The True History of the Blackadder (38 page)

The finale’s one other special appearance
^fn15
came from Gertan Klauber as Mad King George III – the veteran Czech-born actor being another regular (though minor) player in the
Carry On
series, as well as
Up the Front
. Mention of the porphyric monarch also gave a presentiment of things to come, as Fry’s week with the old team saw him instantly settling into the old style of ‘plumpening’. Given the line ‘The King, your father, is mad,’ he politely sidled up to Lloyd and Curtis to posit whether the line ‘Your royal father grows ever more eccentric and at present believes himself to be a small village in Lincolnshire with commanding views of the Nene Valley’ might be slightly more delicious. The tragic denouement of the episode – and in a way, the
final achievement of all the Blackadders’ aims, the taking of the throne – was ridiculously revelatory and rapidly tied up at least partly due to the extent of the ‘plumpening’ which was to be expected with the finicky Hugh and Rowan being backed up by their loud comrade – although it was already decided by the writers that, for the first time, Edmund would escape destruction and prove the real villain.

Sadly Miggins’s presumed death up on a lonely Scottish crag signified the end of Helen’s time on the show, with her character reduced to just a vague mention in a music-hall song in the following series. The actress, however, would soon be starring in
KYTV
, John Byrne’s
Your Cheating Heart
, and in 1992 her own historical sitcom,
Tales from the Poopdeck
, in which she played terrifying female pirate Connie Blackheart. Further members of the Miggins family would have been a treat, but she says, ‘I was always just so dazzled by the construction of the scripts, it’s fair to say I didn’t give a thought as to what was going to happen to Mrs Miggins next, it was just such a delicious twist for her to be setting off with MacAdder.’

The last day of filming was only the beginning of Lloyd’s crucial packaging process, comprising the exquisite literary credit sequence in which the butler stalks through a library to Goodall’s baroque theme, rejecting books such as the
Encyclopaedia Blackaddica
,
Landscape Gardening by Capability Brownadder
,
From Black Death to Blackadder
,
Blackadder’s Book of Martyrs
and
Blackadder’s Bedside Cockfighting Companion
in favour of the lurid romance novel bearing each episode’s new name, with the dashing Edmund caught in a different passionate embrace on every cover. Howard’s desire to surprise came to the fore again in the end credits, where, the final tableau frozen into a historic engraving (a familiar convention from BBC costume dramas such as 1985’s
Pickwick Papers
), the composer delivered an exotic Empire-inspired interpretation of his melody, which Elton suggests ‘might have been because Paul Simon had just come out with
Graceland
…’ ‘John likes making credits more than he likes making shows,’ Robinson says,
and the series’ painstakingly detailed Regency playbill sequence, ‘For the benefit of several viewers’ and ‘To conclude with Rule Britannia in full chorus, No money return’d’, accompanied by Howard’s nautical beat, suggests Tony might be onto something.

A M
UCH
A
DMIR
’
D
C
OMEDY

Some producers could have been tempting fate by calling their programme ‘much admir’d’ in their own credits, but Lloyd knew there was little risk of calumny –
Blackadder the Third
debuted to widespread delight in the autumn of 1987, with audiences still warm from the
Blackadder II
repeat. It was accompanied by the first academic investigation into the Blackadder Chronicles, written for the
Radio Times
by Lloyd himself, the ‘loafing Professor at the University of Camelot’. This early appraisal of the dynasty lost no time in damning the entire family, from prehistoric times to the most recent achievement: ‘A dinner party in Chelsea in 1968, where the present Edmund Blackadder had the distinction of being the first man to scoff at flared trousers.’

With such instant acclaim, Blackadder and Baldrick were to become entrenched in the national consciousness as the Regency duo for some time, the despicable schemer and the pitiful dungball becoming a kind of British Don Quixote and Sancho Panza – quite fittingly, as Curtis had written a successful theatrical adaptation of Cervantes’ novel in the early eighties. Atkinson would muse, ‘It’s odd where the inherent comedy of his situation is rooted, because basically he’s a bright and able man and yet things go wrong for him in a way that we try to make funny. He wasn’t a buffoon, he just tended to over-think things, didn’t he, to out-think himself. Or maybe it was just bad luck! And of course, fatally, he always allies himself with Baldrick. It’s strange, that inter-reliance, you’d think someone as bright as the Black Adder wouldn’t spend any time with Baldrick, and yet he does. It is like Basil Fawlty and Manuel, why doesn’t he just sack Manuel? There is some way in
which they need each other. And the Black Adder and Baldrick need each other – not only to allow us to make jokes about him.’

Of the two, it was Baldrick who would be most likely to pop up on his own unexpectedly, spreading his stench in the CBBC broom cupboard for Comic Relief, throwing custard pies at himself on
Blue Peter
or even going so low as to appear on-screen with Noel Edmonds, showcasing a package of
Blackadder
bloopers on
Noel’s Saturday Roadshow
in 1988, defending the errors in Noel’s ‘Clown Court’.

Thanks to Tony’s performance, somehow the stinking plotter had actually become
cute
, and, as he observes, developed something of a cult all of his own. ‘It took me a long time to realise just how successful the series was. Then it hit me – Baldrick had become this little comedy god. People would send me turnips through the post. Believe me, I’ve tried every turnip recipe known to man.’ Lloyd goes so far as to say, ‘In my opinion it’s Baldrick rather than Blackadder who gives the show its enduring mainstream appeal. Baldrick is everyman – the decent, sensible downtrodden drudge saddled with a boss who is both too clever by three-quarters, and nearly always wrong.’ ‘He’s a pretty dim everyman,’ Atkinson laughs, ‘I’m not sure I’d like Baldrick to represent me in the canon of human existence. But he has an attitude to life which is uncorrupted by expectations or class structures or education or anything, he just takes things at face value and deals with them as he finds them.’ ‘A lot of people say they see Baldrick as an everyman,’ Robinson concedes, ‘and, if that’s true, then I don’t think it says much for the British character.’

The double act was back together the following autumn, to support the BBC’s Children in Need appeal, not just on the telethon itself, with Baldrick offering the kiddies his own beloved childhood toys – an old stick and some clumps of mud:

The pair even fumbled their way through a whole special hour of fund-raising on Radio 4, violently taking over
Woman’s Hour
to link a series of items looking at the struggle for sexual equality through the ages:

In sound only, the duo transcended their most recent incarnations, becoming a strangely immortal pair who seem to have been bickering for centuries – but then, this was just for charity.

F
ORTUNATELY
, I
AM
N
OT A
M
AN OF
H
ONOUR

Blackadder and Baldrick’s appearance for Curtis’s own special cause several months earlier was an altogether more cogent offering – after two years of preparation, the first Red Nose Day and Comic Relief telethon was ready to go, and nothing was more likely to get folk tuning in and reaching for their credit card details to give to Mike Smith up the Post Office Tower than an all-new tale from the Blackadder Chronicles, plugging a gap in the lore by leapfrogging back a century and a half to witness the skulduggery of Mr B’s great-great-grandfather.

The audacious pilot scheme went ahead on 5 February 1988, with millions of schoolchildren and charitable grown-ups encouraged by the young comic generation to buy red noses and do something stupid to
raise funds, with the reward being a whole evening of non-stop comedy on BBC1 – a celebration of laughter in the depths of winter. These jolly, ragged early marathons, presented by Lenny Henry, Griff Rhys Jones and Jonathan Ross, were nowhere near as slick and glamorous as the titanic Comic Relief nights of the twenty-first century – that first evening even devoted a whole prime-time half-hour to a repeat of
Dad’s Army
– but it’s
because
of that rudimentary quality that those first Comic Reliefs were more exciting and, indeed, funnier. With Richard devotedly scribbling the hosts’ scripts as the evening wore on, the several hours of that evening’s proceedings (when not taken up with flubbed studio links, unexpected invasions from Ken Dodd and heart-rending documentary features) were filled with brand-new sketches and skits from every corner of Curtis’s comedy fraternity and beyond. A huge stockpile of sketches had been pre-filmed a few weeks before transmission, but two bastards provided the highlights, with Rik Mayall facing Thatcher as Alan B’Stard for one persona-bending
New Statesman
skit, and
Blackadder: The Cavalier Years
forming the centrepiece of the evening.

Covering one of the single most epochal events in British History, and managing to do it in a fifteen-minute slot involving a grand total of two sets and four speaking roles,
^fn16
Cavalier Years
is a masterpiece of disrespectful brevity. Baldrick’s kitchen at Blackadder Hall and Charles’s cell at Whitehall provided the meagre backdrops to yet another dastardly Blackadder lie, as Sir Edmund hides and then double-crosses and executes his old friend Charles before handing Baldrick and the doll-like infant Charles II over to the Roundheads and, as ever, switching to the winning side. Presumably there was Melchett blood in the Stuart family, allowing Fry to have his turn on the throne, albeit briefly, as one of his numerous appearances on that
night’s bill (which also included dunking Philip Schofield in a gunge tank, abetted by Hugh). Fry portrayed Charles as a kind of dithering tree-hugger (a blatant mimicry of the King’s namesake great-to-the-power-of-eleven-grand-nephew), while Warren Clarke was perfectly suited to take on the mantle of his warty republican counterpart Cromwell, managing to convey a unique brand of manic perversity – even going so far as to caress Baldrick and call him ‘My proud beauty’ – in a slight and sketchily written role. ‘They are jolly tricky, these short sitcom specials,’ Curtis says, ‘we’ve done about fifteen of them on Comic Relief. But that one just found its own natural rhythm. I suspect that had we ever done the period officially, we wouldn’t have wanted Stephen to do the Charles impression – one of our big things being not allowing any anachronisms …’