The True History of the Blackadder (58 page)

THE BLACKADDER 5
–The most widely reported return for Edmund was first let out of the bag by Mayall soon after the end of the fourth series, and was to make full use of Elton & Curtis’s pop-music obsession by featuring Blackadder as a swinging entrepreneur and rock-band manager – part Brian Epstein, part Austin Powers. Few details of this idea have ever escaped, besides Rik’s suggestion that the shiny-headed drummer in Blackadder’s answer to The Beatles would have been called ‘Bald Rick’, and Curtis’s musing that the drummer could turn out to be the man who really shot Kennedy in Dallas in 1963. ‘That would be great!’ Elton said. ‘You could see a naturally conservative man like Blackadder up against all the excesses of the sixties, with Baldrick as a naturally bedraggled hippy …’

BLACKADDER: THE THATCHER YEARS
– Perhaps the most inventive concept was outlined by Curtis, and has been made canonical by the opening titles for
Back and Forth
, which has a Blackadder showing scant respect for Thatcher in her premier pomp. Although the existence of Alan B’Stard makes a Tory Blackadder almost redundant, the writer explained, ‘We did have this idea that if we ever did it again, when we
should
set it is actually when we started it. That Blackadder should be working for Margaret Thatcher. It would be a funny idea to be satirical about the time when we were actually making the series – that they’d be watching! And Blackadder would be very annoyed about the fact that there’s a series called
Blackadder
on the television …’

Set in a similar time, Robinson mused on a concept guaranteed to embarrass his royalist colleagues, but which would be difficult to pull off. ‘My favourite suggestion for a new series is Blackadder as the current Queen Elizabeth’s bastard son who is always lurking around
Buckingham Palace. And they have to make all these rumours about there being intruders in the Palace when there aren’t any at all – it’s this bastard son who isn’t recognised. And as for Baldrick – he’d be the real royal intruder!’

In 1988, long before he had ever played a contemporary Blackadder, Atkinson said, ‘A present-day Blackadder is probably what John is most keen to exploit.’ With no small note of self-awareness, he suggested that this modern Edmund would be ‘some kind of media hack, who drives around in an Aston Martin and has his mechanic, who would probably be Mr Baldrick, in greasy overalls, who would service his motor cars. And he would undoubtedly be something and somewhere around the royal family, probably some minor aristocrat, and then you can get all the contemporary problems of being in the royal family in the present day and age, and what an anachronism it is, and the press and television, and you know, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and all the characters you can have from the present day. And I think it would be an interesting series to do, but quite different from virtually anything else that we’ve done on
Blackadder
, so we’d have to change gear.’

BLACKADDER AT OXFORD
– Curtis’s final gambit harks back to his alma mater, outlined as part of his round-up of contemporary Blackadders (including the ‘Blackadder 5’ manager) in the
Radio Times
: ‘We don’t know the full story, but one of his descendants now holds quite a powerful position at Buckingham Palace and was responsible for trying to block the Jubilee pop concert. Another is a professor at Oxford, where a Mr S. Baldrick has been his scout for forty-seven years. The final descendant of note is a retired pop svengali and heroin addict, now living in Switzerland with his sixteen-year-old wife.’ He expanded elsewhere, ‘We like the idea that when we wrote the first
Blackadder
we were young and scornful, so we love the idea of being old and scornful, of being old men who use the sarcasm of
Blackadder
to attack what’s happened to the world since we were young. One idea we had was that Blackadder should be a very fed-up and corrupt university don and Baldrick would have been his scout for the last forty years, so they would in effect have been married for forty years …’ This final idea would at least make allowances
for the passing of time. ‘We might do one when we’re old, but Tony is so old, I mean, he’s in his early eighties now, that I’m not sure he’ll be alive when we want to go back to work …’

A similarly academic Edmund was casually mooted by Fry at one time, with a Jennings-style school romp entitled ‘Blackadder & The 5th’ to feature the cast as the staff of an inter-war public school – but this jolly concept got no further than idle musing.

STARADDER
– Always high on the list even before the glimpse of what the future could hold in
Christmas Carol
, the sci-fi antics of the Blackadder family have never really been looked into, not least because, as Richard joked, ‘We did think about a science-fiction series, but then we remembered that John was a bit of an expert on space. The interference would have been awful.’ Elton has suggested that such an idea would have been more
Star Trek
-inspired than the vision of Christmas Yet to Come – but then
Red Dwarf
has already provided the ultimate piss-take of Gene Roddenberry’s creation.

Farewell, You Horrid Man

‘Success has never surprised me. I didn’t
assume
it would happen, but when it came it just seemed logical in relation to applied effort,’ Rowan acknowledged as early as 1990, going on to make it clear that even then, as far as
Blackadder
was concerned, ‘success spoils you. You don’t have to work as hard as you did because you get paid more money for what you do. Suddenly it is not the challenge or the fun that it used to be … What we are really talking about is ego, and the simple fact that everyone is scared of failure. The more people keep referring to
Blackadder
as a classic, the more afraid everyone is of carrying on. The last thing we want is to make another one and see it dismissed as not as good as the ones that went before.’

At least one team member has found some way to quash each of the above ideas as they have been thrown up over the years, and it’s
widely felt that the repertory company established by
Goes Forth
is essential, even though that group only came together for that one series. Empirically, as this History shows, for something to be canonical
Blackadder
, all that’s required is Atkinson as a member of the Blackadder family, with Robinson’s Baldrick by his side, speaking dialogue at least approved by Curtis –
Blackadder
has existed without any input from Elton or Lloyd in the past, while the other core actors all flitted in and out of the series. This is irrelevant to the star of the show, however, who ultimately argues, ‘It was representative of a moment in all our lives, that’s why I think it’s futile really to talk about reunions or a fifth series or anything like that because I think it represented a comedy consensus between a group of individuals at a certain time, and as soon as you try and recreate that chemistry five or ten or thirty years later, it’s very difficult … when everyone has moved on into so many different areas, and probably become more choosy about what they do, and less flexible, let’s say, at accommodating other people’s whims and wishes.’ And his irreplaceable sidekick backs him up. ‘I think in the end it’s all about taste. That’s why the series was so successful, you’ve got a bunch of highly intelligent and culturally sophisticated people who for a brief moment of time shared the same taste about a particular piece of work, and all of them were informing that work with that sense of taste … We’re on a hiding to nothing. Everybody will say it wasn’t as good as the last series. The only people who have managed to do that brilliantly were
The Likely Lads
.
Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?
was, for me, a better series than the original. But, by and large, when things do come back they look like a thin version of the original.’ Despite all this, he adds, ‘I would love to do another series. I’ve always been very hawkish but it’s not my call.’

This back and forth is a familiar quandary for any veteran entertainers keen to have a celebratory lap of honour, whether it’s
The Beatles Anthology
, the thirtieth-anniversary
Monty Python Night
, or indeed a musical based on Queen – and the question burns even among the
most devoted
Blackadder
fans, with an ever-fluctuating divide between what we might call the ‘purists’ (who predict disaster for any reunion and believe that the character should remain in his grave) and the ‘optimists’ (for whom the slightest glimmer of a new reincarnation would be like a lifetime of Christmases coming at once). The argument that the show should remain pristine, post-‘Goodbyeee’ is already dented by
Back and Forth
, but even then, the idea that any subsequent reunion could tarnish the existing shows is nonsense,
Blackadder
remains secure for generations to come, no matter what happens. Brian Blessed, who loudly confesses that he ‘would come running’ if asked to be in any reunion, goes so far as to say, ‘From the way each generation has embraced it, I think
Blackadder
will go on for thousands of years; there is a universality about it, and I think that it has very long legs … In the end, more than Mr Bean, more than whatever, Rowan’s Blackadder is the finest comic performance in television history.’ Atkinson shares the purists’ misgivings, however, admitting in recent years, ‘
Back and Forth
wasn’t a very good omen, I didn’t think. We’d have to have a much more professional and rigorous and sort of genuine approach to it. We couldn’t have the instigation coming from outside commercial sources. It’s got to be those who are involved in it saying, “You know what would be good?” There’s got to be a genuine creative impetus.’

For a film, he continues, ‘You have to explore more facets of the character. You can’t just have a single attitude. The great thing about sitcoms is that you can get away with a character with, really, one attitude. Like, Blackadder is just a relentlessly cynical man. And that’s the joke. He’s cynical and negative in a very witty way. If we tried to make a
Blackadder
movie, if you just had a relentlessly cynical man who never acknowledged the ramifications of his own actions, etc., then I think it would be a very odd movie … I like variety. I like to move on, but I don’t – in any sense – ignore the old. I mean, I’m someone who tends to return to characters quite a lot. I could easily have left
Mr Bean
as a TV series, but when the notion of making a movie was put forward,
it kind of interested me. Because I thought, “I suppose that could be fun …” I would return to the Blackadder character if the opportunity came up. I have no qualms about that at all.’