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

by J. F. Roberts

  Spider-Plant Man has Batman in a headlock, and is kicking his arse.

  ROBIN:

  Holy plot-twists, Batman, it’s meee!

  BATMAN:

  Robin! Help me!

  ROBIN:

  First, let’s renegotiate. How about 20 per cent of the Bat merchandise this time?

  S-P MAN:

  … No, Robin, come and work for me! I’ll give you 25 per cent on all franchised pyjamas and a breakfast cereal named after you with real marshmallowy bits in it …

  Robin punches Batman into oblivion.

  BATMAN:

  Nooooo!

  S-P MAN:

  Well, am I glad you did that! In fact, I’m as glad as Bernard Gladboy McGlad, on the gladdest day of his life when he’d just won the Gladdest Man in North Gladmanshire competition, beating into second place Gladys the Glad!

  ROBIN:

  All right, all right, I know, you’re glad …

  Since 2003, there has also traditionally been a corner of the Red Nose Day proceedings reserved for John Lloyd’s creation, Quite Interesting, or, rather, QI – the result of a decade’s self-imposed re-education, in the wake of his Scrooge-like experience that Christmas Eve. As he explained at the time of the series’ launch, ‘The core idea of QI is that we’re taught the wrong way up. We’re taught all the “important” things, all the boring things, all the lists, all the things that are hard to remember, such as times tables and irregular verbs and vocabulary. Meaningless stuff. And then if you get through all those and you get to do a PhD, eventually they start telling you how things really work.’ Translating this ‘Quite Interesting’ philosophy into a TV panel game with the partnership of publisher John Mitchinson, Lloyd found that even after over a decade away from TV production, he still had the ability to create award-winning, popular television. Halfway through its planned twenty-six alphabetical series, it would not be an exaggeration to call QI a British institution, with a philosophy all of its own, spawning successful books, DVDs, Twitter apps and the spin-off Radio 4 show, The Museum of Curiosity, presented by Lloyd himself. The show has also featured numerous Adder veterans, including Laurie, Atkinson-Wood and Goodall, while Atkinson is a regular feature of the QI annuals. Forty years after stumbling out of the footlights and plunging into BBC Radio, Commander Lloyd’s triumph in popularising his philosophy of fascination has placed him more in the limelight than he may have intended, but this fresh success perfectly complements the deep respect and affection in which he was already held by comedy fans, as one of the nation’s most influential living comedy creators.

  Stephen Fry may happily double for Lloyd as the figurehead for QI but he was not the first choice for presenter, the original candidate being Michael Palin, as with Lloyd’s Barclaycard ads. Having stepped into the breach, however, Fry’s schoolmasterly role on the show has become one more avenue for his public veneration as an actor, presenter, writer and all the other dizzyingly myriad occupations that make up his chat-show introductions. That Fry has become such a National Teddy Bear, a kind of millennial Betjeman, for the whole population to hug (or indeed kick) at any opportunity, from an arguable starting point of being a closeted qualification-free convicted felon at the age of seventeen, may be the infamous polymath’s one holistic achievement.

  It’s sadly forgotten that he has also remained loyal to sitcom, and got to play a comedy bastard worthy to stand alongside Blackadder, in the despicable PR guru Charles Prentiss. Originally created as a snobbish BBC Radio controller by writer Mark Tavener for his comedy murder-mystery novel In the Red, Prentiss went on to feature alongside John Bird’s more sanguine Martin McCabe in the Radio 4 and BBC2 adaptations, plus a number of radio sequels (one featuring Laurie as an obvious Blair cipher), before the pair were reborn as spin doctors in their own radio sitcom Absolute Power.fn17 Rather than cunning plans, Charles was fond of pulling off the odd colossal ‘wheeze’, as a moral vacuum meddling with the processes of government and the media. It’s tragic that the TV version of Absolute Power was compromised by the fatal illness of Tavener, and the glossy result, despite lasting for two series on BBC2 in 2003 and 2005, was fated to be overshadowed by The Thick of It, with Peter Capaldi’s Malcolm Tucker becoming the iconic sitcom spin doctor of the decade.

  Fry remains a successful actor by any means, but, he would be the first to acknowledge, not one to compete with his erstwhile colleague’s transformation into the most highly paid TV actor of all time, and the sexual fantasy of millions of fans of the medical drama House all over the world. Perhaps it was not easy for someone with Laurie’s crippling sense of humility to have finally lived up to the predictions of his Blackadder friends and graduated from supporting roles in Hollywood movies to portraying the generation’s most infamous TV doctor Gregory House (especially as his own father earned considerably less as a real doctor), but the magnitude of Hugh’s success has palpably led to the long-time self-flagellator gaining a greater sense of his own ability, and a new comfort within his own skin which has empowered him to realise his greatest ambition: becoming a blues musician – his first solo release Let Them Talk was one of the best-selling hit albums of 2011.

  The rest of the actors who make up the extended Blackadder family could not be said to have done at all badly either, with Oliviers, Golden Globes, BAFTAs, the odd Oscar and high-profile roles abounding on their CVs, comprising an opulent bounty of characters. Tim McInnerny’s wish to avoid typecasting has certainly been granted, having taken on roles as diverse as Dr Frank-N-Furter and Cruella de Vil’s sidekick Alonzo in 101 Dalmatians (where he co-starred with Laurie), while the wealth of historical characters he has portrayed in TV dramas such as The Devil’s Whore and movies like Black Deathfn18 have never brought to mind the foppery of Percy or slipperiness of Darling. Comedy remains crucial to his career, however, and he even became an honorary member of the Comic Strip, alongside Miranda Richardson, who co-starred with him in the surreal Les Dogs as well as making her own return to sitcom with regular roles in the Jennifer Saunders comedies Absolutely Fabulous and The Life and Times of Vivienne Vyle. Like McInnerny, Richardson has also been no stranger to the whalebone corset, with a number of historical movies on her CV and central roles in films like Sleepy Hollow and Made in Dagenham, and the Harry Potter series, reuniting her with many of the Blackadder alumni – Margolyes, Broadbent and of course Coltrane as Hagrid (though Mayall’s turn as the Hogwarts poltergeist Peeves was criminally cut out).fn19

  But what of the Adder himself? Leaving aside the many doings of Mr Bean, much of the new century has seen Atkinson cropping up in the press for uncomedic reasons – taking the controls of a plummeting plane in 2001, and occasionally worrying his fans by crashing expensive cars at high speed. Tony says, ‘He’s one of the few mega performers who genuinely has a full and fulfilling life away from show business. In my experience, I can’t tell you how rare that is. He has a beautiful wife and family and good on him. Yet he remains for me the consummate comedy performer of his generation.’ Besides his headline-grabbing Mr Toad impressions, however, comedy has remained Rowan’s most serious occupation, and he also hit the headlines in 2005 as an outspoken opponent of an Incitement to Religious Hatred Bill which was being steered through the House of Lords, and which could have effectively left any comedian or artist open to criminal prosecution on the grounds of blasphemy. At the time, Fry commented, ‘Religion, surely, if it is worth anything, doesn’t need protection against anything I can say,’ and in his speech to the House, Atkinson concluded, ‘The freedom to criticise ideas – any ideas, even if they are sincerely held beliefs – is one of the fundamental freedoms of society and any law which attempts to say that you can ridicule ideas, as long as they’re not religious ideas, is a very peculiar law indeed.’

  Although the incessant links between Blackadder and Oliver! continued when he appeared as Fagin in the West End in 2009, it’s a long time since Atkinson staged a live comedy show or found a new TV vehicle, with cinema remaining his chief playground f
or over a decade, despite his admitting in the past, ‘I see the film world as a big bag of worry, a slightly bleak minefield which you might make it across. The only reason for doing film is to stretch yourself … I don’t want to take so many risks. It is better to make no films than bad films.’ Supplemental to Mr Bean’s movie success, Rowan bagged the starring role in Keeping Mum (in which he played, of course, a vicar), and his main comedic preoccupation in recent years has been Johnny English, the big-screen incarnation of Lloyd’s BAFTA-winning Barclaycard adverts. Lloyd was on board at the birth of the movie franchise but, as he likes to lament about so many projects in his life, he was swiftly sacked by the money men on both instalments. Despite being another manifestation of the star’s strong sense of patriotism, trouncing the French and protecting Queen and country with pratfalls, the first instalment did better business in the Mr Bean-loving quarters of the globe than in the UK, and left the perfectionist Atkinson keen to give the inept but deluded secret agent a second go, resulting in the more critically acclaimed and highly silly sequel Johnny English Reborn in 2011 – in which he was aided in no small manner by the debut of McInnerny as English’s ‘Q’ figure, Patch Quartermain.

  Having achieved so much, becoming an undeniable comic icon all around the world and now in his fifth decade as a professional comedian, it would be fair for Rowan to devote the rest of his life to racing cars and his other hobbies. As Stephen has observed, ‘Rowan has not an ounce of showbiz in him. It is as if God had an extra jar of comic talent and for a joke gave it to a nerdy, anoraked northern chemist.’ And he himself is happy to admit, ‘I sometimes speculate about where I’d be now if I hadn’t decided to take that plunge and write to those agents and take it seriously. And whether I’d be, you know, in some small research laboratory near Swindon, doing amateur dramatics every three months. And I’m sure I’d be enjoying it greatly!’ But the devotion to making people laugh which possessed Atkinson as a student has not gone away, as his activism in the blasphemy case suggests, and the press junkets for Johnny English Reborn showed that he was still looking for a new direction for his comedy – or, indeed, that he could countenance a return to the character for which his compatriots love him the most …

  The Slither of Tiny Adders

  For the entirety of the 1970s, the crushing inevitability of the question ‘Are you planning a reunion?’ became such an unsavoury running joke among the four Beatles that they often answered it, unheeded, before a single question was asked – and no subsequent artists can have such a deep understanding of how they felt, as the Blackadder team. With every member still with us, still compos mentis and still friends despite previous hiccups and their vastly disparate career paths, not a year goes by without some rumour bubbling up, usually in the tabloids, either blowing an offhand comment about the show out of all proportion, or completely inventing a story from scratch.

  London 2012 Olympics aside, we live in a time when admitting to even the slightest twinge of patriotic feeling can be misconstrued as tantamount to a confession to voting for the BNP, but the comically jingoistic Blackadder’s popularity remains undimmed among the British people. Rowan was delighted to play a central role in Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony – as directed for TV by Geoff Posner – and Prince Edmund himself joined the carnival of British pride, flickering across the Olympic Park’s titanic screens, limply squeaking ‘Hooray!’ Perhaps some element of the show’s power to unite Britons comes from Blackadder’s essential sarcasm, which never allows flag-waving to go unmocked, but there is also the fact that the comedy was written by two first-generation immigrants from central Europe. Curtis concedes, ‘Ben’s much more passionate about the history than I am, but there probably is a point to make about people who are first-generation British. You know, Tom Stoppard is the definitive English writer and his family is Czech, and Anthony Minghella’s was Italian. George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde were both Irish. There is something about people who come from another country, and can look at Britain and write about it in a different way.’ Elton says, ‘I think the term “pride in being British” is a very misleading one, because it does have all sorts of connotations. I think a joy in being British. I take enormous delight in British History, and without Britain I wouldn’t be here, so I’m extremely conscious of my admiration and affection for British institutions and that very broad church which may be called British culture. I consider myself to be British, even though I now have dual nationality. But if “patriotism” means thinking that you’re better than other people then I don’t consider myself remotely patriotic. On the other hand, I have been shaped by the country in which I grew up, and I’m definitely a creature of its history and culture.’

  Nevertheless, fans are not confined to the UK – in 2010, Lord Blackadder’s codpiece drew bids from all over the world when it formed the centre of a TV auction, and the show’s popularity in an array of dubbed languages on YouTube,fn20 copious international repeats and subsequent commercial releases have only increased the despicable family’s reach around the globe. As a ‘property’ now co-owned by Atkinson, Curtis, Lloyd and Elton, there has only been the minimum of merchandising designed to capitalise on this popularity since the TV series’ conclusion, with a number of DVD and audio releases. Transcripts of the four series, supplemented with diversions such as Mrs Miggins’ Coffee House Menu and Private Baldrick’s school report, were finally published as The Whole Damn Dynasty in 1998, accompanied by a press release claiming that the documents within had been discovered in a treasure chest by construction workers on the Millennium Dome site – plus a disgusted disclaimer from the family that all proceeds would be going to Comic Relief. The book was of course a mammoth hit, even though most buyers were likely to know the scripts off by heart already, few shows lending themselves to enthusiastic quotationfn21 quite like Blackadder.

  Despite Blackadder never having a strong official web presence, the BBC’s early online experiments did give us a collection of strange promotional video games, which were collected for a CD-ROM in 2000. Besides sound bites and picture galleries, the disc gave PC owners the chance to duel against the Red Baron in the sky or the Duke of Wellington with cannon, or to play a maze game where you guide Lord Blackadder to riches without getting caught by the Queen or the Bishop of Bath and Wells. ‘There was a craze for CD-ROMs, but we were all too busy to do it,’ John admits. ‘I gave it to my son who was then about thirteen, and he said, “Dad, it’s complete rubbish!”’ Otherwise, the four guardians of the Adder have been stringent about not cashing in. Rowan says, ‘The only merchandising idea that I can recall was “Blackadder Magic”, based on the well-known confectionery: a two-tier box of dark chocolates, consisting of an extremely smart upper tier (the Blackadder tier) and a hideous lower tier (mangled, half-eaten abominations – the Baldrick tier). My recollection was that Richard led disapproval of the notion, because Black Magic is/was owned by Nestlé, a company around which there was controversy because of its sale of powdered baby milk to the Third World. “Blackadder Magic” never happened!’ ‘I sometimes think that the problem is that we did all move on pretty quickly,’ Curtis says. ‘Last year I was contacted about doing some Blackadder posters, just for people who like it, but the truth of the matter is that no one’s ever needed the money, and we do all find it quite easy to disagree on things.’

  John has tended to be the man to bring the team back together for special occasions, helming a radio documentary, I Have a Cunning Plan, for the twentieth anniversary, and a feature-length TV special, Blackadder Rides Again, for the twenty-fifth, which perfectly encapsulated the difficulty of any kind of reunion by showing the producer travelling from chilly Alnwick all the way to the Californian lot of House in order to accommodate everyone. ‘Rides Again had an honesty about it,’ Lloyd says, ‘but it was about closure. I think the subtext was that Blackadder was worth doing, because it was such a good thing, but I tried to get across the idea that nothing “great” is easy. Not ever.’ The twenty-fifth anniversary a
lso brought some of the team back together for UKTV Gold’s celebration The Whole Rotten Saga, which united the nation’s real Blackadders and allowed viewers to choose their own Most Cunning Moments. Like the episodes themselves, these celebrations and clip shows are often repeated, particularly at Christmas time, for the simple reason that Blackadder still gets good ratings, thirty years after its inception.

  Also testament to Blackadder’s influence is the fate of historical sitcom in the last twenty years. Where TV commissioners once sneered at period comedy because ‘it didn’t work’, the fact that flop after flop has been dismissed as ‘no Blackadder’ has subsequently plagued the genre. Not that this has prevented anyone from trying to transcend comparison, with series like the French & Saunders French Revolution sitcom Let Them Eat Cake and Rob Grant’s millennial ITV show Dark Ages littered among the reject pile, alongside the likes of Craig Charles’s pirate comedy Captain Blood, which was weaker than Atkinson-Wood’s CITV equivalent Tales From The Poopdeck. Even the one top-grade period sitcom of the 1990s, Arthur Mathews’s Hippies, was badly received and only lasted for one series. Radio 4 has, however, played host to many more successful historical comedies, with Kim Fuller’s anachronism-packed The Castle and especially Andy Hamilton and Jay Tarses’s sublime Revolting People (produced of course by Paul Mayhew-Archer, and a far funnier exploration of life in revolutionary America than 1775) chief among the station’s successes.