The True History of the Blackadder (36 page)

Forming the third corner of what Hugh calls Edmund’s ‘cretinous triangle’ was, of course, Baldrick, devolved further from his wily original, with class separation finally making his relationship with his dark master more of a double act than ever, underlined by the increase in violence shown towards the stinking subordinate. Tony says, ‘Baldrick puts up with all the physical and mental torture that he receives from Blackadder because he thinks that’s the way of the world. He suffers pain and he accepts it because that’s what people do to people like Baldrick. He doesn’t notice it most of the time. It takes a long while for pain to get from any part of his body up to his brain, and by the time it gets there it’s tired, and doesn’t really register very much.’ For all his deepened idiocy, this generation’s Baldrick continued his surprising ability to play
deus ex machina
when the plot called for it, easily rounding up a lynch mob to save Blackadder from being filled with lead. This incarnation also introduced a burgeoning rebellious side to the downtrodden guttersnipe; with revolution in the air, ‘Sod Off’ Baldrick becomes keen to mutiny against the ‘lazy, big-nosed, rubber-faced bastard’ who keeps him subdued with his wit, and fists – even though he soon realises that he cannot cope without him.

The dogsbody’s increasing repulsiveness in reverse trajectory to the improvements in human sanitation over the centuries was down to the make-up artists Ann Fenton and Victoria Peacock, to whom Tony paid tribute in his one-man show in 2007. ‘You might be thinking
he slapped a bit of brown on his face, thirty seconds, easy. But you’re forgetting Baldrick’s boils. They were created by the make-up artist the night before we recorded each episode, on her kitchen table at home. Basically she got a little round plastic ball of modelling putty and she got her thumb and put it in the middle of the ball, and then she’d tease and squeeze out the top and put it onto the kitchen table so it looked like a little pink bowler hat, then she’d get this sticky yellow stuff and squeeze it into each of the holes, stick a needle in the bottom so that a little bit leaked out and it looked like it was weeping. It was fairly disgusting – in fact during the entire run of
Blackadder
, her husband refused to eat off the kitchen table. But then we’d go into the studio, and she would glue these things onto me, which I suppose was fairly sensible, except we finished taping the show at ten o’clock, the BBC bar closed at ten thirty. At ten past ten, Stephen would be up in the bar with a gin and tonic in his hand regaling his adoring fans, Hugh would be playing the piano, Rik would be
under
the piano … at twenty to twelve I would still be in the make-up room desperately trying to claw off these boils, dying for a drink! But I did get my retribution in a kind of way, because during the rehearsals for each episode, Rowan would discover that he’d got reams and reams of over-elaborate dialogue to learn. I had about seven lines. And they would be going “rabbit rabbit rabbit”, and I’m thinking “what do I say next? Oh yes, I remember: three, two, one …
I have a cunning plan!
” It was easy!’ However, he continues, ‘I think one of the useful things about Baldrick in that series is that he provides a breathing space. Everyone else is talking at nine hundred miles an hour in the most dazzling vocabulary, using words that often most of us don’t understand, or think you may understand but aren’t
quite
sure you know what they mean. And then in comes Baldrick – much slower tempo, much less to say, whatever he says, you’re going to get it. And I think that helps you to feel comfortable about the series – it’s certainly how I felt being in among all those dazzling minds in the middle of rehearsals!’

The central cast then was slimmer than ever, but a third regular set was needed, unless every plot was to somehow unfold at the Prince’s home. In eighteenth-century London, the natural place for a man about town like Mr B had to be the coffee shops where the cream of society’s thinkers, roisterers and artists would meet, plot, and debate the hot topics of the day. Finally, Elton’s mysterious Mrs Miggins, the paraplegic Elizabethan pie-shop owner – or rather, her descendant – would graduate from being an off-screen funny name into an on-screen funny character. A regular female role was a must, and although by this stage any comic actress would have been glad to join the
Blackadder
team, there was a natural candidate for the role, in Rowan and Richard’s long-standing collaborator Helen Atkinson-Wood.
^fn9
Besides being part of the team on the ill-fated adult
Tiswas
spin-off
O.T.T
., Helen had only had small roles in shows like
The Young Ones
and
The Comic Strip Presents: Consuela
, and
Radio Active
was still two years away from transferring to BBC2 as
KYTV
, so when Lloyd contacted her to propose the regular role, she admits, ‘I think I probably said, “Yes please” before he actually got to the end of the sentence.’

Blackadder II
did of course boast its own well-seasoned female dullard, but Atkinson-Wood was trusted to bring to life her own tribute to the toothless fishwives and frilly grand dames of Georgian fiction. ‘Parts for women were so thin on the ground that it was tremendous to be one of the few,’ she says. ‘There was Queenie, and Nursie … and then who? The women brought a different texture to
Blackadder
. Mrs Miggins was a very warm-hearted character: different from Blackadder, who was so oily, and different from Baldrick, who was … well, fiddling with his turnips; and different from the Prince Regent, who was so barking!’ Being the only other regular female on the core team besides the director gave Helen an insight into the difficulties of Fletcher’s
position. ‘It was a pretty exposing place for Mandie, being surrounded by all these people who knew each other well, very hard for her to hold the whole thing together – which she did brilliantly – surrounded by a lot of very strong personalities. The gender is immaterial, but it was very nice for me, having another woman around.’

‘Helen of course had always been part of the gang,’ Tony says, ‘just as Helen Fielding always had, so working with her didn’t feel strange in any way. We were criticised quite a lot at the time for using what was called “the Oxbridge Comedy Mafia”, but there was a real issue here, which was that because we didn’t make acting decisions until very late in the day, people who weren’t used to working that way could be dreadfully insecure – like Wilfrid Brambell. You don’t want to duplicate that experience very often, because it just takes too much time. So actually if you worked with people you knew, there was no aggravation, there was no problem, you weren’t having to deal with their anxieties, they knew something would come out of it at the end of the day.’ ‘Why work with anyone else, other than the people that you know and like? If you’re in a room with people you’d be perfectly happy to be on holiday with, the whole thing just bowls along in a blissful way,’ Helen adds.

‘I don’t think she was originally going to be a Northerner, on paper, but my roots are in the North, and I’m a great lover of cooking – it’s no coincidence in a way that Mrs Miggins was the ideal character for me, given that I love pies and cakes and buns … I think in another guise I’d be president of the WI.’ Besides her Cheshire upbringing being a help in playing ‘a no-nonsense, Northern character’, the attractive actress had a history of portraying the most grotesque crones imaginable in the name of getting a laugh, so the whole team knew that the role of Mr B’s hostess, the hideous nincompoop who could be relied on to buy into every new craze that the period threw up (not just spearheading that week’s plot but giving the butler another chance to pour scorn on the times and her personally), was in good hands. In time, Miggins would
have a cult of her own. ‘I still receive tons of fan mail for Mrs Miggins, and it just constantly amazes me, the fan base that’s out there. So much so that I think I’m going to have to start thinking about opening a cake or pie shop, in the not so distant future.’

T
HE
W
ALRUS
A
WAKES

The first time this new team entered the ‘Hilton’ to bring Ben and Richard’s scripts to life, Atkinson-Wood recalls having ‘that Christmas-morning feeling in your tummy. Comedy and laughter, we all feel better for it, so it is a great thing to be around. It’s not like you’re going in to rehearse Ibsen; you’re going in to have the time of your life.’ Ultimately, however, the process wouldn’t be such a breeze. At this stage, the scripts still followed the Elton pattern of having simple titles – ‘Dictionary’, ‘Actors’, ‘Rotten Boroughs’, ‘Highwayman’, ‘Scarlet Pimpernel’ and ‘Duel’, in that order – but it wasn’t until after recording that Lloyd, the master packaging expert, had the brainwave of giving each episode Austenian monikers, from ‘Ink and Incapability’ to ‘Duel and Duality’. It’s one more way in which the series had more of a workshop feel to it than any other, and John admits, ‘Sudden changes of direction like this, right up to the very last minute, were commonplace. They brought both unforeseen delight, and perennial problems.’

As ever, this way of working was highly testing for all the guest performers, but if any of them were up to the challenge, it had to be Robbie Coltrane. Keen-eared viewers of ‘Chains’ may have been perturbed by one insistent grating guffaw from the audience – a sound not unlike a pirate forcing someone to walk the plank. This was Coltrane, supporting his
Alfresco
comrades in their new venture, and it was no surprise that he was to become one of the extended
Blackadder
family, with two memorable roles. However, the week of pernickety rehearsals for ‘Dictionary’ left him little time to really get under the skin of the noted man of letters, Dr Samuel Johnson. This first story to
be recorded was in a way the spark for the whole series, inspired by a visit to Robbie Coltrane’s one-man show about Dr Johnson – as Elton recalls. ‘I can remember Richard saying, “I’ve had a great idea. Did you know it took Dr Johnson twenty-five years to write his Dictionary? How about he finishes it, lends it to Blackadder, Baldrick puts it on the fire, Blackadder’s got a weekend to rewrite the Dictionary?” And I just thought, that is such a brilliant conceit. A lot better than writing three knob gags, which is what I was sort of trying to do.’ Curtis says that the scripts were bound to be considered open to suggestion when he admits, ‘With Ben and me it was absolute bliss, because you could be irresponsible, you could be a lazy writer. You could say, “Well, I’ve got some scenes here but I don’t really know how to make the plot work.” And you’d basically give up on the plot and write some funny stuff. Or you’d get the plot right, but put in brackets “Must be lots of jokes about a party here.” So each one would be like a challenge to the other person to fill in the bits that you hadn’t bothered with.’

However, the writers never bargained for the battles awaiting them – and with such a literary plot, the text was to be debated more than ever. ‘People fought for their patch!’ Laurie says. ‘Nobody just toed the line and stood where they were told to stand and did what they were told to do, everyone stood up for themselves and for their characters. Let’s just say it was very free. “Just read it out!” Richard said …’ At such times, as Fry puts it, ‘Richard, who finds it very hard to be anything other than extraordinarily nice, would look slightly miffed, which for him is like a real temper tantrum, and then we’d start again.’ McInnerny remembers that in his time, ‘Richard was there all day every day, writing, rewriting, taking it on the chin when everybody said, “Well, that’s not very funny though, is it?” You weren’t allowed to rewrite it, Richard always rewrites.’ And Tony adds, ‘John, Richard, Hugh and Stephen conduct themselves in a very affable way and when they talk about
Blackadder
now it all seems like it was a bit jolly: slightly sticky sometimes, but basically fine. I don’t really remember it quite like that, it was
hard
. Everything took a
lot of work, every day, huge numbers of ideas would go by the wayside. The tension that there was between the writers and the performers was that we had gone too far in excising stuff that they thought was very good – because the writers would be there on day one and not back again until day five. And the further we went, the more that tension grew.’ He argues, however, that it was an inevitable part of the show’s growing popularity. ‘By the time we got to series three,
Blackadder II
had been such an enormous success that I don’t think it weighed heavy on us, but it gave us a great deal of confidence, that our vision for how
Blackadder
could be was right. So we just worked very, very hard on making it as perfect as we possibly could. By that time, I don’t think any of us could have articulated it, but we knew what felt right.’

As a result, Lloyd regrets, ‘Robbie had this huge part which he had to learn in the last few hours really, because we never got the script perfect until late. But what we didn’t do with him was think of what his character was! He’d come in and do the lines, and somehow make something of them. He never complained about it though, he’s such a nice bloke.’
^fn10
‘That was always the lot of any actor who came in to play the supporting roles, if one can describe it as that,’ Atkinson adds, ‘that they had very little time or rehearsal, and they had to sort of cope. And Robbie coped extremely well!’ By the Sunday-night recording on 5 June (with warm-up this time provided by Clive Anderson, in Elton’s stead), the cast may have been flying by the seats of their breeches, with rudimentary scene-blocking and improvised physical business, but every one of the episode’s memorable slews of linguistic nonsense was perfect to every syllable – ‘compuntious’, ‘contrafibularatories’, ‘interphrastically’ and so on, Blackadderisms designed to drive Johnson mad, described by Rowan as ‘Complete codswallop, and yet you can see the Latin or Greek roots of all the words.’