The True History of the Blackadder (29 page)

MIRANDA JANE RICHARDSON B ORN : 3 March 1958, Southport, Lancashire

Miranda was the younger of two daughters born to Marian and marketing executive William Richardson, coming along several years after the birth of her sister. Growing up in a cosy corner of the North-West, young Miranda discovered the two all-pervading loves of her life while still very tiny – performing, and four-legged friends of all varieties.

Her original hopes of becoming a vet, however, were abandoned, thanks to the undeniable skill she showed onstage and in the classroom as a talented mimic. After her O levels Miranda’s first port of call was the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, where three years of study were followed by the then indispensable training ground of repertory theatre. Glowing notices from her work at the Library Theatre, Manchester (where she was also assistant stage manager), led to a West End debut in the play
Moving
, in 1981. In the same year, she had a small role in the ITV sitcom
Agony
, and further success in television roles had by 1985 led to her first
starring role in a film, playing Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain, in
Dance with a Stranger
.

‘Miranda seemed very willing to muck in,’ Rowan reflects. ‘She did effectively become a member of the repertory company. She had such a sort of brave and eccentric creative curiosity to her, it meant that she didn’t really care what she did or how she did it, she was going to enjoy exploring all the possibilities, and that’s where her Elizabeth came from.’ In the summer of 1985 Miranda Richardson was already mulling over the lead in Hollywood thriller
Fatal Attraction
, but having recently had such success playing one romantically deranged murderess in
Dance with a Stranger
, she felt that historical sitcom would offer a greater challenge. ‘I had a glorious opportunity to go off at a tangent, you know? I hate being boxed and labelled, so if somebody had just gone, “Oh, serious drama!” I’d have been a bit disappointed. I’m an actor and I like to be as flexible as I possibly can be, so I was given the opportunity immediately to go and do something really quite wild and wacky … The scripts were very detailed and arcane. It was the combination of, if you like, Ben the yobbo and Richard the scholar. The same elements are all in
Monty Python
. It was scholarly, wide-ranging and mentally adept as well as wild and woolly. That sort of anarchy is very English.’

Curtis was delighted with the new addition. ‘Everybody did it in a very two-dimensional way, and then Miranda came in and she was just completely bizarre – a strange mixture of sort of woman–child– nymphomaniac–tyrant. And I remember that, in a way, every line got changed afterwards. She could do what we wrote, but we actually then wrote something much more in her direction.’ This is not to say that the completed core cast instantly gelled. Tony Robinson remembers the crisis in the air: ‘For the first week we were really, really frightened, because Richard and Ben didn’t know how to write for women. I don’t think they’d met a woman until that time. It was only when Miranda
came in and did this fantastic performance that they knew how to write for her. Miranda is an extraordinary actress, and Richard knew that she was, and brought her in because of the quality of her acting, he was so captivated by it. But the part that had originally been written was half baked, and if the Queen Elizabeth character didn’t work, then the show wasn’t going to work.’ The situation wasn’t helped by Lloyd’s admission that ‘her well of creativity is so bottomless and so brimming with such mysterious liquids that directing her is pointless’. It was down to Richardson herself to find a way to play the Queen, a world away from Glenda Jackson, Bette Davis and a hundred other Elizabeths. ‘I think I knew that this was somebody with a lot of power but far too young really to deal with it. I thought of her like an infanta, somebody who everybody was kowtowing to and saying “yes” to, while politicking like mad in the background … It’s within court, which is a very small, bejewelled world, you know, and there are these little people in there who think they rule the world, but of course it was only me that ruled the world. I thought of her as someone with too much, too soon, far too young. She’s quite prone to sending people off to be trimmed – a small nip and tuck, involving their head usually, if she feels a bit moody that day … and she’s a girl. Girls get moody.’ But that wasn’t the whole picture, this was a young Elizabeth, freshly crowned, and not entirely virginal. ‘She was obviously somebody who had crushes – because I mean, let’s face it, I don’t think she did anything of great significance with boys. It was sort of like the pony club and men in tights – perfect combo for her … big bulbous tights. But nothing ever came to fruition, so she was always in that sort of suspended state of not-quite-adolescence.’

The eureka moment came when Richardson discovered the exact lisping delivery to convey this weird infantilism, a voice which had made the cast of
Dance with a Stranger
howl in between takes. ‘I know I was referencing a friend I had at school, we’d talk in this sort of silly language to each other, and go into a sort of exacerbated sweet, slightly
girly sort of baby voice.’ ‘Midway through that first week,’ Robinson says, ‘suddenly Miranda discovered this young woman who’s on the cusp of ponies and sex, as it were. And I remember the scene when she got it; John Lloyd was leaping up and down with excitement, going “Yes, that’s it! That’s it!” And from that moment, that series took off. Miranda has this ability to make what she does look entirely spontaneous but it’s virtually always really thought through. And it’s as though by thinking it through, she can then allow herself internally to have a whole kind of 5 November firework display going on inside her head, because she’s confident in the structure that’s she’s already created.’

The rest of the cast were bowled over by Richardson’s transformation. McInnerny admits, ‘It was very frightening what Miranda did with Elizabeth – turning her into this kind of psychotic.’ And her sidekick Byrne would concur: ‘She gave a performance of sustained imagination – and she’s just so clever!’ ‘It ought to have been deeply weird, pervy, peculiar, wrong, Queenie’s relationship with Nursie, but instead of making the Queen less dignified, it somehow made her more so,’ Fry says. ‘The essence of caprice in a monarch that Miranda played is one of the most joyous experiences of my life, to be standing next to her watching these incredible contortions and writhings, and hearing these phenomenal squeaks and squeals and noises coming out of this incredible woman.’ To complete the circle of mutual admiration, Miranda was eventually to pay tribute in return, in her own way: ‘Stephen is fantastic … much older than his years, he had this extraordinary gravitas and maturity, that’s what I remember. And his marvellous height! His presence added to the extremes, you know – you’ve got Nursie who’s sort of practically spherical, then I’m like this little firework or something in the middle, and Melchy’s this wonderful lugubrious long streak of piss next to me. His character reminded me a bit of something I used to watch all the time,
Noggin the Nog
. He reminded me of Thor Nogsson, so I was very taken with him.’

All this extraordinary backslapping, however, was in the future, as the
Blackadder
company repaired to the ‘North Acton Hilton’ for rehearsals, preparing to go into Studio 6 at BBC TV Centre, for the show’s first exposure to a live audience.

Tweaking the Nose of Terror

‘It’s a bit like doing Shakespeare in front of an audience – it’s not at all like doing sitcom,’ Mandie Fletcher was to claim about those Sunday-night recordings, but to the returning trio from
The Black Adder
, this stressful new system came as a shock. Early summer 1985 was given up to this recurring nightmare, six intense performances, each the result of a week of equally intense rehearsal and argument. In
The Fry Chronicles
, Stephen traced the process: ‘On Tuesday morning we would read through the script, with Richard and sometimes Ben in attendance … Mandie would make notes and build up her camera script, and John would grimace and sigh and smoke and pace and growl. His perfectionism and refusal to be satisfied was part of the reason
Blackadder
worked. Every line, plot twist and action was taken, rubbed between his fingers, sniffed and passed, rejected or pulled in for servicing and improvement.’

Close proximity to this gaggle of perfectionists had caused problems for guest stars in the first series, but now the stakes were higher. The scripts had already been feted as the best Lloyd had seen, but greatness could be polished further, and even at this relatively early stage in
Blackadder
’s evolution, the wrangling could become fraught. Fry says, ‘Hours would pass and packets of cigarettes would be got through and huge quantities of hideous polystyrene muddy coffee would be drunk, in an effort to try and get the scripts right.’ ‘I remember Stephen at one point just scraping his chair back and striding around the room,’ Richardson adds, ‘this enormous person striding round, and he came back to the table, grabbed a pencil and piece of paper and put it in front
of me, and it just said “Fucking hell!”’ Amid this comedic ruck, while sharing tea-making facilities with David Jason and Nicholas Lyndhurst, Atkinson must have occasionally envied them their straightforward approach to John Sullivan’s
Only Fools
scripts. ‘Sometimes it was very tense,’ he says. ‘I remember some very difficult times when we appeared to be just sitting around for two and a half hours bemoaning the lack of writing clarity in a particular scene and desperately trying to think how that might be reorientated to work.’ On the other hand, Fry says, ‘
Only Fools
was a success because it was real and not trying to be anything other than set in a world Sullivan and his cast knew – a kind of antidote to our smart-arse “Oh look at me I’ve been to university” school of comedy.’

Patsy Byrne says, ‘Miranda and I would play Scrabble at the side while the boys all conferred with John on the script.’ When it comes to favourite scenes, she offers, ‘I think I remember visual moments more, and I really crack up whenever I see them. Perhaps my most favourite is the moment when Baldrick is discovered in a corner, trying out his costume for the party, with two pencils up his nose … and I liked that really disgracefully dirty scene, with the sailor who “loved his mum”, and then asked for a quick one.’ ‘Patsy was delicious,’ Fry says. ‘She seemed happy to let us get on with it and rewrite all the time and there wasn’t a line she couldn’t get instantly. She completely understood her character. An unsung genius.’

When the big recording day arrived, the natural warm-up for the relaunched show was of course Elton himself, never short of a gag, topical, scatological or historical – although often in rapid enough succession that Fletcher had a job to shut him up for a take. He would also put the episode in context for the crowd, which Fry recalls as being vital, as ‘there was always a detectable air of disappointment emanating from the audience. No part of the current series would yet have been broadcast, so they would be staring at an unfamiliar set and fretting at the absence of the characters they had known from the previous
series. When they came to
Blackadder II
they were sorry not to have Brian Blessed there as the King; when they came to
Blackadder the Third
recordings they missed Queenie; and when they arrived for recordings of
Blackadder Goes Forth
they wanted to see Prince George and Mrs Miggins.’ The role of the warm-up is a crucial one, with the audience’s participation central to the proceedings, even if the slog of some TV recordings can prove torture to the general public. Elton didn’t give them time to grow restless, urging, ‘Do try and make new friends during these pauses, you know, use the time properly – we’ll be passing some joints around later, maybe linking arms, I’ll be doing some mime in a leotard … Middle-class comedy, go go go!’