The True History of the Blackadder (32 page)
fn3
Not that everyone in the room on that comedy time bomb of an evening was ecstatic – somewhere in the crowd was nineteen-year-old struggling street performer Eddie Izzard, who took one look at the bright young things on stage and vowed that he would be up there himself one day.
fn4
They were beaten in the final by Merton College, Oxford, in a cerebral mirroring of Hugh’s Boat Race experience.
fn5
Who described the protégé’s sudden ubiquity as ‘a whole cupboardful of Stephen Fries all doing things’.
fn6
It was while recording a surreal commercial for Whitbread bitter, dressed up in military garb with excrescent moustaches, that Fry first encountered a pre-Percy McInnerny, playing a minstrel.
fn7
On leaving the producer’s chair, he was presented with his own hideous Fluck & Law caricature, which eventually found a home in Curtis’s garden as a particularly horrifying scarecrow.
fn8
Whose housekeeper happened to be the unseen ‘Mrs Miggs’.
fn9
Which featured, among myriad comic turns, Hugh Laurie being date-raped by Dawn French’s character Amanda in only his second sitcom appearance.
fn10
Ben was to dub John ‘Mad Jack’ for the passionate, epic nature of his annotation, which sometimes extended beyond the length of the scripts themselves.
fn11
‘We could probably have made a fortune by creating lots of bits of green and selling them to the public,’ rues McInnerny. ‘Maybe I could still do that now …’
fn12
‘He lived rough, he talked rough, he wore … a ruff’.
P
ARTE THE
F
OURTH:
THE GEORGIAN BASTARD
WHILE IT’S NOT
surprising that Ned, the Lord Blackadder, sired bastard issue, it does seem unlikely that any kind of continuity in the Blackadder inheritance should have been possible. With Ludwig in drag on the throne, no Blackadder heir would have dared to claim their title, and so there is no notable clash with monarchy for much of the early Stuart reign, until the ennoblement of Sir Edmund Blackadder by Charles I.
The Blackadder Chronicler not only insists that Sir Edmund was the Privy Counsellor, Royal Master of Revels and a close friend of King Charles, loyally hiding him from his enemies, but also that he was his friend and monarch’s executioner. Once again, the mysterious historian has seized on one of the greatest questions in British History and answered it – there is no official record of who severed Charles’s head on a freezing January morning in 1649. When the chief executioner Richard Brandon publicly refused to behead his King, the streets of London were scoured for an anonymous replacement, with two masked men being paid £100 for the job. Although the most likely suspect remains Brandon himself (letting it be known that he refused to commit regicide, but then doing it anyway), Sir Edmund Blackadder may as well join the roll-call of the accused.
Sir Edmund’s confession to betraying the infant Charles II and cosying up to Cromwell did not apparently dent the dynasty’s standing in the restored court – perhaps because Charles II was actually nineteen at the time of his father’s beheading. The Chronicles even insist that a dukedom was conferred on the family in the reign of Queen Anne, and yet little is told of the Duke, or why the title was so short-lived –
and indeed, the next head of the family to be extensively biographised was nothing more than
Mister
Edmund Blackadder Esq. (1762–1830), butler to the Prince Regent in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He could lay claim to being a gentleman but, although closer to the seat of power than any of his ancestors had been in centuries, he was no nob. Volume XIV of the Chronicles, which details the exploits of ‘Mr B’, still qualifies for its claim to be ‘a giant roller coaster’ of a story (this is the first known use of the term in the English language) because, as well as being ‘crammed with sizzling gypsies’, the narrative also describes how this Blackadder finally achieved what Prince Edmund only managed for thirty seconds – he took the crown.
The scandalous assertion that King George IV was a Blackadder in borrowed robes is perhaps the Chronicles’ most audacious, perverted and stupid claim of all. Even in the twenty-first century, George IV easily won a BBC poll to find the most hated monarch in our history, beating King John and Richard III thanks to a life of gorging himself on the nation’s wealth. So why would any Blackadder lie, to claim such infamy for themselves? Admittedly, an impostor taking on the duties of Prince George would have had to behave as like the pampered epicure as possible, but after centuries of waiting for a Blackadder to rise to power, and despite the Chronicles’ ludicrous suggestions that this ‘George IV’ ‘started the British Museum, the National Gallery, the Police Force’ and ‘legalised trade unions’, the fact remains that this Blackadder, if the rumour is true, proved to be a very bad king, leaving the worst legacy possible.
The chronology of his mooted usurpation makes for one of the most tangled webs of impossibilities in the entire saga – the Chronicle places Pitts the Elder and Younger in direct succession as Prime Minister, while surrounding the great Dr Johnson (whose Dictionary was first published seven years before George’s birth) with Byron, Shelley and Coleridge – a prospect akin to H. G. Wells crossing Abbey Road with the Beatles. They also heavily suggest that this Blackadder was the
same age as his royal master, born in August 1762 – but if the two had even a passing resemblance, Mr B must have been of the ‘extremely rotund’ school of butlers. Everything about George Augustus, Prince of Wales, was rich and bloated. Escaping from a childhood of sadistic austerity imposed on him by his father George III, who then cruelly prevented him from pursuing his dream of a military career, ‘Prinny’ could only rebel by diving into a life of excess, becoming celebrated and pilloried for his passion for life’s richest bounties, with an egregious penchant for food, wine and laudanum, outrageous military fashion and amply girthed ladies,
fn1
not to mention a bad reputation for gilding everything in sight in his ruinously expensive architectural projects, especially his home for much of his life and Regency, Carlton House.
That famed mansion was pulled down by George (or Edmund) himself in favour of Buckingham Palace in 1825, however, and there are no existing records to show that an Edmund Blackadder was ever in the Prince’s retinue. Prince George had a number of extremely close aides throughout his life: Colonels Gerald Lake and John McMahon were both prized private servants, entrusted with the Regent’s most secret affairs – paying off mistresses, bribing publishers to throw unflattering cartoons on the fire and so on – but both were father figures to the Prince, not contemporaries. Either the butler Blackadder knew too much for his existence to be known to the general public or, of course, the first thing he did when taking his master’s place was to destroy all evidence of his former life (his dogsbody S. Baldrick was immediately sent to Australia), only revealing the truth to his own bastard offspring for posterity on his deathbed.
The ostentatiousness of the proposed usurpation is heightened by the suggestion that the real George was shot by the Duke of Wellington – a war hero and future prime minister who was on record as a staunch
opponent of duelling. If their duel took place before the Battle of Trafalgar, as is claimed (Trafalgar being a battleground allegedly suggested by Blackadder himself), then Arthur Wellesley would still have been several years away from becoming a field marshal, let alone a duke. By this time Prinny had been compelled to marry and impregnate – and subsequently become instantly estranged from – the equally repellent Caroline of Brunswick, and their only daughter, Princess Charlotte, would die in childbirth a few years after the official start of the Regency. With no issue from ‘George IV’ therefore, Blackadder may have made himself King, but failed not only to secure the throne for his family, but even to raise the bastards he had sired to their previous nobility.
The evidence certainly mounts up to support the suggestion that Volume XIV is the biggest load of untruths in the entire Blackadder Chronicles, and Justin Pollard agrees. ‘There are two main stumbling blocks to entering this particular volume of the Blackadder Chronicles into the accepted historical record. Firstly, and as is the case throughout the Chronicles, we are presented with the fact that none of the Blackadders central to the narrative appear in any other official documents – at all. This is despite the Hanoverian household being remarkably well recorded in every other respect. Secondly, our assessment of the source material is hampered by the fact that the curator J. H. W. Lloyd will only allow his fellow historians access to the document if they agree to be blindfolded and heavily sedated. I did, however, find the section on “sizzling gypsies” strangely gripping.’
Convincing stuff – and yet it’s hard to suppress a slight chill of doubt when some details of George’s behaviour later in life are brought to light, unbecoming in any prince and not at all in character for the gluttonous despot which people think of in Gillray’s cartoon, sneering over his voluminous belly and picking gristle from his teeth. Despite the infamous exotic opulence of the Brighton Pavilion, which was George’s main passion in later years, the Regent was said to enjoy
secretly dressing as a butler, with a flair for baking bread and expertly carving a joint to share with his servants in their own quarters, down below the sumptuous banqueting halls. As
Niles Weekly Register
reported in March 1819, ‘We are assured that, a few nights ago, the Regent, in a merry mood, determined to sup in the
kitchen
of the pavilion … The whole of the servants, and particularly the female part, were, of course, delighted with this mark of royal condescension!’ Were old habits hard to shake off for this frustrated impostor?
fn1
Young George illegally married the positively circular Catholic Maria Fitzherbert at the age of twenty-three, and went on to have a number of aristocratic lovers of the ‘Rubenesque-plus’ variety.
C
HAPTER 4
BLACKADDER THE THIRD
It’s no life for a man of noble blood, being servant to a master with the intellect of a jugged walrus and all the social graces of a potty.
It must be a source of eternal befuddlement for Richard Curtis that he has so often been identified as the sole instigator of Comic Relief, when a great number of people worked together to make it the institution it has become – not least Peter Bennett-Jones, roped in early on to bring his organisational flair to bear; promoter Peter Crossing, who dreamt up the red-nose motif; Alan Yentob, who brought the idea to BBC TV; and especially Jane Tewson, who was the real visionary. In setting up Charity Projects, she was taking the
Secret Policeman’s Ball
benefit concept to its charitable conclusion, creating a fund-raising business that aimed for funds first, and worried about the most deserving recipients of the aid later. In the wake of
Live Aid
, with the human tragedy unfolding in Ethiopia and the Sudan unavoidable throughout UK media and Bob Geldof already a scruffy, saintly icon, Tewson’s old Oxford friend Curtis pledged to help out with the charity’s next step. ‘It was a horrible mistake to start with, in so far as Jane was a friend
of mine and was asked by Save the Children, I think, to go out to the Sudan because she ran Charity Projects … I offered to go with her, just as a friend, because I was sort of instinctively interested in it, and I thought that she could do with the company.’ In the end, the charity sent Jane elsewhere, leaving Richard bound for war-torn East Africa at Oxfam’s expense, ‘sent off with no purpose or plan to Ethiopia for three weeks’. While on the road between Addis Ababa and Desei, Curtis amused himself with the idea of Cliff Richard duetting with his number-one fan, Rick, and the rest of the Young Ones. The tragedy Curtis found around him required many remedies, but it was clear that extra injections of cash for relief supplies could only do real human good – and who wouldn’t pay to see a duet like that?