The True History of the Blackadder (15 page)

Rather than worrying about the boss coming over for dinner or getting into a tricky situation over a pound note, however, this gang would be facing the worst that the Middle Ages could throw at them: battles, duels, the block – an extreme farce indeed. Basil Fawlty may have frequently been wound up, but he never had the option of hacking his customers to pieces.

Ed opens up a cupboard stacked floor to ceiling with every shape and size of sharp instrument – swords, daggers …

At the recommendation of John Howard Davies, the first adventure for this Black Adder to face – involving a drunken Scots lord, a Royal Command Performance and a cache of dirty letters which throw the King’s issue into question – took the catholic route for sitcom of not wasting any time setting up the situation, but jumping right in (Edmund is never even referred to as ‘the Black Adder’). The script was undeniably perfunctory, but there was clearly something there, and the two creators persevered without the aid of Lloyd. Luckily they had the patronage of Howard Davies, and together they mounted a pilot, with a studio date set for May.

Some elements of the casting were no-brainers – Percy was written with McInnerny in mind, and even though Tim had embarked on a promising career as a straight actor since Oxford, Curtis knew how to play to his friend’s comedic strengths almost as well as he did Atkinson’s. Throughout his time at university, Tim was usually in about three plays per term, as well as joining in the revue, and despite any formal training, his career in theatre was blossoming. He once admitted, ‘When I left college, there were three parts I saw as benchmarks: Hamlet, Gethin Price and Jack in
The Ruling Class
’ – and he played them all before he hit thirty. Nevertheless, Richard has been known to insist that ‘Tim has the mind and the voice of Laurence Olivier, but he has the face and the neck of an ostrich,’ and his pale, high-browed, stringy-limbed
form was just what they wanted for Edmund’s snooty foil. McInnerny found that the set-up was entirely to his taste, and snapped up the part. ‘It was all skullduggery, swords and poison. It was like Jacobean drama, but funny. One of my favourite episodes was about executing people, whether they’re innocent or not … It’s very sick!’

Noel Gay’s artist roster provided freshly graduated Footlighter Robert Bathurst, who was a natural fit for Henry,
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while John Savident brought his bulk and comic dourness into play for the King, and for the Queen, Scottish actress Elspet Gray was ideal – an undervalued, ditzy performance from a consummate comedienne. The wife of famous farceur Brian Rix (he would make her a Lady when given the title of Baron Rix a decade later), Gray would be the only other supporting cast member with McInnerny and guest performer Alex Norton to survive into the actual series. Sadly Lady Rix passed away in February 2013, aged 83.

This still left the rather thankless role of Baldrick – the short serf who balanced out McInnerny’s lanky fop – apparently impossible to fill. The long struggle to cast the part wasn’t made apparent to jobbing actor Tony Robinson, however, to whom the eventual offer came as manna from heaven. ‘I just got a script dropped through my letter box in Bristol, and it was for this new project called
Black Adder
, and there was this part for a servant in it – he only had eight lines, and none of them were funny. But it was an offer! No one just
offered
me parts at that time, I used to have to go up to London and do about nineteen auditions and interviews – and I was terribly flattered … All that had happened was that John Howard Davies had seen me a couple of years previously, playing a part I think for BBC Bristol, and had written me down in his book as “small and vaguely humorous”, and he was so near the end of his list that he’d suddenly found me and offered me the part because otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to make the thing.’

TONY ROBINSON B ORN : 15 August 1946, Hackney, London

In his one-man show,
Cunning Night Out
in 2007, Tony Robinson paid tribute to his late father Leslie, a talented jazz pianist from Essex who at seventeen had the dubious honour of being the Assistant Beadle in Britain’s very last workhouse, before his life was changed by World War II. The diminutive Leslie was a hard-working member of the RAF ground crew, but was regularly sneered at by the lofty airmen whose lives he helped to maintain. ‘He wasn’t one of “the few, we happy few”,’ Tony revealed. ‘My dad thought “the few” were tossers.’ The war did, however, bring Leslie together with the equally musical Phyllis, and a year after VE Day, their only son was born – they were determined that he would not lack the nurturing which their own talents were denied. Ostensibly, young Tony was educated at the local Wanstead High School, where he eventually passed four O levels, but as a child actor, anything academic was precisely that.

Lionel Bart’s musical
Oliver!
opened in the West End in June 1960, and there as part of Fagin’s gang of ruddy urchins was the teenage Tony. Young Robinson impressed the management so much that he was swiftly made understudy to the actor playing the Artful Dodger, and illness soon led to him taking on that very role at short notice: ‘I shouldn’t say this, but I was bloody good … for the first four minutes.’ Tony’s own understudy at the time was Steve Marriott, a fellow child actor and model who was grinning alongside Tony in Fair Isle knitting pattern magazines just a few years before he founded the Small Faces – ‘Itchycoo Park’ was allegedly inspired by the days the two of them played truant, learning to smoke in Little Ilford Park.

Tony had a busy, successful career in his teens, appearing in the Judy Garland film
Judgement at Nuremberg
in 1961, and in the same year making his BBC debut as Stubbs in
The Man from the Moors
(earning twenty-one guineas, plus another thirteen for his chaperone). Eight years later, after many more theatrical and television roles, training at the Central School of Speech and Drama (where his tutor was Eric Thompson) and four years in rep, a BBC bigwig annotated his file: ‘A comic personality. Easy and relaxed and holds one’s attention and interest – a young man with a future.’

By this time Robinson, after a short stint as artistic director at the Midlands Art Theatre, had moved to Bristol, tuned in, dropped out, formed a commune and smoked prodigious amounts of weed. He had also settled down with his first serious girlfriend, Mary Shepherd, and their twenty-five-year union produced two children. Their lifestyle was not just about free love and soft drugs, however – Robinson was a highly politicised socialist and activist, with a fervour that was reflected in the work created by the Avon Touring Company, which he co-founded.

Further accolades came from his appearances at the Chichester Festival (which included Feste in
Twelfth Night
), but despite small movie roles, appearing with John Wayne in
Brannigan
in 1975, soon Robinson would become most recognisable as a star of Children’s TV, part of the gang on
Play Away
and also
Words and Pictures
, with Miriam Margolyes playing his mother when he took the title role in
Sam on Boffs’ Island
. As the eighties arrived, the family man and jobbing actor could be forgiven for feeling that he had gone as far as he could in his career.

One fillip had been the friendship of Terry Pratchett, who had heard Robinson in a spoof show for Radio Bristol and asked him to be the first narrator for the audiobook versions of his
Discworld
novels, which the actor had grown to love as his daughter helped
him through a period of depression by reading them aloud to him. Pratchett’s worldwide popularity would have made Robinson a footnote in comedy history – but at the age of thirty-six, he still wanted more.

By the eighties, Robinson hadn’t had an uneventful acting career. ‘I’d had the lead in comedy pilots, I’d done good bits in television plays – there was a drama-doc called
Joey
, a true story about four guys who were incarcerated in a mental hospital during the war and were still there in the fifties, and they didn’t have a mental illness, they just had cerebral palsy. We won the Golden Rose of Montreux with that.’ But there was no denying, with a young family to support, that a central role in Rowan Atkinson’s new sitcom was a very desirable job, and well worth the commute from the West Country …

All of which made it all the more annoying for him when industrial action by BBC technical staff that May wiped out any chance of the pilot being filmed. Of course, a vehicle for Atkinson was only ever going to be
postponed
, but by the remounted pilot’s recording date, Sunday 20 June, Robinson was already in Greece performing Tragedy with the National Theatre. ‘For me at that time to be asked to go to the National anyway was such a pat on the back that although I was gagging to do the
Blackadder
pilot I just couldn’t get out of it. And I thought my chances of working with those guys was gone.’ In the event, young actor Philip Fox would be thrust into Baldrick’s jerkin, and have to make the best of it.

Fox wasn’t the only new boy in the remount, however. Geoff Posner – who had been a fledgling director on the fourth series of
Not
– was drafted in to put the show together with little notice, a task which made him, in his own words, ‘scared shitless. I got the script and thought, “Blimey, I’ve bitten off more than I can chew here!” It was a very complicated thing, and it all had to be done in the studio. But I remembered Rowan, John and Richard talking about the show towards
the end of
Not
, and what it would be, and it sounded really interesting, and a great challenge.’

The BBC were not given to paying for sitcom pilots which weren’t up to broadcast standard, and Posner and his crew
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turned round a very impressive half-hour which, while not canonical and miles from the quality of the eventual saga, is packed with unique highlights. Atkinson’s penchant for visual tomfoolery demanded two complicated set-piece sequences: a climactic duel with a trick blade (though this dashing Black Adder is famed for his swordsmanship), and ‘The Death of the Scotsman’. When the plot was recycled for the second episode of the series, ‘Born to Be King’, the play put on for St Leonard’s Day
^fn11
was quite swiftly dealt with by Edmund, as he struggled to prevent the live stabbing of the Scots enemy he had just doomed to death, having heard that he carried letters proving Henry’s bastardy. The original concept was far more complex – an entertainment for the Queen’s birthday with Percy and Baldrick in ridiculous costumes trying to kill the enemy, and Edmund’s desperate attempts to prevent the Scotsman being hanged live onstage (yes, there is a ‘well hung’ joke) go on for ten times the length. Atkinson and company rehearsed this violent pantomime to a clinical degree, creating a frantic dumbshow of dizzying proportions – the director’s script for the pilot has several pages painstakingly breaking down even the smallest movement, to tune the farcical ballet to perfection.