The True History of the Blackadder (74 page)
Presented as an excerpt from
Today In Parliament
, in ‘Bank Adder’
a hitherto unknown Sir Edmund, CEO of the Melchett, Melchett & Darling Merchant Bank, is brought before a weak panel of MPs (played by Helen Lederer, Sanjeev Bhaskar and Miranda Hart) to explain himself – and of course, refuses to accept even the tiniest particle of culpability for the worst financial crisis in living memory:
SANJEEV: | Sir Edmund, you are a banker. A very rich banker. How can you justify paying yourself such a vast bonus every year? |
EDMUND: | ‘Because I’m worth it.’ If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. |
MIRANDA: | But you earn many times’ more than a cabinet minister! |
EDMUND: | So clearly you see my point. |
SANJEEV: | Sir Edmund, the crux of the matter is that Britain’s banks are broke. If you’re as good as you say you are, why are you in crisis? |
EDMUND: | Crisis? I’m not in crisis. |
SANJEEV: | Aren’t you? |
EDMUND: | Nnnno … I own half of Kensington. My pension pot’s so big you could boil John Prescott in it. Quite frankly, life couldn’t be cushier if I was a mouse astronaut who’d just landed on the moon and discovered it really is … made of cheese. |
MIRANDA: | I don’t think the Honourable Member was talking about you personally Sir Edmund, rather your bank. |
EDMUND: | Oh my bank. What about it? |
HELEN: | It’s twenty billion pounds in debt. |
EDMUND: | And your point? |
SANJEEV: | That you have no means of repaying it! |
EDMUND: | I think you’ll find that’s more of a problem for the people who lent us the money. |
This caddish silver fox’s despicability was to be expected, but what came next certainly was not:
MIRANDA: | Sir Edmund! Do you wish to assist this enquiry or don’t you?! |
EDMUND: | I do indeed, Madam Chairwoman. UK PLC is broke. It couldn’t be in more debt if it was a small, contented, olive growing economy in Southern Europe which got drunk one night and woke up in the Eurozone with Angela Merkel pulling on the rubber gloves. The task of this committee is to identify those responsible and, if necessary, apportion blame. I would therefore like to call a witness to the enquiry … my gardener, Mr Soddoff Baldrick! (A brass sting of the theme. BALDRICK enters looking bewildered.) Before we begin, Baldrick, kindly assure the Enquiry that you are here of your own volition. |
BALDRICK: | I cannot do that, my Lord. |
EDMUND: | Why is that? |
BALDRICK: | I don’t know what volition means … |
MIRANDA: | Why is the witness calling you ‘My Lord’, Sir Edmund? |
EDMUND: | Because I bought a peerage at the gift shop on my way in, Madam Chair. You’ll find there’s a selection of honours for sale next to the Big Ben snowglobes. So, Baldrick … |
‘I got an email out of the blue from Ben, who I don’t think I’d spoken to for about ten years,’ Tony says, ‘and I just thought to myself how lovely it would be to spend the day working with Rowan and Ben again, it was purely an emotional reaction. And I wasn’t disappointed when we started rehearsing, it immediately felt exactly as it did all those years ago, we all remarked on that. Normally when you’re rehearsing new comedy, you feel very on edge because you simply don’t know what reaction you’ll get. But doing Blackadder again felt so comfortable. We understood what each other wanted out of the scenes, we understood each other’s timing and what we were aspiring towards, it was everything you hoped for.’
Those in the crowd were only slightly more stunned by this unexpected reunion than anyone else, both on the bill and behind the scenes at the Albert Hall. Tony continues, ‘The irony for me was that it felt backstage as though there was royalty there – but it was him and me! We were treated with such courtesy and deference by the other comedians. And neither of those two words are something I would particularly associate with the comic fraternity …’
Getting Blackadder and Baldrick together for the first and maybe only time in the 21st century wasn’t pure sentiment, however – the presence of a contemporary Sodoff was crucial for satirical reasons, with the poor underclass icon’s family history of exploitation and physical suffering at the hands of The Black Adder reaching its apotheosis in his boss’s heartless solution to the Credit Crunch. Blackadder’s bastardry had always been pushing him further into far-right-wing villain territory the closer his genes moved to the present day, but in 2012 no Establishment figure could be more wholly wicked:
EDMUND: | Tell me, Baldrick, how much money have you got? |
BALDRICK: | None, Sir My Lord! … Like the naked man who stepped too close to the combine harvester – I haven’t got a sausage. |
EDMUND: | And yet I have evidence in the form of your bank statements that, despite being penniless, you took out a mortgage on your hovel … The simple fact is that you, like the rest of the public, ran up debts for numerous luxury items such as food and fuel, which you could not possibly afford to pay. |
BALDRICK: | Yes I did, sir! |
EDMUND: | You are, in fact, feckless! |
BALDRICK: | Yes I am, my Lord. In fact I haven’t had a feck since our last holiday in Wales. |
EDMUND: | You borrowed and you borrowed. What led you to this outrageous irresponsibility? |
BALDRICK: | You did, my Lord! And the lovely people at Melchett, Melchett & Darling! You took my small savings and then tempted me to borrow more with glossy brochures, smooth talking and a free ballpoint pen. |
EDMUND: | And so we have it! This man trusted his bank. Millions and millions trusted their banks. For the sake of a free biro they allowed us to bankrupt the nation! |
SANJEEV: | Are you suggesting, Lord Blackadder, that we blame the public for the entire Financial Crisis? |
EDMUND: | That’s exactly what I’m suggesting. |
HELEN: | But that would absolve the Government and the Financial Sector of all responsibility! |
EDMUND: | Well, I don’t wish to sound impertinent, but … Duh!? |
MIRANDA: | My God it’s brilliant. |
EDMUND: | It is indeed, Madam. It’s so brilliant it could win a place at Oxford even if it had a Northern accent. And for the purposes of simplicity, rather than blaming all of the public – which could prove unpopular – I suggest we simply blame Baldrick. |
BALDRICK: | What? |
EDMUND: | Make him a scapegoat! Pillory him! Traduce him! Strip him of his trousers, roger him with the Speaker’s gavel and let’s just move on! |
Baldrick has long been called Everyman, but by making him stand for the millions of unemployed and disenfranchised British people being ridden roughshod by the braying Tory/Lib-Dem coalition, while bankers escaped all reasonable censure, Elton found the perfect satirical motive for any 21st century Blackadder incarnation. That is, unless …
BALDRICK: | Supposing, my Lord! Supposing … I had a cunning plan? |
EDMUND: | A cunning plan, Balders, to correct the inherent weakness of unregulated markets which must lead inevitably to the obscene enrichment of the few and the exploitation of the many? |
BALDRICK: | Yes, my Lord! |
EDMUND: | A cunning plan to force those predatory exploiters to finally take some responsibility for their destructive greed? |
BALDRICK: | Yes, my Lord! |
EDMUND: | Well, that would of course be brilliant. Do you have such a plan? |
BALDRICK: | No, my Lord. |
This reminder of today’s injustices, in royal company, made it well worth Robinson hob-nobbing with the big nobs for one evening – especially if that really does turn out to be the final gasp from the unpredictable Blackadder family vault. The attendant Prince Charles, admittedly, did take his chance to rib the actor in the post-show line-up, when he grinned ‘Are you still working, or have you retired?’ on his rapid journey up the line. ‘You may know I’m still working, I dug up your garden a few years ago’, Tony replied, but the Prince simply moved on to Jimmy Carr. ‘I think the royalty probably won that one’, Robinson admits, but subsequently adds, ‘I did get an extremely fulsome hand-written letter from the Prince thanking me for my participation, so I shouldn’t be too hard on him …’
Even if there is no more Blackadder of any kind, there will still be plenty to come from all of the team, including Tony – though it is definitely regrettable that the end of
Time Team
after over twenty years prevented the nation’s favourite bone-kicker from coming face to face with the man who started this whole sorry story in the first place. When Ricardian archaeologists uncovered the remains of Richard III in a car park in Leicester at the end of 2012, Tony was regrettably not on hand to witness perhaps the most momentous archaeological discovery of our times, broadcast to the nation exactly thirty years after he, Rowan, John et al had travelled up to Alnwick Castle in the ice and snow, to begin filming their historical epic.
On the other hand, it should be noted that when the crooked skeleton was finally revealed to the public, the skull was clearly still attached to the body, which must surely raise serious doubts as to the reliability of the remains’ official acknowledgement as the last of the Plantagenets, given what we have learned about Richard’s demise from the Blackadder Chronicles.
Nonetheless, the grisly discovery remains a perfect reminder of how our history has to be rewritten, all the time …
ADDENDUM (SUPPLEMENTAL)
‘It’s all right Blackadder, you don’t have to curtsey or anything.’
On the 15th June 2013, thirty years to the day since the very first broadcast of ‘The Foretelling’, it was announced that Rowan Atkinson had finally been given his well-deserved CBE for services to drama and charity, which he described as a ‘genuine surprise’.
This sentiment was surely amplified manifold in response to the accompanying spot of news: on the same day, in a stunning development reminiscent of the Lord Baldrick’s ennoblement in ‘Dish & Dishonesty’ (and which all-but turns so much of what was said in the last four-hundred-odd pages on its head), Sir Tony Robinson accepted a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II, for public and political services, including his work with the Alzheimer’s Society, at
alzheimers.org.uk
. The self-confessedly ‘gob-smacked’ new Knight told reporters ‘I’ll use my title with abandon to highlight the causes I believe in, particularly the importance of culture, the arts and heritage in our society, and the plight of the infirm elderly and their carers … I also pledge that from this day on I’ll slaughter all unruly dragons, and rescue any damsels in distress who request my help.’
This honour wasn’t just Prince Charles’ hyperbolic way of apologising for the aforementioned line-up slight, of course. That Tony Robinson deserves such recognition should go without saying – his work promoting archaeology for twenty years alone is surely gong-worthy. But the manner of the announcement, alongside his fictional Master on the thirtieth anniversary of the first meeting of Blackadder and Baldrick, certainly supports the familiar claim that the Royals do have a highly developed sense of humour …
fn1
Whither Blackadder, were such a law in place? It’s worrying enough that Rowan’s Archbishop of Canterbury monologue, co-scripted by Richard for Comic Relief 2013, was investigated by the broadcasting watchdog Ofcom, just because a few thousand viewers had a sense of humour failure about the clergyman’s reasonable observation, ‘prayer doesn’t work.’
fn2
The show’s forced filthiness and conscious conservatism unfortunately earned the writer whole new levels of howling invective on its spring 2013 broadcast.