-beating bore and Mrs Cropley the creator of the Marmite chocolate cake), French’s Reverend Geraldine Granger still filled the Blackadder position of being the relatively sane centre of a ridiculous world, perhaps sharing the weight of the inanity with the right-wing head of the parish council, David Horton. It’s surely forgivable, however, to see the greatest Blackadder echoes in the relationship between Geraldine and her sweet but utterly brain-free verger Alice Tinker. Blackadder obviously has no monopoly on stupid sidekicks, but it would be no surprise to see Emma Chambers’s Alice cropping up in Baldrick’s family tree.

  GERALDINE:

  … Alice, can I just share a private thought with you?

  ALICE:

  Oh certainly, Vicar – as long as it isn’t about tampons, ’cos I don’t understand them at all.