The True History of the Blackadder: The Unadulterated Tale of the Creation of a Comedy Legend
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He was also no stranger to the Royal Variety Performance, performing numerous monologues over the years, but Blackadder’s royal debut was created for a separate birthday entertainment, staged in October 1998, and broadcast on ITV a month later. We discover the Cavalier Sir Edmund in the same quandary as the Black Adder in the original pilot – arranging a royal entertainment against his will:
SIR EDMUND:
To my Lords of the King’s Own Council. I received this morning your kind invitation to organise a gala performance, to celebrate his gracious majesty, King Charles, surviving another year with head and shoulders still attached. I am replying by return to thank you. And when I say ‘to thank you’, I mean of course, to tell you to sod off. I would rather go to Cornwall, marry a pig, have thirteen children by her and see them all become Members of Parliament … My reasons, my lords, are twofold. In the first part, it is a well- and long-established fact, that royal galas are very, very, very dull. So dull that strong men have been known to stab their own testicles in an effort to stay awake through the all-singing, all-dancing, no-talent tedium that represents British Variety at its best. There are more genuine laughs to be had conducting an autopsy. There is more musical talent on display every time my servant Baldrick breaks wind. If the King has even half a brain – which I believe is exactly what he does have – he will spend his birthday in pious prayer, naked, in a bramble patch, with mousetraps attached to his orbs and sceptre. I hope I make myself clear. I am yours, as ever, Lord Blackadder, Privy Counsellor. Shortly to be Privy Attendant, if Cromwell has his way with the aristocracy … (Fanfare. Enter Charles I.)
CHARLES I:
Behhh, Slackbladder! Fol-de-rol and hi-de-hi. Behhh! It’s my birthday and I’ll ‘behhh’ if I want to! I just popped in to see if you were going to organise my royal gala?
SIR EDMUND:
Well, Your Majesty, it’s interesting that you should mention it …
CHARLES I:
I was talking about it the other day to Lord Rumsey, and the cringing cur dared to suggest that we tone things down a bit to pander to the popular mood. I want you to kick his arse and give him a good clout about the head.
SIR EDMUND:
Well, certainly, sir, but –
CHARLES I:
You’ll find his arse in a ditch in Tyburn and his head on a spike at Traitor’s Gate … Show me what you can do. Improvise, let’s have a look.
SIR EDMUND:
Um … well … Your Majesty, your Royal Highnesses, my lords, ladies and gentlemen. I stand here tonight as excited as a masochist who has just been arrested by the Spanish Inquisition. What you are about to witness will be the most exciting piece of entertainment since Bernard the Bear Baiter stopped using a big brown cushion and actually got himself a bear …
The most extraordinary thing about this surprise return to the Stuart period, as any Blackadder fan could see, was Fry’s depiction of Charles. Where his Comic Relief persona had been dithery and eccentric in an undeniably familiar way, before HRH himself Fry’s performance was pure Melchett bombast (although perhaps one could suggest that by the time of his arrest in The Cavalier Years, a few nights in a blackcurrant bush had extinguished Charles’s ‘behhh’). Fry adds, ‘I think it’s well known, a) that I’m friendly with the Prince of Wales, and b) that he has a great sense of humour. Well, everyone does, but he really does. He idolised Spike of course and Barry Humphries and many others. I do dozens of charity performances and if I can’t do one for a man I admire and more importantly like, whatever the world might think about him, then it would be weird indeed. Especially given the astounding achievements of the Prince’s Trust. In America comedians perform in front of an elected president, which means at least half the country hate them for it. The beauty of a constitutional monarchy heading the state is that they have no politics, so you don’t get the stupid nonsense of Kenny Everett doing Tory Party conferences and bien-pensant Labour comedians doing the same for Labour.’
Ben Elton’s relations with the Windsors have had their ups and downs, as has his estimation of the Labour Party, in the light of New Labour and the Blair administration.fn12 But as a history-loving patriot from another German immigrant family, and an ambassador for the Prince’s Trust, Elton was proud to get the gig of presenting sections of the Royal Variety Performance and indeed the Queen’s Golden Jubilee concert. Some of his subsequent stand-up material was used by the press to depict him as a yob, of course, and he used the Daily Mail of all papers to try and set the record straight. ‘I wrote to Prince Charles to apologise for calling the Queen a “sad little old lady” and her husband “a mad old bigot” … I was doing a comedy routine and it was quoted out of context as if it was a diatribe. There’s not much in comedy that can’t be made to look cruel and ridiculous when taken out of context. I’ve been doing that routine about the Royals for years. The point is that in all its dysfunction her family is just like the rest of us … Although the whole principle of monarchy is nutty, I personally believe if you must have a head of state, I would rather have someone who has to do the job than who wants to do the job. Intellectually there is no argument for the monarchy, but as I always say, if you have to go to a disco with the world’s heads of state, who would you trust with your keys and your handbag? It would be Yer Majesty.’ However, he reasons, ‘The monarchy is absurd and illogical. There’s no moral justification for a single family always providing the head of state. Nevertheless, it has delivered a great deal of stability. We’re fortunate that our Royal Family appears to be made up of decent, caring, flawed but honest individuals. So, while the system is ridiculous, it seems to work.’
It was Elton who wrote and introduced Blackadder’s further royal performance, presenting a tangential military member of the family on to the stage at the Dominion Theatre, while Back and Forth was still airing at the Dome:
ELTON:
Tonight we are celebrating a great British tradition and tradition is something we do very well in Britain. Some of our noblest families go back many, many centuries … and some popped over from Germany a lot more recently. Perhaps our oldest and most celebrated family of all is the Blackadder dynasty and now, representing the current generation of malcontents please welcome from Her Royal Highness’s Regiment of Shirkers: Captain, the Lord, Edmund Blackadder.
EDMUND:
All right, settle down, settle down. Your Royal Highness, ladies and gentlemen. The world is changing and Her Majesty’s armed forces must change with it. Consider Britain and its position in the world today. At the beginning of the last century just two hundred years ago, Britain kept the peace in a quarter of the entire globe. The sun, they say, never set on the British Empire. Now what have we got? The Channel Islands … The Germans have bought Rolls-Royce. All the newsreaders are Welsh – although that may not be relevant. And most foreigners think that the Union Jack is based on an old dress design for one of the Spice Girls. So what is to be done? Well, the answer, to my mind, is very simple. If we are to re-establish our position in the world, the army must return to its traditional role, the very reason for which it existed in the first place – we must invade France. No no, no no, I’m serious. Our advanced guard of mad cows has already done a superb job. And the French are in disarray. Now is the time for actual occupation. Now you may say, ‘Why France?’ Well that’s a very good question. But I can think of three reasons. Firstly, whenever we try to speak their language they sneer at us and talk back to us in English … God, they are so irritating! Secondly, they deliberately won the World Cup by maliciously playing better football than us. And thirdly, simple political strategy. Look at the history books – whenever Britain fought the French, we were top dog. For five hundred years from Agincourt to the Battle of Waterloo, Britain went from strength to strength and gained the greatest empire the world has ever known. The minute we start getting chummy with the garlic chewers, within three short decades we’re buggered. Hello? Obvious connection alert!
And thus the live Blackadder l
egacy ended, just as the Dome movie itself – by sticking it to the French. Excepting, maybe, the only half-relative to surface – Sir Osmund Darling-Blackadder, Keeper of the Royal Sprinklers, who popped up in a TV spot during the Jubilee preparations in 2002 to remind the monarch that she was ‘not Fatboy Slim’, and that holding a rock concert at Buckingham Palace was out of the question. The Royal toady even returned for a special review of the occasion, a clip show called The Jubilee Girl, alongside the great Dame Edna Everage. For all these royally commissioned swansongs delivered by Ben, Rowan and Stephen, the first members of the Blackadder team to accept honours were Howard Goodall, Richard Curtis and John Lloyd, who all have CBEs, and Hugh Laurie, OBE. Tony Robinson, however, never seemed a likely candidate for an invitation to Buckingham Palace – by inclination, rather than desert. He too revived Baldrick for live performances in the past, but they were only for charity – the Tudor incarnation of the little peasant presented Comic Relief’s Debt Wish Show at the Brixton Academy in June 1999. Belying Baldrick’s totally inept brand of socialism, Robinson’s radical background led to his not just becoming vice president of the acting union Equity, but also being elected to serve on the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee for four years, a calling of which he was proud, despite his outspoken disapproval of the Iraq War, and Blairite politics in general. On the other hand, socialist politics has never been a bar to elevation within the British Empire – see footnote here.
And Then I Want to Be Middle-Aged and Rich …
There was a clear warning at the outset of this narrative that it would be festooned with very talented young performers basking in their flowering of comic brilliance, and deservedly so – but British comedy and television have mutated so dramatically since the turn of the millennium that this generation of comedians can often seem like a lost one, with many members too anarchic to comfortably accept their place as comedy’s elder statesmen, and too far removed from the demographics chased by today’s breed of TV executives to hold on to their former ubiquity. But then, history has shown that the number of comedians – especially graduate comedians – who have managed to retain their thirst for creating comedy from debut right through to death can be counted on a plague victim’s fingers. Despite never losing one iota of his wit, Peter Cook’s youthful industry gave way to the chat-show circuit, while Michael Palin set a trend when he abandoned silliness to travel around the world, and the eighties generation have similarly moved beyond sketches and sitcom into straight acting, presenting, and making documentaries on any subject to which the next middle-aged comic has neglected to stake a claim. Like Tony and Rory McGrath, even Rik Mayall presented his own history show for the Discovery Channel, Violent Nation.
In some ways, the comedy industry has changed so much around the Alternative veterans that they cannot be blamed for moving on in their careers – Ben Elton is one of the few to persevere as a TV comedian in the new millennium, and has experienced the difficulty of moving with the comedic times as a result. The studio-bound sitcom has weathered an incredibly hostile decade, in the wake of The Office – despite Gervais & Merchant’s hit being a mockumentary in much the same vein as previous series like Operation Good Guys and People Like Us,fn13 its sudden runaway success meant that the idea of a live audience laughing at a live performance became outdated to TV bosses, if not taboo. ‘Comedy does have fashions that come and go,’ Elton concedes. ‘I gave it the term “the new minimalism” (I don’t know if anyone else picked up on it!), but it didn’t start with Ricky, but The Royle Family, in my view. When Victoria Wood and I were doing dinnerladies and TTBL in the mid-nineties, we did suddenly look quite old-fashioned. I was working in a very specific tradition of comedy, the big, broad studio-based sitcom, and just around that time The Royle Family was storming the barricades, and a brilliant show it was indeed, and shortly thereafter came shows like The Office, and a minimalist, closely observed approach to non-gag-based comedy came to the fore. Big, ballsy gag-based silliness was out, and commissioners have to go where they will go. Really it just comes down to whether the show is any good – take a piece of work like Outnumbered, which is brilliant. I like an audience, but I don’t think you should be too concerned about pitting genre against genre – artists find the format to fit the work. Two of the greatest sitcoms ever made, Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm – one was studio and one was not, both brilliant pieces of work made by the same team.’
Ben did work within the ‘new minimalist’ environment by writing and directing 2005’s Blessed but, continuing his parenting theme from Maybe Baby, the rant-filled tribulations of struggling new parents Ardal O’Hanlon and Mel Giedroyc weren’t a hit with critics or viewers, and further experimentations with TV comedy Get a Grip and Australian series Live from Planet Earth also drew more flak than acclaimfn14. It would be fruitless to deny that Elton remains one of our most pilloried comedians, barracked from the right and the left, nominated for purgatory on the Hat Trick TV series Room 101 and unable to get through any interview without having to deal with charges of ‘selling out’. Admittedly, there was never a time when the comic enjoyed complete public approval, and perhaps he has been hoisted by his own petard at times, trying to reconcile two awkward bedfellows, mainstream popular entertainment and passionate social commentary. But if by a man’s friends shall ye know him, Elton’s bad rap remains an injustice – as Douglas Adams once protested: ‘The trouble with the stand-up stuff – although it was brilliant – is that it was only presenting a very small aspect of a very complex, rather thoughtful and warm-hearted man. People just got the wrong idea.’
The term ‘sell-out’ has to be one of the least useful in our language, carrying as it always does an inherent need for the user’s personal definition, and judgemental connotation, before its meaning can even begin to be understood. Like the word ‘smug’, the bandying about of the insult often says more about the user than their target, and besides, you cannot truly ‘sell out’ unless you first publish a specific manifesto, something which so few entertainers get round to. By some critics’ reckoning, perhaps every bright young thing depicted in this history has ‘sold out’ some inferred principle, be it via advertising, acquisition of wealth, mainstream popularity or even specific political statement, since they set out on their lives in comedy. But in many ways, Elton has remained more true to himself than any of his peers, always powered by an intense desire to entertain, coupled with a social conscience which he cannot keep bottled up – and of course, bar one unpaid ad for Fairtrade chocolate, he has also eschewed advertising where others have embraced it.fn15
By returning to his earliest love, musical theatre, Elton found his greatest international success, but once again earned the opprobrium of talking heads, not least for working with the Tory peer Andrew Lloyd Webber, on the Irish troubles musical The Beautiful Game (a song from which was used for George W. Bush’s inauguration, without Elton’s approval) and the Phantom of the Opera sequel, Love Never Dies. His biggest hit, however, has been the Queen jukebox musical We Will Rock You, which he has helped to steer to success around the globe (as well as penning a sequel, and another jukebox musical for Rod Stewart, Tonight’s the Night). His futuristic book for WWRY may only provide the lightest thread to link the Queen hits, but comprises the by now familiar Elton themes of homogenised dystopia, shallow glamour and corporate greed. These also remain regular themes in his novels, with perhaps one notable exception – the World War I murder mystery The First Casualty. Returning to World War I was a brave move for Elton, particularly as any Blackadder fan would find it difficult not to make comparisons with Goes Forth. The hero, policeman Douglas Kingsley, may have little of the Captain B in him, but his dispatch to uncover a wrongdoer on the Ypres front in 1917, involving romance with a modern-minded nurse at the field hospital, and a feud with an oversexed handsome celebrity officer, certainly resonates with echoes of the series. A Second World War novel based on his father’s experiences, Two Brothers, was also published in 2012.
Although Blackadder himself has remained in the shadows for Comic Relief, 2005’s spoof Spider-Plant Man relied heavily on love for the show, when Atkinson’s turn as an inept teenage superhero in tight spandex results in a clash with Batman and Robin – or rather, Jim Broadbent and Tony Robinson, in ill-fitting fancy-dress costumes being mistaken for Fathers 4 Justice protesters. Rowan once mulled over the idea of doing a comic-book spoof called BatAdder – this is the closest he got: