The True History of the Blackadder: The Unadulterated Tale of the Creation of a Comedy Legend
Page 46
BALDRICK:
Ahm …
BLACKADDER:
It’s something to do with a hand and a very sharp axe, isn’t it?
BALDRICK:
O yes.
BLACKADDER:
Now, get that cousin, and round up any other entertainers, or we’re in trouble. And get that turkey in … NOW!
(Blackadder leaves.)
BALDRICK:
Why didn’t you say anything while he was here?
TURKEY:
I was shy.
BALDRICK:
Well, I’m going to have to do it anyway.
TURKEY:
You cruel bastard.
BALDRICK:
But I’ll go and talk to my cousin first.
TURKEY:
Phew. At least it gives me time to make peace with God … O, and by the way … if it comes down to parsnips or peas, I prefer parsnips.
BALDRICK:
Brilliant.
SCENE 3. FOYER.
A bunch of people are checking in. Blackadder is quite thrilled …
BLACKADDER:
Excellent, excellent. (He eventually has to write ‘No’ in front of ‘Vacancies’.) Brilliant. The place is full. Rachel – Baldrick – if anyone else comes – it is full. We haven’t got room to squeeze in a mouse …
He exits, as Rachel potters round the desk. There is a sound of angels vaguely in the background – and Joseph enters, a nice man with a beard.
JOSEPH:
Good evening. Is there any room at the inn?
RACHEL:
I’m afraid not.
JOSEPH:
What – totally sold out?
RACHEL:
Totally booked up.
JOSEPH:
Fine. Fine. O god. (He starts to cry.)
RACHEL:
What’s the matter?
JOSEPH:
O no, it’s fine. It’s just that my wife and I have been travelling for weeks now – and she’s about to give birth, I mean literally it could be at any moment. And, well, I suppose she’ll just have to have the baby in the street.
RACHEL:
Well, maybe we could find somewhere. Go on, bring your wife in.
JOSEPH:
O thank you very much. (He goes to the door.) Darling – there’s a place!
It turns out that Blackadder is actually returning, and nose to nose with him. Blackadder is not happy.
BLACKADDER:
I’m sorry?
JOSEPH:
I was just telling my wife there was a room here.
BLACKADDER:
Ah – and who told you that?
RACHEL:
It was me.
BLACKADDER:
And where is this extraordinary room going to magically spring from?
RACHEL:
Well, I thought perhaps they might stay … (Enter Baldrick.) In Baldrick’s room.
BLACKADDER:
O well, yes, all right. How about I offer you this young man’s room?
JOSEPH:
That sounds excellent.
BLACKADDER:
Yes. It’s not that excellent – less of a room, more of a manger.
JOSEPH:
As long as it’s inside, it’ll do us.
BLACKADDER:
Ah.
JOSEPH:
It’s outside?
BALDRICK:
Outsidish. Come on – you’ll be all right.
BLACKADDER:
Great, let’s get on with the evening. And tell her, if she does have the kid, to keep the noise down. We don’t want him crying during the entertainment. Which reminds me …
SCENE 4. THE MANGER.
Baldrick leads Joseph in. It is a total hole.
BALDRICK:
Here we go. Had any thoughts about what you’re going to call the baby?
JOSEPH:
Not really. If it was a girl we thought maybe after its mother.
BALDRICK:
What’s her name?
JOSEPH:
Mary. We’re having a lot more trouble with the boy’s name. Any ideas?
BALDRICK:
Well, my name’s Baldrick, but I doubt if you’d want that.
JOSEPH:
Well, it’s not bad. Baldrick. Yes, not bad …
Then perhaps on with the proper plot …
FOYER.
This might be the hotel where the returning officer is staying.
BLACKADDER:
So tell me, if people don’t enrol what happens to them?
OFFICER:
They don’t exist, officially.
BLACKADDER:
I see.
OFFICER:
So if for instance a man comes up and says, My house has been broken into – we say, I’m sorry, but it can’t have been, you don’t exist.
BLACKADDER:
Very difficult job.
OFFICER:
You’re not bloody joking. This stuff with the names is absolute hell.
BLACKADDER:
In what way?
OFFICER:
Well, what’s your name, for instance?
BLACKADDER:
David, but I’m called Simon.
OFFICER:
Exactly – EXACTLY, so what are you registered under?
BLACKADDER:
Well, David.
OFFICER:
Quite – so if I go out into the streets, and I ask for David, what are my chances of getting you?
BLACKADDER:
Well, very small, you’ll get Peter … who’s called David. I see the problem – you’d be better off enrolling everyone under what they’re called.
OFFICER:
My point exactly. So you’d be called Simon. Now, I’m the tax collector, and I come to collect taxes – what do you say?
BLACKADDER:
I’d say, I’d love to help, but my name’s ACTUALLY David. It’s a bugger.
OFFICER:
It is a bugger …
John Lloyd: ‘These photographs graphically illustrate how painfully slow the first series was to make.
It was shot without an audience: all young comedy writers go through this stage where they think it would be “better” without one. In my experience, this just means you don’t have to work so hard to get the laughs, so it’s not as funny.
Because there was no audience seating in the studio, we could have huge sets and put the cameras almost anywhere – this meant it took longer to shoot and (to be honest) none of us really knew what we were doing.
We changed all this for Blackadder II – small sets, all the cameras in a line across the “fourth wall”, a live audience. Rowan’s timing improved at once, the script was much tighter and, as we had to shoot each episode in two hours max, there was no hanging around getting bored – everyone was much too busy!’
To prepare for his time in the saddle of the far-from-trusty Black Satin, Atkinson was sent for extensive training, under the guidance of a Swedish Olympian equestrian – though he subsequently insisted that he learned more from the horse-wrangler on set. Despite all this effort, Ben Elton observed, ‘Rowan falling off a horse at 200 metres is not really funnier than anyone else falling off a horse at 200 metres…’
King Brian: ‘I had very strong ideas about the King – like he must be a man who never opens the door. So he knocks one down, you build another – if I could, I would like to walk through doors like Tom & Jerry!’
Natasha King, the first Mrs Adder, remembers: ‘aged only eight and with my front teeth missing I was over the moon to receive a bouquet of flowers from Rowan Atkinson when filming finished – it did wonders for me in the playground!’
Frank Finlay, one of only two thespians to merit a ‘Special Guest’ credit in the opening titles, prepares to take the despicable Grumbledook to task.
Peter Cook, the King of Comedy, as Richard III:
‘Now is the summer of our sweet content made o’ercast winter by these Tudor clouds…’
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Good Queen Bess and her saucy Ned. Atkinson’s expression would surely have been even sourer if Brian Blessed had worn the red wig and the dress, as he threatened.
Camera rehearsals in the miniscule royal court. ‘Someone once said this lovely thing about series two,’ Curtis says. ‘They were talking about the other series, and they said “I miss the ‘ee’s!”
And Ben said to them, “What d’you mean you miss the ease?” And they said, “Well in series two it was Percy, Nursie, Melchy, Queenie…” they were like a friendly bunch of schoolchums.’
Love with young Bob came only fleetingly for Lord Blackadder, ‘which is a bit sad really,’ Gabrielle Glaister says, ‘because I think Blackadder and Kate would have made rather a nice couple!’
‘You have a woman’s… beard, my lord?’ Everyone’s favourite Doctor was a welcome presence on set in June 1985 – though he still insists that he should have had his Equity card revoked for his celebrated scenery-chewing.
The combustible cream of a comic generation. ‘There was a sort of gang feel and it was fun,’ Elton says. ‘For heaven’s sake let’s not say it was cliquey, but it was people who liked being together and working together, and I think perhaps the fact that everybody is still friends might be unique.’
Edinburgh, August 1981:
An Oxbridge convergence like no other, as the final ingredients of the Blackadder chilli are located. Fry: ‘Hugh nudged me; a man had walked on stage from the wings behind us and was coming forward, holding his hand up for silence. His presence only encouraged more cheering. It was Rowan Atkinson. For a moment or two I thought he had gone insane…’
The Elizabethan Bilko, and cohorts. ‘Blackadder worked the way it did because someone was at the top and someone was at the bottom and there was a real threat of punishment or death’.
Stephen Fry says. ‘And as in Goldoni and Ben Jonson, you don’t always find that the one on top is the smart one… that tradition connects all the way up to Jeeves & Wooster of course.’
In a lifetime’s worth of hard-man roles, Arthur the Sailor must be the high point in actor John Pierce Jones’ long career – it’s certainly one of the most celebrated one-scene-wonders in the Blackadder canon. ‘Now how much do you charge for a GOOD – HARD – SHAG?’
Long after Baldrick’s last cunning plan, Robinson has perennially been happy to ease back into the stinking trousers over the years, largely for Comic Relief – his Christmas Card is now a collector’s item.
George Augustus Frederick, the Prince of Wales: as thick as a whale omelette, but with a wig like an exceptionally attractive loaf of bread.
‘Toffs at the top, plebs at the bottom, and me in the middle making a fat pile of cash out of both of them.’ Fine words for any budding politician.
Mr E. Blackadder’s dogsbody, The Lord Baldrick, with intellectual equal.
The Prince and the Pauper – the porpoise, presumably, being just out of shot.
Fry could have found a regular role for himself in Regency England, but says, ‘It probably was due to Me and My Girl commitments that we just did the Wellington episode. It was pleasing though as it was the last of the series anyway and ended in a great heap of bodies…’
Lord Smedley: a perfect example of the milk-livered Restoration fop, as Nigel Planer’s colleague, the seasoned actor Nicholas Craig, could tell you.
The immortal Miggins. ‘I think when Richard and Ben were creating the character,’ Helen Atkinson Wood says, ‘the fact a horse’s willy got mentioned is no accident, me being the keen horsewoman that I am…’
Two of Alfresco’s finest reunited in a historically impossible, but humorously crucial, sticky situation. Coltrane would get to reprise the role of Dr Johnson in a little more depth for Screen Two a few years later.
The Braveheart of the Clan MacAdder: evidence of the Scottish roots of the Blackadder family, or just an excuse to stick on a skirt and a ridiculous ginger wig?
Once and for all, let the record show, only the phrase ‘Hot potato, orchestra stalls, Puck will make amends!’ with relevant nose-tweaking gestures, will ward off the evil spirits of The Scottish Play.
‘Hand over the loot, goat-brains!’ Mr Blackadder learns the crucial lesson, never to fall in love with a criminal who sounds like James Mason.
‘I want to be young and wild, and then I want to be middle-aged and rich, and then I want to be old and annoy people by pretending that I’m deaf.’
The final historical meeting of Ade Edmondson and Rik Mayall made for one of Blackadder’s most explosive half-hours. The real Manfred von Richthofen was only twenty-five years old when he was shot down in 1918, and had little interest in lavatorial humour.
‘One more, Bob?’
Masters and servants: The meeting of the top brass and the ignoble Tommies provided the precise rigidity of hierarchy that Blackadder required to thrive. Atkinson: ‘He’s got a ladder to climb, but he’s so cynical about climbing it. And he’s also cynical about those who are climbing up towards him. He’s just a fantastically cynical man.’
‘Just because I can give multiple orgasms to the furniture just by sitting on it, doesn’t mean that I’m not sick of this damn war: the blood, the noise, the endless poetry…’The Lord Flashheart was allegedly at least partly based on the dashing Piers Fletcher – old friend of Lloyd, Oxford contemporary of Curtis, former soldier, and current producer of QI. He modestly refuses to accept the honour – but if called, he does still answer to the name of ‘Flash’.
The descendents of Elizabeth, Ploppy and Ludwig having a whizzy-jolly time while millions die all around them.
Colthurst St Barleigh of the Bailey has Darling on the ropes: ‘Captain, leaving aside the incident in question, would you think of Captain Blackadder as the sort of man that would usually ignore orders?’
Cluck cluck, gibber gibber, my old man’s a mushroom, et cetera – not to say, ‘Wibble’ and similar gobbledegook.
‘To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance, was what the knowing ones call “nuts” to Scrooge’ – and it suited most of the Blackadder family equally well.
The fin de siècle fraternity posing on-set in the summer of 1999. Rowan Atkinson’s goatee beard would go on to establish a cult all of its own.
John Lloyd recalls the creation of one of the greatest TV moments of the twentieth Century: ‘You watch it and it’s like being in church. There’s the sudden sense that you’ve touched something that isn’t usually touched. A kind of epiphany, I suppose.’
At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them…
PICTURE PERMISSIONS
Plate Section 1
The Black Adder pilot frontispiece reproduced by kind permission of Geoff Posner
The Black Adder series 1 images courtesy of John Lloyd
Blackadder on a horse ©BBC Motion Gallery
Brian Blessed as the King, Mr and Mrs Adder ©BBC
Frank Finlay as the Witchsmeller Pursuivant ©BBC
Peter Cook as King Richard III ©BBC
Plate Section 2
Blackadder and Queenie ©BBC
Pictures 1 & 2 ©BBC
Young Bob and Blackadder ©BBC, Tom Baker as Captain Rum ©BBC Motion Gallery
John Lloyd © Peter Brooker/Rex Features, Hugh Laurie © Johnny Boylan/Rex Features, Rowan Atkinson © Gemma Levine/Getty Images, Ben Elton © Steve Pyke/Getty Images, Tony Robinson © Redferns/Getty Images
Perrier Awards image ©Perrier/Penguin
Baldrick, Blackadder and Percy ©BBC
Baldrick and Arthur the Sailor ©BBC, Tony Robinson (Comic Relief) © Victor Watts / Rex Features
Plate Section 3
Hugh Laurie as the Prince of Wales ©BBC
Pitt the Younger, Blackadder, Baldrick and Vincent Hanna ©BBC Motion Gallery
Baldrick ©BBC
The Prince and Blackadder ©BBC, Stephen Fry as the Duke of Wellington ©BBC Motion Gallery
Nigel Plan
er as Lord Smedly and Helen Atkinson Wood as Mrs Miggins ©BBC
Robbie Coltrane as Dr Johnson with the Prince and McAdder ©BBC Motion Gallery
The Actors and the Highway(wo)man ©BBC Motion Gallery