The True History of the Blackadder (39 page)

The Cavalier Years
was only a small footnote, a few months after
Blackadder the Third
, not in any way eclipsing the Regency comedy’s popularity with the public, and the characters of Blackadder and Baldrick remained much the same – in fact, Tony says, ‘All I remember about it is the damn wig, I was fighting the wig for the entire recording. It was the wig of the oldest hippy in the world.’

So resonant was Edmund’s Regency incarnation that the 1990 ITV sitcom
Haggard
, following the antics of a despicable squire with a grotty servant, came in for criticism for aping
Blackadder the Third
, even though it was based on a character created by the journalist Michael Green more than a decade earlier. Similarly, media myths about an uncredited American ‘remake’ of
Blackadder
, the short-lived 1992 CBS sitcom
1775
, centred on comparisons to
Blackadder’s
third series more than any other, through historical necessity if nothing else. Ryan O’Neal starred as cowardly Boston innkeeper Jeremy Proctor, with a stupid lackey called Bert and a regular customer in a twittish British governor played by Jeffrey Tambor – plus Adam West as George Washington. But this Proctor is a pretty decent family guy surrounded by sassy daughters, so even if the show had been a hit, there would
be no grounds for Atkinson to sue. Another US show to be dubbed ‘the American
Blackadder
’, 1998’s
Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer
, fared even less well, with only four episodes broadcast detailing the ‘hidden history’ of Chi McBride’s eponymous character, a black English lord who becomes valet to Abraham Lincoln (and who also has a dungball for a lackey). The show was rapidly pulled after mass complaints about slavery gags, as well as a scene in which Lincoln pioneers sex chat via telegraph, but the episodes that do survive have more of a flavour of
Blackadder the Third
than any other
Blackadder
.

So no US equivalent of
Blackadder
ever took hold,
^fn17
but the four series remain popular among comedy connoisseurs in the USA, not least thanks to Atkinson’s encouragement to the ex-colonies to buy the real thing, back in 1988. Interviewed for the programme’s first run on the A&E channel, he suggested, ‘Certainly from series two onwards, the hero is quite a cool character, and most English comics or comic heroes are not cool at all, they’re kind of gimpy, middle-class suburban put-upon husbands and putting-upon wives, uncool characters. Whereas Americans I think like their comedians to be quite cool – Eddie Murphy and Steve Martin – all these kind of guys, they’re cool, they’re in charge. They get into sticky situations, but they get out of them in a fairly cool way. And Blackadder is a pretty hard, cool, cynical character.’ He also assured colonial viewers that there was still more to come, revealing plans for a Victorian series four, before a fifth series in the twentieth century. ‘We are already projecting actually, we’re doing a Christmas special soon in which we momentarily look into the future of The Black Adder, and we see Frondo Blackadder, who’s dressed like some kind of ice warrior with lots of muscles and long black ringlets of hair, who has basically killed everyone else off in the universe and is having a very good time in AD 3000. I think there is a major future for the Black Adder.’

^fn1
In which Vyvyan Basterd’s ‘History of the World’ claimed that after the Vikings’ exit, ‘The world was now a pretty boring place apart from a few wars, and even some of those were about stupid girly things like roses.’

^fn2
And also co-author with Curtis and Simon Bell of the 1987 book
Who’s Had Who
, a guide to famous infidelity, well worth a reprint.

^fn3
The eventual seasonal lucky dip contained input from Curtis, Atkinson, Lloyd and Fry, though items such as ‘The Young Ones’ Nativity’ nearly caused the book to be uncharitably pulled from shelves, thanks to Christian pressure groups.

^fn4
A
Spitting Image
protégé of Lloyd’s, Enfield’s rise was augmented by the support of two witty neighbours, East Anglia University dropouts Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson – their plastering work on a house in nearby Dalston, occupied by Stephen and Hugh, led to the creation of zeitgeist-collaring monster Loadsamoney. Hugh admitted, ‘They were so funny that it actually made me think, “Well either they’re really funny or I’m just simply not, and I ought to now become a plasterer.”’

^fn5
With Rowland Rivron, they had just completed their own joint
Comic Strip
movie,
Mr Jolly Lives Next Door
, taking their ‘Dangerous’ chemistry into even darker territory as two hideous alcoholics, neighbours to Peter Cook’s titular blood-spattered hitman who is hired to ‘take out’ Nicholas Parsons.

^fn6
Elton in turn invited Corbett to revive his armchair monologues on
The Ben Elton Show
, following in the footsteps of Spike Mullins and David Renwick by penning Ronnie’s shaggy-dog stories himself.

^fn7
Comic Relief
provided a brief hiatus during the run – some proceeds from all the performances went to the charity.

^fn8
Where he originated the aged characters of the unworldly Professor Donald Trefusis and the wistfully barking Rosina, Lady Madding.

^fn9
Completing the connection, while performing at the Edinburgh Fringe with the
Radio Active Roadshow
, Helen had befriended Ben Elton, there as part of his Mayall tour, ‘in an airing cupboard during a game of sardines’.

^fn10
Six years later, Coltrane would finally get a chance to put more meat on Johnson’s bones, with John Sessions joining him as Boswell for a BBC2 dramatisation of their
Tour of the Western Isles
.

^fn11
From Murdoch’s takeover of
The Times
to David Steel’s 1981 exhortation to the Liberal faithful to ‘Go back to your constituencies, and prepare for government’ being mangled as Edmund’s order to Baldrick, ‘Go back to your kitchen sink, you see …’

^fn12
Mossop & Keanrick’s painfully repeated superstitious incantation, every time the impertinent butler says ‘Macbeth’, has been a bone of contention for a quarter of a century, even being misquoted on DVD subtitles, but let the record show that any thespians hoping to exorcise Scottish demons should say the following before tweaking each others’ noses: ‘
Hot potato, Orchestra stalls, Puck will make amends!’

^fn13
He also provided the voice of the notorious Shadow, modelled on James Mason in
The Wicked Lady
– the 1945 film that inspired the episode.

^fn14
Fry & Laurie popped up in the first series, as a moral vacuum of a City boy and the waiter he reduces to destitution.

^fn15
Besides Atkinson himself, echoing the plot’s ‘duality’ and keeping the Scottish bloodline alive by guest-starring in a pre-recorded sequence as Mr B’s equally crown-coveting Highland stereotype cousin MacAdder.

^fn16
Not including Harry Enfield, who gets his one
Blackadder
credit as Patrick Allen’s stand-in for the historical introduction.

^fn17
Although many felt that a French spin-off was discernable in the 1993 film
Les Visiteurs
, its sequels and remakes, all following the time-travelling antics of a medieval knight and his filthy servant.

Parte the Fifth:

LIONS LED BY BASTARDS

IN THE AFTERMATH
of Mr E. Blackadder’s alleged usurpation of the Hanoverian throne, little evidence is given to suggest that the family benefited from the ruse, and the nineteenth century saw the descendants of ‘George IV’ snaking off into disparate, more lowly areas of society, often as awkward cogs within the almighty mechanism of British Imperialism. Besides obscure references to non-eminent engineers, physicians and scientists, pictorial evidence has been discovered of a likely family member in the Empress Victoria’s service at the Indian Raj, but who this was and what cunning plans they were cooking up behind the scenes remains a mystery (although a Dr Blackadder is also cited as being present at Victoria’s death). One popular black sheep of the family was music-hall performer ‘Elegant Eddie’ Blackadder, but no footage or notation of his celebrated song ‘Let’s Shove, Shove, Shove (a Bayonet Up a Frenchman)’ has survived.

The only remaining book of substance in the Blackadder Chronicles covers the final years of rather a lowly descendant, a Captain Edmund Blackadder (18??–1917), whose war diaries form an extensive part of the last Chronicle. But what was it about this middle-class officer that marked him out for such emphasis in the family history? When the Archduke of Austria–Hungary got shot in 1914, a relay of international aggression was unleashed which resulted in the untimely deaths of a still incomprehensible 35 million people, so even though the Blackadders had a reputation for cowardice stretching back for centuries, why should the sacrifice of this one obscure officer have become such a major event for the Chronicler?

The Captain’s war diaries, after all, contain little to turn the accepted history of the Battle of the Somme on its head – the official record admittedly places the conclusion of action on the Somme in 1916, but it is still the case that most World War I front-line operations inspired tales of suffering, filth, incompetence and tragedy, and Blackadder’s is no exception. The odd stray unswallowable detail may be littered throughout his memoirs,
^fn1
but Captain Blackadder generally paints a picture that is by now the largely accepted image of the horror of trench warfare in World War I.

There are historians who seek to deny this consensus, to argue that the Great War was not only inevitable given the balance of power between the royal houses of Europe in the early twentieth century, and therefore beyond lamentation, but that Field Marshal Douglas Haig (who
was
actually known to friends as ‘Dougie’) has been libelled by generations of military historians, who have portrayed him as tantamount to a heartless strategic simpleton. Blackadder’s primary source would be no help to these revisionist historians – for once, the Blackadder take on history chimes entirely with the accepted version. The military record contains such startlingly bestial displays of insanity in that environment (from the well-documented and widespread shooting of innocent shell-shocked men, or even teenage boys, for ‘cowardice’, to court-martialling soldiers simply for refusing to wear a helmet) that nothing the Captain could invent could be more mind-boggling than the truth. Some innocent conscripts, executed on the strength of Earl Haig’s signature, have only begun to receive their pardons now, one century later.

Lies, however, remain central to the mysterious figure of the Captain himself. He claims to have been a professional soldier for fifteen years by the time of his arrival at the Somme in the autumn of 1914, and
yet this soldier’s one badge of honour, his reputation as the Hero of M’Boto Gorge, receiving the Military Medal for ‘selfless action in blowing up a heavily defended mango dump when under fire by a hail of wortleberries’ (also described by some military historians as ‘massacring the peace-loving pygmies of the Upper Volta and stealing all their fruit’), was alleged to have taken place in 1892, seven years before he joined up, while the Chronicles insist that he entered the army in 1888. Given that he could have been no younger than fifteen at the time, that would put him in his mid-forties at the time of his apparent death in 1917 (neither he nor any of his named fellow soldiers were mentioned in dispatches, or ever identified among the dead).

A Lt Blackadder was also quoted at the Battle of Rorke’s Drift, dying with the words ‘Oh, just keep the bloody place then!’ on his lips, so the family had experience of the Anglo-Zulu war, but clouds of mystery still surround the details of M’Boto Gorge – which is another way of saying that no geographer, cartographer or military historian has ever heard of the place. It’s possible that military code disguises the battle’s real location, but the only lead we have is the suggestion that the young Edmund became hero of the hour by saving the life of Haig (then only a squadron commander) from a native with ‘a viciously sharp piece of mango’. Haig’s biographers may quibble with this suggestion, due to him beginning his soldiering in India, where he spent most of 1892 – it would be several years before his infamous career took him to the Sudan and, by the turn of the century, fighting in the Boer War, both possible battlegrounds for Blackadder’s brave fruity encounter with the junior officer. The open-minded historian can only surmise that the dates in Captain B’s war diaries were smudged and mud-spattered, and the Chronicler simply took a punt.