The True History of the Blackadder (18 page)

McInnerny was in the more confident position of playing a well-known archetype – the foppish fool. It was a role he already knew well from Oxford, and would eventually get to reprise when Griff Rhys Jones directed
Twelfth Night
for the RSC in 1991. ‘I loved Percy because he was extraordinarily loyal, I mean, to the point of it being dangerous to his health. What Percy reminded me of most was Sir Andrew Aguecheek, from
Twelfth Night
. He’s a very similar character who’s mocked and derided by Toby Belch but is immensely loyal to him throughout.’ He did, however, have the pressure of history weighing on him more than most, as they were filming in the very castle which had for centuries been the seat of the real Percy family, the Earls of Northumberland – albeit as a Lancastrian stronghold, rather than Yorkist.

Despite the progress, stylistically there was still some degree of floundering – Baldrick’s now familiar cry of tactical inspiration when he, Percy and Edmund (or ‘Grumbledook’) are seconds from being burnt at the stake for witchcraft was met with a blunt ‘Oh,
fuck off
,
Baldrick!’ from the Black Adder in the recording, a lapse of wit which had to be covered up in the edit with a hasty cough. The finale had also yet to be completely straightened out – a sequence was filmed in which Patrick Allen’s Hawk bloodily murders Prince Harry as he smells a rose, which would have made the series’ conclusion far blacker than it already was. The original epic plot also gave Percy his big scene, trying to bravely but ineptly defend the castle from the terrifying Black Seal, but though this sequence was filmed, it had grown too dark to use the footage.

Peter Cook’s journey north to play the King came along when the land had thawed even further and everyone else in the cast was well settled. In these excised lines Cook, Blessed and East’s incitements to the Yorkist army at Bosworth Field seem a case in point – Cook channels his own perversion of an arch Olivier, Blessed barfs pure bloodlust, and East simpers like a country priest.

Coming off the back of a miserable period in Hollywood making US sitcom
The Two of Us
, and also being up to his neck in another historical romp at the same time, Graham Chapman’s
Yellowbeard
, Cook didn’t especially need a trip to the North-East. But for the chance to play royalty with his favourite young comic
^fn16
he agreed,
to Lloyd’s delight. ‘Peter was his usual modest self when we asked him – “I don’t think I’ll be good enough” – when of course he was, he was perfect.’ ‘He was very nervous,’ Blessed agrees, ‘he had a lot of Shakespeare speeches to do, and he liked just being himself. He kept saying to me in the make-up room, “What do I do, Brian?” I said, “Just play him slightly mad. Get out there as if you’ve got a temperature all the time, and you’re almost hallucinating. As if he’s got some disease.” And I relaxed him … I think the reason Peter then made such a success of that episode was because he was so fucking scared. I think that Rowan was frightened as well. It’s healthy. The best performances come from people who are vulnerable, within an inch of failure. It makes you do exciting things.’

McInnerny says the guest did go some way to make Richard III his own. ‘Rowan had to be on his toes quite a lot, because Peter wasn’t content with doing the lines as written on the page, there was quite a lot of improvisation going on. So Rowan had to get over his shyness quite quickly with Peter!’ ‘He got on well with all of us,’ Lloyd says, ‘and he’d known Rowan for a long time. But like so many actors who came to do cameos on
Blackadder
, we treated them appallingly because we wanted a “house style”, a sort of revue way of performing rather than Great Acting.’

Cook owed Atkinson a cameo anyway. Rowan had been invited to guest-star in several programmes in his short career (giving a memorable lecture on one of his favourite topics, church organs, for
The Innes Book of Records
), but one of the unmissable offers had been to feature in Cook’s own solo vehicle in 1980, an LWT special made for Humphrey Barclay called
Peter Cook and Company
. Atkinson stepped into Cook’s traditional role of playing exasperating freaks in public areas without any trouble at all, but the special never led to a renaissance for the elder comic’s career.

Once they returned to the BBC studios, many more hugely respected actors, what Blessed terms ‘people of substance’, were drafted in to
feature in episodes, often with only tiny roles – Richard ‘Stinker’ Murdoch and the legendary ‘Man in Black’ Valentine Dyall only get brief lines as part of the King’s council, but not all egos were as forgiving, and Wilfrid Brambell’s similarly minor role, which would have been the final comic performance of a sitcom icon, had to be recast when the veteran walked out after waiting three hours to get to his line, carping about ‘bloody amateurs!’.

The Vile Turnip of Sweet Richard Slain …

With the onerous location shooting finally complete, there was only a short break before decampment to the capital for rehearsals and studio recordings. Ordinarily the BBC would be dispensing free tickets to see the live recordings at the end of each week, but the
Adder
team had to make the decision to do without an audience – the lavish production which they envisaged left too little room in their allocated studio to fit in the bleachers where the audience sat. It wasn’t an exercise in ‘comedy realism’ to do without a laugh track, however; the edited shows would be shown to audiences later
^fn17
.

In the rehearsal studios in North Acton, Rowan and the cast could really begin to shape their half-hour comic tragedies, and the rest of the crew could witness how the master craftsman worked. What Chris Langham termed the ‘mental chemistry’ of Atkinson’s approach, the clinical cerebral engineering of every line and look until it is deemed amusing enough to him, could seem like procrastinating perfectionism to less tolerant co-stars, and Atkinson himself admits, ‘I’m just a perfectionist, which is good in some ways because it makes you strive harder, but it’s not something of which I’m particularly proud. I would agree with anyone who suggests that perfectionism
is a disease, not a quality. It reduces you to a person who worries too much and that isn’t healthy for anyone … I don’t like to take it home with me. That’s why I’m so keen on my sports cars, because they are a simple, boyish interest. They relax me.’ But with the equally exacting and tenacious Lloyd by his side, and the perfectionism of
Fawlty
ringing in his ears, Atkinson was clearly aiming high. ‘They all put up with the interminable wrangling in rehearsal as we paced about struggling to think of a vegetable beginning with C funnier than courgette,’ John recalls. ‘Mostly they just sat quietly listening to the debate with a kind of aghast bemusement.’ Once again, poor Frank Finlay suffered on his brief sojourn with the
Adder
team. After many hours of laboured fine-tuning holding up the proceedings, with Shardlow’s and Atkinson’s backs turned, Finlay crept over to Lloyd and begged, ‘For God’s sake, will someone
tell me what to do
?!’

Tony Robinson admits to feeling overawed by his co-star on first impressions. ‘From my point of view, quite crudely, when I joined it, Rowan was a big famous person! And in his own way, though very confident, he was a very shy person, quite a stroppy guy in some ways, and
very
bright. Not somebody who you’d want to tangle with. But also he’s a kind of omnivore in a way, he watches everything that’s going on all the time, you know that whatever you’re doing, or the lighting director’s doing, or the prop man, he’s always kind of running through that as well … So for me it was like, “I’m going to have to keep some way away from this guy.”’ He soon found, however, that perfectionism didn’t extend to egotism. ‘I can remember very early on, Rowan had a very funny line, and John said, “We ought to cut away to Baldrick after that and get his reaction.” I can remember thinking, “Oh Christ, that’s not going to stay in, there’s no way he’ll allow it to happen.” But the extraordinary thing about Rowan, as far as I was concerned, was that he was so incredibly generous, he allowed me to have the kind of reactions and cutaways that most stars wouldn’t have.’

Having broken the cardinal rule of sitcom by writing a new episode to establish the situation, the first Chronicle the team put through the BBC sitcom assault course was ‘The Foretelling’, in which we discover the depth of Henry Tudor’s treachery, and witness the birth of the Black Vegetable. It’s easy to forget, after four triumphant series of often absurd but generally grounded historical comedy, that
Blackadder
essentially began life as a ghost story. In fact, not only would the writers’ desire to prod Shakespeare inspire them to echo Banquo’s ghost by having Richard III’s spectre chasing after his own head, the series would also contain instances of genuine black magic, witchcraft, demons and even a cameo from Satan himself. But then, as adaptations of an unreliable chronicle, each episode was bound to represent the superstitions of the Middle Ages, creating a world in which an old crone can conceivably give birth to a poodle, sticking your finger up a sheep’s bottom on Easter Monday increases fertility, the King eats roast horse and there are any number of popes at any given time. This is lost history after all – who remembers the Swiss Invasion now?

The lavish production design underlined the ridiculous nature of this forgotten period of history, with costume designer Odile Dicks-Mireaux given free rein to add to the spectacle, with knights sporting absurd antlers and King Richard rarely seen without his golden armour. Atkinson adds, ‘I remember having increasingly ludicrous codpieces, and wondering if it wasn’t so lewd that your eyes were glued to it instead of the actor the entire time when it was in shot. We compromised on something that, even now, when you look at it, still looks fairly extraordinary. I’m not sure that you’d want to do that kind of thing now. But I didn’t mind wearing the tights and the codpieces were, we thought, hilarious … these hideous but hysterical priapic appearances in my crotch.’

A post-coronation sequence in which the new royal family pose for a portrait made good use of the livery of Atkinson’s strange new creation, but though it established the central characters of the series brilliantly,
it had to be trimmed for time.

The second episode introduced a surprise regular character and a double act of great import to
Blackadder
. ‘The Queen of Spain’s Beard’ mocked the ruthless arranged marriages that powered medieval politics by matching the weedy Edmund with a Hispanic monster of an infanta, Maria Escalosa – a comedic gorgon played to perfection by Miriam Margolyes. Despite the actress’s natural exuberant sweetness, she says she was happy to transform herself. ‘I liked the people very much, much better than the Footlights crowd that I knew earlier … The main thing about the Spanish Infanta is that she’s hideously ugly, and I could have felt a bit peeved at being cast in this role, because although fat, I am charming and pleasant-looking. But I remember it being lots of fun.’ Nevertheless, some of the script’s jokes may have been deemed too cruel – or were cut for time.

Of this first time working with Atkinson, Margolyes recalls, ‘I was fascinated to see that he had a stammer, and sometimes if that got in the way of working, he would get so furious with himself. I only saw, on the television, the superb, disciplined results of his work, I didn’t realise how hard he had to try not to stammer.’ A first-rate comic actor of Miriam’s skill could only be paired with someone equally adept, and so Rowan and John were happy to be reunited with Jim Broadbent, who played the small but memorable role of the Infanta’s interpreter, Don Speekingleesh. Since his appearance on
Not
, Jim had turned down the role of Del Boy in
Only Fools and Horses
in favour of the lesser role of dodgy copper Roy Slater (who also debuted in 1983), had appeared in Terry Gilliam’s
Time Bandits
, and would further his film career by appearing in Gilliam’s next,
Brazil
. But alongside these small but significant roles, Broadbent was making a far bigger commitment in joining Patrick Barlow in the National Theatre of Brent, playing the long-suffering Wallace: co-star and general dogsbody of the great theatrical impresario Desmond Olivier Dingle
^fn18
.

Together Miriam and Jim would play scenes which would be among the few moments from the first series which all the
Blackadder
team agree to be classic, not least Curtis: ‘Jim as the Spanish translator – I’ve never worked out why it’s so perfect, but I think it’s that he mis-stresses
every single word
. It’s just a sort of astonishing technical feat, to get the rhythms of the English language so completely wrong.’ Brian Blessed recalls, ‘They’d just rehearsed it, and Rowan grabbed me by the arm and said, “Come and watch this, what do you think?” And of course I had tears in my eyes from laughter. And Rowan looked at it, and said, “You find this very funny, don’t you?” I said, “Yes, yes!” And he very seriously said, “I think it’s funny, yes, I think it works.”’ ‘I’m embarrassed to say
that I had no idea really of what a Spanish accent was so I just came up with this thing which I suppose is a very bad cod Italian accent, but it seemed to be funny,’ Broadbent shrugs. ‘Nobody questioned it, but I’m embarrassed now because I should have done my research … The fact that he was slightly camp seemed to fall into place from how it was written. That famous line, “Nice to have a little talk just about-a the
lydees
’ things …”’ ‘Now I’m a specialist in accents,’ Margolyes says, ‘and I’m not quite sure what accent Jim was employing … it doesn’t matter!’