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

by J. F. Roberts

  But this was Fry & Laurie’s curse – with their dinner-jacketed cocktail-shaking antics around the grand piano, they bore all the hallmarks of being respectable – or even ‘safe’, which is far worse – but in practice they were anything but, and their whimsy was always tempered with bouts of satirical anger, and unapologetic sickness. The final series of ABOF&L, despite its new, cosy format and scheduling, was steeped in an unprecedented darkness and weariness, from a tear-sodden climactic ‘Soupy Twist’ right back to the very first misanthropic moment:

  HUGH:

  I’ve got this feeling that my life is grey and hopeless.

  STEPHEN:

  Grey and hopeless? Oh now, come on. What are you talking about?

  HUGH:

  … Films and music are crap. Books are crap. The streets are so full you can’t walk in a town without being pushed off the pavement, the roads are unusable, the trains are a joke, the politicians are so feeble-minded and gutless you can’t even hate them … You smile at someone in the street, you’re either knifed in the kidneys or in court for rape.

  STEPHEN:

  It’s frigging useless, isn’t it?

  HUGH:

  We’re done for…

  Pause: an incredibly long one. Turn to the camera.

  STEPHEN:

  Well, first of all, m’colleague and I would like to welcome you to this brand-new spanking series of the show that tries to bring a little jolliness into the darker corners of modern Britain, but doesn’t.

  To make matters worse, whatever mitigating twinkle there may have been in th’colleagues’ delivery was dimmed when, one week after the series began, Fry’s face was all over the news-stands, the headlines screaming: ‘FEARS AS FRY GOES MISSING’.

  The cold coals of Fry’s ‘Bruges episode’ have been raked over enough times already – Simon Gray even wrote a memoir, Fat Chance, about the debacle – and in retrospect Stephen’s diagnosis as a cyclothymic manic-depressive puts the affair so neatly in context that the extent of the dismay at the time has been largely forgotten. Gray’s new Cold War play, Cell Mates, reuniting his favoured young actors Fry and Mayall, had played to great success on its pre-London run, but within three days of the West End opening on 17 February 1995, Fry had taken his critical notices to heart, and fled the production, leaving only a single note of contrition. As the final episodes of ABOF&L were broadcast, their star was wrestling with a suicidal compulsion – not for the first time – which only the thought of his family’s reaction helped him to vanquish, choosing instead to secretly abscond across the Channel and disappear. In his absence, the tabloids had a free-for-all on Fry’s life, running exposés on his addiction to cocaine (which he insisted was taken as a relaxative from his hectic schedule) alongside the unfolding drama of his self-imposed exile.

  Despite the best efforts of the remaining cast and crew, Cell Mates was doomed, and the effect of the play’s demise was felt keenly not just by the playwright but by Rik, whose highly praised performance had been overshadowed by the media circus surrounding Stephen. A week before the last night he was arrested in the small hours for wandering around Covent Garden brandishing what was obviously a prop revolver at a pair of American tourists, yelling, ‘You want some, you mothers?’ and had to make a public apology after a few hours in the cells.fn8 Far worse was to come – the next time Mayall hit the headlines he was in a coma after a horrific quad bike accident in April 1998, during which, he claims, ‘I was technically dead for five days. That’s why I’m better than Christ. He was dead on Good Friday, but came to life on Easter Sunday. Whereas, on what’s called Crap Thursday in my household, I had my accident. Assassinated by the Tony Blair administration. I was technically dead until the following Bank Holiday Monday, five days later. So I beat Jesus Christ five–three.’

  Returning to Blighty (and sitcom) to play Blaster-Sump was one of Fry’s primary steps back into the fray, as he began to reorder his priorities, at least in his personal life – given the fillip of his triumphant central performance in 1997’s Wilde, his professional life rapidly returned to breakneck speed. The real tragedy of this life-changing experience, however, is that Fry & Laurie’s professional partnership has never recovered. ‘I don’t remember why we stopped,’ Hugh pondered. ‘Did they have enough of us or did we have enough of them? Not absolutely sure, maybe I’m so traumatised by the circumstances that I’ve actually blanked it out, I’ve got some false memory syndrome. And I’m going to imagine that they sent us a big cake, you know, “Any time you want to come back!” … That probably didn’t happen though. I think they just had enough of us.’ Despite the odd fleeting reunionfn9, the double act has not collaborated on any of their own comedy together since a positively final performance of ‘The Hedge Sketch’ from the one-off Hysteria successor Live from the Lighthouse in 1998. That is, of course, unless you count Blackadder Back and Forth.

  Time for Blackadder

  From the moment Blackadder went over the top, there had been incessant rumours about where the family’s filthy genes would show up next, but what was unexpected was that the eventual impetus for his return would come not from within the group, but from the government. Or, at least, from the New Millennium Experience Company who were trying, to the great mirth of the nation’s satirists, to find something to draw the crowds to an enormous dome in Greenwich, which had been proposed by John Major’s government, and adopted by New Labour at great public expense. One confirmed attraction was the Sky-funded Skyscape cinema, but finding something to be actually shown on this mega-screen several times a day for the whole of 2000 was no easy task – initially, a special Only Fools and Horses was mooted, but at such an epochal time, nothing could fit the bill better than Blackadder. What a coup it would be for the beleaguered Millennium Dome to reunite the team after a decade apart – and as Fry insisted at the time, ‘I’m extremely loath to join the usual, sneering, British, “it’s-all-so-crap-before-it’s-even-happened” lot. There would be nothing clever in doing nothing about the Millennium.’

  The dream booking, however, came up against the inevitable complication of the team’s irreconcilable schedules. Richard was immersed in the production of the second Hugh Grant vehicle Notting Hill, with Tim prominent in the cast. Ben, meanwhile, having followed The Man from Auntie with the more variety-filled Ben Elton Show on BBC1, was preparing his own move into films and pre-empting Curtis by directing, as well as writing, his debut. His 1999 novel Inconceivable was openly inspired by the Eltons’ own experiences of fertility treatment – treatment which was ultimately more than successful, resulting in the arrival of twins halfway through the filming of the screen version, Maybe Baby. With Hugh developing his burgeoning career as a matinee idol by starring as the sexually beleaguered BBC executive Sam Bell and Rowan cropping up as tactless gynaecologist Mr James, a full Blackadder reunion was not on the cards.

  Nobody, however, told Lloyd that the Millennium deal was out, he having also been enticed back to comedy production in the country’s hour of need, after a decade of family life, funded by directing commercials including Leslie Nielsen’s Police Squad-aping cider ads, (which led to John turning down a lucrative offer to direct a Naked Gun sequel), and the highly successful Barclaycard series which was at first supposed to star Michael Palin, but evolved into a spy spoof featuring Atkinson as the inept operative Richard Latham. Of his change of career, Lloyd acknowledges, ‘It’s completely, utterly amoral and without justification apart from the fact that I’ve put in my time as a public servant on very small wages for very long hours, and this is a way for me to see my children, which is more important to me than certainly any sort of career I might have had … this is the way of the world: the more worthless your profession – PR people, advertising and marketing, bankers, for God’s sake! – the more you’re paid. It’s an inverse law of worth. It’s rotten to the core, really.’

  Faced with the task of entertaining Dome visitors, John recalls, ‘Ben wasn’t free, and he and Richard didn’t want to do
it, so I got the job. Because they didn’t want to write it, we were going to do a sort of historical sketch show,fn10 linked by Blackadder and Baldrick. Years ago I said to the BBC that they should invest in doing the history of Britain from a Blackadder perspective. So, slightly like what they’ve done with that rather wonderful adaptation of Terry Deary’s books, Horrible Histories, you can actually do teachable school history, say the Battle of Hastings, and have Tony and Rowan drop in for comments, you know, “Well, Baldrick, what did you think of William the Conqueror?” “Oh, I didn’t like him sir, I thought he was a big fat bastard …” And you’d have proper actors doing sketches and so on. I thought that would be worth spending five years of your life on.’ With Atkinson and Robinson confirmed for this journey through British History, young comic writers including Black Books and late-period Spitting Image scribes Kevin Cecil and Andy Riley were already planning out suitable sketches and links. ‘Then when Ben heard it was going to be done under the Blackadder name without him, he came back with Richard. The other writers who’d been commissioned were let go, and I didn’t hear any more. By the time they’d got it going I wasn’t free, but I wasn’t wanted much anyway. It was very much “let’s get rid of John – he’s annoying”. I was dreadfully hurt and cross, but I bit my tongue and didn’t do anything about it.’

  By the time the £3 million Dome project, then entitled Time for Blackadder, was unveiled at the Montreux TV Festival in April 1999, Curtis & Elton had put their heads together to bash out a short but cinematic trawl through Anno Domini, and all the cast had been squeezed into a tight schedule of recording on location and at Shepperton Studios in May and June. Richard joked, ‘I think we’re the only thing they’ve got for the Dome, frankly – and all for £57 per family. It’s an irreverent trek through British history – a time-travel adventure story consisting entirely of people who are either rude or stupid.’ At the same time, Rowan insisted, ‘Bringing Blackadder to the big screen has always been an ambition. I am delighted to be realising it to celebrate the arrival of the twenty-first century. But I’m a bit worried at the prospect of travelling through time with Baldrick …’

  Nobody had a tougher schedule than Tony, who was well established in his third or fourth career by the turn of the millennium. Maid Marian had flourished – though not matured – over four series, a range of comic-book spin-offs and a pantomime-esque live show before CBBC called it a day in 1994. A new series relocating the cast to Roman Britain with Kate Lonergan as a feisty Boudicca never saw the light of day, but in a pleasing echo of Curtis’s sponsorship of Robinson, the actors who portrayed the Sheriff’s two right-hand goofs Gary and Graeme, David Lloyd and Mark Billingham, began their own successful writing careers with another historical kids’ sitcom, Knight School, thanks to Tony’s patronage. Although he continued to write and perform, in the same year that he took off the Sheriff’s goatee for the final time, Robinson made his debut as presenter of Channel 4’s Time Team. The revolutionary archaeological series was created by Tim Taylor, who had attempted programmes featuring live historical digs in the past, but it wasn’t until rainbow-jumpered archaeologist the late, great Professor Mick Aston met Tony on holiday in Greece and discovered that the Baldrick actor had a genuine obsession with history that the winning formula was devised, and by 2000, Tony had racked up not just seven series of digs all over the country, but had branched out into presenting series on an array of topics, as the fourth channel’s most ubiquitous documentarian, and authored a whole avalanche of tie-in non-fiction books. When the call to get back into the stinking breeches came, he heeded it, but admits, ‘All of us were off doing wildly different things, the production was rather tortuous. There were a couple of scenes where I just disappeared. Rowan was walking down a corridor with me and then in the next shot I just wasn’t there, because I had to go off and do a couple of episodes of Time Team. I was filming on a pretend Hadrian’s Wall just outside Guildford for Blackadder, and at the end of that day’s filming, I was driven up to the real Hadrian’s Wall to start excavating!’

  Although John was not on the team, there was a strong crew committed to bringing Blackadder to the big screen, with Geoffrey Perkins and Peter Bennett-Jones keeping an eye on things for Tiger Aspect (producer Sophie Clarke-Jervoise was eight months pregnant at the time), and Paul Weiland in the director’s chair. ‘The strength of Blackadder had always been that it was just dialogue in one room, very witty dialogue,’ Weiland acknowledges, ‘so what we had to do was give it a sense that this was going to be a bigger treat than usual. You get all the qualities of the old Blackadder, but on a scale that is like a huge American movie.’ ‘Paul was rather sweet about it,’ John says. ‘He said, “This is ridiculous, you should be doing this job.” Of course, I had directed an awful lot of stuff in the meantime.’ In John’s absence, Richard was mindful to say, ‘We’ve always made a lot of changes in rehearsal, because the standard set by John was that we should try and make every single line as funny as we could.’ Tony admits that this occurred ‘Much, much less – John always egged us on, because I think he just wanted to see as many comic alternatives as possible, whereas with Richard in the room for the vast majority of the time, he would allow us to play with his ideas, but keep within much tighter parameters. And I think everybody respected that, nobody worried about it, it was just a different way of working.’

  Nonetheless, when the central cast were assembled, some habits were impossible to kill off, as Curtis was happy to admit when interviewed for the Sunday Times during the filming: ‘Today we’ve got Hugh saying a line about how excited he is. Well, that started life as, “I’m as excited as a person who’s just bought a jam doughnut only to discover that he’s got a double portion of jam.” With all the actors chipping in their ideas, it has developed into, “Gosh, this is as exciting as discovering that, due to an administrative error, the new boy in dorm is in fact a girl with a large chest, a spirit of adventure and no pants.” In fact it had gone further, and at one point the girl had “big breasts, two friends and a packet of condoms”, but we got worried about the kids in the Baby Dome audience, so that got cut out.’ ‘I actually went to the first day of the readthrough,’ Lloyd says, ‘and it was fairly obvious that the actors weren’t happy. Because however difficult Blackadder was – and we did get cross with each other, heated arguments and pain on all sides – the point was: it worked. And I think Richard and Ben decided they could do it better on their own, which proved not to be the case. Because although it’s a very professionally produced piece of work – there are funny moments and it looks great – it doesn’t have the Blackadder spirit.’ ‘We missed him without any doubt,’ Robinson adds, ‘but having said that the working relationship between Richard and Ben on one hand and John on the other had broken down to such a degree that it wasn’t possible, so I think I was fatalistic about that. I know that John was very hurt not to have been asked to direct it.’ ‘I understand that the group rewriting process had been very painful, especially for Richard,’ Lloyd concludes, ‘so I quite understand he didn’t want to go through that again. But without it, it didn’t really work. Anyway, thankfully, we’ve long since made up.’

  In time, the show’s star would echo John’s misgivings. ‘It was very difficult, and in my opinion not wholly successful. I don’t much enjoy Back and Forth. I mean, I think it has its own particular qualities, but it was one of those classic things, really – it was made to a commercial brief. It was the Millennium Dome Authority wanting something to raise the profile – and I suspect attempting to glean a lot more respect from the population for their enterprise. I thought it was misjudged, really, the whole thing … I do remember John being in rehearsals, although his role was definitely more peripheral than previously. Whether his lesser input was responsible for what was, in my personal view, the least successful half-hour of Blackadder we ever made, is not for me to say – and that half-hour was, ironically, also by far the most expensive that we ever made!’ Elton has also confessed in hindsigh
t, ‘We had to do the whole two thousand years in twenty-eight minutes, it was pure frustration, in that it was all we could do,’ but even at the time, during the height of promotion, he was characteristically sincere in admitting, ‘Look, I don’t know if what we’ve done is ideal, to be honest. We did resist it but it turned into a bit of a “Your country needs you” thing. You don’t normally start projects with a venue and say, “Well, let’s fill it.” But we did get very excited about it. It’s a convivial family entertainment with familiar friends, faces, and Stephen Fry in the shortest skirt in history, and that will be an extremely pleasant way to spend twenty-five minutes. But it’s not the next place for Blackadder.’

  The Greatest Genius Who Ever Lived

  It’s difficult to gauge the success of a millennial comedy special, if only because they don’t come round very often. Reneging on the lessons learned from The Black Adder by taking Edmund out of the three-camera set-up and dismissing the audience was always going to be a gamble comedically, but as fan service, Blackadder Back and Forth was undeniably cunning, managing to introduce at least two new incarnations of the Adder (with allusions to several more, male and female, as the sumptuous opening credits pan over Blackadders through history, from the Bayeux Tapestry to Thatcher’s Cabinet) and giving an ultimate conclusion to the Chronicles, in just two minutes short of a half-hour.