The True History of the Blackadder (44 page)

With only a partial twinkle, Rowan says, ‘Tim, unlike the rest of us, is a proper actor … I like to think,’ and it’s certainly the case that of all the cast, he took the job most seriously. Lloyd says, ‘Tim, as well as being a very funny guy, is a real actor’s actor. He wants to know what the haircut is, what kind of walk the character has – he’s brilliant at it … Darling is, I think, one of the great comic creations, and it came from an actor’s determination to carve himself a place here. Tim said, “I’ve been dragged in here for this teeny weeny part, and where’s me laughs?” And then Stephen chimes in, “Yeah, and Cartwright’s a really boring name, isn’t it?”’ Fry continues, ‘Tim was a bit distressed because his character seemed to be nothing. He was called Cartwright, and I suggested, in a rare moment of brilliance, that maybe he should have a really silly name that was a constant torment to him … And suddenly this character was born out of nowhere, just because of the name! For the next three days, his name was changed to Darling, and we all fell about. Then I remember we actually had a vote, and said, “Look, is this Darling joke going to run very dry, and is it going to seem really embarrassing after the third episode, or will it sustain?” And Tim said, “Oh no, please let me keep it!” Because Tim being the wonderful actor that he is, he knew how to play someone who all his life had been called Darling in a sarcastic way.’ ‘We thought the name Darling was funny,’ Tim admits, ‘but it really didn’t occur to us that people would pick it up in the way that they did. Which was very stupid of us, obviously. We just thought it was a silly, embarrassing name, we didn’t realise what it would mean for the other characters … The scene where Melchett is getting ready for dinner with “Georgina”, and the whole misunderstanding of him practising his speech to her, and calling her “darling”, but at the same time I think he’s talking to me, I think is brilliant, it’s a fantastic piece of writing.’ ‘The character punches way above his weight. You watch him acting his socks off when Stephen’s doing the talking, it’s wonderful. Because acting isn’t just about delivering
lines, it’s about being there and being real,’ John says, adding, ‘Darling hates Blackadder because he’s jealous of him. He’s a real man, a front-line soldier.’ But there was more to Kevin Darling than that, with a bizarre homoerotic undertone to his hatred of Blackadder being just one ingredient which made up the neurotic ‘sort of spotty squit that nobody really likes’, his frustration betrayed by the pulsating squint in his left eye. ‘The twitch stayed with me for months actually,’ McInnerny says, ‘I did get quite scared that it was never going to go, and that I’d have to start writing my own spin-offs, because I wouldn’t be able to get rid of the twitch and I’d never get another job.’

McInnerny’s transformation into the Captain completed the strongest line-up of any
Blackadder
series, but as the writers may have reflected even at that very early stage, Darling’s genesis did not augur well for a smooth production from their point of view. When
The Times
visited the team in rehearsals, the first inkling of the finality of the new show came when Richard told them, ‘If you’re making a lemon sauce, all you need is a bit of lemon. But if you’re making chilli everybody can shove bits in, and
Blackadder
is a very rich chilli. Everybody on the show thinks they can put in good jokes, despite the fact that Ben and I think there are already quite a few good ones in there to start with. It does usually end up funnier, but it’s time to do something over which I have more control.’

Pack Up Your Troubles …

‘One of the great things about
Blackadder
was you used go whistling in to work, because it was so funny in rehearsal. What would happen was just so very, very entertaining, and the rehearsals were often funnier than the shows,’ John Lloyd remembers through rose-tinted spectacles, but Stephen has a clear memory to the contrary: ‘I remember saying to Hugh and Rowan and John, “What will happen in six months’ time when a taxi driver says to you, ‘Oh, those
Blackadder
s, I bet they’re fun
to make, aren’t they?’ Will you go ‘Yes, marvellous fun!’?” And they all said, “No! We’ll be honest and say they’re absolute hell!”’

‘The producer is supposed to be the person who makes sure that inspiration doesn’t turn into complete filthy anarchy. Unfortunately, we had John …’ Tony Robinson says. ‘We were workshopping all the time, we workshopped every bloody word, every exclamation mark! Although we didn’t have the twelve writers that you would have for
Taxi
or
Cheers
or whatever, actually, you had people in the room who were doing exactly the same kind of thing that those writers on an American show would do. So by the end of the week the whole thing was really lean and spare. Everything, any ounce of fat on it, would have been challenged and hacked away. Virtually all of us who were involved in the performance were writers and, outrageously, we decided that we knew just as well if not better than Richard and Ben what the words ought to be. So we were constantly challenging every single gag, the structure of every scene – we even put additional characters in sometimes! So there was a lot of tension between the writers on the one hand, and the producer on the other, who was, as it were, the representative of what the actors were saying. And it was very healthy and very good, but it could be quite upsetting sometimes.’

Robinson continues, ‘The legendary coffee scene is an example of the improvisation that we all used to do in the rehearsal room. Because in the original script, the only line was about the fact that the coffee was made out of mud. And then somebody said, “Why don’t you add sugar? Dandruff!” and we all giggled like the naughty late adolescents we really were.’ A glimpse of the tweaking/plumpening process was captured by the BBC series
Behind the Screen
, which bearded the troublemakers in their lair, agonising over Captain B’s struggle with telephonic communications in the last episode. Rowan’s dialogue is perfected word by word, to group frustration – what colour should the mis-ordered curtain material be? In which direction is the taxicab meant to travel? As the diatribe is painstakingly recited in full by the faltering
star, Fry and Robinson egg him on with a desperation born of hours of sluggish progress, and cheer when he reaches the end … only for Lloyd to then cause groans of misery by apologetically griping: ‘I hate to raise this, having worked on it for three hours, but do you think it’s a very good joke?’ To which Atkinson admits, ‘I’m still labouring under the belief that no one ever ordered anything by the phone in 1917!’ During the same tortuous session, the
Radio Times
reported Rowan sitting with two pencils up his nose (a piece of grotesque tomfoolery which had long been in his armoury), occasionally plucking one from a nostril to make further notes as the brainstorming continued.

By this point, Blackadder’s skill with an extended simile was something of a trademark-cum-millstone, and a definite trap for the team when rehearsing. John says, ‘It was an area where real creative madness could go on and on, and then it was the trick of trying to find which were the best aspects of that simile, and pull it back so it wasn’t over-weighted.’ The writers could hardly quibble on this point either, as Curtis admits, ‘The most difficult thing was definitely thinking of the similes. Ben and I used to put that off forever, so Ben would send it to me and the line would say: “You are as stupid – as my knob.” That’s what it would always say. We couldn’t use “my knob”, so I’d have a go at it, and then he’d have another go at it, and when we got into the rehearsal room everybody would have a go at it.’ ‘John, Hugh and I in particular would rewrite until the final moments,’ Fry adds, ‘we endlessly had “epithet moments” as we called them, “Sticky the stick insect”, all those sort of jokes. Somehow there was never enough time to get them absolutely right. We used to wriggle about screaming with adolescent laughter whenever we did those.’

Tony was not to be put off by his comic company, and admits, ‘I love them all, but when I’m with them, I suddenly want to win. I don’t want them to put me down … I can’t tell you how profoundly competitive that environment is, but I contributed like mad. I think whenever I’m in a corner I always get noisy. Being the only grammar-school
boy among that incredibly talented group of highly articulate performers, and having left school at sixteen, and not having been to university, there was a sense in which they always felt very different from me, really rather exotic, and yet in a way, not really kind of tuned in to the real world, because they all talked so elaborately. And I think that probably helped me with Baldrick – in a way it doesn’t matter to Baldrick whether or not a hierarchy exists, because they’re all up above him, dancing around in some way or another, and I suspect there’s a bit of me that felt like that myself.’

‘We were working with an extraordinarily creative group of people, and you know, to expect Stephen and Hugh not to chip in “wouldn’t this be a good idea?” or “wouldn’t that be a good idea?” would be madness, obviously the actors had a real part to play,’ Elton said many years later, but as ever, he was seldom there to take the hard knocks, while Curtis says, ‘I’ve never been able to understand non-involved writers. I think they have much happier lives – those who don’t go to rehearsals all look younger than me. But I’ve always gone to every part of the process, right up to the edit … John was never happy unless everything was fabulous, so it was a very argumentative and passionate rehearsal room. But in some ways it always was – Ben and I were used to arguing about what was funny, so already by then it had been through lots and lots of drafts. We always had a read-through a month before, and two or three episodes would just be wiped because they weren’t funny enough, so it was no surprise that we kept on arguing until the final moment … It was very difficult and testing, but the pain in the arse about it was that it was effective.’ Ben, however, says, ‘I think I was able to maintain friendships more consistently, because Richard did all the bloody work – he went in and I didn’t. I just couldn’t handle it. Sometimes lovely ideas emerged on the floor and they were marvellous, and sometimes they were completely ridiculous! Like, “What are you all discussing?” I said to John. “This sort of relentless anal worriting over each syllable can sometimes mean that you miss the whole.” They’d end up doing
the line as written in the first place anyway, and half a day would have been wasted, in this sort of pained panic. I thought it was
nearly
as counterproductive as it was productive.’

These final fraught plumpening sessions may have bruised some egos, but Tony insists that Richard’s presence was the reason that nothing ever spilled over into full enmity. ‘He’s such a loving bloke, and because of him that deep competitiveness was swathed in affection, the sort of environment where everyone remembers everyone else’s birthday.’ And while paying tribute to the writers, Lloyd himself was happy to tell journalists at the time, ‘The producer is basically someone who has no talent whatsoever, except the talent to criticise everyone else’s talent … I have to say that the writers are saintly men who put up with an awful lot of brutality.’ However, he was also to admit, ‘The key to
Blackadder
is that it’s about the writing: that is where all the difficulties come from. Because Ben and Richard are professional writers, I’m a writer pretending to be all the other things, and pretending
not
to be a writer … and there were more writers in our rehearsal room than would be in any sitcom. The scripts had always been the source of passionate disagreement between both the writers themselves, and between them and me, but when this widened to include the actors on a regular basis, it became clear that the team would not survive another series.’

A united front was put on when the team decamped to Cavalry Barracks in Colchester, in full regalia, walrus moustaches and all, to be joined by the 3rd Battalion the Royal Anglian Regiment (‘the Pompadours’) for the first
Blackadder
location shoot in four years. As ever, Lloyd’s credits were to be meticulously crafted, with the full cast on parade in the opening credits, marching to Goodall’s new military arrangement of the theme – which pleasingly resulted in the melody becoming a permanent favourite with brass bands across the nation. ‘It was all very last minute,’ Howard recalls, ‘and it’s quite hard to get a military band from the army at two weeks’ notice, virtually impossible. We just happened to get in touch with someone who was a friend of a
friend, and they managed to sort it out with a band which doesn’t now exist, the Royal Anglian.’ The end credits, which were originally to feature the ranks whistling the theme, convincingly recreated mottled archive footage, complete with militarised credits courtesy of Prd. 597602 Lloyd, J.

The march past of Blackadder’s regiment, however, was to have featured the top brass mounted on horses – a plan foiled by Fry’s extreme discomfort as an equestrian. ‘Stephen Fry on a horse is one of the least convincing sights you will ever see,’ Atkinson laughs, but Fry recalls the reality being more serious than his chums could conceive: ‘The Colonel said, “Oh, I think my mount will do for you very well. Meet Thunderbolt!” This enormous horse, twice the height of me … I walked once around the parade ground, but then the band of the Royal Anglian Regiment strikes up “The British Grenadiers”, and my horse went vertical. It was like some painting of a rampant horse. And it started to charge and go round and round the parade ground. Hugh and Tim got off their horses – not to help me, but so they could roll on the ground wheezing and barking at my predicament, which was horrific! I was screaming! I was twelve foot off solid parade ground, I was going to die!’

‘We got on very well with the army,’ John remembers, ‘I think they thought we’d all be a bunch of communist poofters, and we thought they’d all be chinless wonders. We had lunch in the mess, and they made Baldrick sit on a stool – he had to eat baked beans out of a tin helmet.’ In fact, thanks to
Goes Forth
, despite UK troops’ entertainment usually being the domain of Jim Davidson, an obsession with
Blackadder
became the norm in the military. Rowan says, ‘You can see why they enjoy
Blackadder
so much, it’s such an enjoyable teaching tool for them, as a representation of hierarchy and humanity, which I think is what the army is, you can see how it rings all the right bells.’ As Lloyd is proud to repeat, around half of all regimental goats tend to be called ‘Baldrick’, and in the first Gulf War, all the British lines were
named after characters from the series. One week after the filming, a serious IRA attack on the Colchester barracks nearly forced a last-minute change of credits, but the team decided to go ahead with what they had, as they left the ‘North Acton Hilton’ once again and went into the studio.