The True History of the Blackadder (19 page)
Playing the leading man’s child bride, when Edmund swaps the Infanta for the ‘young and beautiful’ (and of course, heavily anachronistic) Princess Leia of Hungary, would provide a career highlight for the eight-year-old Natasha King (now a successful businesswoman). Being a Curtis creation of course, Princess Leia bubbles over with cuteness – perhaps discounting her excitement at her husband being burned alive – and King’s performance was perfectly natural, just on the right side of stage-school-style excess. ‘The one thing I remember very clearly,’ she says, thirty years on, ‘is what a genuinely warm-hearted and very considerate cast and crew they were to work with. In particular, aged only eight and with my front teeth missing I was over the moon to receive a bouquet of flowers when filming finished from Rowan Atkinson – it did wonders for me in the playground!’
Other actors to create a number of reincarnations throughout
Blackadder
’s history were Bill Wallis, a Cambridge contemporary of Peter Cook’s who would get caught up in the slipstream of the satire boom, singing ‘Alan A’Dale’ for
Not Only But Also
and providing voices for
Week Ending
during Lloyd’s tenure and
H2G2
(alongside Jim Broadbent and a whole host of fledging members of British comedy acting royalty) before debuting in ‘The Archbishop’ as Sir de Boinod, one of two drunken knights thirsty for the unholy Edmund’s blood. Barbara Miller, a wonderful comic actress who truly embodied
Blackadder
’s performance ethos of ‘more is more’, also made her first appearance as one of the three witches (alongside Gretchen Franklyn)
who hail Edmund King, besides playing Edmund’s claimed wife during his witchcraft trial. She would return as
Blackadder II
’s Wise Woman and even have an uncredited cameo as the old crone in
Blackadder’s Christmas Carol
before her death in 1990.
The influence of
The Young Ones
is tangible in
The Black Adder
’s wealth of eccentric cameos and supporting roles – in the last episode, Edmund’s villainous Black Seal is entirely made up of great comedy actors, including
Young Ones
regular Roger Sloman as Three-Fingered Pete. The Oblivion Boys, Mark Arden and Stephen Frost, made their first appearances in the show playing themselves as blockheaded guards in much the same way that they’d popped up as policemen in
The Young Ones
episode ‘Boring’. Perhaps the most eccentric minor character was that of the regular roly-poly Messenger, played by young actor David Nunn, who’d had a few small roles in
Not
. Where the pilot’s Messenger, Rudkin, had been a straight servant, Nunn’s clumsy herald was an absurd pain in the Black Adder’s neck, prone to mirroring his masters’ actions for no apparent reason other than to annoy them – with no discernible cause, the usually charming Prince Henry reserved a specificfiery detestation for the chubby envoy
fn19
.
The greatest example of
The Black Adder
’s debt to
The Young Ones
came, of course, with Rik Mayall’s guest spot in the final episode – once again, uncredited, just as he had been with Kevin Turvey: ‘I had my name taken off the credits because I was addicted to this form of performance where the audience thought it was genuinely happening.’ There was less chance of this with his appearance as Mad Gerald. The character’s role essentially was a) to get on Edmund’s nerves while at his lowest ebb, and b) to give the anti-hero some way of escaping imprisonment and a slow death by snail – but within those parameters, from the moment Rik showed up on set, he was in charge of the creation of Mad Gerald. This was the first time that Rowan and Rik could size each
other up in collaboration, and see whose brand of humour would win the day.
fn20
If Rik’s rotting prisoner of Philip of Burgundy was an ancestor of Lord Flashheart, then phenomenal amounts of sexy genes must have been introduced in the intervening decades. Barely recognisable in a shock wig, with massive false teeth and caked in red-raw make-up, Mayall provided the ultimate test for Atkinson’s eternally irritated Prince: a stinking presence which could rival the medieval Baldrick’s descendants, a penchant for rats and that endless inane laugh – all, according to John Lloyd, of his own invention. ‘Rik insisted he rewrote all his lines, which is why, when he appeared, he wiped the floor with everyone else – because he took over his scenes.’
The same episode featured the last great guest spot in the series, with Patrick Allen stepping into shot from his narrator’s chair to play the Black Adder’s nemesis: the Hawk, Philip of Burgundy. Originally he was to have enjoyed far more screen time, disguising himself as a messenger to tell the King and Queen that Edmund had beheaded himself in a bear trap, causing clever Baldrick (who found work as a guard) to complain to Percy, ‘I think we may be victims of someone else’s cunning plan!’ Despite his ex-servant’s quick wit, however, in every version of the script Edmund – though eligible for the throne for only a few moments before idiotically poisoning himself – ends up horrifically mangled in Philip’s torture machine, and the Black Adder’s machinations are finally ended.
Thanks to the leather-and-mahogany tones which made Allen’s fortune,
fn21
Lloyd could not have found a more perfect voice to relate the facetious historical background to every episode, introducing the
entire legend of
Blackadder
from the very first shot: ‘History has known many great liars …’ But historical comedy was nothing new to Allen, who had filled the same narrator role for two historical
Carry On
s –
Don’t Lose Your Head
and
Up the Khyber
. His physical presence for the finale was equally apt: in his long career he’d had roles in a number of historical TV thrillers of just the kind that they were lampooning – indeed, his experience went back far enough for him to have featured in the
Errol Flynn Theatre
anthology series in the fifties, providing a solid link between Atkinson and his inspiration.
May His Name Last as Long as Our Dynasty!
Patrick Allen’s vocal stylings have become such an eerily ubiquitous part of British culture that it’s easy to forget how they defined the cod epic approach of
The Black Adder
. Several years later, the idea of him using that authoritative, strident voice to read out complete nonsense was hijacked by Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer for every episode of their first BBC series, and from there he could be heard belting out non sequiturs for an endless succession of shows and products – or rather, in many cases, it was a soundalike stealing his style, for shows like
The X Factor
, with the sad result that Allen’s bombastic tones can still be heard some years after the one and only original died in 2006, at the age of seventy-nine.
Complementing Allen’s narration was, of course, Goodall’s theme music. The melody and style had come to Howard back in 1982 when he was first given the brief for the pilot: a strident, galloping slice of orchestral derring-do which could have graced the credits of any serious historical epic. There was work required to fine-tune the theme for the series, however. ‘With a producer like John Lloyd, his instant reaction is to say, “Give it a try, how bad can it be?” Once we had a tune that everybody liked, it was a question of rearranging and finding other ways to do it … It was mock-heroic. In fact the “horse’s
hooves” part of the tune I wrote without the chorus for the pilot. I took it into a BBC rehearsal room, and played it to John, and he said, “It’s all right, but it needs a middle bit, it feels like it’s just the first phrase going round and round. What would it be if it was the same rhythm as the word “Blackadder”? So I just said, “What about this?
Duhduhduh, duhduhduh
…” and he said, “Yeah, that.” It was kind of instantaneous.’ Curtis joined the pair in the pub and added lyrics, perfect for priming the audience for half an hour of thrilling swashbuckling: the sound of hooves, the deadly flashing blade (a reference to the badly dubbed sixties French series called, of course
The Flashing Blade
), and many a cunning plan. Goodall wasn’t just briefed to pen the theme, though, and provided the soundtrack for every episode – far from being incidental music, his pastoral pastiches and melodramatic organ stabs energised every cunning plan, conveying as much information and emotion as every twist and turn of Atkinson’s simpering face.
Bringing together all the footage for the audience’s laughter, however, was a sizeable feat even for a master of editing like Lloyd. ‘We never finished on time, so we had to pick up the next week and it got longer and longer. It took months and months to edit.’ Whole sequences had to be cut – in ‘The Archbishop’ there are numerous scenes with the Plantagenet family suffering through boring sermons and King Richard raging from the pulpit at the funeral of the Archbishop he’s just killed. ‘They were all very over-length and very difficult to edit down to size,’ Curtis says, and Lloyd confirms, ‘We showed the first two episodes to BBC Light Entertainment, and they said, “I dunno, is it funny? It’s very good, but it seems rather scary … do you think it’s funny?” We said, “Yeah, we think it’s really funny, but it’s not meant to look, like,
obviously
funny …”’ Tony Robinson claims to have felt less confident at the time. ‘I think we all knew from the beginning that the first series was pretty dire, but it was a bit like a production line, in that once you’ve started it off, you can’t just stop it right away. Everything was booked, you just had to go through with it and make it as good as
you could. And if you think about it, no one had made the kind of historical comedy half-hour series that Richard and Rowan had got in their minds, and it wasn’t until we’d started work that we could actually see what worked and what didn’t.’ ‘My theory,’ Curtis counters, ‘is that no matter how hard you try on sitcoms, out of six episodes two are good, two are all right and two are weak.’
The finished series debuted on BBC1 at 9.30 p.m. on Wednesday 15 June 1983, and the
Radio Times
heralded the sitcom and Atkinson’s new character (‘the scummiest toe-rag in the great basket of human history’) with a special investigation into the new-found Chronicles by Lloyd himself, establishing the lore of the Blackadder family. Lloyd has always been keen to shape the packaging of every project with his name on it, from press fluff to comical credits, here listing the cast ‘In Order of Precedence/Affability/Witchiness/Disappearance’ and concluding with the Hollywood-ribbing ‘Filmed in Glorious TELEVISION’. Not for the last time, there was an unexpected episode switch to worry about as well, with Lloyd having to make the decision to swap the unready scene-setting second episode ‘Born to Be King’ with ‘The Queen of Spain’s Beard’, despite the opening narration providing a date for each instalment, making a bigger nonsense of the already nonsensical historical context.
It was a knuckle-gnawing summer for the whole team as their show entered British homes, lined up for judgement by critics both professional and public. Curtis admits to snooping around the suburbs of Shepherd’s Bush peering through windows at half past nine to see whether people were watching his creation or not, whereas Atkinson was saved from such embarrassing behaviour by already being in Australia on a promotional tour. Maybe the biggest impact on Atkinson of having his first sitcom starring role was that it finally forced him to officially change his occupation to ‘comedian’ on his passport, and admit that his dreams of staying out of the spotlight were officially dead: ‘I tried to maintain “engineer” as a career for as long as possible,
mainly for insurance policies. You have
no idea
of the quantum leap in the premium when I made the change.’
As was clear from the readers’ letters in
Radio Times
, varying from ‘Superbly brilliant, side-splitting, fabulous, hilarious and very, very funny’ to ‘Utter rubbish – Rowan Atkinson’s facial contortions made me feel physically sick’, the reaction to
The Black Adder
tended to be quite violently split between approval and disgust at the show’s perceived blasphemy, lewdness and general ‘undergraduate humour’. John Lloyd rightfully bridles, ‘Anyone who’s been in comedy will tell you sooner or later, somebody says, “Oh, undergraduate humour, I see.” You mean, people who have been to university type humour? “Yes, that’s right, toilets and all this kind of stuff …”’ There may have been a number of laughs squeezed out of nether regions in the show, McInnerny concedes, but ‘You have to have a couple in each episode to make a bedrock of laughter, on which to build the intellectual gags!’
Blessed says, ‘I remember with
I, Claudius
, the first write-ups were quite derogatory. And within a week, they said, “Ah! I can see the style!” and apologised that they got it wrong. And I was in tears of laughter to see a review programme the night after the first
Black Adder
episode was shown, and they just thought it was a disgrace! Unfunny, silly, immature, and absolutely substandard. It’s making me laugh now, the shock on their faces … It was terribly misunderstood.
The Black Adder
has a magic of its own. It’s somehow more vulnerable, and varied in a strange way.’
‘We were very proud of it when we did it,’ Lloyd says today, but the general verdict on the historic first series has always tended towards the derisory from all concerned – largely in order to more grandly praise the series yet to come. Everyone has had their theories as to why it wasn’t the immediate hit that Atkinson’s reputation in 1983 – and of course, the unprecedented cost and ambition of the production – should have delivered. Much has been said about the lack of a live audience, which Lloyd feels ‘meant the cast had no focus. Rowan is used to performing
to an audience; that’s what edits his performance and makes it real.’ Atkinson himself feels that it was a kind of hubris: ‘We were flattered to find someone willing to spend a lot of money on the project and got a little carried away. Instead of the three sets and five actors you get with the average sitcom we filmed in snowdrifts around Alnwick with a large cast, sixty-five extras and a dozen horses. It was misguided, naive thinking on our part. Someone should have slapped us down and said “No”, because it didn’t really work. The action got in the way of the humour.’