The True History of the Blackadder (31 page)

Roaring into the plot with a textbook example of Lloyd’s insane ‘house style’, Baker chews the scenery magnificently, electrifying the court and even stealing Nursie’s heart, to Byrne’s joy. ‘Anyone who pays attention to her in a slightly flirtatious or sexy way, she crumbles with delight! I think she thinks Rum is quite extraordinary, even if he is legless.’ Baker himself was not quite so pleased with his performance; while claiming it as the oddest TV role he’s played (more so than a two-hearted time-travelling alien), he has also complained, ‘I keep getting money because they repeat my appalling
Blackadder
performance … for which someone should have taken away my Equity card. It was terrible and the buggers keep playing it.’ Fry begs to differ: ‘His performance was superb, and he himself was entirely charming. While a scene that didn’t involve him was being rehearsed he would disappear and return with a tray fully laden with sweets, crisps, chocolates, sandwiches, nuts and snacks, which he would hand round to everyone in the room, often nipping off again to reload … He had a way of gazing at you with grave
bulging eyes that made it rather hard to determine whether he thought you an idiot or a god.’ Despite being repeatedly hit with a boomerang in the episode, McInnerny was to declare, ‘He’s my favourite Doctor, so working with him was a fabulous week! One of my favourite weeks on
Blackadder
.’

Technically, the role of the Bishop of Bath and Wells in fourth episode ‘Money’ was not a true historical figure, but there is something slightly fishy about the fact that the official records for holders of the exalted ecclesiastic post record two of the few extended vacancies in the 800-year-long history of the diocese during the late sixteenth century – it’s probable that a bishop who was a self-confessed baby-eating ‘colossal pervert’ would be expunged from all documents. The late Ronald Lacey, despite being a doubly well-known face, as the greasy Harris in
Porridge
and the Nazi Toht in
Raiders of the Lost Ark
, was lost within the ruddy folds of fat that enveloped his despicable bishop. So infamous was his grotesque depiction, indeed, that when the present incumbent the Right Reverend Peter Price took up the post in 2001, he felt obliged to tell the House of Lords in his maiden speech, ‘In the aftermath of the
Blackadder
television series, there are always perils for the bishops of Bath and Wells. I am constantly reminded of the alleged activities of one of my predecessors as a baby-eater … Entering Your Lordships’ House has proved no exception, and the greeting from the doorkeeper on my first day was capped only by the Bishop of Southwark seeing my five-week-old granddaughter arrive and remarking, “The Bishop has brought his own lunch!”’

The penultimate caper ‘Beer’ (rated as least favourite by the team, but highest rated by viewers) was another ramped-up farce, introducing a new branch of the Blackadder family to make Edmund’s life a misery – and providing a celebrated return for Miriam Margolyes, as the violently Protestant gorgon Lady Whiteadder. ‘For a Jew, as I am, to be covered in crosses was a complicated experience,’ Margolyes says sweetly, neglecting to acknowledge the pleasure she gained from
treating Atkinson and McInnerny to repeated physical abuse without recourse to stage-fighting, the latter laughing, ‘I think that she would say that there was no way of faking it … but it really hurt, actually.’ Fletcher adds, ‘In rehearsal, Rowan got a bit fed up with this, and actually it was very funny. He said, “Would it be all right, Miriam, if you just didn’t do it
quite
so hard?”’ But as the original directions called for the mad Puritan to
hit
Edmund rather than slap him, perhaps they got off lightly. Margolyes insists that people still request slaps and cries of ‘Wicked child!’ from her in the streets, to her bemusement, but above all, she says, ‘I remember being quite surprised that the director was a woman! Mandie was very good; I hadn’t been expecting a woman to be directing comedy, I don’t know why, I suppose I came from that world where comedy was always completely dominated by men. It was just terrific to see the authority she had. We laughed all the time, and worked very hard.’ ‘I used to crave the times when we had women performers on, like Miriam,’ Fletcher returns, ‘not that we had many, we were terribly outnumbered, but we were often at the lunch table together.’ Margolyes’s screen husband Lord Whiteadder would of course have been a fitting return for Jim Broadbent – almost entirely silent where his Interpreter had found it impossible to shut up – but Jim’s unavailability gave the part to the stony-faced Daniel Thorndike, nephew of Dame Sybil, who would go on to feature in
A Bit of Fry & Laurie
.

The episode’s real place in history, however, comes from the
Blackadder
debut of Hugh Laurie, stepping in to fill the minor role of merrymaker Simon Partridge, alongside William Hootkins and
Spitting Image
’s Roger Blake. ‘I had the strong feeling at the time that someone had backed out at the last minute … But of course it was thrilling, because by that time Stephen had been doing the second series, Melchetting and all that stuff, and I had pangs of jealousy! And it was a real thrill to get a ticket onto that ocean liner.’ This characteristic self-effacement belies the fact that Hugh was already in place to be the
final guest star of the series, providing our anti-hero with his ultimate nemesis, Prince Ludwig the Indestructible. It’s interesting that Laurie’s first involvement also coincides with an emphasis on cast-led script enhancement, defined by Lloyd as ‘plumpening’. Fry says, ‘The first four scripts which Richard and Ben presented were simply perfect, we barely changed a word, they really were marvellous. I guess, flushed with the excitement of working together and doing something completely new, they really honed them. I’m not saying they got lazier for the last two, but maybe we were more confident with our characters so we were adding a bit more.’ Whether it’s therefore fair to apportion blame or not, ‘Chains’ is perhaps the one episode which most betrays the writers’ avoidance of historical logic – in a time when Elizabeth was constantly fending off either France or Spain or both, our heroes are finally brought down by a German (albeit with a Spanish torturer). For once, Edmund got to swing into action Flynn-style and save the day, even if it was only his own hide that concerned him …

And there Curtis & Elton were content to leave the Lord, victorious and adored by his Queen (not to mention finally managing to catch the taunting minstrel and give him a dunking), until John Lloyd put his foot down, and decided, ‘No, let’s not get stale, let’s move on another two hundred years!’ As a coda, where every other episode was to sign off with a jolly cha-cha-cha, once again a royal court was piled high with bodies, for a tragic ending which allowed the producer to note in the
Radio Times
that ‘Chains’ was a ‘very funny last episode in which the court get horribly murdered at the end again’.

The Filthy Genes Resurface

Despite the long delay between the end of recording in July and the eventual first broadcast of
Blackadder II
the following January, the slickness of the studio recordings, thanks to the simplicity of Fletcher’s direction, made for a far smoother post-production job for Lloyd
and his team. Any slight flabbiness was tweaked as career-defining performances from the extended family of performers played out on the edit suite: Baldrick doing favours for sailors; Bernard the Nurse wearing her dead lover’s beard; Melchett’s glorious golden comedy breasts (as presented to Fry for the twenty-fifth-anniversary tribute); Edmund’s attempts to finish the song about goblins; the alchemist Percy’s miraculous discovery of how to make a splat of the purest green;
^fn11
Lady Whiteadder chomping on a turnip ‘as nature intended’ … Lloyd had no doubt that the finished series had been well worth the distraction from the pressures of
Spitting Image
– the new show was cheap, sexy, and
windingly
funny.

A full quarter of a decade after Edmund’s debut, the official press release would warn, ‘The filthy genes of the Blackadder family have resurfaced in the melting pot of history,’ as the rogue landed in the same slot, Thursdays at 9.30 p.m. on BBC1. Atkinson busily went to work to remind the British public about his historical alter ego, recording special trailers for the series
^fn12
and telling the
Radio Times
, ‘I’m actually happier with this series and believe it has wider appeal. It’s zappy and anarchic.’ On
Wogan
, he mulled over ideas for future incarnations of his acerbic noble, positing the World War I flying ace the Baron von Blackadder, and the space-age adventurer Star Adder.

But though he was open about his hopes for the show to catch on, Atkinson had already gained the most important thing in his life from his time on
Blackadder II
. Sunetra Sastry was the make-up artist detailed to glue on the Melchett beard for every recording and, Fry admits, she had quite an effect on him: ‘From a Brahmin-caste Indian family, she was bright, funny and as captivatingly alluring as any girl I had met for years.’ Although describing himself as ‘90 per cent homosexual’, Fry
had created a rod for his own back when he wrote a short article for the
Tatler
admitting that sex was one of the things he ‘didn’t do’, but despite his self-imposed evasion of romance, he claims that the make-up artist gave him pause for thought. ‘I was quite seriously considering asking her out on a date, when Rowan timidly approached me one morning during rehearsals for the second episode and asked if I would mind swapping make-up artists with him. Since he had grown his own beard for the part, unlike me, who had to have my large excrescence glued on with spirit gum every week, I thought this rather odd: his make-up sessions lasted as long as it took to powder the tip of his nose …’ Fry eventually decoded his diffident co-star’s meaning, and with his blessing, Atkinson finally plucked up the courage to ask Sastry out. Despite taking her to a Dire Straits concert on what was reportedly a disastrous first date of Bean proportions, Sastry was smitten, and Rowan’s bachelor days were over. Fry continues, ‘They now have two children and twenty years of marriage behind them, but I still sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had been bold enough and quick enough on my feet to have asked Sunetra out straight away.’

The critical response to
Blackadder II
was markedly warmer than it had been for the first series, but still the praise was not entirely thunderous, Ronald Hastings in the
Telegraph
begrudgingly admitting, ‘The first series was so variable, all right, so awful, that the BBC must have been reluctant to make a second. It is good that they did, for this is a great improvement.’

John, Rowan and the team were certainly vindicated for fighting for
Blackadder
’s return and yet, especially for its mainstream slot, the second series was no breakthrough hit on its first broadcast, with ratings as modest as the critical appreciation. Tony recalls, however, ‘It was around about the repeat of the second series that I began to get an inkling of quite how popular it was. It also coincided with the time I was bringing up my children in Bristol and so it wasn’t as if I was popping in and out of the Ivy and the Groucho Club. I was dealing with things like
queuing up outside primary schools and driving children to the next games field. I remember going to Alton Towers with my kids one day and we were unable to go round it. My presence there caused chaos. I suddenly thought, “I have to recalibrate what my life is!”’ These BBC2 repeats, at 9 p.m. during the glorious summer of 1987, opened up the
Blackadder
history to a whole new audience, not least the millions of children who would have been tucked up in bed for the first airing. A third series was already a certainty, but thanks to being prefaced by the triumphant repeat run, Edmund Blackadder was finally gaining the place at the heart of British society which he had always felt his absolute right.

By this time of course everyone in the cast had moved on to different projects, in film, theatre and especially comedy. But the biggest project of them all, which would unite most of the cast for years to come, began to take seed right back in the summer of ’85. As Stephen recalled, ‘The Saturday after the taping of the last episode of
Blackadder II
Richard held a party at his house in Oxfordshire. It was a glorious summer’s day, and, as we all wanted to watch television, he unwound an extension cord and put the set on a wooden chair in the shade of an apple tree. We sat on the grass and watched
Live Aid
…’ Before the party was over, having witnessed the magnitude of what could be achieved in the name of charity, Curtis and his friends began to form a plan. By the time their newly wrapped series was actually broadcast, Comic Relief would already be a red-nosed, stonking reality.

^fn1
Historical drama was a speciality – the last play imagined the scene when Mussolini was captured by partisans, prior to being strung up in 1945.

^fn2
It was John Lloyd’s visit to one of the latter which led to Fry getting his
Not
credit, much to Laurie’s annoyance as it meant they had to cut the gents hand-dryer quickie out of their own show.