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

by J. F. Roberts

  It wasn’t until the CBBC sketch show Horrible Histories began to get wider acclaim that historical comedy on TV started to thaw out – and although that series was good enough in its own right, when it was repackaged for a wider audience, there was something fitting about Stephen Fry being chosen to provide scholarly historical links. Fry has dipped his toe back into Adder-ish waters more than anyone else on the team, and often in a villainous role. Lionshead Studios’ role-playing series Fable has referenced Blackadder numerous times through each epoch of its throne-grabbing narrative – even teasing the Xbox 360 instalment Fable III with artwork featuring a male prostitute holding a ‘Get It Here!’ sign – but the closest link is Fry’s recurring role as the villainous industrialist Reaper, a snarling combination of Flashheart and Blackadder there to tempt the player over to the dark side. His other villainous return to the past has been as the cartoonish bastard Malifax Skulkingworm in the pilot for The Bleak Old Shop of Stuff, the TV incarnation of Radio 4 series Bleak Expectations, written by Mark Evans and produced by Mitchell & Webb collaborator Gareth Edwards. Despite Ben Elton’s years of hankering after a whole series prodding Dickens, the Bleak team got there first – although the show’s outlandish absurdism is of a very different comedic vein to Blackadder, and once again, it lacked a live audience. It did, however, provide the first chance in a generation for Stephen to overact in period clothing – as well as being succeeded for one series by the equally despicable Harmswell Grimstone, played by a manic McInnerny. ‘I think Blackadder held back things like Horrible Histories and the wonderful Bleak Shop series,’ Stephen muses. ‘Shows like Blackadder can cast a long shadow.’

  Live audience sitcom remains on the critical list in the second decade of the twenty-first century, not helped by a number of high-profile flops, sadly including Tony Robinson’s foray back into sitcom as the deadpan shyster Erasmus in the circus comedy Big Top, which was awkwardly broadcast on BBC1 after a difficult production, with the death of original director John Stroud requiring a last-minute replacement by Geoff Posner. Robinson says, ‘Geoff was great, he just came in and pulled the whole thing together. But it’s rather sad that when a series doesn’t take off, the hard creative work that individuals have done on it is never noticed … We all knew what was wrong with Big Top, really from day one, but by that time the scripts were written, the roles were cast, the sets were built … If it had been made in the eighties I think it would have got a second series.’

  Numerous homages and the resurgence of historical sitcom in recent years, however, do not silence the clamouring for a new Blackadder. There have been many false alarms, close calls and d’you-mind-if-I-don’t’s since 1989, and recently Tony admitted to the press, ‘I’d love to do one again. I love those people even if they are toffs. We had this idea that we would do a phone-round in 2010 and see how we felt. There is the argument that it’s best left alone – that way it will stay in people’s memories. There’s also the argument, wouldn’t it be good to get together for one last time? I think it is down to Richard and Ben. If the recession hits Ben’s book sales and no one will give Richard money to make any more movies then maybe it will happen. There may be a silver lining to the Credit Crunch after all!’ However, he subsequently said that if there was a 2010 meeting, ‘I didn’t go. I sometimes have this paranoid fantasy that everyone else met up and they didn’t invite me, but assuming that wasn’t the case … I don’t think so. I know that Tim, for instance, just thinks the moment’s gone, that time is passed, and it would be undignified and imprudent to revisit it. And I think that unless Richard or Ben or Rowan had some really driving desire to bring it back in some form or other and a very strong idea, it wouldn’t happen. People are too bound up with their lives now to want to recapture the triumphs of yesteryear.’

  There’s been no shortage of ideas coming not just from the writers, but all members of the fraternity, as they dangled reunion-hungry journalists on their hook. So many Blackadder instalments have been mooted indeed, that it would be simplest to list definitively what might have been …

  PREHISTORIC BLACKADDER – J. H. W. Lloyd’s history of the family began in pagan times, but there has always been the temptation to go back further, outlining a time when the first Baldrick would have been King of the Monkeys, until the arrival of Homo Blackadder, a presumably far less verbally gymnastic progenitor. ‘But then,’ Elton said, ‘how many times can you do jokes along the lines of: “We are dragging this cart along the ground, what we need is some kind of tool to make it travel more easily …”?’

  THE SIX WIVES OF BLACKADDER – A brilliant title – and little else. Whether it could have aped The Six Wives of Henry VIII by centring on Cardinal Blackadder, we shall never know.

  THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN BLACKADDERS – Only mentioned in passing, Lloyd suggested that a Wild West Blackadder loosely based on Bonanza could feature all of the regulars as highly unlikely brothers running a ranch in the Old West, and getting into gunslinging scrapes as they feud with each other – to which Miranda happily responded, ‘I’d do that, definitely! Would I get to be a sort of Calamity Jane or something? Fantastic!’

  REDADDER – This idea for a movie, dreamt up by Rowan and John and then sketched out by Ben, would have done away with one of the series’ central themes – British History. Nonetheless, Atkinson was intrigued, ruefully admitting, ‘I think it was one of those things when it became a victim of people being not sure that they wanted to do that kind of thing. It was set in the Russian Revolution. Blackadder and Baldrick are members of the secret police for the Tsar in 1916 – and then the Russian Revolution happens in 1917, and at the end of it, they’re in exactly the same office with the same typewriter, but now they’ve got red bands around their caps instead of blue. Plus ça change, as it were.’ Featuring Soviet relatives who coexist with Captain Blackadder and co. on the Somme was a sizeable imponderable, but it did inspire some curious set pieces, such as a ‘bore hunt’, in which dissidents Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were released and tracked down for sport. ‘It was rather a fun idea, actually. It was a nice context. I mean, Blackadder always worked well when there was a hierarchy – the Elizabethan Court or the army. Places like that are great for the Black Adder, because he’s so cynical of people who are above him, and he’s so rude to those who are below him, and it’s nice if you’ve got that hierarchy for him to play in.’

  BLACKADDER IN COLDITZ – The most generally approved set-up in recent years has centred on that most exhausted of chestnuts – the World War II escape plot. Atkinson was keen. ‘I always felt if we ever did a fifth series, I would love to have done a Colditz escapee sort of one. Because I think a POW camp has got that sort of claustrophobia, and the sense of hierarchy.’ For all the tiredness of the concept, Lloyd enlarged on the idea in such a way that it not only made more sense, bearing in mind the average age of the team, but also had a uniquely epic scope. ‘We got quite far talking about one set in World War II, with a platoon of Dad’s Army soldiers in a seaside resort. One day a German submarine appears, lands on the pier, captures them and takes them to Colditz, where they have to escape. I thought that was quite funny …’

  THE BLACKADDER 5 –The most widely reported return for Edmund was first let out of the bag by Mayall soon after the end of the fourth series, and was to make full use of Elton & Curtis’s pop-music obsession by featuring Blackadder as a swinging entrepreneur and rock-band manager – part Brian Epstein, part Austin Powers. Few details of this idea have ever escaped, besides Rik’s suggestion that the shiny-headed drummer in Blackadder’s answer to The Beatles would have been called ‘Bald Rick’, and Curtis’s musing that the drummer could turn out to be the man who really shot Kennedy in Dallas in 1963. ‘That would be great!’ Elton said. ‘You could see a naturally conservative man like Blackadder up against all the excesses of the sixties, with Baldrick as a naturally bedraggled hippy …’

  BLACKADDER: THE THATCHER YEARS – Perhaps the most inventive concept was outlined by Curtis, and has been
made canonical by the opening titles for Back and Forth, which has a Blackadder showing scant respect for Thatcher in her premier pomp. Although the existence of Alan B’Stard makes a Tory Blackadder almost redundant, the writer explained, ‘We did have this idea that if we ever did it again, when we should set it is actually when we started it. That Blackadder should be working for Margaret Thatcher. It would be a funny idea to be satirical about the time when we were actually making the series – that they’d be watching! And Blackadder would be very annoyed about the fact that there’s a series called Blackadder on the television …’

  Set in a similar time, Robinson mused on a concept guaranteed to embarrass his royalist colleagues, but which would be difficult to pull off. ‘My favourite suggestion for a new series is Blackadder as the current Queen Elizabeth’s bastard son who is always lurking around Buckingham Palace. And they have to make all these rumours about there being intruders in the Palace when there aren’t any at all – it’s this bastard son who isn’t recognised. And as for Baldrick – he’d be the real royal intruder!’

  In 1988, long before he had ever played a contemporary Blackadder, Atkinson said, ‘A present-day Blackadder is probably what John is most keen to exploit.’ With no small note of self-awareness, he suggested that this modern Edmund would be ‘some kind of media hack, who drives around in an Aston Martin and has his mechanic, who would probably be Mr Baldrick, in greasy overalls, who would service his motor cars. And he would undoubtedly be something and somewhere around the royal family, probably some minor aristocrat, and then you can get all the contemporary problems of being in the royal family in the present day and age, and what an anachronism it is, and the press and television, and you know, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and all the characters you can have from the present day. And I think it would be an interesting series to do, but quite different from virtually anything else that we’ve done on Blackadder, so we’d have to change gear.’

  BLACKADDER AT OXFORD – Curtis’s final gambit harks back to his alma mater, outlined as part of his round-up of contemporary Blackadders (including the ‘Blackadder 5’ manager) in the Radio Times: ‘We don’t know the full story, but one of his descendants now holds quite a powerful position at Buckingham Palace and was responsible for trying to block the Jubilee pop concert. Another is a professor at Oxford, where a Mr S. Baldrick has been his scout for forty-seven years. The final descendant of note is a retired pop svengali and heroin addict, now living in Switzerland with his sixteen-year-old wife.’ He expanded elsewhere, ‘We like the idea that when we wrote the first Blackadder we were young and scornful, so we love the idea of being old and scornful, of being old men who use the sarcasm of Blackadder to attack what’s happened to the world since we were young. One idea we had was that Blackadder should be a very fed-up and corrupt university don and Baldrick would have been his scout for the last forty years, so they would in effect have been married for forty years …’ This final idea would at least make allowances for the passing of time. ‘We might do one when we’re old, but Tony is so old, I mean, he’s in his early eighties now, that I’m not sure he’ll be alive when we want to go back to work …’

  A similarly academic Edmund was casually mooted by Fry at one time, with a Jennings-style school romp entitled ‘Blackadder & The 5th’ to feature the cast as the staff of an inter-war public school – but this jolly concept got no further than idle musing.

  STARADDER – Always high on the list even before the glimpse of what the future could hold in Christmas Carol, the sci-fi antics of the Blackadder family have never really been looked into, not least because, as Richard joked, ‘We did think about a science-fiction series, but then we remembered that John was a bit of an expert on space. The interference would have been awful.’ Elton has suggested that such an idea would have been more Star Trek-inspired than the vision of Christmas Yet to Come – but then Red Dwarf has already provided the ultimate piss-take of Gene Roddenberry’s creation.

  Farewell, You Horrid Man

  ‘Success has never surprised me. I didn’t assume it would happen, but when it came it just seemed logical in relation to applied effort,’ Rowan acknowledged as early as 1990, going on to make it clear that even then, as far as Blackadder was concerned, ‘success spoils you. You don’t have to work as hard as you did because you get paid more money for what you do. Suddenly it is not the challenge or the fun that it used to be … What we are really talking about is ego, and the simple fact that everyone is scared of failure. The more people keep referring to Blackadder as a classic, the more afraid everyone is of carrying on. The last thing we want is to make another one and see it dismissed as not as good as the ones that went before.’

  At least one team member has found some way to quash each of the above ideas as they have been thrown up over the years, and it’s widely felt that the repertory company established by Goes Forth is essential, even though that group only came together for that one series. Empirically, as this History shows, for something to be canonical Blackadder, all that’s required is Atkinson as a member of the Blackadder family, with Robinson’s Baldrick by his side, speaking dialogue at least approved by Curtis – Blackadder has existed without any input from Elton or Lloyd in the past, while the other core actors all flitted in and out of the series. This is irrelevant to the star of the show, however, who ultimately argues, ‘It was representative of a moment in all our lives, that’s why I think it’s futile really to talk about reunions or a fifth series or anything like that because I think it represented a comedy consensus between a group of individuals at a certain time, and as soon as you try and recreate that chemistry five or ten or thirty years later, it’s very difficult … when everyone has moved on into so many different areas, and probably become more choosy about what they do, and less flexible, let’s say, at accommodating other people’s whims and wishes.’ And his irreplaceable sidekick backs him up. ‘I think in the end it’s all about taste. That’s why the series was so successful, you’ve got a bunch of highly intelligent and culturally sophisticated people who for a brief moment of time shared the same taste about a particular piece of work, and all of them were informing that work with that sense of taste … We’re on a hiding to nothing. Everybody will say it wasn’t as good as the last series. The only people who have managed to do that brilliantly were The Likely Lads. Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? was, for me, a better series than the original. But, by and large, when things do come back they look like a thin version of the original.’ Despite all this, he adds, ‘I would love to do another series. I’ve always been very hawkish but it’s not my call.’

  This back and forth is a familiar quandary for any veteran entertainers keen to have a celebratory lap of honour, whether it’s The Beatles Anthology, the thirtieth-anniversary Monty Python Night, or indeed a musical based on Queen – and the question burns even among the most devoted Blackadder fans, with an ever-fluctuating divide between what we might call the ‘purists’ (who predict disaster for any reunion and believe that the character should remain in his grave) and the ‘optimists’ (for whom the slightest glimmer of a new reincarnation would be like a lifetime of Christmases coming at once). The argument that the show should remain pristine, post-‘Goodbyeee’ is already dented by Back and Forth, but even then, the idea that any subsequent reunion could tarnish the existing shows is nonsense, Blackadder remains secure for generations to come, no matter what happens. Brian Blessed, who loudly confesses that he ‘would come running’ if asked to be in any reunion, goes so far as to say, ‘From the way each generation has embraced it, I think Blackadder will go on for thousands of years; there is a universality about it, and I think that it has very long legs … In the end, more than Mr Bean, more than whatever, Rowan’s Blackadder is the finest comic performance in television history.’ Atkinson shares the purists’ misgivings, however, admitting in recent years, ‘Back and Forth wasn’t a very good omen, I didn’t think. We’d have to have a much more professional and rigorous and sort
of genuine approach to it. We couldn’t have the instigation coming from outside commercial sources. It’s got to be those who are involved in it saying, “You know what would be good?” There’s got to be a genuine creative impetus.’

  For a film, he continues, ‘You have to explore more facets of the character. You can’t just have a single attitude. The great thing about sitcoms is that you can get away with a character with, really, one attitude. Like, Blackadder is just a relentlessly cynical man. And that’s the joke. He’s cynical and negative in a very witty way. If we tried to make a Blackadder movie, if you just had a relentlessly cynical man who never acknowledged the ramifications of his own actions, etc., then I think it would be a very odd movie … I like variety. I like to move on, but I don’t – in any sense – ignore the old. I mean, I’m someone who tends to return to characters quite a lot. I could easily have left Mr Bean as a TV series, but when the notion of making a movie was put forward, it kind of interested me. Because I thought, “I suppose that could be fun …” I would return to the Blackadder character if the opportunity came up. I have no qualms about that at all.’

  Indeed, though history has shown that making any great prophecy about a new Blackadder is a mug’s game, there’s never been a better time for his return than the second decade of the third millennium, with Atkinson freely rhapsodising about the idea on the Johnny English Reborn press junket, and even Hugh’s punishing schedule on House reaching a climax. Laurie himself openly admits that we have not totally lost him to the world of drama and music when he says, ‘The possibilities for Blackadder going further back into the past, or into the future or to other continents … there are always possibilities, because Richard and Ben are immensely talented writers, and they could make an awful lot of different kinds of things work … We’re eternally bound together, you know, by that experience. Every year we meet under the clock at Paddington Station, ten to four, all wearing the tie – we’ve got a tie made, you know, nice.’ ‘We will take the piss out of him non-stop and tell him what an appalling American accent he has,’ Tony laughs, ‘but we are all deeply proud of him.’