The True History of the Blackadder (16 page)

It’s something of a fallacy that the studio-bound format of
Blackadder II
was a miraculous development, as the original pilot is stylistically far more akin to the later series than
The Black Adder
would be – even the character of Edmund, the witty, vicious bad boy in black leather, is a clear
taste of things to come. But it seems clear why this pilot was kept under wraps for so long – it wasn’t really
Blackadder
at this point, and as Lloyd himself would observe, ‘It kind of wasn’t
about
anything. It had a
Game of Thrones
feel, not rooted in real events.’ The wooliness of the central conceit is underlined by Geoff Posner: ‘They decided that they didn’t want to tie themselves down to one period. They just thought they’d make it a medieval/Elizabethan period. I remember having a discussion with the costume designer, and thinking, “This is a pilot, we don’t have much money for costumes, so where shall we set it, and
when
shall we set it?” The timing of the setting was more decided by what there was available in the costume store than Richard saying, “It has to be set in 1523” or whatever. It’s very vague … I won’t say we immersed ourselves in months of historical research, because we were more concerned with getting the jokes right.’ No clearer sign is needed that they were not quite there yet than to point out that in the pilot, Edmund is ultimately saved by the King’s solemn interdict to spare the life of his son (whose name he actually knows), once he has begged for forgiveness. ‘I know that we thought it was going very well,’ Curtis says, ‘and I remember sitting down in front of about six friends and watching it, and realising it hadn’t quite worked. There was
something
there, but …’ Tony says, ‘It’s like a signpost pointing in a particular direction, but certainly not getting there.’ Posner recalls that it was felt, given the epic nature of the setting, that it seemed a shame not to expand their horizons and film some ambitious external sequences, allowing for more spoofery of BBC costume drama of the time.
^fn12

Posner would not play a part in the series again, however, as he had already signed up to direct episodes of Paul Jackson’s new sitcom about
a student household, and was soon preparing to start filming in Bristol. When editing the final episodes of
Not
, Posner had been bothered by the screeching coming from the next booth, found Jackson immersed in cutting together the pilot of
The Young Ones
, and grabbed his chance to get involved with an extraordinary new branch of sitcom. It looked like Rik Mayall (with his girlfriend Lise Mayer and an old pal from Manchester University) had finally found the right TV format for the Comic Strip’s manic anarchy, and with the start of Channel 4 heralding the first ever episode of
The Comic Strip Presents
(thanks to
Young Ones
renegade Peter Richardson and producer Michael White), the BBC quickly demanded another five episodes to be recorded as soon as possible.

For the full series of
The Black Adder
, however, Atkinson and Curtis would have all the time they needed – they just needed a hands-on producer. ‘By that stage I’d had a bit of a rest,’ John Lloyd says, ‘and I remember Richard and Rowan sent me a dozen red roses and a case of champagne, saying, “Please come and do this,” so I saw the pilot, and it was very funny – but it was somehow not rooted … I couldn’t see the point of it really. My sort of contribution, if I might call it that, was to try and say, “This should be set in real history, so that you’ve never heard of Blackadder and Baldrick, but you’ve heard of the people around them.” It was a missing bit of history which had been written out. Interestingly, there’s a theory from Germany doing the rounds that the years 600–900, the darkest of the Dark Ages, never existed. Because there was a guy called Otto IV who wanted to be Holy Roman Emperor at the time of the millennium, so he just fast-forwarded about three hundred years, and changed all the dates. I’m reliably informed that it’s bollocks, but it’s a very amusing theory. As we know, Henry VII did a lot of propaganda. So I wrote all this genealogy and so on …’

‘We thought we did quite well,’ Curtis says, ‘John thought we did quite badly.’ After a period of pondering, and with
The Times
at that time promising extraordinary extracts from the newly discovered Hitler Diaries (and questions about their authenticity being raised by all the
other newspapers), the air of conspiracy inspired Lloyd to cook up a whole new angle for the writers.

What Happened to Bernard Fripp

The task of reworking
The Black Adder
in time to start production in the new year, of course, still fell to Rowan and Richard, but first of all they had another original half-hour to film before the year’s end.
Dead on Time
(also known as
Whatever Happened to Bernard Fripp?
) was a short film that could be seen as the first of Curtis’s boy-meets-girl movies, but is more of an extended sketch, like one of Atkinson’s live skits, on celluloid. Michael White once again stepped in to fund the film, with his girlfriend Lyndall Hobbs directing, and, of course, Howard Goodall provided the insistent, plaintive soundtrack to accompany the dynamic action. Once again, getting laughs out of death was very much the theme.

It was the tale of another Bernard, in this case Fripp, a personable but shallow bespectacled gawd-help-us who discovers in his lunch hour that he has contracted a rare disorder called Hirschman’s disease, and has less than thirty minutes to live – and so, in near-as-dammit real time, he decides to try and experience everything he possibly can before his life is over. This is the natural cue for a frantic race across central London to make up for his wasted existence, but with surprisingly little in the way of visual humour by Atkinson’s usual standards. Bernard is more of a sufferer of verbal diarrhoea, which isn’t cured by his new desire to seize life.

What the short does contain, however, is an alarmingly star-studded cast, largely made up of actors yet to make their mark – although the doctor who sends Bernard off on his quest was Nigel Hawthorne, already the winner of two BAFTAs for his transformation into Sir Humphrey Appleby in
Yes Minister
. As Bernard streaks around, trying to cram in all the art and music he should have appreciated, find the spiritual solace he desires, and even hopefully find love in the last few minutes of his time on Earth, there’s a famous face on every corner, few of them given enough screen time to make the slightest impression – Ade Edmondson, Nigel Planer, Jo Kendall, Rupert Everett, Christopher Biggins and Rowan’s girlfriend Leslie Ash all pop up, with Greta Scacchi as the love-interest nurse who saves the day. The
Blackadder
cast was also well represented, with Curtis himself belying his retirement from acting by playing a tough in a cafe, plus McInnerny, Alex Norton, Joyce Grant, and Jim Broadbent as one of the few characters with enough time to register: a slow, syrupy clergyman who fails to understand that Bernard’s in a bit of a hurry.

Curtis and Atkinson’s brief experiment in film-making came and was forgotten with little ceremony, and the autumn of 1982 brought them back together with Lloyd to start the scripting of the full series of their sitcom. Just as with
Hordes of the Things
, Lloyd suggested a strong framing context for their epic comedy, a real world surrounding
the swashbuckling gag-slinging to give every laugh an entirely new level of pathos, a depth which would mark it out in the world of early-eighties sitcom, if nothing else. He could not have picked a more perfect moment in our island’s history to focus on, as few periods were quite as entangled by vipers as the roots of the Tudor reign, just a generation earlier than was suggested in the pilot. The five-hundredth anniversary of Richard III’s coronation would coincide exactly with the eventual first broadcast run, with ‘Born to Be King’ marking the day on 6 July 1983. If ever a bubble of believable alternative history could be floated it was in that dark period, one ruthlessly vilified by Tudor propaganda for centuries, set in stone by Shakespeare, and only recently revised by committed Ricardians. Making the hero of the sitcom the son of one of the Princes in the Tower, whose entire reign was stamped out of existence by Henry VII, took the Ricardian cause to absurd lengths.

Not that a vast amount of scholarly research was conducted, of course. Lloyd is quite open about the level they were aiming for. ‘There’s a book that I had when I was nine or ten, called
Looking at History
, by R. J. Unstead – “In the Middle Ages, women wore wimples, and in the seventeenth century, gentlemen wore wigs!” So pretty childish, but about what anyone except a professional historian can ever remember.’ They had a checklist – witchcraft, torture, sedition, Shakespeare, killing archbishops and, of course, plague and death. ‘We took it back another hundred years to the middle of the fifteenth century when it could be harder and even more vicious and people were very mean and hundreds were murdered every day,’ Atkinson told the
People
. ‘In
The Black Adder
nearly everyone suffers and humour is about human suffering and hurt. In any humorous situation someone is always having something terrible done to them or rude said about them.’ ‘Real jeopardy was fun,’ Curtis confirms. ‘The fact that death was always around the corner was a delicious thing to be cracking jokes about. What I wouldn’t give now to be able to have some deaths in my romantic films …’ Now it was
just a case of the partnership setting off to a ‘hideous house’ in the south of France to hammer it all out together. Or rather, as Curtis told the audience at the Cheltenham Literary Festival in 2008, ‘It was a sort of, um … what’s another word for “lie”? It was a
myth
that Rowan wrote. He was going out with Leslie Ash, so I was keen to go on holiday in the same house, with her in her bikini, so I was allowed there on the understanding that we’d write together … It didn’t make any difference, she was repelled by me anyway.’

When they returned from rewriting British History in France, the pair found that Rik Mayall’s new sitcom had begun, gradually but surely, to blow minds on Tuesday nights on BBC2. It was hugely rough stuff even given the wealth of untrained talent involved, but
The Young Ones
was at that time Curtis’s big treat after a day of trying to get laughs out of fifteenth-century politics – the blend of fresh comedy with live bands was catnip to such a pop music obsessive. Lloyd too was impressed, given that he’d had an early peek at what Jackson was up to. ‘I was sent the script of
The Young Ones
, and this thing arrived, you know, covered in Marmite stains and half written in pencil and full of Ben Elton’s terrible spelling … and I could not make head nor tail of it. It was full of brilliant ideas, but so incompetently put together, you’d think, well, if I did this I’d just try and structure it, make it neat, and … that would have destroyed it really.’

The Young Ones
gave first appearances to a huge number of comedians who would go on to establish their own legacies in the coming decade. ‘It just happened to have lots of people who were at that point in their career where they were just starting out,’ Geoff Posner reflects, ‘most of them had stood on the stage at the Comedy Store at some point and wanted to start their own career, so getting a break was probably what it was all about, really.’ Many future
Blackadder
players, from Helen Atkinson-Wood to Robbie Coltrane to Tony Robinson himself, would be happy to add
The Young Ones
to their CVs as the series continued.

By the start of 1983 Curtis had pieced together the alternative history, and the group knew where their series was headed, even if some scripts were still perfunctory. Lloyd had recalled as much of the original cast as he could, with the added bonus of John Howard Davies managing to give Tony Robinson another chance. Philip Fox was dealt a bad hand with his brief time in the Baldrick role, though Atkinson insists, ‘He was very good, but when we eventually got to make the series Tony was available and we opted for him.’ The Prince of Wales would now be played by seasoned theatre actor Robert East, and for the King, a revelation. Brian Blessed had been a household name for two decades, since starring in
Z Cars
in the early sixties, and had developed his craft in an array of successful roles year after year, from historical drama to cult science fiction, his scene-stealing bellowing as Prince Vultan in
Flash Gordon
sealing his reputation as a bombastic, captivatingly histrionic actor, a man to be feared and to obey in so many roles. Who better to take on the mantle of Richard of Shrewsbury, hitherto thought of only as a tiny weak golden-haired child doomed to die by an uncle’s hand, than a large hairy 47-year-old with a voice that could drown out the apocalypse? Despite this being his one foray into sitcom, Blessed acknowledges, ‘I can’t tell jokes, but I myself, as an individual, when I’m talking to other actors, usually leave them asthmatic with laughter because of just being me. I do see life with a big smile. And even in Shakespeare, you have to find the comedy.’

Now is the Winter of Our Discontent …

The following February, the cast and crew of
The Black Adder
arrived in the frozen Northumberland countryside to begin bringing Atkinson’s alternative history to life. Alnwick Castle had been selected as the perfect site for the filmed inserts, being already a regular on-screen from movies such as
Mary, Queen of Scots
and
Becket
, and fated to star in
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
(a return for Blessed),
Elizabeth
and
Harry Potter
. The wintry location would provide everyone with a crash course on the sufferings of the medieval way of life. As Atkinson recalls: ‘Alnwick had this sense of openness and bleakness, particularly in the snow in February – genuinely Northumbrian winter weather of the mid-twentieth century, very,
very
cold and snowy. I just remember sort of the sense of difficulty of everything, the scale of what we were trying to do, and the number of animals, and children, and extras, most of whom you felt had a slightly miserable couple of weeks … And us not quite knowing what we were doing.’