The True History of the Blackadder (53 page)

The Greatest Genius Who Ever Lived

It’s difficult to gauge the success of a millennial comedy special, if only because they don’t come round very often. Reneging on the lessons learned from
The Black Adder
by taking Edmund out of the
three-camera set-up and dismissing the audience was always going to be a gamble comedically, but as fan service,
Blackadder Back and Forth
was undeniably cunning, managing to introduce at least two new incarnations of the Adder (with allusions to several more, male and female, as the sumptuous opening credits pan over Blackadders through history, from the Bayeux Tapestry to Thatcher’s Cabinet) and giving an ultimate conclusion to the Chronicles, in just two minutes short of a half-hour.

The time restrictions did require a certain amount of backstory-skipping – there’s no real explanation as to who this Lord Blackadder is,
^fn11
and why his closest friends just happen to be Lady Elizabeth, Bishop Flavius Melchett, Archdeacon Darling and some military type called the Viscount George Tufton-Bufton. Nonetheless, it is New Year’s Eve 1999 at Blackadder Hall (a portrait of the brave Captain B adorns the dining-room wall), and this Blackadder has a ridiculous bet to win, abetted by ‘the man who empties the septic tank’, temp chef Baldrick. One irksome truism about bringing Blackadder into the present day is that where once Rowan’s character was a modern voice surrounded by antiquated idiocy, his sneering at contemporary values tends to make the character more of a right-wing throwback, an establishment-supporting bounder which it’s harder to like. This Blackadder is interested in nothing but cash and sex, but gets more than he bargained for when his plan to hoodwink his friends by pretending to travel through time, collecting their chosen ancient artefacts, is spiked by Baldrick’s unwitting savantism in building an actual working machine, to the design of Leonardo da Vinci (not, sadly, Acropolis):

This device was obviously ideal for shoehorning in as much British history as possible – and for ramping up the cinematic dimension by bringing our heroes face to face with budget-slaking dangers, from an outraged T-rex (Baldrick’s trousers causing the extinction of the dinosaurs) to a
Star Wars
-referencing battle out in the distant realms of future space. Time travel had long been a particular interest of Curtis’s, and at one point there were even thoughts about making a
Doctor Who
-spoofing
Blackadder
special with Edmund and Baldrick in the Tardis, called
Doctor Whom
. This transmuted into the Comic Relief special
The Curse of Fatal Death
, a non-canonical spoof filmed at the start of the year and starring Atkinson as the ‘Ninth Doctor’, facing off against Jonathan Pryce’s Master and the Daleks – though, luckily for him, with
Julia Sawalha as his companion rather than Baldrick. As this Doctor regenerates several times in the story, the fact that both Jim Broadbent and Hugh Grant get their fleeting moments in the Time Lord’s costume may have led viewers to believe that this was a Curtis script, but the Comic Relief supremo had called in sitcom scribe Steven Moffat to write the most fanboyish lampoon imaginable, exactly a decade before Moffat took over the reins of the revamped franchise itself. The tables were turned in his first series as script editor of the show, for which Curtis provided his first completely straight time-travel tale,
Vincent and the Doctor
, an emotionally charged series highlight in which the Doctor helps Van Gogh to conquer his demons, and finally realise the magnitude of his artistic legacy. With this success under his belt, in 2013 Curtis masterminded an all-new time-travelling romcom for cinemas –
About Time
– still drawing inspiration from his original teenage heartbreak.

Moffat’s ‘timey-wimey’ shenanigans would be good practice for Blackadder’s own journey through time and space, in Baldrick’s carriage-clock-shaped time-shed. Robinson returned to Sherwood Forest as the pair bumped into Robin Hood – a Flashheart progenitor with a band of ‘woofing’ Merry Men and gay jokes straight out of
Up the Chastity Belt
. Mayall was on fine form after his difficult recovery, buoyed by the addition of a new on-screen paramour – as Curtis announced, ‘For Maid Marian we needed someone new, so we thought we’d pick the best-looking woman in Britain, nay the world,’ and model Kate Moss didn’t need to be asked twice to have the honour of joining the by now immortal
Blackadder
team.

Then came the briefest glimpse of the first-millennium equivalent of Captain Blackadder’s squalid bit of line on the Somme, as the time machine homed in on Blackaddercus, a centurion fated to die on Rome’s Northern Front:

Whether by design or not, the Roman Blackadder just happened to be placed precisely contemporary to
Chelmsford 123
, and, for Fry’s General Melchecus, even used the same trick of having his dialogue spoken in Latin – agonisingly delivered from a series of cue cards (dubbed ‘Intelligent Person Boards’ by Stephen). It can only be presumed that if the Emperor Hadrian had shown up, he would still have been played by Bill Wallis.

The show’s first return to an established epoch exemplified the writers’ celebrated disdain for conventional history, as the modern Edmund came face to face with Queenie, Nursie and Melchie. Despite
the loss of the cosiness of the studio set, the Tudor trio didn’t look a day older on film, but (besides the unsavoury element of product placement for Dome sponsors Tesco’s, even if that was just to make a mockery of the concept of supermarket loyalty cards) the Elizabethan stop-off was one which it wasn’t wise to think about too intently. Chief among the brain-busting anachronisms was the presence of Shakespeare, clutching the script for
Macbeth
, but you can’t blame Curtis for taking his chance finally to directly attack the man who had made his schooldays so miserable, sixteen years after he provided ‘additional material’ for
The Black Adder
. The playwright’s appearance may have been a touch of ‘stunt casting’, but Curtis explained: ‘Colin Firth has actually refused to do all sorts of things for me throughout his career, so we thought we’d pay him back by having the shit kicked out of him by Rowan.’ While they were at it, they also got the boot in on the director who had cast Brian Blessed, Fry & Laurie and Elton in his films:

Blackadder knocks Shakespeare down with one clean punch
.

The final stop-off on this patriotic odyssey revisited another familiar period, but far away from the goings-on in Prince George’s household – indeed, as the Battle of Waterloo is in full flow, presumably after the real Prince’s death. Reprising the role of Wellington was an especially strange experience for Fry, as in the same year he also played the Duke in a Spanish–French–British co-funded farce,
Sabotage!
– essentially a screwball romantic comedy with David Suchet’s Napoleon as the hero. The casting of his counterpart in
Back and Forth
, on the other hand, allowed Fry to share a comedy cast list with his Cambridge contemporary Simon Russell Beale, twenty years after failing to lure him into Footlights. McInnerny was also called upon to originate two new members of the extended Darling family to play the aide-de-camp of both leaders, in addition to his Archdeacon.

The crushing of Wellington, like the murder of Robin Hood and the introduction of Shakespeare to the ball-point pen, requires Blackadder to return to all the scenes of his time-meddling – the reason for the second time round being, of course, flagrant Francophobia. With thousands of years of British History to celebrate,
Back and Forth
’s ultimate declaration of national pride revolves solely around the fact that we are not French – which is to say, we are not garlicky and effete. As ever, the anti-French sentiment was taken to a cartoonish degree, with Edmund’s alternative universe guests singing ‘La Marseillaise’ and eating an enormous garlic cake, but that only a xenophobic fear of poofiness compelled Blackadder to undo his historical sabotage was not exactly the kind of thing to inspire the swell of British pride which the average Dome visitor was expecting.

This would not be the end of the meddling from the last of the Blackadders though, as an innocent exchange with Baldrick inspired a final cunning plan which, echoing Baldrick’s unspoken scheme on the Somme, is ‘as cunning as a fox what used to be Professor of Cunning at Oxford University, but has moved on and is now working for the UN at the High Commission of International Cunning Planning’:

Of course this sentimental claptrap does not wash with a cynic like Edmund, who argues that change can only come from ‘huge socio-economic things that individuals have no effect on’ – unless, of course, they are world leaders … like a king. How the Lord’s meddling with time finally allowed him to achieve what his DNA had been reaching out for since time immemorial – a safe seat on the British throne – we shall probably never know, but if you want to make a final sign-off from a sitcom character, there is no surer way of doing it than giving them what they have always wanted – the Trotters became millionaires, and Blackadder became King Edmund III (his ancestor’s thirty seconds as monarch presumably not really counting). With his consort Maid Marian on one side, and the scruffy Prime Minister Baldrick on the other, at last Blackadder takes it all, becoming that least likely thing in any British sitcom: a winner. The new monarch and his powerless
sidekick even granted special interviews to the
Sunday People
, explaining how this new style of democratic fascism worked, to the benefit of Britons everywhere: