The True History of the Blackadder (40 page)

Other historians would beg to differ, however, and Professor Pollard is one of them. ‘One of the defining characteristics of this section of the Chronicle for me is the copyright symbol and legend “Property of the BBC” which appears at the top of every page much in the way
one might expect if the Chronicle were actually a BLOODY TV SHOW. I shall be dealing with this and every other historical travesty promulgated by these frankly fake Chronicles in my new book
The Blackadder Chronicles: The Anatomy of an Historical Fraud
.’

Like Pollard, some historians question the validity of Blackadder’s experiences on the Somme front line altogether or, even further, the ultimate conclusion that the sacrifice made by hundreds of thousands of British soldiers in No Man’s Land was a travesty, and an avoidable tragedy. However, even with a hundred years between us and World War I, to visit the final reputed resting place of the Captain in northern France, to gaze across the overwhelming lines of white gravestones stretching out as far as the eye can see in every direction, each one denoting a human being wiped out in the prime of life on the whim of the ruling and upper classes, such historical revisionism seems distastefully beside the point. When it comes to the futility of warfare, Captain Blackadder was telling the truth, if ever any Blackadder was capable of such a thing.

^fn1
There is no evidence that Oscar Wilde was ever officially the Heavyweight Champion of the World or wrote a book entitled
Why I Like to Do It with Girls
, for instance.

Chapter 5

BLACKADDER GOES FORTH

If I should die, think only this of me … I’ll be back to getcha.

As John Lloyd has established, the end of each series of
Blackadder
was the cue for everyone to go off into individual frenetic displays of creativity. Elton’s career as a novelist began with the publication of
Stark
, an Australian odyssey that took him ten weeks to get down on paper: ‘In 1988 I sort of decided I’d try and write a novel, I’d have a bash at it – that’s how I do everything, because I feel like doing it …
Stark
was my first piece of extended prose, and I found that I enjoyed storytelling very much, it gave me a chance to concentrate more on the story than the gags.’
Stark
’s setting was no surprise – when touring Down Under with Mayall in 1987, Elton had met Sophie Gare, saxophonist with the boys’ support act, the Jam Tarts, and they were married a few years later with Mayall as best man, beginning a lifelong association with Australia which led to Ben’s gaining of dual citizenship in 2004.

The tale of a farty Pom caught up in an ecological conspiracy theory was an instant hit, launching a long and fruitful career, as well as a 1993 BBC TV adaptation, starring Elton himself (although he had to audition). The continued topicality of Elton’s subject matter has
been a defining element of his career as a novelist, but he insists, ‘be it
Stark
on the environment or
Dead Famous
on the nature of unearned fame, it’s not that I’m desperate to exploit or prove my point or say something, it’s just that the stories come to me, the jokes come to me. I’m just interested in the world! I think most people are, actually …’

It Must Be Love

Richard Curtis, meanwhile, had finally made the step into cinema that he had been coveting for years. After regrettable early experiences,
^fn1
he made the decision to keep his film career as British as possible, and would go on to work closely with UK film-makers Working Title, helping to propel them from modest critical triumphs such as
My Beautiful Laundrette
to being one of the most successful production companies in the world.

Admittedly, Curtis’s first script to make it to the big screen did make some concessions to a US audience, with Jeff Goldblum given the central role and the name being changed from
Camden Town Boy
to
The Tall Guy
to appeal as far afield as possible. Despite this, he says, ‘
The Tall Guy
was not autobiographical, but pretty close to it. I wanted it to be not misinterpretable, not something that could be taken out of my hands and turned into something else. I wanted it to be just a small, acute observation of things I absolutely knew, and I think I’ve stayed in that mode.’ To that end, trusted friend Mel Smith made his directorial debut, spending the summer of ’88 shooting Richard’s personalised romance of Dexter King, the eponymous lanky Yank – a love-struck comedy stooge forced to kowtow to a self-professed ‘major comic talent’, the star of a West End hit entitled
The Rubberface Revue
,
called Ron Anderson. ‘When I first sent Rowan the script,’ Curtis says, ‘the character that he eventually played was at that point called Rowan Atkinson, just as a joke, and he rang me up and asked me which part I wanted him to play.’

Rowan had been playing around with the idea of a villainous alter ego for a long time (the programme for
The New Revue
laid all blame for any signs of ego on Rowan’s twin brother Mycroft), but nothing could be nearer to the knuckle than his fictional depiction in
The Tall Guy
. Smith explained to
Film 89
, ‘Ron Anderson is a loud, foul-mouthed, bigoted nasty person, which Rowan certainly isn’t … but he’s having a fairly good crack at it.’ ‘People will realise my part is grossly exaggerated,’ the star said, which his old partner Richard only partially backed up, admitting, ‘The only true bit was where Jeff gets sacked, and in the interval they have a party for him, and Rowan’s character produces a sort of quarter-bottle of champagne. I remember we did seventy-two dates around England, and at the party afterwards Rowan had bought one of those cherry slices that you used to get on British Rail – for eight of us …
^fn2
But I never heard Rowan shout in all the years we were together.’ Alternatively, he said, ‘The only thing in which Row was naughty during the stage show, was that he did have a lot of trouble describing it as anything but a one-man show …’ Angus Deayton once stood alongside Atkinson on Shaftesbury Avenue as they sized up the hoarding for
The New Revue
, and as he noticed that not one mention had been made of himself, despite his being onstage for most of the time, his suggestion to the star that ‘something wasn’t quite right’ was met with complete agreement – the lettering should be in green, not yellow.

Angus would eventually get some reparation via his
Tall Guy
cameo as an actor mulling over offers from Steven Spielberg while Dexter has
to make do with adverts requiring a tall American (that is, until the hero gets the title role in the musical version of
The Elephant Man
, entitled
Elephant!
), but even then he gets no actual lines in a film bristling with great cameos and comic performances, with Emma Thompson providing the main love interest and Curtis getting a walk-on/walk-off role as ‘Man Coming Out of Toilet’, besides finally having his chance to work with Madness when the band provided a surreal musical interlude performing their version of ‘It Must Be Love’ – an anarchic sequence unlike anything in Curtis’s subsequent mainstream hits.

The Tall Guy
proved to be only a minor success on release in the spring of 1989, but in the UK at least it was Atkinson’s daringly villainous turn that drew the crowds, and got many of the best lines:

Jerry Lewis’s turn as Jerry Langford in
The King of Comedy
had nothing on Atkinson’s willingness to satirise his own career, creating a monster who dresses as a gorilla to advertise chocolate, bores everyone to death about his friendship with Prince Charles and even dares to steal the hero’s girl, requiring Dexter to kidnap and imprison his ex-boss as part of a mad climactic dash to declare his love (a Curtis movie staple in the making), provoking the trussed-up major comic talent to whine, ‘This sort of shit never happened to Charlie Chaplin!’

Compliments of the Gorging Season

Atkinson’s one other major job that year was a return to theatre, playing several roles in a staging of Chekhov sketches, self-confessedly undertaken to feature in something that his mother could discuss with the vicar. But by the autumn, any thoughts that the
Blackadder
team had about a Victorian series were diverted by the upper echelons of BBC Comedy. ‘There is a sense in which a Christmas special is a kind of accolade,’ then-Controller Michael Grade said. ‘Your series has made it if you are asked to do an hour-long Christmas special. You may not do it, but you just want to be asked to do it. They did deliver in fact, which was great.’

As was understandable, considering his devotion to
Oliver!
and love of everything Dickensian, Elton was already sketching out ideas for a nineteenth-century murder mystery directly spoofing Dickens, just as Shakespeare had got it in the neck in earlier
Blackadder
s. ‘For a long time I kept thinking about a Victorian setting, with Dawn French as Queen Victoria. Like Queen Victoria, she is very small and round … ish. But unlike Queen Victoria, she is very amusing.’ Although Curtis wasn’t keen on the direction Elton was taking, he did note that there was a certain inevitability about exploring the most wonderful of Christmas-special clichés by retelling Dickens’s greatest story once again, except with one cunning alteration: ‘Again, a brilliant Richard idea,’ Ben acknowledges, ‘why don’t we play
A Christmas Carol
in reverse? Make him start off good and turn horrible. A brilliant plotting idea, and I think we wrote a great script.’ Dickens’s basic set-up of a detestable misanthrope who abuses his lackey and travels backwards and forwards in time was just too uncanny for the partnership to ignore, with the idea of Rowan playing a soft-spoken, virtuous Blackadder, sunk so low as to be barely scraping a living selling fake face fungus, being an undeniable draw.

Besides, their only other seasonal idea, Richard recalls, could have led to some undesirable controversy. ‘The
Blackadder
Christmas Special
That Never Was! Blackadder ran the inn when Mary and Joseph came by, so he put them in Baldrick’s bedroom.’ ‘Blackadder in Bethlehem’ is a very curious oddity, featuring a talking turkey which objects to Baldrick’s attempts to pluck it, a Miggins-esque sidekick called Rachel, festive entertainment featuring close-harmony shepherds, and a modern-day scene in which the unbeliever Blackadder is turned into a stuffed hedgehog by Jehovah. Besides Rowan and Tony playing Jewish ancestors of the central duo, the only other regular specifically included in Curtis’s rough script was Stephen, who was pencilled in for the first of the Three Kings.

(
They sign. One normally, one upside down, and the other with a huge signet stamp. Baldrick is in attendance
.)