The True History of the Blackadder (50 page)

Despite the popular estimation of Curtis as a romantic comedy writer fit to stand alongside Nora Ephron, Woody Allen and Neil Simon, he says, ‘I didn’t know what a “romcom” was! It wasn’t like it is now, a form which every young actor has done three of. I thought I was writing an idiosyncratic, autobiographical film about a group of friends, with a bit of love in it … but it transpired it was a textbook romantic film. Then I
did
write a textbook romantic film with
Notting Hill
, but then it was because I wanted to; I’d always wanted to turn up at a friend’s house with Madonna. Then
Love Actually
was a kind of joke with myself, trying to write ten of them at once.’

From Dibley to Gasforth

Not content with becoming the UK’s most successful screenwriter in 1994, a few months after
Four Weddings
’ release, Curtis’s first solo sitcom debuted on BBC1. With the long overdue ordination of women vicars by the Church of England becoming official in 1993, French & Saunders were the first comics to capitalise on the news, with a sketch in which Dawn donned the traditional garb of dog collar, bad teeth and dandruff – and as Saunders had recently launched her own solo vehicle,
Absolutely Fabulous
, French was the ideal star of Curtis’s new series, even if it took the natural clown a long time to accept what was for her a relatively straight role.

During the usual interminable relay of wedding Saturdays, Curtis had reflected on how women registrars seemed to be far more suited to the job than crusty old male vicars, just as he felt that it was the women in his life who had steered him through his most emotionally fraught
periods, and he decided that if he could do something to further the cause of women priests, he would. The eccentricities of his own rural Oxfordshire home had already struck him as ideal sitcom material, and marrying the two ideas presented him with his first domestic sitcom set-up, after years of rejecting anything remotely cosy in favour of death, battles and rewriting British History.

Like the majority of the
Blackadder
team, Richard had no religious faith to inspire his new venture, telling the
New Humanist
in 2007, ‘I stopped believing before university. This is going to sound facile. But I thought if God is worth worshipping then he must be at least as intelligent and knowledgeable as my own dad, and yet Dad would always forgive me for the mistakes I made. There is no way in which he would look at all the pressures and temptations on a person and then still say that he should be punished. So I thought, well, either God doesn’t exist or he is thoroughly nasty, in which case I am not interested in worshipping him.’ But
The Vicar of Dibley
’s brand of Anglicanism was more concerned with humanist charity than theology, and as the years went by, the series would double as a mouthpiece for the writer’s social conscience and campaigning spirit. Curtis has also admitted that
Dibley
was a specific reaction to years of perfecting Blackadder’s lip-curling cruelty. ‘I was very interested in writing about the problem of niceness. A lot of sitcoms are about nasty people losing their temper a great deal. And I think most of us in life come across more comedy by attempting to be nice; we’re endlessly caught attempting not to offend this relative, or that person, making arrangements we don’t want to make, going to places we don’t want to be … You write a play about a soldier going AWOL and stabbing a single mother and they say it is a searing indictment of modern British society. It has never happened once in my entire life. Whereas you write a play about a guy falling in love with a girl which happens a million times a day in every corner of the world and it’s called blazingly unrealistic sentimental rubbish. It has always been that way. Nobody has really written anything intelligent
about Shakespeare’s comedies. People prefer to write about tragedies because they can’t get to the bottom of happiness or comedy.’

On the other hand, being presented with a flock of such incredible freakishness as the pillars of the Dibley community (Hugo the lovable posh dimwit, Jim the stutteringly negative geriatric babe magnet, Owen the creepy livestock lover, Frank the world-beating bore and Mrs Cropley the creator of the Marmite chocolate cake), French’s Reverend Geraldine Granger still filled the Blackadder position of being the relatively sane centre of a ridiculous world, perhaps sharing the weight of the inanity with the right-wing head of the parish council, David Horton. It’s surely forgivable, however, to see the greatest
Blackadder
echoes in the relationship between Geraldine and her sweet but utterly brain-free verger Alice Tinker.
Blackadder
obviously has no monopoly on stupid sidekicks, but it would be no surprise to see Emma Chambers’s Alice cropping up in Baldrick’s family tree.

It would be wrong to over-egg the
Blackadder
comparisons, of course, not least because, having set up his new situation in the pilot, Curtis was quick to bring in new co-writers to help him pen the programme, including Kit Hesketh-Harvey and, above all, Paul Mayhew-Archer. Besides remaining loyal to radio production (helming both
Radio Active
and
I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue
), Mayhew-Archer was a mainstay of family sitcom, with mainstream fare like
Nelson’s Column
,
An Actor’s Life for Me
and
My Hero
on his CV, and for most of
Dibley
’s thirteen years of existence, he and Richard developed such a seamless partnership, a kind of invisible collaboration where Elton’s work with Curtis had been explosive, that it became impossible to tell who had written what.

Perhaps one of the few remaining
Blackadder
parallels, as with
Mr Bean
, was the musical input from Goodall, whose reputation grew as he complemented his career as a composer by moving in front of the camera, as the authoritative but playful presenter of his own programmes, including
Howard Goodall’s Choir Works
and
20th Century Greats
. Having specialised in devotional music, his rearrangement of ‘The Lord Is My Shepherd’ for
Dibley
came naturally, but as the maestro for a wealth of shows including
Red Dwarf
there was little he couldn’t turn his hand to, so it was natural for Ben Elton to turn to Howard when he needed a jolly, whistled theme tune for his solo sitcom venture,
The Thin Blue Line
.

It had been the best part of a decade since Elton had created a new sitcom, but since
Saturday Live
his TV work had gone from strength to
strength, with his stand-up vehicle
The Man from Auntie
lasting for two series, despite a jocularly acknowledged loss of credibility after standing in for Terry on the early-evening chat show
Wogan
. As a writer, although his novels continued to appear with insouciant regularity, the nineties had seen a new career as a playwright bloom for Ben, with Laurie perfecting his insufferable yuppie businessman persona in 1990’s
Gasping
, in which executives attempt to corner the market in designer oxygen. In 1991, Elton finally got his chance to craft a role for Dawn French, as the eponymous gossip columnist in
Silly Cow
,
^fn4
and in the following years his novels
Popcorn
and
Blast from the Past
would both successfully be adapted for theatre, the former receiving an Olivier Award for best comedy. His new sitcom in 1995, however, was a concerted return to traditional light entertainment. ‘I wanted to write a sitcom I would enjoy to watch, and although I love
Seinfeld
and
Frasier
, and gritty abrasive stuff or whatever, my favourite of all is
Dad’s Army
– although I’m not so arrogant as to think that I can write something like
Dad’s Army
.’ On the other hand, he adds, ‘I don’t know whether it’s traditional, there’s a lot of stuff in it that isn’t.’

Elton would never have had any trouble interesting the BBC in a new sitcom, but as Fry suggests, the one crucial ingredient would be its star. ‘Essentially, all you have to do is go in and say, “It’s a sitcom for Rowan Atkinson and Rowan wants to do it,” that’s the only thing you need to do to pitch it!’ After half a decade on mute as Bean, Atkinson jumped at the chance to craft a new sitcom role, taking it to the BBC under the Tiger Aspect banner (like
Dibley
before it), with Geoffrey Perkins co-producing alongside Elton, and with Rowan’s usual knack for timing,
TTBL
debuted on pre-watershed BBC1 less than a fortnight after the final
Mr Bean
TV special, in the autumn of 1995.

Examining the friction between the uniformed plods and deluded
detectives of Gasforth (a godforsaken town within the Thames Valley, motto: ‘It’s not as bad as you think!’),
TTBL
was any character comedian’s dream, but Atkinson was to be the heart of the show, even prefacing each episode with a
Dixon of Dock Green-
style monologue in series two. The mirroring of Blackadder’s status – this time, rather than being the only modern voice, Rowan played ‘an old-fashioned stick-in-the-mud in a modern situation’ – meant that there would be no mistaking Inspector Raymond Fowler for any Edmund, although perhaps his strained politeness may have had a tang of Ebenezer Blackadder. It might be taking it too far to suggest that Fowler’s anoraky bumbling made the character closer to what Atkinson could have been if he had not been famous, but he was happy to admit, ‘I liked the part immediately because Fowler is a man with some amusing contradictions. He has to live in the modern world but he wishes it was different. Fowler rings bells with me, I can identify with his point of view … The common link between my parts is that they are establishment – soldiers, vicars, policemen – which must relate significantly to my upbringing. You can believe in the establishment but, by gum, there’s a lot to laugh at about it.’

Initial moans from critics expecting instant
Blackadder
levels of brilliance centred on the sitcom’s reliance on broad humour and innuendo in the Croft & Perry vein, and also the unoriginal setting, but Elton argued, ‘In comedy the obvious is often very good. You’ve got a vast wealth of background knowledge of television police stations that have gone before. You don’t have to establish anything. It’s just a sitcom full of completely flawed and fumbling but basically decent people … Thank goodness Rowan said yes. I’m always at it like a terrier, but he’s more selective about what he does.’ The humour’s broadness was of course deliberate, and it certainly struck a chord with the average 11 million viewers who tuned in.

Just as he had slipped
Dad’s Army
references into
Goes Forth
, there was a certain level of homage to the classic in
TTBL
’s central cast.
Fowler’s pomposity of course put him in the Captain Mainwaring role, while his begrudging comradeship with CID boss Derek Grim made the latter reminiscent of ARP Warden Hodges, with a parallel pairing of two mutually loathing leaders who are both on the same side.