The True History of the Blackadder (14 page)

To find the real flowering of home-grown historical comedy, we need to fast-forward to the late 1960s, when the
Carry On
franchise hired a new writer to replace the trusty Norman Hudis, and Peter Rogers snapped up Talbot Rothwell – a trusty joker who had taken up gag-writing as a prisoner of war twenty years earlier, staging noisy revues alongside Peter Butterworth to drown out the sound of tunnelling. Although his first film released turned out to be
Carry On Cabby
, the script which got Rothwell the job was a tale of eighteenth-century highjinks on the high seas,
Carry On Jack
, which triggered a whole new world of period sauce for the continually buoyant series. Rothwell had a passion for historical japery which steered the
Carry On
s from being a strictly contemporary comedy franchise to a series of irregular period parodies, with the usual team in their familiar roles, transported through time in every other film. Again, these were almost always in
reaction to great historical epics of the time, often even using the same costumes and scraps of sets at Pinewood Studios.
Jack
begat the hugely loved Roman epic
Cleo
, with genre spoofs
Cowboy
and
Screaming
to follow, and almost every second or third offering from Sid, Kenneth, Babs and the gang throughout the seventies was historical – the French Revolution, Dick Turpin, Edwardian England and the days of the Raj saw many of the same faces in the same positions no matter what the calendar said, each period lovingly brought to screen on the most economical of budgets.

Henry
posed an alternative Tudor history, prefaced with Rothwell’s apology: ‘This film is based on a recently discovered manuscript by one William Cobbler which revealed the fact that Henry VIII did in fact have two more wives. Although it was at first thought that Cromwell originated the story, it is now known to be definitely all Cobbler’s … from beginning to end.’ This gave them the licence to enjoy the same bawdy set-up as ever – King Sid dealing with battleaxe wives and lusting after pert ladies-in-waiting, while Williams’s Cromwell stalks the shadowy corridors, ploddingly plotting away. This being a
Carry On
, however, it’s all a fun anachronistic pantomime, as light as the flutes and strings of Eric Rogers’s score – when Charles Hawtrey’s Sir Roger de Lodgerly is forced on the rack to squeeze out an admission to a bit of slap-and-treason with Joan Sims’s garlicky Queen Marie, he stretches like toffee. The Tudor romps also extended to the TV spin-off
Carry On Laughing
, alongside a whole host of historical half-hours in the Rothwell style, which took in medieval England and the Cavalier years. The Dick Vosburgh & Barry Cryer-penned
Orgy & Bess
featured Hattie Jacques as a (naturally) matronly Elizabeth I, flirting with her favourites Raleigh, Essex and Sid James’s rascally Sir Francis Drake.

So successful were Talbot Rothwell’s historical romps that, just before scripting
Carry On Henry
, he was commissioned by BBC executive Michael Mills to write a brand new vehicle for Frankie Howerd. Howerd had recently enjoyed great success stepping into the
sandals of Zero Mostel for the West End run of Sondheim’s
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
, and on the plane back from his own holiday in Pompeii, Mills decided that a sitcom starring the comic as a Roman slave, tetchily interacting with the audience just as he did in all his shows, was a dead-cert hit.
Up Pompeii
was Plautus by way of Donald McGill, the desperate antics of Lurcio the British slave gaining handsome ratings and endless repeats of its two series – but it also started the ball rolling for a whole decade or more of further historical titters for Francis, with the bawdy farce spawning a cinema franchise of its own, long after Rothwell had written his last double entendres for unlikely hero Lurcio to quibble over. Ned Sherrin produced a series of movies transporting Howerd through time, from doomed Pompeii to Norman Britain, and ultimately the Great War, in
Up the Front
. Each setting saw a new incarnation for the scheming servant to get one up on his idiotic masters, though scripting duties fell to Sid Colin, backed up by the prime likes of Galton & Simpson and Eddie Braben. In 1971’s
Up the Chastity Belt
, the serf Lurkalot dreams of greatness, little knowing that he’s the elder twin of Richard the Lionheart, stolen from his cradle by evil barons and left to be brought up by pigs. During his epic tale, the fool Lurkalot dresses as a nun to avoid detection, is tried for witchcraft, meets a limp-wristed band of Merry Men led by Hugh Paddick’s camp Robin Hood and by the end of the narrative, the crafty coward finds his way into the royal bedchamber. Despite his royal blood, Lurkalot’s twentieth-century descendant Private Lurk was as lowly as ever, hypnotised into joining up to ‘Save England’, and getting embroiled in a series of lascivious plots which made Flanders during World War I seem like a swingers’ holiday camp.

There were several less canonical entries into ‘Howerd’s History of England’ (which itself was the title of a 1974 TV special).
Whoops Baghdad
was an unsuccessful Babylonian attempt to repeat the success of
Up Pompeii
, and the final offering, following the World War II
exploits of Private Potts in
Then Churchill Said to Me
, was shelved in 1982 due to the Falklands War. There was even a brace of short-lived eighteenth-century spin-offs: the ITV pilot
A Touch of the Casanovas
, and
Up the Convicts
, made for the Seven Network in Australia, which featured Frankie as early colonist Jeremiah Shirk, who no doubt had close ties to the Lurk family. The details of the Lurk dynasty are never explored, though – after all, each incarnation was only an excuse for Howerd to get into period scrapes while enjoying the comedic beard of being surrounded by busty damsels.
^fn7

The similarities between the
Up
franchise and
Blackadder
are glaring on the surface, but none of the Rothwell-inspired films and TV shows are tarred with the ‘undergraduate humour’ brush, belonging to a completely different comedy tradition – saucy music hall by way of the permissive society. The period sitcoms of David Croft, Jimmy Perry and Jeremy Lloyd also broadly belong to this comedy category, but programmes like
Dad’s Army
,
It Ain’t Half Hot Mum
,
You Rang, M’Lord?
,
’Allo ’Allo
,
Hi-De-Hi!
and
Oh, Doctor Beeching
, as well as often being genre spoofs, more pedantically come under the heading of ‘Nostalgia’ rather than ‘History’.

A more apposite forefather of Atkinson’s sitcom would be the 1959
Beyond the Fringe
sketch ‘So That’s the Way You Like It’. As masterminded by future celebrated Shakespearean director Jonathan Miller and medieval historian Alan Bennett, the sketch is of course a lampoon of Shakespeare’s Histories rather than History itself, taking a step back from the text and recognising its inherent silliness and pomposity – or rather, the difficulty of performing the text effectively without sounding like an idiot.

One young fan of the sketch who would have the honour of taking over Dudley Moore’s Fool role when it was wheeled out for the
Secret Policeman
forerunner
Pleasure at Her Majesty’s
was Terry Jones, an English scholar at Oxford when he first saw the revue. His writing partner Michael Palin was the one studying History when they met at the university in the early sixties, and as the fledgling Oxford Revue gave way to budding careers in TV comedy, getting laughs out of British History was often on their minds. In 1967 the pair were hired to create filmed inserts for the live BBC comedy show
Twice a Fortnight
, one of which was the Battle of Hastings in the style of a boxing match. When given the chance to make their own comedy vehicle in between series of Humphrey Barclay’s children’s show
Do Not Adjust Your Set
, they expanded the idea to a whole series for LWT,
The Complete & Utter History of Britain
. One series in early 1969, posing as a History magazine programme with reports from different epochs, received short shrift from viewers and broadcaster alike, and by the end of the year Palin and Jones were glad to accept the invitation to sign up for the
Flying Circus
.

It would be several years before they would return to a similar clash of ancient Britain and modern manners, with
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
, which is in essence a series of typically silly medieval sketches, made funnier by the gravitas of Jones’s pedantic eye for period
direction, and Terry Gilliam’s muck-encrusted art direction. ‘I don’t think I ever wanted to
take the piss
,’ Jones insists. ‘I didn’t see
Holy Grail
as being a parody of Knights or anything. I just saw it really as doing silly things in a context that you recognise – and I was very keen on History, because I was into the fourteenth century at the time … You had to
feel
the period. But I think it’s exactly like
Blackadder
, we’re not making fun of History, it’s making comedy within a historical context.’ Richard Curtis admits that it was this approach which guided him from the start with his historical sitcom idea. ‘I suppose if there was any precedent for what we were doing it was
Carry On
s and
Up Pompeii
, and that must have been something we
didn’t
want to do, to make it look as though it had just been knocked up.’

We Need Something … More Cunning

Having taken their cue from the Technicolor romps that fuelled a writer’s procrastination on daytime TV in the early eighties, Curtis and Atkinson had no real historical spur in plotting out their swashbuckling sitcom. ‘It was those sort of medieval Hollywood-type movies that seemed to have the word “black” or the colour red –
The Black Shield of Falworth
or whatever – in front of it. And then … God knows where “Adder” came from,’ says Curtis. Where these movies starred a handsome hero fighting for honour, it was the twisted bastard anti-hero of Jacobean tragedy that piqued Atkinson’s interest – the swaggering murderous wit of Middleton’s Vindice, and the ugly ambition of the bastard Edmund in
King Lear
. ‘Villains are always more fun to play than good guys,’ he says. ‘That’s a well-known fact. And I enjoy characters who have a vindictiveness in them. I always have done. In the end, it’s just more fun … You only have to go through a fairly mild public-school education to have witnessed cruelty. If you tried to do what I did, which was to establish your individuality, you become a loner and to some extent I experienced bullying and cruelty. I am a really meek
person and keen to please, so I grew up terribly conscious of cruelty. Comedy may well be my way of taking revenge all these years later.’

There was only one person the duo could imagine taking their new script to – the man Curtis at that time considered ‘the oldest person I know’, their long-time fixer Lloyd. But he was still recovering from the rigours of producing
Not
. ‘I worked far too hard on that show; I felt about eighty years old. Then Richard and Rowan came up with this pilot. The original title was
Prince Edmund and his Two Friends
– a rather weedy thing.’ John was already producing Pamela’s own comedy pilot,
Stephenson’s Rocket
, with video director David Mallett, and couldn’t commit to both projects – although Stephenson’s show would fail to get beyond a pilot. ‘I got big-headed,’ John recalls, ‘thought I was a genius because I’d got a BAFTA Award. We all thought we were geniuses and, of course, the show was absolutely awful.’

Rowan and Richard’s pilot script clearly played up to the idea of going beyond the trad sitcom set-up, showing the ideal historical royal family in its very first scene: the almighty King reading scrolls, the ditsy Queen making lace, the foppish elder son Prince Henry … painting an apple. But somewhere in the castle, fermenting in his bedroom like any dissatisfied adolescent, is the younger son with eyes on the throne. Like
Lear
’s Edmund, this Duke of York knows that he could take the reins of power far better than his idiotic elder brother, or anyone else for that matter. Atkinson stipulated that this dark plotter was ‘a tall, dark, satanic (but hopefully comic) figure in studded black leather, scowling villainously’. His bedroom was packed with horrific instruments of torture, very like the coat of arms that had been designed to open the pilot.
^fn8
By the Prince’s side were the two friends of the original title, idiotic sidekicks completing a trio of treasonous hoodlums. Neither part was at all well developed beyond the fact that both were fall guys:
the base clown Baldrick, convinced of his own cunning despite his lowly position, and the more inbred Lord Percy, who doubled as the family retainer. Together, their inept plotting and squabbling would bring to mind a medieval Will Hay movie more than anything else: three clods with sliding scales of idiocy, getting caught up in scrapes of their own devising. So many hoary old gags could be done with this set-up: Edmund being cornered by Harry, with the other two miming answers to get him out of trouble, and of course, Baldrick’s plans being dismissed and then instantly proposed by his master, to great approval.