The True History of the Blackadder (43 page)

‘Of course there was a long tradition of World War II comedy from
The Army Game
, with Bootsie and Snudge, through to
Dad’s Army
,’ Stephen says, ‘with the American equivalents
Bilko
,
Hogan’s Heroes
,
M*A*S*H
, etc. Radio too, with
Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh
and the
Navy Lark
.’ In World War I terms, however, besides
Up the Front
, and perhaps the greatest pacifist treatment of the tragedy, Joan Littlewood’s
Oh What a Lovely War
, the Great War had featured in sitcom format in Dennis Pitts’s 1972 comedy
No Peace on the Western Front
. This
Comedy Playhouse
one-off began with genuine archive footage, prefacing a farce starring Warren Mitchell and Ronald Fraser as ‘the original odd couple’, a German and a Scots soldier who share a dugout on the Somme in 1916 and help each other to shirk their duty.

But the younger generation were far more cautious about causing offence. Laurie says, ‘It was a really peculiar and bold thing to try and make a comedy out of, but I think ultimately a very sympathetic and respectful one. Even though the characters were absurd and moronic at times, it never disrespected their courage or their sacrifice.’ ‘It was a big gamble and we did get some complaints,’ Atkinson adds, ‘but of all the periods we covered it was the most historically accurate. We may have exaggerated the characters and what happened to them but it is very difficult to exaggerate the absurdity and horror of World War I. People thought we were really going over the top … It may sound ridiculous for someone to face a court martial for shooting a pigeon, but madder things happened in reality. Towards the end of the war thirty soldiers were court-martialled and shot in France by our own
side for not wearing a hat in the trenches. It is so absurd nobody would ever believe it.’

Blackadder
’s
raison d’être
from the start was to draw humour from death and tragedy, but Elton for one was concerned that the closeness of the Somme bloodbath required caution – and nobody in the team was more aware of the seriousness of the subject matter than him, as both his grandfathers had actually been there, fighting on opposite sides (his father’s father had even won the Iron Cross, which was hastily buried in the back garden when the family migrated to Britain). But he was adamant that the war was ripe for comic treatment. ‘I was very anxious to do World War I; it’s a period I’m very interested in and have read a lot about. From the beginning Richard and I were absolutely committed to being extremely respectful, and aware of the unimaginable human tragedy … I hope no one was left in any doubt of the respect I think everybody on the team had for the sacrifices made and the honour of the people involved. But it was a damn silly war, and if ever there was a subject requiring satire, it’s people, no matter how honourably and how nobly, blindly going to war. Those awful policies, of what were called the Pals Brigades, because in 1914 people joined up together, whole gangs, the pub, a cricket team – or the tiddlywinks team as we said in
Blackadder
– would all march to the recruiting station, they’d all go together because the idea was that they’d fight together and for each other. And of course this industrial war didn’t really have a lot of time for people who’d fight for each other because people would be mown down in an instant … It was respectful to all. Yes, we had some fun with the old “lions led by donkeys” idea, but that’s legitimately part of our world experience as Britons and Europeans inheriting the memories and the history of our forefathers in that war.’

Lloyd goes further: ‘People don’t stop making jokes because somebody was killed just round the corner. In many ways – as people who’ve actually been fighting in real wars say – life becomes very
precious and pumped up … I think it’s manifest right from the beginning that nobody’s making fun of people. Quite the reverse, it’s entirely sympathetic to the poor bastards who were put in this appalling situation.’

But John had an extra reason for being glad of the setting. As Robinson says, ‘We’d always said that more than anything what we’d like to do would be to create a series that was very claustrophobic, where the five or six of us who were the performers were trapped in a space. And what better way to feel that notion of claustrophobia than to set it in the trenches?’ ‘We wanted a place and a time that could reproduce, to a certain extent, the claustrophobia and the sordidness of medieval England,’ Atkinson says, ‘and the best way to do that is to set it in the middle of a war.’ ‘Good sitcoms, so the wisdom goes, are set in places where people can’t get out,’ Lloyd continues, ‘
Porridge
in prison; in
Fawlty Towers
, Basil’s trapped with a ghastly wife that he can’t escape from and a business which is obviously going bust but which is his only livelihood. And we set ours in a trench dugout where there’s only two ways to escape – one is forward to the German machine guns, the other is backwards to the British firing squads.’ However, he adds, ‘I used to bang on to Richard and Ben that to do a proper sitcom, it has to be a situation in aspic, with a set number of characters who interact, and you find out more and more about them. So when they came along and said, “World War I, that’s the idea – three people in the dugout, two people in headquarters and that’s it, there are no other people,” I said, “That is brilliant.” But when the first three episodes came in, one was set in a flying school, one was set in hospital and the other one was set during a concert party. I said, “Guys, what’s happened to this three in the dugout, two in the headquarters idea? Where’s that gone?” And they said, “Well we couldn’t do that, it’s too difficult.”

Your Country Needs YOU

Having begun the entire dynastic saga by chickening out of active service at Bosworth, finally a Blackadder was going to war, whether he liked it or not. This didn’t actually make Captain B brave, just in the wrong place at the wrong time, although Atkinson did sense a change with each dynasty. ‘In the first series, Blackadder was just an idiot. In the second series he was dashing but weak. As the butler, he became cleverer and nastier. This time he is less cruel and more careworn.’ In his Flashman-esque pomp, fighting for the Empire, the Captain may have been as villainous as ever, but faced with heavily armed Germans, all he had left was what Fry calls ‘a strong belief, almost raised to the pitch of religiosity, that his skin and well-being were more important than that of anybody else’. The anti-hero’s traditional contempt for his surroundings was magnified by peril, in Boden’s view. ‘He was the person that could see the madness all around. He saw the madness in his own trench, let alone what was going on outside and in No Man’s Land.’

Curtis penned special service history profiles of all the regulars for
Radio Times
on the series’ broadcast, which detail how far from power the Blackadder family had fallen: ‘Captain Blackadder is a lifelong soldier, pipe-smoker and moustache-grower. He joined the army to escape the rigours of civilian life, and distinguished himself sitting in armchairs and ordering drinks across three continents, making it his particular business to avoid enemies who actually possessed guns …’ Baldrick, however, had fallen still further: ‘Christian name uncertain, Private Baldrick is a graduate of the Turnip Street Workhouse, where he majored in gutter-sweeping and potato peeling … It is impossible to pick up any textbook on rare skin diseases without coming across pictures of him.’ Despite the batman’s devolution to ‘amoeba level’, though, Fry identifies how the change of context lent a new kind of nobility to the fetid dwarf: ‘Baldrick makes his absolute apotheosis as the Tommy; he can make the best of everything, he can turn things to his advantage however ghastly, he can find a better puddle to go to.’
‘One of the things I love about series four,’ Curtis says, ‘is that strangely I think Baldrick gained meaning. You know, he’d just been a fool and a butt the whole way through, but there was a remarkable thing that happened right at the end of that series, when he did suddenly seem to represent the working man.’ ‘I had the privilege of performing a part that represented the ordinary lives of the grandfathers of an awful lot of people in the country in which I live,’ Robinson says, ‘but really it was for them to imbue Baldrick with that notion rather than me – I was just a bloke who couldn’t make coffee.’ Baldrick’s signing up also gave Robinson inspiration from a new quarter: ‘There’s a character called the Good Soldier Svejk, in a novel which came out in the First World War, who is as stupid as Baldrick. And you never actually really know whether he is incredibly stupid, or whether he’s just pretending to be stupid. That was kind of my inspiration. But rather than “I have a cunning plan, sir,” he says “Beg to report, sir!”’

Hugh Laurie says, ‘Baldrick is the hero really, because wherever you go, every school or organisation, every shop or whatever has got a Baldrick. They just loved that character.’ The audience were used to Hugh completing the central trio, and so George had to be reincarnated, with the Prince’s oafishness depleted, but not one ounce of brain being inherited along the way. ‘I think the kinship of stupidity between Baldrick and George was a very heart-warming one. They were companions on the great road of idiocy.’ Lt George the Hon. Colthurst Barleigh was conceived as a Woosterish silly ass (Hugh even experimented with a monocle until he discovered how hard it was to keep on), but his lack of guile made him perhaps the most sympathetic character of all. The actor suggests: ‘George’s sort of happy-go-lucky, “home in time for tea” attitude was especially tragic. His ideas about war come from games; George could only see real warfare in those terms. He genuinely was a lamb to the slaughter.’ In Curtis’s own words, George embodied the innocence lost in World War I, ‘Dying for a good scrap, he’s always the first to volunteer for a tricky escapade, and the last to duck.’

In taking over the all-important role of Blackadder’s death-dealing superior, Laurie’s partner, despite the General’s surname, had far more of the Wellington about him than Lord Melchett, and though he had no short supply of mad military commander forebears to inspire him, Fry became the first of the team to craft an all-new character – General Sir Anthony Cecil Hogmanay Melchett, although undeniably Colonel Blimp-ish, would go on to personify the dangerous ignorance of World War I high command like no other comic creation. Despite mistaking Cambridge for Oxford, Curtis’s service history for the General encapsulated the bullish buffoon perfectly: ‘Cousin of the Melchett who sent off the Light Brigade, Hogmanay Melchett is described by an uncredited captain as “having a skull that is such a perfect vacuum, it’s a constant surprise his moustache doesn’t get sucked up his nose”. Educated, using the word at its loosest, at Oundle, where he was one of the great fag-beating team of 1877, he went on to break wind for his college at Oxford, and then joined the army to protect the British Empire and shout at the lower classes in a very loud voice.’ It was the thirty-year-old Fry’s portrayal, however, that made this crusty old dinosaur such a memorable monster. With characteristic modesty, Fry says, ‘Young people playing old people are funny. Because I was young and I was playing a General, it was somehow funnier than if I’d been the right age to be a General, which I am now … Most of what I do isn’t terribly hard. I don’t have to “disappear” into a character in some terrible way. With
Blackadder
the last thing you want is to take it too seriously. The audience relishes the sight of an actor enjoying himself. They like to see the gargantuan imbecility of it.’ He adds, however, ‘The Melchett in series four was a very different character to the one in two, he was much, much more aggressive, much more insane, much more powerful. He was really, for almost the entire series,
the
source of power. And he represents the absolute insanity of the war. Without being too pompous about
Blackadder
, it does I think illustrate perfectly the nature of that
grotesque war, the genuine insanity if you like, of the way the war was practised, which however much it may have been justifiable, to us it is now clear that it was a moment of madness in human history that one would never want to repeat again, so it’s wonderful to concentrate some of that madness into a single being.’

Since the Cambridge days, when his Shakespearean kings tended to incorporate extraneous senile noises into every speech, Fry had entertained his friends with his own unique loud bleating, which could act as a greeting, an agreement, or even a threat. ‘It was done as much as anything to amuse Rowan and Hugh, this rather bizarre way of speaking, and barking. You knew he was coming just because you heard a “Beh!” noise somewhere in the background. I would try and make Rowan laugh by sometimes sitting down and going “Ach!” and only Rowan knew it was because I had these apparent piles.’ The haemorrhoidal subtext to Melchett’s madness was gifted to Fry by Brian Blessed – an apt gesture, given that the General was the closest thing to Blessed’s Richard IV in three series.

McInnerny was brought back into the fold with the promise of the series’ second all-new character, essentially filling Fry’s previous role, of Blackadder’s weaselly and sycophantic equal. ‘Darling and Blackadder are kind of the same really,’ Elton says, ‘lower-middle-class sort of semi-gentlemen. But obviously one of them has managed to connive his way onto the staff, and the other one’s bad-lucked into the trenches.’ As Tim recalls, this was about the size of the role. ‘The whole idea of doing the fourth series … I mean, it took a great deal of thought, as far as I was concerned, but doing Darling was a kind of way of hoping that everyone might forget a little bit about Percy. To play Darling, who hated Blackadder, and throughout the series wanted him to go on the front line and be killed, was quite extreme.’ However, he adds, ‘In the initial rehearsals, he wasn’t even called Darling, he was called Captain Cartwright, which is kind of dull. I mean, I didn’t even know who he was and couldn’t get an angle on him.’