The True History of the Blackadder (13 page)
Why Don’t You Grow Up, You Bastards?
‘We had an empire, we had a franchise,’ laments Lloyd, ‘and what I wanted to do was break into America, and I wanted to do movies, and, you know, make something that would last forever. Sean and I asked the cast to dinner, and the proposal we were going to make was that we were going to do exactly what the Pythons had done, when they started Monty Python Productions.’ With everyone gathered, however, Rowan had to offer an apology – in not so many words. ‘You’re all very nice people,’ he began, ‘and I like you a great deal and you’re all very talented … but I’ve talked to my agent, and he thinks that I shouldn’t play with the second eleven any more.’
Jaws dropped all around the table. ‘You won’t get Rowan being rude to people,’ Lloyd insists, ‘he doesn’t do rude to people. He was passing
on a remark … He then left the restaurant and everybody else got fantastically drunk, because we all thought that was the end of our careers, basically. And we had to go in the next day and be polite to each other in rehearsal, which was pretty tricky.’ The BBC’s thirtieth-anniversary tribute of the debut,
Not Again
, did allow Atkinson a belated apology, when he jovially admitted, ‘Retrospectively, I’d like to apologise for my high-handed attitude towards the whole thing.’ But the fact remains that back in 1982 he had big plans: movies to make, and perhaps – like many a great comic keen to cement their place in comedy history – a solo sitcom vehicle which he and Curtis had already begun to toss back and forth. They were done with sketch comedy, as the third member of their trio, Howard Goodall, reflects today: ‘It would have been an odd thing had he stayed in a topical weekly TV show forever. You’re talking much more Chaplin, Jacques Tati-type character. Rowan needed to find a bigger, wider stage to play on. And boy, did he …’
Nevertheless, there were still six episodes slated to begin broadcast in February, so it was time for everyone to watch their backs, look to their own futures, and get back to work. It was more than a year since the third series had closed on a muted note – being broadcast a week after the murder of John Lennon, the screen had finally cut to black and ‘In My Life’ played as the credits rolled.
fn4
Despite this long time away, the fourth and final series of
Not
hit the ground running, every episode packed with sketches which were soon to become classics.
Most people nowadays only know
Not the Nine O’Clock News
as an array of differing compilations or, of course, audio highlights (many taken from the fourth series). It may be that the rights holders fear that twenty-first-century sensibilities might be offended by some of the gags in uncut episodes, which could be construed as racist or
homophobic. There’s no denying that everyone on the team was happy to offend, but what is naughty in one decade can seem scandalous in another (such as Toby’s order to the sodomites in Hell, or the free use of the term ‘spastic’ in much of British comedy at this time). On the other hand, perhaps it’s considered that a full DVD release would be a commercial flop because the topical references would mean nothing over thirty years on – as if a Britain in which a Tory government were making ruinous cuts in public spending, provoking zooming levels of unemployment and mass protest, and having a royal wedding to help distract the populace, would seem to be an alien world to modern Britons. But the original broadcasts still stand up, peppered as they are with celebrated moments (the final series’ opener concludes with Curtis and Goodall’s epic New Romantic lampoon ‘Nice Video, Shame About the Song’) and forgotten jewels (Mel Smith running a company which offers job creation schemes for human sofas, hatstands and pencil sharpeners). By the time the final sketch (the Youth TV spoof, ‘Hey Wow’, featuring a leotarded Atkinson as the mime artist Alternative Car Park) had descended into bedlam, there was no doubt that the
Not
team were going out on a high. The punning finale, the valedictory ballad ‘Kinda Lingers’ (another Curtis/Goodall original), was filmed in the cold industrial atmosphere of Bankside Power Station, and closed with Atkinson quite fittingly cutting transmission with a hefty turn of a valve. After three years and twenty-seven episodes, that was the end of
Not the Nine O’Clock News
.
John Lloyd had to let his empire kinda linger a little longer, however – a book covering the 1983 election was published, and with Douglas’s help, he put out two
Not
-themed calendars. Despite their late-seventies contretemps, Lloyd and Adams did some of their best work in the eighties
fn5
, with the calendars giving birth to
The Meaning of Liff
comic dictionaries, rated by John as his favourite creations. The odd comedy book continued to surface under the
Not
banner, with Lloyd and Hardie collaborating on
Prince Harry’s First Quiz Book
as late as 1985. A vastly different US spin-off for HBO,
Not Necessarily the News
, on the other hand, ran quite successfully for several years without any input from either Sean or John.
The final gasp from the original team was the live show
Not in Front of the Audience
, a farewell concert staged in Oxford and at the Drury Lane Theatre, where on 29 April a recording was made for the last
Not
double album. This theatrical swansong came only a month after the last episode was broadcast, and was necessarily boosted in topicality due to the Falklands War, which had begun in the interim, and would be over by June. Although constructed from brand-new material (albeit including the old joke about being ‘well hung’), the team allowed themselves the return of a few favourite characters and sketches, Rowan reprising his outrageous sex-obsessed French critic, an extra-foul-mouthed ‘Ranting Man’ and Zak, the friendly alien with a malfunctioning translator.
With the last bows taken that night, the unusual quartet went their separate ways – although Rowan would remain close to regular collaborator Mel, whose years of comically successful partnership with Griff would also lead to massive financial success with the setting up (and flogging off) of their production company Talkback.
Not
was never a love-in, and both Smith and Atkinson would have difficult relationships with Stephenson, but three decades on, Rowan’s memories of the time tend towards the fond. ‘What I do remember about those days was the fantastic freedom you felt at that age to do and try anything,’ he reflects, ‘There was none of this sort of angst which one feels later on in life, where you think, “Now is this the kind of character I should be playing at this stage in my career?” You just sort of busked it. If it worked then everybody took the credit, and if it didn’t work then nobody took the blame.’ He adds, however, ‘I think
it stopped at the right time. I think if you’re going to carry on with that idea, you have to do something a little different. Either you have to bring new people in, or lose some people, or take it in a different direction …’ His own new direction was sitcom, although taking on the might of a popular and artistic triumph like
Fawlty Towers
, even four years after its final episode, was a task which neither he nor Curtis savoured. ‘For some reason we started to think about the possibility of writing a sitcom together, for me to perform or be a major character in. And I remember we both felt the sort of scourge of
Fawlty Towers
, which was, and remains, fantastically funny. And it was sort of hanging over us as something to which we were bound to be unfavourably compared. We were fairly convinced that whatever we did, set in the modern day, was going to be described as a pale imitation.’
Curtis was beginning to shape a contemporary crime series, pitched unpromisingly as ‘
Fawlty Towers
meets
Starsky & Hutch
’, centring on Atkinson as a lawyer’s clerk who turns detective after a spate of bicycle thefts in Camden Town.
Not
had already sent up the state of situation comedy back in its second series, presenting the BAFTA Award for Best Sofa in a cosy suburban sitcom, so something a little grittier than
That’s My Boy
was required. As Atkinson explained to the
Sun
in 1989, ‘We wanted to go the opposite way from the usual sitcoms and thought a bit of crime would give the comedy an edge.’ But after a series of wrestling matches with a rudimentary script, they had to agree that it wasn’t going to work. There was just something tawdry about such a low-key premise, and they thought that the more epic their idea was, the better chance it had of being a hit. Then, as Atkinson was to recall, ‘Errol Flynn came to the rescue …’
A daytime showing of the 1938 film
The Adventures of Robin Hood
lit a spark for the duo: if it was murder and skulduggery they wanted, after years of topical sketches, what could be a cleaner break than a medieval tights-and-codpiece spoof? ‘I remember the
Robin Hood
movie was a touchstone for us,’ Atkinson revealed twenty years later.
‘We thought it was definitive in terms of its way of presenting – albeit in a slightly Hollywoodesque way – the excitement of that time, of the fifteenth century.’ Not that the powers that be offered them any encouragement. ‘We were very strongly advised that the two things that absolutely never, ever worked – and everybody tried – was sitcoms set in heaven, and historical sitcoms,’ Curtis remembers, ‘but, um, we ignored the advice. The reason we did the historical one was twofold. We did it because I just couldn’t imagine putting Rowan in a jacket and being anything but embarrassed by how much less funny he was than Basil Fawlty; and second, we liked the idea of big plots! Death and carnage and kings and princes and chaos, rather than just writing about your car breaking down.’ The duo had form with mocking historical drama – a regular part of their live shows was Curtis’s Shakespearean lecture, with all the laughs coming from Rowan’s mimed illustration of every point, while Richard droned, ‘At the centre of the Elizabethan world, sits the King. Upon the character of the King depends the plot, and so there are many different kinds of King. The benign King … The benign King with a physical defect … The benign King with two physical defects …’ and so on.
Everything Rowan turned his talent to tended to emerge as a unique animal, no matter how many footsteps he was treading in, but he and Curtis must have been well aware of the rich tradition of which they were planning to become a part. What made historical comedy so verboten to comedy commissioners in the early eighties, and how could they make it work this time, and keep the Atkinson star in the ascendant?
Historical Comedy Through Comedy History
Ever since the first nomadic hunter-gatherers swapped Neanderthal impressions around the fire, it’s been a reflex action, part of the subversive side of human nature, to laugh at the past. When Shakespeare depicted
the fifteenth century Lollard Sir John Oldcastle as a drunken coward fit for the finest clown to play, he was writing historical comedy – although Oldcastle’s Elizabethan descendants were litigious enough to compel the playwright to change the name to Falstaff after the first run of
Henry IV, Part 1
, and before long the character became the Elizabethan equivalent of Alf Garnett, Del Boy and Alan Partridge rolled into one. Another titan of English literature, the big, bearded Yorkshireman Jane Austen, deliberately spoofed his own history tutorage in the posthumously published
History of England by a Partial, Prejudiced & Ignorant Historian
, written when he was just a fifteen-year-old girl. A hundred years later Mark Twain mocked the medieval idea of chivalry in
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
in much the same way that Cervantes had depicted the clash between antiquity and ‘modern life’ in
Don Quixote
in the sixteenth century. Maybe the single most comprehensive literary send-up of British History, however, came courtesy of
Punch
magazine, which gave rise to the publication of
1066 and All That
in 1930. Combing through the annals of our island history (or ‘all the parts you can remember’), humorists W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman provided the template for historical piss-taking for years to come, with a combination of inaccuracy, anachronism and downright silliness which spawned a host of spin-offs.
By this time, historical comedy had already found its way to the screen, notably in
Three Ages
, written, directed and performed by Buster Keaton in 1923. In separate strands designed to be split into shorts if necessary, Keaton showed the unchanging ways of courtship from the Stone Age through Roman times to the hectic city life of the Roaring Twenties – no matter what the period, each incarnation of the long-faced clown still had to fight the heavy and please his prospective in-laws to get his girl. Keaton intended the movie as a burlesque of D. W. Griffiths’s
Intolerance
, but then historical comedy is almost always respondent – if not a direct spoof of popular costume drama or historical teachings, then usually a suggestion that there’s been quite
enough heavy emoting in tights, and it’s time to make a mockery.
The first infamous example of this reaction to the kind of early Hollywood romps which made Errol Flynn a star was Danny Kaye’s 1955 musical
The Court Jester
, originally a huge flop, but rendered a TV favourite for its Technicolor (indeed, VistaVision!) spectacle and zippy crosstalk (‘the vessel with the pestle’ ad nauseam). But the setting was all that mattered, and the plot and characters were pure cheap fantasy – accurate English history didn’t sell tickets in the Midwest, but tap-dancing in brightly coloured jerkins was a winner. One consequence of the film’s total avoidance of existing lore was that the Robin Hood cipher, the brave fighter famed in song for his skills in battle, was known as the Black Fox – perhaps a tribute to Robert Louis Stevenson’s historical romp
The Black Arrow
, in which the hero takes his eponymous name when he becomes embroiled in the Wars of the Roses
fn6
.