The time restrictions did require a certain amount of backstory-skipping – there’s no real explanation as to who this Lord Blackadder is,fn11 and why his closest friends just happen to be Lady Elizabeth, Bishop Flavius Melchett, Archdeacon Darling and some military type called the Viscount George Tufton-Bufton. Nonetheless, it is New Year’s Eve 1999 at Blackadder Hall (a portrait of the brave Captain B adorns the dining-room wall), and this Blackadder has a ridiculous bet to win, abetted by ‘the man who empties the septic tank’, temp chef Baldrick. One irksome truism about bringing Blackadder into the present day is that where once Rowan’s character was a modern voice surrounded by antiquated idiocy, his sneering at contemporary values tends to make the character more of a right-wing throwback, an establishment-supporting bounder which it’s harder to like. This Blackadder is interested in nothing but cash and sex, but gets more than he bargained for when his plan to hoodwink his friends by pretending to travel through time, collecting their chosen ancient artefacts, is spiked by Baldrick’s unwitting savantism in building an actual working machine, to the design of Leonardo da Vinci (not, sadly, Acropolis):
EDMUND:
Well, Balders, this is a turn-up for the books – you have built a working time machine and are therefore, rather surprisingly, the greatest genius who ever lived.
BALDRICK:
Thank you very much, my Lord.
EDMUND:
Right, let’s get out of here, shall we? Can you set the date so we can get home?
Baldrick reaches up to turn switches and pull levers.
BALDRICK:
Yeah, I just turn that there, pull that there, reset that there, pull this lever like that and the date should come up … But unfortunately it doesn’t, cos I was gonna write the numbers on in felt pen, but I never got round to it.
The counter spins – it’s actually a fruit machine.
EDMUND:
Right. So the date we’re heading for is actually two watermelons and a bunch of cherries?
BALDRICK:
That’s right, my Lord.
EDMUND:
In other words – we can’t get home.
BALDRICK:
Not as such.
EDMUND:
Excellent … Rather a spectacular return to form after the genius moment, Baldrick.
This device was obviously ideal for shoehorning in as much British history as possible – and for ramping up the cinematic dimension by bringing our heroes face to face with budget-slaking dangers, from an outraged T-rex (Baldrick’s trousers causing the extinction of the dinosaurs) to a Star Wars-referencing battle out in the distant realms of future space. Time travel had long been a particular interest of Curtis’s, and at one point there were even thoughts about making a Doctor Who-spoofing Blackadder special with Edmund and Baldrick in the Tardis, called Doctor Whom. This transmuted into the Comic Relief special The Curse of Fatal Death, a non-canonical spoof filmed at the start of the year and starring Atkinson as the ‘Ninth Doctor’, facing off against Jonathan Pryce’s Master and the Daleks – though, luckily for him, with Julia Sawalha as his companion rather than Baldrick. As this Doctor regenerates several times in the story, the fact that both Jim Broadbent and Hugh Grant get their fleeting moments in the Time Lord’s costume may have led viewers to believe that this was a Curtis script, but the Comic Relief supremo had called in sitcom scribe Steven Moffat to write the most fanboyish lampoon imaginable, exactly a decade before Moffat took over the reins of the revamped franchise itself. The tables were turned in his first series as script editor of the show, for which Curtis provided his first completely straight time-travel tale, Vincent and the Doctor, an emotionally charged series highlight in which the Doctor helps Van Gogh to conquer his demons, and finally realise the magnitude of his artistic legacy. With this success under his belt, in 2013 Curtis masterminded an all-new time-travelling romcom for cinemas – About Time – still drawing inspiration from his original teenage heartbreak.
Moffat’s ‘timey-wimey’ shenanigans would be good practice for Blackadder’s own journey through time and space, in Baldrick’s carriage-clock-shaped time-shed. Robinson returned to Sherwood Forest as the pair bumped into Robin Hood – a Flashheart progenitor with a band of ‘woofing’ Merry Men and gay jokes straight out of Up the Chastity Belt. Mayall was on fine form after his difficult recovery, buoyed by the addition of a new on-screen paramour – as Curtis announced, ‘For Maid Marian we needed someone new, so we thought we’d pick the best-looking woman in Britain, nay the world,’ and model Kate Moss didn’t need to be asked twice to have the honour of joining the by now immortal Blackadder team.
Then came the briefest glimpse of the first-millennium equivalent of Captain Blackadder’s squalid bit of line on the Somme, as the time machine homed in on Blackaddercus, a centurion fated to die on Rome’s Northern Front:
BLACK’US:
Brilliant. Just brilliant.
BALDRICKUS:
What, O Centurion?
BLACK’US:
We’re facing a horde of ginger maniacs with wild goats nesting in their huge orange beards, or, to put it another way – the Scots. And how does our inspired leader Hadrian intend to keep out this vast army of lunatics? By building a three-foot-high wall – a terrifying obstacle, about as frightening as a little rabbit with the word ‘boo’ painted on its nose.
GEORGIUS:
Oh come now, Centurion, I won’t have that. This wall is a terrific defence mechanism. Why, surely you’re not suggesting that a rabble of Scots could get the better of Roman soldiers? Great spirit of Jupiter, our culture is centuries ahead of theirs! Why, we have toilets! And wipe our bottoms with vinegar-soaked sponges!
BLACK’US:
Yes. And they wipe their bottoms with Roman soldiers.
Whether by design or not, the Roman Blackadder just happened to be placed precisely contemporary to Chelmsford 123, and, for Fry’s General Melchecus, even used the same trick of having his dialogue spoken in Latin – agonisingly delivered from a series of cue cards (dubbed ‘Intelligent Person Boards’ by Stephen). It can only be presumed that if the Emperor Hadrian had shown up, he would still have been played by Bill Wallis.
The show’s first return to an established epoch exemplified the writers’ celebrated disdain for conventional history, as the modern Edmund came face to face with Queenie, Nursie and Melchie. Despite the loss of the cosiness of the studio set, the Tudor trio didn’t look a day older on film, but (besides the unsavoury element of product placement for Dome sponsors Tesco’s, even if that was just to make a mockery of the concept of supermarket loyalty cards) the Elizabethan stop-off was one which it wasn’t wise to think about too intently. Chief among the brain-busting anachronisms was the presence of Shakespeare, clutching the script for Macbeth, but you can’t blame Curtis for taking his chance finally to directly attack the man who had made his schooldays so miserable, sixteen years after he provided ‘additional material’ for The Black Adder. The playwright’s appearance may have been a touch of ‘stunt casting’, but Curtis explained: ‘Colin Firth has actually refused to do all sorts of things for me throughout his career, so we thought we’d pay him back by having the shit kicked out of him by Rowan.’ While they were at it, they also got the boot in on the director who had cast Brian Blessed, Fry & Laurie and Elton in his films:
Blackadder knocks Shakespeare down with one clean punch.
EDMUND:
That is for every schoolboy and schoolgirl for the next four hundred years. Have you any idea how much suffering you are going to cause? Hours spent at school desks trying to find one joke in A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Years wearing stupid tights in school plays and saying things like, ‘What ho, my lord’ and ‘Oh look, here comes Othello, talking total crap as usual’? Oh, and … (a further kick) That is for Ken Branagh’s endless uncut four-hour version of Hamlet.
SHAKESPEARE:
Who’s Ken Branagh?
EDMUND:
I’ll tell him you said that.
And I think he’ll be very hurt.
The final stop-off on this patriotic odyssey revisited another familiar period, but far away from the goings-on in Prince George’s household – indeed, as the Battle of Waterloo is in full flow, presumably after the real Prince’s death. Reprising the role of Wellington was an especially strange experience for Fry, as in the same year he also played the Duke in a Spanish–French–British co-funded farce, Sabotage! – essentially a screwball romantic comedy with David Suchet’s Napoleon as the hero. The casting of his counterpart in Back and Forth, on the other hand, allowed Fry to share a comedy cast list with his Cambridge contemporary Simon Russell Beale, twenty years after failing to lure him into Footlights. McInnerny was also called upon to originate two new members of the extended Darling family to play the aide-de-camp of both leaders, in addition to his Archdeacon.
The crushing of Wellington, like the murder of Robin Hood and the introduction of Shakespeare to the ball-point pen, requires Blackadder to return to all the scenes of his time-meddling – the reason for the second time round being, of course, flagrant Francophobia. With thousands of years of British History to celebrate, Back and Forth’s ultimate declaration of national pride revolves solely around the fact that we are not French – which is to say, we are not garlicky and effete. As ever, the anti-French sentiment was taken to a cartoonish degree, with Edmund’s alternative universe guests singing ‘La Marseillaise’ and eating an enormous garlic cake, but that only a xenophobic fear of poofiness compelled Blackadder to undo his historical sabotage was not exactly the kind of thing to inspire the swell of British pride which the average Dome visitor was expecting.
This would not be the end of the meddling from the last of the Blackadders though, as an innocent exchange with Baldrick inspired a final cunning plan which, echoing Baldrick’s unspoken scheme on the Somme, is ‘as cunning as a fox what used to be Professor of Cunning at Oxford University, but has moved on and is now working for the UN at the High Commission of International Cunning Planning’:
BALDRICK:
As we approach the end, my Lord, what do you think we’ve learned on our great journey?
EDMUND:
Good question, Baldrick. I suppose I’ve learned that I must buy you a much stronger mouthwash for Christmas this year. How about you?
BALDRICK:
Oh I don’t know. I suppose I’ve learned that human beings have always been the same – some nice, some nasty, some clever, some stupid. There’s always a Blackadder and there’s always a Baldrick.
EDMUND:
Yes, very profound, Baldrick.
BALDRICK:
Also, it occurs to me –
EDMUND:
Oh God, there’s not more, is there?
BALDRICK
– if you’re in the right place at the right time, then every person has the power to go out and change the world for the better …
Of course this sentimental claptrap does not wash with a cynic like Edmund, who argues that change can only come from ‘huge socio-economic things that individuals have no effect on’ – unless, of course, they are world leaders … like a king. How the Lord’s meddling with time finally allowed him to achieve what his DNA had been reaching out for since time immemorial – a safe seat on the British throne – we shall probably never know, but if you want to make a final sign-off from a sitcom character, there is no surer way of doing it than giving them what they have always wanted – the Trotters became millionaires, and Blackadder became King Edmund III (his ancestor’s thirty seconds as monarch presumably not really counting). With his consort Maid Marian on one side, and the scruffy Prime Minister Baldrick on the other, at last Blackadder takes it all, becoming that least likely thing in any British sitcom: a winner. The new monarch and his powerless sidekick even granted special interviews to the Sunday People, explaining how this new style of democratic fascism worked, to the benefit of Britons everywhere:
Q:
Sir, given your sometimes robust comments on modern architecture, can you share your thoughts on the Millennium Dome with us?
KING E:
Certainly, it’s the most beautiful and exceptional piece of architecture since the Parthenon, and I will be spending the money that the Prime Minister paid me to answer that on a very fast new car …
Q:
Prime Minister, do you feel that your socialist plans to make the monarchy more relevant in the twenty-first century have been in any way changed by the deep and abiding debt of gratitude you owe your close friend King Edmund?
BALDRICK:
I am certainly happy to concede that the King had a strong influence on my decision to make the monarchy more relevant in the twenty-first century by giving the King total power over everything except the price of a dog licence.
This epic final twist allowed for a jubilant close to the mini-movie, thanks to the rousing new orchestration of the theme by Howard Goodall. For all the comedic imponderables in Back and Forth, it unquestionably looked, and sounded, wonderful, and Goodall’s cinematic soundtrack was a large part of that. ‘It was great actually,’ he recalls. ‘The whole nature of it required there to be a bigger scale, and it was nice to do the score and the song at the end with those bigger resources, and a great recording. I knew by then that the BBC had lost all the original recordings we’d made, so it was nice to have a higher-quality version of it. From time to time I’ve thought of going back to the King’s Singers people who sang on the originals, Simon Carrington, and then Jeremy Jackman who sang series two, and re-recording them from scratch.’
Another problem with Back and Forth is that, since its final airing in the Skyscape cinema, it has only been seen out of context. Dome visitors approached the cinema past enormous cut-outs of the Blackadder team, posed for photographs with Baldrick’s time machine, and then queued up to watch the then exclusive film on a huge screen, with a laughing audience all around them. The special was eventually broadcast, after much corporate back-stabbing, on both Sky and BBC1, and though the latter broadcast did include an audience recording, the commercially available version lacks any of that atmosphere (even if it did come bundled with Baldrick’s Video Diary, a behind-the-scenes featurette in which everyone is interviewed, bar Baldrick himself). Visitors to the Dome could also buy a special programme with proceeds going to Comic Relief, which featured the whole script of Back and Forth, as well as new material put together by the retained stand-in scribes Cecil & Riley, including a Blackadder Insult Generator, an interview with Rowan’s false goatee beard and a guide to Baldrick’s Dome (which boasted the world’s biggest turnip, the Belly Button Fluff Zone, and of course the movie Baldrick Back and Forth). Without this programme, the viewer also loses the King’s highly suspicious disclaimer:
‘As you know, generation after generation, my family have only ever wanted one thing: to bring pleasure to all mankind. (Except Baldrick.) May God bless you all in the new millennium.’
EDMUND BLACKADDER REX
Blackadder, by Royal Appointment
Whatever perceived offence may have been caused by Blackadder dethroning the reigning Windsor family, it is the notable affection shown for the character by HRH Prince Charles and his family which has kept the Blackadder name ticking over, such as it has, in the twenty-first century. Indeed, Back and Forth was not even the character’s comeback, Atkinson and Fry having revived a long-dead Blackadder live onstage two years earlier, especially for the Prince of Wales’s fiftieth birthday.
The traditional image of king and jester was never quite reflective of real court life, but there’s still a long history of Humour by Royal Appointment in Britain – Henry II was a big fan of Roland the Farter’s annual Christmas show, Henry VIII doted on his court jester Will Sommers, and most Blackadder-esque of all would be Edward II’s commissioning in June 1313 of a special nude dance, to be performed by none other than Bernard the Fool. But no royal figure has done more to revive the link between monarchy and mirth than Prince Charles. Since his days as a
young Goon Show fan, impressing Milligan and Sellers with his Bluebottle impressions behind closed doors, the heir to the throne has proven himself to be a devoted comedy aficionado, from generation to generation, and time and again the country’s best comics have reciprocated this affection, with each Royal Variety Performance still a dream booking for many comics today. And just as the sitcom’s military theme made it popular with the armed services, few comedies have wibbled the royal frusset pouch as pleasantly as Blackadder.
Like any good Licensed Fool, Blackadder’s appearances before royalty have tended to stress the ‘comedy roast’ element of the role, pricking a royal family who have always been keen to be seen laughing at their own expense – within reason. But as a self-proclaimed supporter of the establishment, in a real-life echoing of Edmund’s own deference, there aren’t many comedians who have received royal patronage as readily as Atkinson, as his own roasting in The Tall Guy hinted. He and Curtis sent a telegram from their West End show for the Prince of Wales’s first wedding in 1981: ‘All love, fun and laughter from the cast and company of the Rowan Atkinson Revue’, and received the reply, ‘Enormous thanks for your wonderful message which is heartily reciprocated.’ Six years later, having received invitations to a private audience with the Prince (the two of them bonding over a love for Aston Martins), Rowan was very nearly reprising the role of Lord Blackadder for The Grand Knockout Tournament, Prince Edward’s infamous historical pageant and charity extravaganza in which Atkinson’s Lord Knock – master of Alton Towers and husband to Barbara Windsor’s Lady Knock, but Blackadder in all but name – opened the proceedings with a deadpan speech presaging a host of celebrities (including John Cleese and the rest of the Not team) participating in gunge-filled festivities.
The True History of the Blackadder: The Unadulterated Tale of the Creation of a Comedy Legend Page 38