The True History of the Blackadder (42 page)

In addition to their scripting feat, the first series of
ABOF&L
, which began on BBC2 only a few weeks after
Blackadder’s Christmas Carol
, only relied on one regular third hand for sketches, with
Yes, Prime Minister
’s Deborah Norton as their female foil. Their return just over a year later was even stronger and more ambitious, with a number of guest stars, including Atkinson (credited as ‘Nigel Havers’), who offers his condolences after Stephen punches Hugh to death for repeatedly singing about lost coffee-jar lids:

Hugh was probably the most voluble nit-picker in the
Blackadder
cast, and in their own programme he and Stephen chiselled away at their own comedy with the same level of perfectionism. Though their show would come to an abrupt end in the mid-nineties,
ABOF&L
amassed a multitude of obsessive admirers, with its ‘vox-pop’-punctuated comedy world which, unlike so many other shows, made no great attempt to skirt around the Pythonesque, being packed with surreal skits, cross-dressing, ‘amusing and unusual names’ such as Ted Cunterblast and Peter Cuminmyear, and sketches which regularly dissolved into punchline-free silliness. There was also, inevitably, a memorable emphasis on the sesquipedalian, Fry positing, ‘I thought language for language’s sake was funny. That simply saying certain words at speed and with a kind of rhythm could be entertaining.’ ‘Stephen has the most terrific facility with the English language,’ Hugh says, ‘I mean, he takes a genuine poetic pleasure in the feeling of a good sentence.’ Nevertheless, the
scripts were a fifty–fifty affair, and Laurie’s half of the equation is too easily forgotten. No matter how successful an actor he may become, he remains one of the most under-sung writers of completely barking comedy this country has produced.

Alongside the new series, Fry had also taken a leaf from Cleese and Curtis’s book, to become a fund-raiser for a timely cause of particular import. His
Hysteria
benefits for Aids charity the Terence Higgins Trust in some ways capitalised on the
Saturday Live
fan base (with Enfield’s Stavros a highlight of the first show and both Posner and Jackson getting involved), but his style of revue also took its cue from the good work still being done by the
Secret Policeman’s Balls
. In lieu of Rowan’s appearance, Fry, Laurie, Coltrane and Elton were mainstays of the 1987 and 1989 Amnesty benefits, witnessing Cook & Moore’s final live sketch performance together. Rowan was, however, game for all
Hysteria
shows, performing new vicar monologue ‘Tom, Dick & Harry’, acting as a human prophylactic for Hugh and Dawn French, and for the second outing, performed at Sadler’s Wells on 18 September 1989, even starring in a brand-new historical sketch with Laurie. Author Richard Curtis was so proud of this piece he could only hand it over to Stephen saying, ‘That’s yours. From me. But take it now so I’m not tempted to use it for Comic Relief …’

Veni Vidi Non Vincere

The
Who Dares Wins
team were also regulars at the
Hysteria
shows, though Tony was only with them for the first outing, playing a director who has to coach Julia Hills on how to have an orgasm. The final series of
WDW
aired at the start of 1988, and elsewhere Tony’s storytelling skills remained to the fore, with series on Boudicca and Bible stories, and plans for writing a children’s comedy series all of his own – which meant breaking his deal with Curtis. ‘I phoned him up and said, “Richard, I don’t need to schlep up to Oxford, because now I’ve heard
your voice so often that I know what you’re going to say before you say it, so I incorporate it. So would you mind if I stepped out on my own?” And he said, “Don’t you realise that this is the moment that I’ve been waiting for since we started doing this work together?” So I was given tutorage from the best possible comedy writer I could have, without even being aware that I was doing the learning.’

The first series of
Maid Marian and her Merry Men
, written by Robinson for Children’s BBC, was filmed in the leafy environs of Exmoor National Park in Somerset in the summer of 1989, and followed the heroine’s silly struggle to free the muddy peasants of Worksop from Norman oppression. The inspiration for the sitcom came from the writer’s own daughter, Laura, star striker for her school’s football team and a spirited girl who had nursed Tony through periods of depression earlier in his career. Feeling that there was no female role model on TV with even a fraction of Laura’s pluck, Tony created his own ‘secret history’, turning the medieval legend of Robin Hood on its head by showing the hero to be nothing more than an idle, vain tailor who took all the credit for Marian’s freedom-fighting. After years at the bottom of the heap as Baldrick, he bagged the role of Marian’s despicable nemesis, the Sheriff of Nottingham,
^fn6
for himself. ‘It did cross my mind that I might like to be Robin Hood, but quite honestly I’ve always thought that Robin was a bit of a wally, so I decided that what I’d like to do most was be the baddy. Having played sweet little Baldrick for so long, it was wonderful to be sarcastic and vitriolic.’ But although this was a departure for Tony, the Sheriff was still ultimately the most put-upon character in the show, outwitted by Kate Lonergan’s spirited Marian, let down by his moronic henchmen Gary and Graeme, and browbeaten by the infantile bully King John. John was played with terrifying abandon by Forbes Collins, who had been a peasant in
The Black Adder
(a complete
coincidence, Robinson insists), but besides Collins,
The Black Adder
’s Mr Applebottom, Howard Lew Lewis, as brainless beast Rabies
^fn7
and Ramsay Gilderdale playing a Guy of Gisborne even wetter than the pathetic halibut Ralph in
Christmas Carol
, there weren’t many links to be made between
Maid Marian
and
Blackadder
– at least not until Patsy Byrne cropped up as Marian’s embarrassing mother in a later series, a deliberate piece of casting by her old colleague which saw his dastardly baddie seducing the cuddly old lady via a romantic samba. He says, ‘There was never anyone I wanted for that role other than Patsy, I knew she would be perfect.’

Despite being aimed at a teatime audience, part pantomime, part playground-style rough and tumble, Tony says, ‘We got away with murder, we said things we could never say on children’s television nowadays. I remember there was one line Marian has, which was: “Men: they promise you the world, then you end up flat on your back servicing their muckspreader.”’ The writer had extensive experience of children’s TV, and would soon be hosting his own cartoon compendium,
Stay Tooned
, but Robinson had learned from Baldrick’s popularity with kids that there was no point in writing down to the viewers. ‘I think I knew that I was writing for an audience who would be very au fait with
The Young Ones
and
Blackadder
and Dawn and Jennifer and Alexei’s programmes. I knew a lot of nine- to eleven-year-olds at that time, and that was their world, that was the television they really cared about. They didn’t care about children’s television at all really, apart from cartoons. So I knew that if I was writing out of my experience of
Blackadder
, there was no need to shake that off, I just needed to write it in my own way, and I knew that my target audience would get what I was doing. I couldn’t help but be informed by the comic rhythms I had been working on over the previous ten years or so.’

Being warmly remembered for its many pop-music pastiches, as befitted the anarchic nature of the show, a constant stream of modern-day allusions which the kids would get made it clear that the twelfth-century setting was not to be taken seriously – the Sheriff’s expostulation, ‘Wait a darn-tootin’ minute! I have an idea so tasty you could coat it in sugar, stick a raspberry on top and serve it up on
MasterChef
!’ not only exemplifies this, but shows that the writer had no problem with throwing in the odd
Blackadder
-esque extended metaphor, usually reserved for his own character’s long speeches, which made up for years of Baldrick’s monosyllabism. Despite the silliness of it all, however,
Maid Marian
complemented its gleefully childish spirit with an overtly political stance, mocking Wayne Morris’s woolly royalist Robin and packing every story with suitably right-on rhetoric – a foreshadowing of Robinson’s move into party politics.

While Tony was only just beginning to sketch out Marian’s exploits, the Hat Trick team were branching out into sitcom themselves. Mulville had starred in the Humphrey Barclay-produced sitcom
That’s Love
, but he and Rory McGrath had their own idea for a sitcom vehicle – and it was historical.
Chelmsford 123
, as the name suggested, was set in second-century Essex, and followed the frayed relations between new Roman Governor Aulus Paulinus (Mulville), and Trinovantes Chieftain Badvoc (McGrath). As a
Who Dares Wins
spin-off, a part was earmarked for Robinson, who was at first invited to play Gracientus, Aulus’ slimy brother-in-law, but Tony recalls, ‘I think Denise O’Donoghue said, “Actually everyone thinks it would look too much like
Blackadder
if you played that character, so we’re going to ask Phil to play it.”’ Philip Pope ultimately put in perhaps the best performance in the show, but he wouldn’t be the only
Blackadder
player to feature – the bestial Emperor Hadrian, who spoke almost entirely in Latin, was played by Bill Wallis; Helen Atkinson-Wood was a British housewife; Howard Lew Lewis’s Blag allowed him to portray yet another moronic man mountain; Robert Bathurst got his sitcom pilot hat-trick; and Angus
Deayton and Geoff McGivern also joined the roster of Oxbridge guest stars littered throughout the two series. Although Britain was firmly in the firing line,
^fn8
one other similarity between the two historical sitcoms was a taste for Frenchie-baiting. Indeed, the entire saga ended on such a dig, after Gracientus’ despicable suggestion to Aulus that he displace Hadrian as Emperor lands everyone employment as galley slaves:

Although unfairly damned by comparison to
Blackadder
, the knockabout
Chelmsford 123
took a wholly different approach to historical comedy, using the set-up to make every anachronistic gag imaginable, with Blag regularly making ‘they haven’t invented it yet’
gags, the whole cast turning up in a modern-day sequence as their schoolboy descendants, and even a brief cameo from the Doctor, as the Tardis materialised in the background during the very first episode. Nevertheless, Mulville and McGrath knew that they were bound to be compared to Atkinson’s team – and, of course, felt they were more than equal to taking them on. While insistent that there was never any bitter division between the two Oxbridge camps, Robinson admits, ‘As with any ambitious people in their twenties, there’s always petty ambitions and cattiness, but I think that’s just part of the deal.’ Besides,
Blackadder
was not such a sitcom Goliath for the
WDW
team to face when they first piloted their Roman comedy in 1988 …

By early 1989, Curtis & Elton had already agreed on the setting for Edmund’s fourth full incarnation, moving into the twentieth century, and the team were contracted to begin recording in late summer. With McInnerny back in the fold, as well as Fry & Laurie being full-time players, the new line-up was just one way in which the latest series would be the ultimate distillation of everything that had gone before. There was no question of this being a finale, and yet by bringing the Blackadder family so close to the modern day, everybody involved knew that this would not just be any other series.

One of many differences for this all-new passage from the Chronicles was the fact that, with the World War I in their sights, the writers decided that historical research was a necessity, for the first time. ‘With
Blackadder
two and three, we weren’t particularly respectful of the periods, but I don’t think we were really into any blatant howlers,’ Elton says. ‘Obviously, with World War I we had a very different approach.’ Ribbing the attitudes of centuries gone by was one thing, but finding humour in the deaths of 35 million people within living memory was not a task that anyone connected to
Blackadder Goes Forth
could countenance taking lightly. ‘We read lots of books about it,’ Curtis says, ‘Ben knew it all, I read a few books. They were interesting, because all the stuff we wanted to write about,
which was sort of the clash of the classes, and getting stuck in a small confined space,
was
funny. All the people coming from communities where they’d never bumped into posh people, and vice versa, and all being so gung-ho and optimistic and enthusiastic … The first hundred pages of any book about the World War are hilarious – and then everybody dies.’