The True History of the Blackadder (41 page)

‘It’s not very legitimate because I never sent it to Ben,’ Richard admits. ‘It was begun in 1988, and then abandoned for fear that it would cause too much offence … On rereading it, I suspect it was also abandoned because it’s like a strange mixture of
Fawlty Towers
and
Life of Brian
– both of which are too good to measure up to. So we returned to Dickens.’

Having decided that ‘Ebenezer Blackadder’ would be visited by a spirit which showed him previous Blackadder incarnations – bar
The Black Adder
, which was already considered best forgotten, especially given the time constraints of a special only extended by fifteen minutes – Lloyd was faced with the perennial problem of reuniting his team of in-demand stars, and it was to prove a bigger headache than ever. McInnerny was still shy of returning to sitcom, so the writers knew to
work around the absence of any Percys, but even then, the programme would need to be recorded on separate evenings just to accommodate the plot’s scope, and on a tight schedule – with the finished episode in that year’s Christmas
Radio Times
, BBC1, 9 p.m. on the day before Christmas Eve, less than a fortnight after the recording.

So there would be less room for plumpening and argument than before, but that didn’t mean the writers’ original scripts would reach the screen untouched, as the unedited version of Hugh’s jovial introduction alone would show:

In the reign of Good Queen Vic, when little boys lived up chimneys and caring mothers drank four bottles of gin for breakfast, there stood in Dumpling Lane in Old London Town, the moustache shop of one Ebenezer Blackadder – the kindest and loveliest man in all England. Here is the story of what happened to him one very special Christmas …

For all the dramatic time constraints, with the writers’ plan to revisit two past Blackadders as well as creating two brand-new ones ramping up the pressure, the best cast imaginable was assembled to bring the life-changing visions of Christmas to life. The New Zealand-born sitcom stalwart Denis Lill was reincarnated from the crusty Sir Tolbert Buxomley in ‘Dish & Dishonesty’ into the fat Beadle;
^fn3
Patsy Byrne of course returned as Nursie as well as creating Bernard, her far-future descendant; Robbie Coltrane made his last guest-star turn par excellence as the Spirit of Christmas (a hairy giant who might have caught the magpie eye of writer Jo Rowling when she began to construct Hogwarts, inspiring the lovable caretaker Hagrid); and the greatest coup of all had to be the reunion of Miriam and Jim, once again displaying the most preposterous accent in the role of Albert to Margolyes’s pitch-perfect Queen Victoria. ‘I played Victoria subsequently in a documentary
about the restoration of the Albert Memorial,’ she says, ‘I’m fascinated by her, always have been, and I’m the same size and shape as she was …’ As another Dickens fanatic, it would have been unthinkable to leave Miriam out of the proceedings, not least as this time she got to play a syrupy fun-bundle with only a hint of the gorgon. Add to these returning players all-new wonderfully revolting turns from Comedy Store veteran Pauline Melville as Mrs Scratchitt and
Dr Who
pin-up Nicola Bradbury as Ebenezer’s irritatingly loud Godniece Millicent, and it’s little wonder that the forty-five-minute episode required three nights of recording to get in the can.

The flashbacks to the days of previous Blackadders was perhaps made more of a challenge by the change of director, with Mandie’s tenure ending, to be succeeded by budding sitcom director Richard Boden
^fn4
. The tension between producer and director remained, however, John admits. ‘When we got Richard Boden on board, we went to the pub and I said, “Now look, Richard, we’ve done three series now and it’s a success and you’re lucky to get the job – if you want to do it, the deal is, if I say I want a two-shot I don’t want to argue about it, is that OK?” And he said, “Absolutely, John, of course, I quite understand and I’m pleased to be asked.” A very nice, decent, civilised guy, Richard. And then on the first recording, in the camera rehearsal during the day, about two hours in, I said, “Richard, you know, shot 37, that should be a two-shot with Baldrick in the background if you don’t mind.” And he said “Oh, so you want to direct this, do you …?” “Richard, can you come into my booth …?” He got up, and I said, “I won’t say this in front of the crew but the answer to your question is yes, I do want to direct it and if you don’t do what I ask without fuss, I
will
.” And I never heard another peep out of him! It’s a long-suffering job and he did it extremely well. It was frustrating for the directors, because they wanted
the power, and they weren’t going to get it from me. I would consider myself the representative of the group, I would say, “Nobody is working for me, I am working for the programme and I am the programme’s representative on Earth!” It’s a priestly role, it’s an intercessor. It’s not an ego thing. All three were very nice, competent, good directors – but they walked into a room full of arrogant lunatics who wanted their way! It must have been awful for them. I’m sorry, guys!’

Editor Chris Wadsworth was still a crucial part of the crew, abetted by Lloyd’s eye for painstaking editing, snipping out the tiniest exchanges to keep up the pace and squeeze everything in.
^fn5
One sequence to receive a special slimming-down was the vision of Christmas Yet to Come, to tone down the writers’ (and Lloyd’s) understandable excitement at getting to spoof the worst excesses of the science-fiction genre. Note the switch of the name ‘Frondo’ to Stephen Fry’s preposterous intergalactic aristocrat, and the excised reference to TV colleagues Geoff,
Only Fools
producer Gareth, and Alan:

A splendid reception chamber from the furthest reaches of time. Four mighty figures stand in state
.

The conclusion to the special proved especially tricky to pin down, once Ebenezer is returned to his rightful villainy, with a number of alternative endings being included in the studio script. When the reformed shopkeeper has sent away Victoria and Albert more offended than they have been in their entire lives, the writers suggested either a cheeky way to turn the Blackadder–Baldrick relationship on its head:

Or alternatively, with Baldrick displaying the Queen’s royal seal to prove to his master what a mistake he has made, there was a more convoluted but traditional display of seasonal violence from the newly despicable moustache vendor:

Ultimately, the producer decided to freeze the action at Blackadder’s moment of realisation, and leave Baldrick’s inevitable punishment to the imagination.

It was an incredible feat of comedy production to get this complicated special ready to broadcast to the nation’s eggnog-sated families, but they watched in their millions with great approval as Advent drew to a close – the Black Adder worming his way into the nation’s hearts even during the season of goodwill. Which makes it all the sadder that every subsequent broadcast of
Blackadder’s Christmas Carol
capitulated to a minority of complaints about one of the funniest exchanges, as Baldrick details the pitfalls of recasting the role of Baby Jesus in the workhouse nativity play with a frisky dog named Spot – Blackadder’s kindly concern for the orphan audience originally received Baldrick’s chirpy reply, ‘Nah, they loved it! They want us to do another one at Easter – they want to see us nail up the dog!’ ‘I have a lot of experience of being right on the edge of bad taste,’ Lloyd says. ‘I flatter myself that I have a good-taste meter, I know
exactly where the line is. And I can almost guarantee that in rehearsal I would be saying, “This is too strong, it’s going to upset a lot of people and we’re going to have complaints,” and Ben saying, “Don’t be so pathetic, Jack, it’s just a gag.” God knows how it got through the censors – I think because there was no censorship, there weren’t compliance people. So it probably went through on the nod and then got a
lot
of complaints … It’s breathtakingly cruel and very dark. And you don’t just get the Jesus lobby, you’ve got the dog lobby as well!’ Nonetheless, besides the unpleasant taste in the mouth which is inevitable when artists bow to viewer complaints, be they for reasons of animal cruelty or blasphemy, the swift edit required to cut the end off Baldrick’s line has always stuck out like, well, a giraffe in dark glasses trying to get into a polar bears-only golf club. That the gag remains excised from the DVD releases is one reason why the
Blackadder
box set’s ‘Ultimate’ branding has a faint whiff of humbug.

One other planned festive treat has remained safely locked away in the archives: to accompany the Christmas special, Curtis, Goodall and Robinson collaborated on a Christmas single, along the lines of ‘Grandma, We Love You’, entitled ‘Baldrick, We Hate You’, complete with cherubic choir singing abuse to the stinking guttersnipe as he revels in his repulsiveness. There was a time when sitcom spin-off singles were not unusual – Steptoe & Son, Manuel and Mr Humphries all made assaults on the charts – but Goodall recalls that it was decided that Baldrick’s song was just too much for the British public. ‘It sort of died a death. No one would allow us to do it because it was very rude, although it wouldn’t seem that rude now. I think it was mainly suppressed because it wasn’t very good.’

Soupy Twists and Turns

Despite their absence from
Friday Night Live
, Fry & Laurie’s live sketches had cemented a professional partnership which seemed to
have crept up on Stephen and Hugh despite their close friendship, but which was seen as a done deal to everybody else. The Fry & Laurie brand, as it were, had a sophisticated but frequently outrageous charm all of its own, and they were more than ready to take on the decade’s other young TV double acts, Smith & Jones, French & Saunders and Hale & Pace, as they strove to plug the holes left by the tired Two Ronnies, feuding Cook & Moore and much missed Morecambe & Wise. When the BBC finally learned from their mistake in pooh-poohing
The Crystal Cube
and offered the chaps the chance to pilot their own vehicle, the pair decided to outdo their competitors in one crucial area, as Hugh recalls: ‘We just decided that we were going to write them all. All the other sort of sketch shows that were around at the time were all more or less being written by the same people, and so we felt that the thing we have going for us, if we have anything, is that this is personal, this is our personal view of the world, it’s not a corporate machine that’s just sort of generating thirty minutes of a sketch from here and a sketch from there, and these two guys will put on funny moustaches and do it … There are lots of times when we didn’t make anyone else laugh, but we were always amused by ourselves.’ This belies Dawn and Jennifer’s gleefully slapdash creation of their own world in
French & Saunders
, and Victoria Wood took the crown for her solo authorship of every episode of
As Seen on TV
, but with their joint moulding of
A Bit of Fry & Laurie
the Footlighters had finally stepped out of the script-producing shadow of the whirlwind Elton. After a successful pilot in ’87, much of the following year was spent with the two of them cursing into a word processor, but between sessions Hugh was settling down with new wife Jo and starting a family, while Stephen was in the West End making his first appearance in a Simon Gray play,
The Common Pursuit
, with Rik Mayall playing a firebrand narcissist to Fry’s gentle academic. Although he claimed never to have seen any of these young stars’ TV shows, Gray would develop a particular attachment to Fry, casting him in the central role
of his 1990 TV play
Old Flames
, alongside Simon Callow and Miriam Margolyes, playing curious siblings.