The True History of the Blackadder (55 page)

And thus the live
Blackadder
legacy ended, just as the Dome movie itself – by sticking it to the French. Excepting, maybe, the only half-relative to surface – Sir Osmund Darling-Blackadder, Keeper of the Royal Sprinklers, who popped up in a TV spot during the Jubilee preparations in 2002 to remind the monarch that she was ‘not Fatboy Slim’, and that holding a rock concert at Buckingham Palace was out of the question. The Royal toady even returned for a special review of the occasion, a clip show called
The Jubilee Girl
, alongside the great Dame Edna Everage. For all these royally commissioned swansongs delivered by Ben, Rowan and Stephen, the first members of the
Blackadder
team to accept honours were Howard Goodall, Richard Curtis and John Lloyd, who all have CBEs, and Hugh Laurie, OBE. Tony Robinson,
however, never seemed a likely candidate for an invitation to Buckingham Palace – by inclination, rather than desert. He too revived Baldrick for live performances in the past, but they were only for charity – the Tudor incarnation of the little peasant presented
Comic Relief’s Debt Wish Show
at the Brixton Academy in June 1999. Belying Baldrick’s totally inept brand of socialism, Robinson’s radical background led to his not just becoming vice president of the acting union Equity, but also being elected to serve on the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee for four years, a calling of which he was proud, despite his outspoken disapproval of the Iraq War, and Blairite politics in general. On the other hand, socialist politics has never been a bar to elevation within the British Empire – see footnote
here
.

And Then I Want to Be Middle-Aged and Rich …

There was a clear warning at the outset of this narrative that it would be festooned with very talented young performers basking in their flowering of comic brilliance, and deservedly so – but British comedy and television have mutated so dramatically since the turn of the millennium that this generation of comedians can often seem like a lost one, with many members too anarchic to comfortably accept their place as comedy’s elder statesmen, and too far removed from the demographics chased by today’s breed of TV executives to hold on to their former ubiquity. But then, history has shown that the number of comedians – especially graduate comedians – who have managed to retain their thirst for creating comedy from debut right through to death can be counted on a plague victim’s fingers. Despite never losing one iota of his wit, Peter Cook’s youthful industry gave way to the chat-show circuit, while Michael Palin set a trend when he abandoned silliness to travel around the world, and the eighties generation have similarly moved beyond sketches and sitcom into
straight acting, presenting, and making documentaries on any subject to which the next middle-aged comic has neglected to stake a claim. Like Tony and Rory McGrath, even Rik Mayall presented his own history show for the Discovery Channel,
Violent Nation
.

In some ways, the comedy industry has changed so much around the Alternative veterans that they cannot be blamed for moving on in their careers – Ben Elton is one of the few to persevere as a TV comedian in the new millennium, and has experienced the difficulty of moving with the comedic times as a result. The studio-bound sitcom has weathered an incredibly hostile decade, in the wake of
The Office
– despite Gervais & Merchant’s hit being a mockumentary in much the same vein as previous series like
Operation Good Guys
and
People Like Us
,
^fn13
its sudden runaway success meant that the idea of a live audience laughing at a live performance became outdated to TV bosses, if not taboo. ‘Comedy does have fashions that come and go,’ Elton concedes. ‘I gave it the term “the new minimalism” (I don’t know if anyone else picked up on it!), but it didn’t start with Ricky, but
The Royle Family
, in my view. When Victoria Wood and I were doing
dinnerladies
and
TTBL
in the mid-nineties, we did suddenly look quite old-fashioned. I was working in a very specific tradition of comedy, the big, broad studio-based sitcom, and just around that time
The Royle Family
was storming the barricades, and a brilliant show it was indeed, and shortly thereafter came shows like
The Office
, and a minimalist, closely observed approach to non-gag-based comedy came to the fore. Big, ballsy gag-based silliness was out, and commissioners have to go where they will go. Really it just comes down to whether the show is any good – take a piece of work like
Outnumbered
, which is brilliant. I like an audience, but I don’t think you should be too concerned about pitting genre against genre – artists find the format to fit the work. Two of the greatest sitcoms ever made,
Seinfeld
and
Curb Your Enthusiasm
– one was studio and one was not, both brilliant pieces of work made by the same team.’

Ben did work within the ‘new minimalist’ environment by writing and directing 2005’s
Blessed
but, continuing his parenting theme from
Maybe Baby
, the rant-filled tribulations of struggling new parents Ardal O’Hanlon and Mel Giedroyc weren’t a hit with critics or viewers, and further experimentations with TV comedy
Get a Grip
and Australian series
Live from Planet Earth
also drew more flak than acclaim
^fn14
. It would be fruitless to deny that Elton remains one of our most pilloried comedians, barracked from the right and the left, nominated for purgatory on the Hat Trick TV series
Room 101
and unable to get through any interview without having to deal with charges of ‘selling out’. Admittedly, there was never a time when the comic enjoyed complete public approval, and perhaps he has been hoisted by his own petard at times, trying to reconcile two awkward bedfellows, mainstream popular entertainment and passionate social commentary. But if by a man’s friends shall ye know him, Elton’s bad rap remains an injustice – as Douglas Adams once protested: ‘The trouble with the stand-up stuff – although it was brilliant – is that it was only presenting a very small aspect of a very complex, rather thoughtful and warm-hearted man. People just got the wrong idea.’

The term ‘sell-out’ has to be one of the least useful in our language, carrying as it always does an inherent need for the user’s personal definition, and judgemental connotation, before its meaning can even begin to be understood. Like the word ‘smug’, the bandying about of the insult often says more about the user than their target, and besides, you cannot truly ‘sell out’ unless you first publish a specific manifesto, something which so few entertainers get round to. By some critics’ reckoning, perhaps every bright young thing depicted in this history has ‘sold out’ some inferred principle, be it via advertising,
acquisition of wealth, mainstream popularity or even specific political statement, since they set out on their lives in comedy. But in many ways, Elton has remained more true to himself than any of his peers, always powered by an intense desire to entertain, coupled with a social conscience which he cannot keep bottled up – and of course, bar one unpaid ad for Fairtrade chocolate, he has also eschewed advertising where others have embraced it.
^fn15

By returning to his earliest love, musical theatre, Elton found his greatest international success, but once again earned the opprobrium of talking heads, not least for working with the Tory peer Andrew Lloyd Webber, on the Irish troubles musical
The Beautiful Game
(a song from which was used for George W. Bush’s inauguration, without Elton’s approval) and the
Phantom of the Opera
sequel,
Love Never Dies
. His biggest hit, however, has been the Queen jukebox musical
We Will Rock You
, which he has helped to steer to success around the globe (as well as penning a sequel, and another jukebox musical for Rod Stewart,
Tonight’s the Night
). His futuristic book for
WWRY
may only provide the lightest thread to link the Queen hits, but comprises the by now familiar Elton themes of homogenised dystopia, shallow glamour and corporate greed. These also remain regular themes in his novels, with perhaps one notable exception – the World War I murder mystery
The First Casualty
. Returning to World War I was a brave move for Elton, particularly as any
Blackadder
fan would find it difficult not to make comparisons with
Goes Forth
. The hero, policeman Douglas Kingsley, may have little of the Captain B in him, but his dispatch to uncover a wrongdoer on the Ypres front in 1917, involving romance with a modern-minded nurse at the field hospital, and a feud with an oversexed handsome celebrity officer, certainly resonates with echoes of the series. A Second World War novel based on his father’s
experiences,
Two Brothers
, was also published in 2012.

Curtis also revisited the Great War in his work on
War Horse
, undertaken as the UK’s top screenplay troubleshooter – he also helped Helen Fielding to guide her best-seller
Bridget Jones’s Diary
to huge cinema success. Like any artist of his generation of course, Curtis’s Midas touch has not been unwavering, with the epic goodwill of
Love Actually
, despite its huge popularity worldwide, proving too saccharine for some moviegoers’ tastes
^fn16
and the return to period comedy in his love letter to sixties rock and roll,
The Boat That Rocked
, or
Pirate Radio
, similarly split British audiences on release. It is as grand supremo of Comic Relief that he remains untouchable, and the biennial Red Nose Day evenings have remained a haven for every generation of comedian – often the one night in the calendar on which celebrity documentary-makers remember that they started out as jokers. It’s rare that Curtis comments on this side of his career, but does admit, ‘It doesn’t allow you to think that the viewing figures that your situation comedy gets are an important thing. Which they ain’t.’ Despite his big-screen success, Richard still believes he has one more TV programme in him. ‘There is a specific rhythm about that half-hour which you learn. There’s a lovely thing about planting the information, then taking time off in the middle to be as stupid as you like and then winding it up and reminding people of something that happened. There seems to be a rhythm which is a joy.’

Although Blackadder himself has remained in the shadows for Comic Relief, 2005’s spoof
Spider-Plant Man
relied heavily on love for the show, when Atkinson’s turn as an inept teenage superhero in tight spandex results in a clash with Batman and Robin – or rather, Jim Broadbent and Tony Robinson, in ill-fitting fancy-dress costumes being mistaken for Fathers 4 Justice protesters. Rowan once mulled over the idea of doing a comic-book spoof called
BatAdder
– this is the closest he got:

Spider-Plant Man has Batman in a headlock, and is kicking his arse
.

Robin punches Batman into oblivion
.

Since 2003, there has also traditionally been a corner of the Red Nose Day proceedings reserved for John Lloyd’s creation,
Quite Interesting
, or, rather,
QI
– the result of a decade’s self-imposed re-education, in the wake of his Scrooge-like experience that Christmas Eve. As he explained at the time of the series’ launch, ‘The core idea of
QI
is that we’re taught the wrong way up. We’re taught all the “important” things, all the boring things, all the lists, all the things that are hard to remember, such as times tables and irregular verbs and vocabulary. Meaningless stuff. And then if you get through all those and you get to do a PhD, eventually they start telling you how things really work.’ Translating this ‘Quite Interesting’ philosophy into a TV
panel game with the partnership of publisher John Mitchinson, Lloyd found that even after over a decade away from TV production, he still had the ability to create award-winning, popular television. Halfway through its planned twenty-six alphabetical series, it would not be an exaggeration to call
QI
a British institution, with a philosophy all of its own, spawning successful books, DVDs, Twitter apps and the spin-off Radio 4 show,
The Museum of Curiosity
, presented by Lloyd himself. The show has also featured numerous Adder veterans, including Laurie, Atkinson-Wood and Goodall, while Atkinson is a regular feature of the
QI
annuals. Forty years after stumbling out of the footlights and plunging into BBC Radio, Commander Lloyd’s triumph in popularising his philosophy of fascination has placed him more in the limelight than he may have intended, but this fresh success perfectly complements the deep respect and affection in which he was already held by comedy fans, as one of the nation’s most influential living comedy creators.