The True History of the Blackadder (57 page)

John has tended to be the man to bring the team back together for special occasions, helming a radio documentary,
I Have a Cunning Plan
, for the twentieth anniversary, and a feature-length TV special,
Blackadder Rides Again
, for the twenty-fifth, which perfectly encapsulated the difficulty of any kind of reunion by showing the producer travelling from chilly Alnwick all the way to the Californian lot of
House
in order to accommodate everyone. ‘
Rides Again
had an honesty about it,’ Lloyd says, ‘but it was about closure. I think the subtext was that
Blackadder
was worth doing, because it was such a good thing, but I tried to get across the idea that
nothing “great” is easy
. Not ever.’ The twenty-fifth anniversary also brought some of the team back together for UKTV Gold’s celebration
The Whole Rotten Saga
, which united the nation’s real Blackadders and allowed viewers to choose their own
Most Cunning Moments
. Like the episodes themselves, these celebrations and clip shows are often repeated, particularly at Christmas time, for the simple reason that
Blackadder
still gets good ratings, thirty years after its inception.

Also testament to
Blackadder
’s influence is the fate of historical sitcom in the last twenty years. Where TV commissioners once sneered at period comedy because ‘it didn’t work’, the fact that flop after flop has been dismissed as ‘no
Blackadder
’ has subsequently plagued the genre. Not that this has prevented anyone from trying to transcend comparison, with series like the French & Saunders French Revolution sitcom
Let Them Eat Cake
and Rob Grant’s millennial ITV show
Dark Ages
littered
among the reject pile, alongside the likes of Craig Charles’s pirate comedy
Captain Blood
, which was weaker than Atkinson-Wood’s CITV equivalent
Tales From The Poopdeck
. Even the one top-grade period sitcom of the 1990s, Arthur Mathews’s
Hippies
, was badly received and only lasted for one series. Radio 4 has, however, played host to many more successful historical comedies, with Kim Fuller’s anachronism-packed
The Castle
and especially Andy Hamilton and Jay Tarses’s sublime
Revolting People
(produced of course by Paul Mayhew-Archer, and a far funnier exploration of life in revolutionary America than
1775
) chief among the station’s successes.

It wasn’t until the CBBC sketch show
Horrible Histories
began to get wider acclaim that historical comedy on TV started to thaw out – and although that series was good enough in its own right, when it was repackaged for a wider audience, there was something fitting about Stephen Fry being chosen to provide scholarly historical links. Fry has dipped his toe back into Adder-ish waters more than anyone else on the team, and often in a villainous role. Lionshead Studios’ role-playing series
Fable
has referenced
Blackadder
numerous times through each epoch of its throne-grabbing narrative – even teasing the Xbox 360 instalment
Fable III
with artwork featuring a male prostitute holding a ‘Get It Here!’ sign – but the closest link is Fry’s recurring role as the villainous industrialist Reaper, a snarling combination of Flashheart and Blackadder there to tempt the player over to the dark side. His other villainous return to the past has been as the cartoonish bastard Malifax Skulkingworm in the pilot for
The Bleak Old Shop of Stuff
, the TV incarnation of Radio 4 series
Bleak Expectations
, written by Mark Evans and produced by Mitchell & Webb collaborator Gareth Edwards. Despite Ben Elton’s years of hankering after a whole series prodding Dickens, the
Bleak
team got there first – although the show’s outlandish absurdism is of a very different comedic vein to
Blackadder
, and once again, it lacked a live audience. It did, however, provide the first chance in a generation for Stephen to overact in period clothing – as well as being succeeded
for one series by the equally despicable Harmswell Grimstone, played by a manic McInnerny. ‘I think
Blackadder
held back things like
Horrible Histories
and the wonderful
Bleak Shop
series,’ Stephen muses. ‘Shows like
Blackadder
can cast a long shadow.’

Live audience sitcom remains on the critical list in the second decade of the twenty-first century, not helped by a number of high-profile flops, sadly including Tony Robinson’s foray back into sitcom as the deadpan shyster Erasmus in the circus comedy
Big Top
, which was awkwardly broadcast on BBC1 after a difficult production, with the death of original director John Stroud requiring a last-minute replacement by Geoff Posner. Robinson says, ‘Geoff was great, he just came in and pulled the whole thing together. But it’s rather sad that when a series doesn’t take off, the hard creative work that individuals have done on it is never noticed … We all knew what was wrong with
Big Top
, really from day one, but by that time the scripts were written, the roles were cast, the sets were built … If it had been made in the eighties I think it would have got a second series.’

Numerous homages and the resurgence of historical sitcom in recent years, however, do not silence the clamouring for a new
Blackadder
. There have been many false alarms, close calls and d’you-mind-if-I-don’t’s since 1989, and recently Tony admitted to the press, ‘I’d love to do one again. I love those people even if they are toffs. We had this idea that we would do a phone-round in 2010 and see how we felt. There is the argument that it’s best left alone – that way it will stay in people’s memories. There’s also the argument, wouldn’t it be good to get together for one last time? I think it is down to Richard and Ben. If the recession hits Ben’s book sales and no one will give Richard money to make any more movies then maybe it will happen. There may be a silver lining to the Credit Crunch after all!’ However, he subsequently said that if there was a 2010 meeting, ‘
I
didn’t go. I sometimes have this paranoid fantasy that everyone else met up and they didn’t invite me, but assuming that wasn’t the case … I don’t think so. I know that Tim,
for instance, just thinks the moment’s gone, that time is passed, and it would be undignified and imprudent to revisit it. And I think that unless Richard or Ben or Rowan had some really driving desire to bring it back in some form or other and a very strong idea, it wouldn’t happen. People are too bound up with their lives now to want to recapture the triumphs of yesteryear.’

There’s been no shortage of ideas coming not just from the writers, but all members of the fraternity, as they dangled reunion-hungry journalists on their hook. So many
Blackadder
instalments have been mooted indeed, that it would be simplest to list definitively what might have been …

PREHISTORIC BLACKADDER
– J. H. W. Lloyd’s history of the family began in pagan times, but there has always been the temptation to go back further, outlining a time when the first Baldrick would have been King of the Monkeys, until the arrival of Homo Blackadder, a presumably far less verbally gymnastic progenitor. ‘But then,’ Elton said, ‘how many times can you do jokes along the lines of: “We are dragging this cart along the ground, what we need is some kind of tool to make it travel more easily …”?’

THE SIX WIVES OF BLACKADDER
– A brilliant title – and little else. Whether it could have aped
The Six Wives of Henry VIII
by centring on Cardinal Blackadder, we shall never know.

THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN BLACKADDERS
– Only mentioned in passing, Lloyd suggested that a Wild West
Blackadder
loosely based on
Bonanza
could feature all of the regulars as highly unlikely brothers running a ranch in the Old West, and getting into gunslinging scrapes as they feud with each other – to which
Miranda happily responded, ‘I’d do that, definitely! Would I get to be a sort of Calamity Jane or something? Fantastic!’

REDADDER
– This idea for a movie, dreamt up by Rowan and John and then sketched out by Ben, would have done away with one of the series’ central themes – British History. Nonetheless, Atkinson was intrigued, ruefully admitting, ‘I think it was one of those things when it became a victim of people being not sure that they wanted to do that kind of thing. It was set in the Russian Revolution. Blackadder and Baldrick are members of the secret police for the Tsar in 1916 – and then the Russian Revolution happens in 1917, and at the end of it, they’re in exactly the same office with the same typewriter, but now they’ve got red bands around their caps instead of blue.
Plus ça change
, as it were.’ Featuring Soviet relatives who coexist with Captain Blackadder and co. on the Somme was a sizeable imponderable, but it did inspire some curious set pieces, such as a ‘bore hunt’, in which dissidents Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were released and tracked down for sport. ‘It was rather a fun idea, actually. It was a nice context. I mean,
Blackadder
always worked well when there was a hierarchy – the Elizabethan Court or the army. Places like that are great for the Black Adder, because he’s so cynical of people who are above him, and he’s so rude to those who are below him, and it’s nice if you’ve got that hierarchy for him to play in.’

BLACKADDER IN COLDITZ
– The most generally approved set-up in recent years has centred on that most exhausted of chestnuts – the World War II escape plot. Atkinson was keen. ‘I always felt if we ever did a fifth series, I would love to have done a Colditz escapee sort of one. Because I think a POW camp has got that sort of claustrophobia, and the sense of hierarchy.’ For all the tiredness of the concept, Lloyd enlarged on the idea in such a way that it not only made more sense, bearing in mind the average age of the team, but also had a uniquely epic scope. ‘We got quite far talking about one set in World
War II, with a platoon of Dad’s Army soldiers in a seaside resort. One day a German submarine appears, lands on the pier, captures them and takes them to Colditz, where they have to escape. I thought that was quite funny …’