The True History of the Blackadder (35 page)

These diverse frenzies of career progression did not make it easy for Lloyd to regroup the usual suspects for the third incarnation of Edmund Blackadder. He recalls, ‘We had two-year gaps between series and at the time of
Blackadder II
none of us had many strings to our bows – apart from Rowan who was red hot at the time. However, between series two and three Ben had
Saturday Live
, Richard had Comic Relief, I’d done
Spitting Image
… The net effect was that we had bigger egos and were more used to having our own way, so we were much more reluctant to surrender any territory.’

Nevertheless, Richard and Ben had already found time between rhapsodising about Stock, Aitken & Waterman to settle on the next period for their comedy, doubling the distance between series to leapfrog the seventeenth century entirely. Moving on so dramatically allowed for an entirely evolved British society to send up – although Robinson insists that the choice of Regency England was a brave one. ‘I think my favourite series is
Blackadder the Third
. Partly because of Hugh’s performance, but also because I think it’s so audacious to create a six-part comedy series about a period of history where virtually none of the viewers can remember anything about that period!’

For much of the Georgian era, this concern would make sense – from the dramatic end of the Stuart reign to the late eighteenth century, the nation boringly fermented under Hanoverian rule, with each German George less interesting than the last, but by the latter years of George III’s reign, so many revolutions were afoot – Industrial, American and French, to name but three – that few periods of our history could have contained such rich material for
Blackadder
. From
The Madness of George III
to
The Scarlet Pimpernel
, the cusp between Georgian and Victorian Britain has always been such a magnet for dramatists that the writers needed to do little to no research to bring a bewigged Blackadder to life. Also, as with the previous two series, they could
draw on yet another BBC costume drama, as Peter Egan had portrayed the infamous ‘Prinny’ in 1979’s
Prince Regent
.

Because in the Regency period, where would Blackadder be but as close to the Regent as possible? With both writers as devoted to P. G. Wodehouse as they were to Kylie, the fresh epoch inspired a central set-up indebted to the Master, making their anti-hero the Prince’s closest retainer. ‘What I think it did was that it made it a very different dynamic,’ Curtis says. ‘You could have had it about the King and then Blackadder would have been a Lord again, and we’d have been back in the same situation that we were in before. It’s the whole Jeeves thing, isn’t it, the idea of somebody actually being much cleverer than the person above them.’ ‘Rather than being a lone wolf as he was in the first series,’ Elton adds, ‘it made life easier to actually give him a position, it meant we could find things for him to do. He sort of dropped a class every time, from royal to courtier to butler to sort of lower-middle-class officer. He’d have ended up a trade union leader if we’d done the 1950s!’ Fry continues, ‘The fact is, a lifetime of prep school, public school, prison and Cambridge had given me, and most of us, a tremendous acuity when it came to the nuances of British class and hierarchy.
Blackadder
worked the way it did because someone was at the top and someone was at the bottom and there was a real threat of punishment or death. And as in Goldoni and Ben Jonson, you don’t always find that the one on top is the smart one … that tradition connects all the way up to Jeeves and Wooster too, of course.’

Robinson believes that the butler Mr B’s world was a step towards Lloyd’s ambition for simplicity, and containment. ‘I think one of the things that we were always striving for in
Blackadder
was more focus, more discipline, really to concentrate on every single little joke, every scene, every concept. So
The Black Adder
goes hurtling all over the place, loads of extras, loads of horses, loads of characters. Series two is reduced from that, but by series three, that was the time when I really felt that we were focusing on what we really wanted to do.’
Where previous series had taken cues from Shakespeare, there was an equally celebrated vein of Restoration and Regency theatre to inspire the new show, with sesquipedalian verbiage aplenty, and a tradition of complicated farce, from the French. ‘I don’t think we consciously crafted these supposedly “brilliant” playwright-type structures,’ Lloyd says, ‘but we were certainly trying to make
Blackadder
more than a mere extended sketch. We could see that, if he was a butler, for example, he’d have a different attitude, a different turn of phrase and so on. Those things are taken on board and to some extent dictate the action … In the first series he talks like a lord; butlers don’t talk like that. He has to be in a different relationship, so we had to unlearn all those things and start again.’

It was established that there would be an ‘upstairs/downstairs’ feel to the new Edmund’s life, with the ineffable Jeevesian servant in Antony Thorpe’s BAFTA-nominated gilt royal quarters reverting to type by the time he reached Baldrick’s kitchens – although his reduced circumstances would, if anything, intensify his feeling of entitlement to the throne. Atkinson muses, ‘He’s got a ladder to climb, but he’s so cynical about climbing it. And he’s also cynical about those who are climbing up towards him. He’s just a fantastically cynical man. He wants the fast track, and yes – he’s trying to get up there … or at least to get out.’ It’s mildly disturbing that Atkinson has claimed in the past that Mr B is the one incarnation which most closely resembles himself, as the butler is probably the most ruthless of all Blackadders: seemingly urbane, but happy to commit or commission bloody murder to achieve his aims. On the other hand, Mr B is the first Edmund to be ‘respected about the town’, despite being just as duplicitous, ambitious and cowardly as his forebears.

One other side effect of Edmund’s lowering in status was the natural adoption of ‘Blackadder’ as a surname, which would lead to all sorts of people claiming that the character’s name came from them – but their surname is derived from Scots Border country, where the River
Adder runs, and as we know, Edmund’s darkly serpentine roots reach far deeper. Still, Tony says, ‘Blackadder was certainly a name that Rowan was familiar with, being brought up in Newcastle. Right up as far as Edinburgh I’ve seen plaques in churches dedicated to so-and-so Blackadder. They were a wealthy minor noble Borders family, stretching way back.’ Atkinson says, ‘Various men named Blackadder have erroneously been thought the inspiration, including the BBC doctor at the time that we were making the series and a “scout” at my old Oxford college, who died in the early seventies. I only became aware of the presence of the name in the Scottish Borders long after we began to make the programmes.’

It’s fair to surmise that it was equally purely coincidental that Mr B was not the first eighteenth-century Blackadder to star in his own BBC series. Nearly forty years earlier, John Keir Cross had authored a swashbuckling radio serial,
Blackadder
, set during the Napoleonic Wars, in which the mysteriously villainous figure of the pirate/spy Blackadder looms large (this Blackadder was, it can be assumed, no relation).

As ever, frugality was important to the sitcom’s creation, and so the main set, above and below stairs at the Prince’s home, Carlton House, would house George’s enormous entourage, slimmed down to just two, Blackadder and Baldrick – Edmund and his two ‘friends’ recreating
The Frost Report
’s ‘Class Sketch’ trio two hundred years early. However, as the show’s set-up was beginning to take form, Edmund’s original first ‘friend’ informed the team that he was out – Tim McInnerny insisted that Percy’s bloodline had to be ended. ‘I didn’t want to get stuck with being seen as this one character. However ground-breaking it is, it’s still a sitcom.’ When publicising the movie
Severance
in 2006, the actor explained, ‘The genre doesn’t actually make a lot of difference to me, as long the character’s interesting and has a journey and the acting’s a challenge, that’s all I’m concerned about. The jobs I don’t want to do are the jobs that are easy. When I get up in the morning to go to work, I want to be excited and also a bit scared about whether I’m going to
be able to do what I’m required to do that day. And I want to feel that every day.’ Before
Blackadder II
’s burst of popularity, McInnerny had managed to balance his comedic and dramatic careers, with a critically acclaimed role in
Edge of Darkness
helping to make his name even before recording
Blackadder
’s second series. Percy’s popularity, however, had begun to weigh him down, as he discovered when playing Hamlet for the National Theatre. ‘We did lots of school matinees, and I had to win them over. They thought they were coming to see Lord Percy … The idea of it being fun, and friends together making something, you know, that we’d enjoy even if other people didn’t, had snowballed into such a huge success that I felt it was getting in the way of the public’s perception of me, and my perception of myself as an actor, and I didn’t want it to overpower other things I was doing.’

This was a disappointment for Lloyd at first. ‘When I heard that Tim wasn’t going to do it, I thought, “Oh dear, this is a bit of a disaster,” because he’d become so much a part of the second series, and if Tim had wanted to do the third series, and had he been free, he might well have played the Hugh Laurie part. In some ways, Hugh’s character is a sort of Percy, similar sort of twittish type.’ But with Fry nannying
Me and My Girl
on Broadway, there was nothing more perfect than for Laurie to step into the sitcom ‘family’ – and the fact that he was a tall wiry actor portraying one of British History’s most ridiculed human balloons would be entirely ignored. ‘I was conscious of filling the great Tim McInnerny’s shoes,’ Hugh says, ‘and in comic terms, he takes a size – He’s very big-footed, comically. I suppose George was sufficiently different, rather than being a sidekick of Blackadder’s, the dynamic was different.’ ‘I thought it was brilliant,’ Tim happily returns, ‘and it worked terribly well – it wasn’t the same as Percy anyway.’

Laurie had always specialised in playing repellent Middle Englanders in the past, or anyone with a stupendously silly accent, but his first chance to give an extended performance of inbred aristocratic idiocy would land him with a certain level of typecasting trouble himself
in years to come. ‘Hugh’s Prince Regent should be celebrated more,’ Elton says, ‘I mean, a truly brilliant performance of a foppish Regency idiot.’ Curtis agrees: ‘When Hugh plays stupid, there is nothing behind the eyes. I think we took Percy, who hadn’t been clever, and scooped out the final teaspoonful of brains, and presented Hugh Laurie. That utter thickness was something that was fun to put Blackadder against, and different from Miranda’s sort of dangerous childishness.’ ‘It’s that utter sort of gullibility,’ Atkinson says, ‘the perfect sponge for whatever anyone says. Anyone can take him in any direction at any one time. He has no resolution of his own. In the hands of the Blackadder, he is complete putty.’ ‘Underlying all this stupidity,’ Robinson adds, ‘there’s a desperate loneliness; the reason why I think he craves Blackadder so much is that it’s somebody who’ll talk to him on a level that won’t make him feel too threatened, even though Blackadder is manipulating him shamelessly.’

Hugh was also to bring with him an air of modesty stretched beyond breaking point into neurotic pessimism which, allied with Atkinson’s perfectionism, would only escalate the team’s exhausting obsession with ‘plumpening’ every script into perfect shape, to Elton’s admitted chagrin. ‘They got into overanalysis, but you’d have two actors, Hugh and Rowan, and I know they’ll forgive me for saying it, but they were both very, very intense people, you know, the two of them together could get very gloomy about things and talk themselves into a great deal of a “This is awful, we’re awful, who are we kidding?” sort of world. Particularly Hugh, but I think Row would always go along for the ride.’ ‘Hugh wears his heart on his sleeve; he doesn’t conceal anything. If Hugh is nervous or depressed you see it, it’s all over him,’ Lloyd affirms, adding, ‘I remember saying to Hugh in rehearsal one day, “Why aren’t you a world-famous actor? You’re so good,” and as he does, Hugh said, “Oh, I’m rubbish …”’ and Robinson laughs, ‘Hugh would be beating himself up, going, “Oh God, oh God, I’m so unfunny, I’m the least funny person in the world!” They must throttle him on
House
, mustn’t
they?’ However, he continues, ‘What we had always concentrated on was getting the work right. Nobody was more po-faced about the work than we were. Virtually all of us thought we were the worst thing in it. Stephen thought he was rubbish. He’s probably right! Hugh thinks he’s the least funny person in the entire world. Miranda always felt she was an outsider. What a bunch of neurotics.’

Elton had learned to minimise his time at rehearsals to avoid dealing with the ensuing contretemps when Laurie would attempt a line only to pull a face and carp, ‘Do they actually read it back once they’ve written it?’ so Curtis had to be the one to take the blows and rework the lines accordingly. ‘He’d often speak to Ben on the phone in the evenings,’ Lloyd remembers, ‘saying, “I’m so fed up with what they’re doing, they’re making a mess of it.” And then when the show would come out eventually, Ben would ring Richard and say, “I can’t understand it, it seems exactly the same!” He’d forgotten the details. Ben’s got a rhinoceros skin – if it’s getting funnier, Ben likes it. He’s not precious.’ It was Lloyd’s job to maintain diplomacy, but he admits, ‘The majority of the second series’ scripts were extraordinarily good, despite them having utterly different writing styles, but later on the first drafts wouldn’t be very good. They’d be cobble jobs of Richard’s fluffy sentimentality, all fluffy teeny-weeny-nosey, and Ben’s whacking great huge arse gags. I’d be going through the scripts, saying, “I think this knob gag’s too rude,” and they’d both be, “Well we like it,” and I could see in their faces that they’d had a conference beforehand – “Ben, that knob gag has got to go.” “Well, if I can’t have my knob gag you can’t have your fluffy gag!” My role was in smoothing out their writing styles in rehearsal so the end result would seem like the work of one writer.’ This did on occasion lead to rescripting entire scenes himself. ‘If I write, I’m generally doing a technical job. For example, in
Blackadder the Third
, Blackadder wants to stand for a rotten borough and become the MP for Dunny-on-the-Wold, and I said to Richard, “Most people won’t know what a rotten borough is so you’ll have to explain
it – but for God’s sake, don’t make it a boring history lesson.” He said, “Well, how can you do that? It’s just boring – ‘A rotten borough is …’” So I went home that evening and wrote that scene where Blackadder goes on about the electorate being a small dachshund called Colin, and the Prince Regent, confused as usual, going, “What about this robber button, then?” and doing chicken impressions. It’s a neat piece of technical writing, going from A to B, very enjoyable to do, and in the pleasure of doing it these things occur to you – we’ve got to say that rotten boroughs had very few electors so you just exaggerate that …’