The True History of the Blackadder (17 page)

The very first scene to be filmed exemplified just how up against it the fledgling sitcom-makers were. Director Martin Shardlow was admittedly an experienced pair of hands, having steered
Only Fools and Horses
through a bumpy first series as well as helming
Then Churchill Said to Me
, but at the time he was suffering from a painful slipped disc which meant that he could only direct the scenes while flat on his back. Blessed recalls that every time the director’s pain dissipated, the cast would soon make him laugh and out would pop his disc again – often requiring the mighty King Brian to walk up and down his spine until it clicked back in.

The bitingly frosty weather posed challenges not just for Shardlow and the cast, but the entire crew were witness to Atkinson’s first appearance as the reborn Black Adder. Rowan had gone so far as to inflict a harsh Henry V haircut on himself for the role, which made him look like he’d ‘just been let out of the Belgian army’. ‘Certainly the costumes got more flattering – and the haircuts in particular – after the first series. This extraordinary pudding-basin cut that I really had, my own hair was cut that way for the first series. For the three months we were rehearsing and shooting the programme I remember it was very difficult to go into shops and unselfconsciously ask for Mars bars and things.’

The series’ first shot was actually for the final episode, where Prince Edmund takes leave of the loyal Baldrick (offering him a reference, in an exchange which was cut for broadcast) before setting out to take the
throne by force.
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Robinson recalls, ‘I can remember on the very first day, Tim and I started to get the giggles, because in the previous hour we’d been subjected to
five different kinds
of snow. It was everything the North-East had to throw at us.’

As the flakes fell and the prone director called for action, Atkinson leaned over in his saddle, nose dripping in the icy air, beckoned Lloyd over, and hissed, ‘What voice should I use?’ Lloyd, taken aback, hadn’t a clue, and deferred to Richard Curtis. ‘
On the day we were going to start shooting
, John came over to me with Rowan and said, “What’s Rowan’s character?” And we all thought, “Oh God, we don’t know! We’ve written some funny lines but we don’t how he’s meant to perform them!”’ The ridiculous design of Edmund’s costume already marked out this Duke of Edinburgh from the earlier Duke of York, but the inbred grotesque that came to Rowan on that first day of filming was an entirely different Adder. As he admitted on-set, ‘I love characters that are extreme and larger than life and very peculiar. But I like them to read consistently and real. You think this guy is a lunatic, but you are convinced you’ve seen him somewhere … He thinks he is a great swordsman and seducer. In fact he is just the reverse – a loud and arrogant failure in both departments.’
^fn14

A whole day was spent filming footage of the Black Adder proving his ineptitude as a swordsman, equestrian and adventurer for the opening titles. With no sound or dialogue to worry about, Rowan built on his character, scowling and leering as he fails to waylay a merchant’s cart, trying to pull an arrow out of a trunk and bringing the entire tree
down on top of himself, and tumbling from the back of his oblivious stallion, Black Satin. Even when just creeping along ramparts, or trying to run up cramped castle staircases in pointy shoes, Prince Edmund and his two friends couldn’t hide the beating they were taking from the elements.

Despite the freezing conditions, the comics soon began to thaw to the extent that their producer felt that he could be cautiously hopeful, writing in his diary for 12 February 1983: ‘On Monday and Tuesday, worried dreadfully that Rowan’s character was a disaster, but it seems to be gelling well. Tim McInnerny is brilliant, as is Tony Robinson – quite splendid juices being squeezed from a rather shrivelled selection of lemons … Filming has been fantastically slow and tedious; the snow comes down on the words “Turn over” as if summoned by an incantation, and a remarkable variety of textures … The hailstones are as fat as mint imperials and it’s so cold we had to wear our long johns in the bath.’ This wasn’t quite like making the epic Hollywood romps which inspired
The Black Adder
, with Errol Flynn and pals battling under the Californian sun. Creating a sitcom on this scale was drudgery, Lloyd admits in hindsight. ‘The first series was by far the least enjoyable to make; we were all absurdly disorganised and overambitious. Rowan was sacked from any actual writing quite early in the series – he was far too busy trying to learn the lines which we pushed under his hotel-room door at four in the morning for the next day’s shoot.’

Of the main cast, only the men were needed for location shooting, so the central trio were soon joined by Blessed and East – the latter playing the boyish heir to the throne at the age of forty, only seven years the junior of his screen father. Perhaps as a response to
The Young Ones’
surreal dimension, in much the same way that many of the jokes were now far more outlandish (the dog which Edmund kept in a cage in the pilot had now become his pet dwarf, for instance), the central characters had also taken a definite turn for the peculiar since the pilot, with Curtis making the most of Blessed’s bombastic capabilities to have the King roaring, in
another unused scene: ‘CHISWICK! FRESH HORSES! I want to strip naked to the waist and ride round and round the castle shouting, “
I AM HE WHOSE PECTORALS FRIGHTEN THE MOON!
”’

Sitcom was a departure for Blessed, but, he recalls, a pleasing one, to be working with such fresh comic talent. ‘They were a team, and they had their rules. Rowan, it’s fair to say, is an incredibly serious comedian. He always reminded me of the famous Russian clown, Auguste, who was quiet and serious and sad, and would have audiences roaring with laughter. I don’t know that Rowan is sad, but he seemed somehow out of place, light years ahead of everybody mentally. He has a face that belongs to all periods, from the modern age right down to the Stone Age. I would call him the History Man. And he likes mechanical things and speed, speedy rehearsals, speed of thought.’ However, Blessed would soon establish his own way of working. ‘Richard IV is the power base. Without the King, you cannot have a Kingdom! Rowan would be directing and giving very serious notes and so forth, scratching his head all the time – and everyone was very obedient to this except me! I was therefore like a sore thumb, and I used this, because I have an animal cunning. I felt it was my job, as the King, to fuck up every scene, to which Rowan was rather taken aback. I love him, he’s wonderfully clever, but I had very strong ideas about the King – like he must be a man who never opens the door. So he knocks one down, you build another – if I could, I would have liked to walk through doors like Tom and Jerry! He’s in a world of his own, he’s utterly fearless, he has a wild, strange imagination, an astonishing capacity for blood, and rumpy-pumpy! And a wonderful, healthy loathing of the Turks.’
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East got on famously with his screen father, but recalls that Blessed took his psychotic characterisation to such great lengths, remaining in bloodlust mode at all times, that the cast learned to keep their distance. ‘The BBC rehearsal rooms at that time
(long since sold off, rehearsal now deemed superfluous for TV acting) were full of poles on circular bases that were used to mark the boundaries of the various sets and corridors etc. They were about six foot high and quite substantial. We were rehearsing the scene where Brian comes back from the Crusade and bursts through the door of the castle, and in order to create the appropriate effect Brian thought it entirely appropriate to hurl one of these poles across the room. It cannoned into several others and about ten poles dominoed to the ground around the room, felling several elderly actors in the process. Never one to do things by halves, our Brian.’ This headstrong autonomy set Blessed up for a fall. He merrily recalls, ‘The camera crews, for the fun of it, made one of the doors really solid, and bolted it and God knows what. I was breaking into the door, to get to the Bishop. You only had one take, and I had to literally break down this three-inch steel door – and I’m powerful, I bench-press four hundred pounds … Rowan nearly lost the use of his legs with laughter as I had to actually fucking break open the door and half of the set to get in.’

King Richard’s milder elder son had his own eccentricities, being secretly afraid of spoons and openly obsessed with drains, which Blessed is sure was partly down to the actor himself. ‘I always thought it was a mistake that they didn’t carry on with Robert; he was a very inventive man, a lot of the things Harry did, 10 per cent of it was his own creation.’ Despite being every bit the fine son that Edmund wasn’t, the Prince was already a fully realised irritant, judging by these external scenes, edited out of the finished version of ‘The Archbishop’:

In the same sequence, a more concerted attempt to channel Shakespeare was also attempted (in order to justify the Bard’s ‘additional material’ credit), but had to ultimately be cut as it held up the plot to have our hero soliloquising while his flunkeys hurriedly pack to flee uncertain death, Becket-style.

A huge crash, and a neigh, off
.

Only selected guest stars were chosen to make the pilgrimage to Alnwick, and when Frank Finlay – a major name to feature proudly in your opening credits then, as today – came up to film the complex tragedy of ‘Witchsmeller Pursuivant’, he fared little better than the chilly regulars. Hilary Bevan-Jones is embarrassed to recall: ‘I made a terrible mistake – it was a Friday night and one of my responsibilities was clearing up afterwards and making sure that everyone had gone, and I thought that Frank Finlay had gone home with the person that normally picked him up. And in fact he hadn’t, and he was left behind on this snowy location. I was already back in the hotel, having a brandy, and some of the make-up people came in and they’d found him wandering, in his costume, on the way back to the hotel. I thought my career was over …’

A co-financing deal had been struck with the Seven Network, the Australian company which had for decades been paying big money to the greatest UK comics to defect Down Under (from, tragically, Tony Hancock, to Cook & Moore and, of course, Frankie Howerd), but Lloyd tried to be very careful with how the money was spent. Bevan-Jones remembers Finlay’s episode being one of the bigger deals. ‘There were certainly times during the first series when you’d turn up and it felt more like a huge feature film than a BBC comedy! Stunts and animals and lots of make-up effects as well. We built a whole village for “Witchsmeller Pursuivant”! And we set fire to it, so we weren’t pussyfooting around.’

Curtis’s scripts were confidently adapting to the styles of the cast as shooting continued, and it was clear by Finlay’s episode that they had
a catchphrase. As we’ve seen, the ‘cunning plan’ was already a central part of the pilot, but at first nobody had seen it as especially resonant. Tony Robinson, however, was all for a spot of repetition: ‘I said, “Could I not say ‘I have a
cunning
plan’?’” “I have a plan” is rather a flat line, but “I have a
cunning
plan …” – you dwell on it, it’s so exciting, it’s so sexy this plan, that it’s bound to be fantastically good. I think even then, I thought, “Well, maybe it could turn into a bit of a catchphrase …”’ The design of Baldrick’s sack-like livery and dishevelled appearance did mark him out as the most proletarian character on-screen, but he still sparkled like a new pin in comparison to the rest of his filthy family tree. Certainly, something was needed to give some life to ‘the short one’ of the trio. ‘He was just the servant, the kind of everyman servant. And it was only as the episodes went on, and I was after all surrounded by the greatest comic writers of their generation, that gradually his character matured and developed. And then that whole character was thrown completely out of the window, and we started again …’