The True History of the Blackadder (49 page)

So while it’s fair to conclude that lies and propaganda may be history in modern Britain, I remain considerably indebted to those whose historical researches and philosophies have enriched my examination of how such lies have malformed our understanding of the past – the great Terry Jones, the venerable J. H. W. Lloyd and, of course, the brave Professor Justin Pollard.
^fn1

The truth remains that when a new king is crowned, what he says is the True History, becomes the True History.

GOD SAVE THE KING!

^fn1
To whom this True History is at least partly dedicated, he having very sadly accidentally beheaded himself flossing his teeth, before publication. He is a great loss to outlandish historical conspiracy theorists everywhere.

Chapter 6

BACK AND FORTH

Chaos theory tells us that if a butterfly so much as breaks wind, it could cause a cataclysm …

You have to hand it to Rowan Atkinson, his career has been exceedingly punctual, with new challenges and projects clicking into gear with precision engineering.
Mr Bean
had a long and complicated gestation period, and at one point John Lloyd was down to be producer of the irregular series, but by the time the original programme went out on the first day of the 1990s, Atkinson had flitted to the third channel, with John Howard Davies directing and producing the debut. It was a coup for Thames TV, who had enjoyed great success with Benny Hill’s internationally popular variety shows, but with Hill’s brand of saucy humour finally judged to be officially past its sell-by date by Howard Davies himself, Atkinson was poised to step into the vacuum. His own company shared the production credit, Tiger TV – and, latterly, Tiger Aspect – being founded on the basis of an agreement between Atkinson and Peter Bennett-Jones, made in the wake of the loss of Richard Armitage.

Some remnants of Rowan’s original idea of using the
Blackadder
powerhouse for his new creation survived for the first special, with old
Curtis material like the ‘blind man on the beach’ and ‘falling asleep in church’ sketches being recycled, alongside an exam sequence by Elton which had its roots in a sad monologue from Neil in
The Young Ones
about wasting his entire examination time arranging a selection of good-luck gonks. With that being Ben’s sole contribution to the Bean legacy, the core
Blackadder
team dissolved. Curtis himself would step back from being Bean’s primary puppeteer as the awkward disaster magnet’s career flourished throughout the decade, his burden gradually relieved by regular
Smith & Jones
player Robin Driscoll, as Bean’s five years of TV specials began to lead to international acclaim.

The Ever-Growing Bean

Despite the debacle of his Broadway debut and turning down a multimillion-dollar offer to star in a US sitcom, Atkinson continued to make more modest inroads into the transatlantic market, with a successful tour of the
Not Just a Pretty Face
show being captured for posterity live in Boston
^fn1
but it was the unearthly overgrown schoolboy in the dilapidated green Mini who changed everything. Obviously the near absence of dialogue in Mr Bean’s world would be a major part of the character’s huge success all around the planet, and within just a few years Rowan could genuinely be said to have attained the status of international comedy icon – even, finally, in the USA. In fact, the one country where Bean always garnered a mixed reception is back home in Blighty, where Atkinson’s fan base missed the verbal gymnastics of
Blackadder
, and despite the popularity of the shows, British critics could never bring themselves to applaud Atkinson’s move towards all-inclusive family entertainment with as much aplomb as their foreign counterparts: ‘I have to say that it is difficult to think of examples
where the gulf between popular perception and the media’s perception is as wide as it is with
Mr Bean
,’ he was to muse, rejecting the elitist critics who sneered at Bean’s proletarian popularity. ‘It’s because it has no intellectual conceit, or irony or subtext whatsoever. It’s the sheer manifestness of it, I think, which is sort of irritating to those who tend to look for more depth in comedy.’

Atkinson took on the form of Mr Bean more devotedly than any other character as the decade wore on. ‘I did strange things – like appearing on chat shows in character. I remember going to a book signing as Mr Bean, and I just wrote “Mr Bean” in the book rather than Rowan Atkinson … it was a fantastically kind of freeing experience, because I could just submerge myself in this character and behave however I liked.’ Videos, books, a hit number-seven single, ‘I Wanna Be Elected’, Easter eggs, lunch boxes, video games, toys – Bean became, and remains, a major industry, the weirdo’s life extended far beyond the run of TV specials by his becoming almost a mascot for Comic Relief, regularly featuring in most Red Nose Night marathons, until Atkinson relinquished the role’s taxing physical demands and Bean joined the highest echelons of comedy characters, like Laurel & Hardy and Inspector Clouseau before him, by becoming a cartoon. Mr Bean was certainly no angel, but Atkinson could hardly have got further away from the arch, cool sesquipedalian character of Blackadder in the decades following
Goes Forth
.
^fn2

With Atkinson having already co-starred in one Oscar-winning short film, Steven Wright’s
The Appointments of Dennis Jennings
in 1988, Mr Bean first began inching his way into the American consciousness via cinema shorts based on the TV show – but despite Bean’s tongue-tied nature, a move into features was always on the cards, with 1997’s
Bean: The Ultimate Disaster Movie
and the following
love letter to Jacques Tati,
Mr Bean’s Holiday
, doing great business on release. There was a mooted UK invasion when the shorts were made, with Lenny Henry starring in Disney’s
True Identity
and Rik Mayall on fine form in
Drop Dead Fred
, but although the latter film can claim a cult following, neither comic shared Atkinson’s doggedness in making it big in the States, persevering even if it meant playing smaller roles in films such as
Hot Shots! Part Deux
,
Scooby Doo
or
Rat Race
. It was unexpected, however, that Rowan’s movie triumphs would not come along until after his long-time partner had already been feted by Hollywood.

Four Weddings and a Funeral
would not set Richard Curtis on the road to becoming a romcom ‘brand’ until 1994, and then Atkinson would only have a cameo, once again donning the vicar’s surplice. A couple of years earlier, however, perhaps the writer’s most charming feature had once again cast Rowan as the bad guy – though it remains a sadly uncelebrated part of his oeuvre, being made for TV, broadcast on BBC1 on 23 December 1991, and never repeated or commercially released in the UK.
Bernard & the Genie
was co-produced by Talkback and directed by Paul Weiland, who had helmed
Alas Smith & Jones
after Martin Shardlow’s exit, before moving into movies with a turkey of disastrous proportions,
Leonard Part 6
, starring Bill Cosby. Alan Cumming made his heroic debut as the sweet loser Bernard Bottle, whose life begins to fall apart on Christmas Eve until he discovers an ancient lamp containing the bombastic good-time genie Josephus, played by Lenny Henry on full throttle. Atkinson’s weaselly millionaire art dealer Charles Pinkworth – ‘a very large turd in a horrible pink shirt’, in the Genie’s summation – is another exemplary bastard, a heartless boss in need of a Scrooging which never really comes, with a bizarre line in camp, florid abuse. Having discovered a priceless collection of Old Masters belonging to two sweet old ladies (and then offered them half of the proceeds), the promising young art dealer with the suitably alliterative name receives the first of many Christmas surprises:

Curtis’s own brand of warm-hearted wonder made the TV movie a Christmas treat which would be fondly remembered by many, perhaps only slightly marred in hindsight by the instantly dating topicality of the pop-culture references (when the Genie grants real wishes to children disappointed by a drunken store Santa, one young boy’s transformation into Gary Lineker made perfect sense in 1991, but has jarring connotations for the modern viewer, while a line from Howard Goodall’s opening
music, when Bernard is on top of the world – ‘
He’s higher than high, if he was a girl he’d be Princess Di
’ – seems grimly inappropriate in retrospect). Unsurprisingly, Curtis has kept the screenplay in circulation ever since, with other writers including Linehan & Mathews reworking the script from time to time, to no avail – but then the chances of hitting quite the same note with a new cast are slim. Certainly there’s no replacing Denis Lill’s show-stealing performance as Bernard’s compulsive liar lift attendant confidant, Kepple.

But as Curtis learned the hard way, a hit screenplay is not something you can rush – by the time
Bernard & the Genie
was on TV, he was already years into agonising development on the follow-up to
The Tall Guy
, entitled
Four Weddings and a Honeymoon
, the ultimate manifestation of the writer’s irritation with Saturdays spent throwing confetti and listening to drunken speeches. Emma Freud was now her boyfriend’s script editor, and proved to be a hard taskmaster. ‘She’s a very ruthless, almost unpleasant script editor. The thing I dread is the bloody letters CDB, which stand for “Could Do Better”. I used to think: “But I’ve worked on that for a week!”’ However, it was his old collaborator Helen Fielding who first steered him away from the whimsical fluffiness plaguing his second film script, urging him to cut a sequence where the hero Charles stalks the object of his affection on her honeymoon, and advising the writer that it was ‘time to grow up’. The injection of tragedy into what was otherwise a light romance revolving around a gaggle of toffs was perhaps the strongest element
^fn3
which turned
Four Weddings and a Funeral
into the smash-hit romcom of 1994 – at the time the highest grossing British movie in history, released in America with a publicity budget of zero cents, but ultimately grossing nearly a quarter of a billion dollars, besides garnering Oscar nominations and BAFTAs. Rowan only had a small role as Father Gerald, but his popularity still
made him prominent in all the movie posters that summer – while the only film to rival
Four Weddings
’ success that season was
The Lion King
, in which Rowan played Zazu the pompous Polonius-styled hornbill, duetting on the pleasingly Adder-ishly titled ‘I Just Can’t Wait to Be King!’