Through the ages, our great nation has been littered with power-mad kings... Who told you that?
Bloodthirsty queens... I'm going to knock your block off.
And the odd nutty prince.
And in that time, one dastardly dynasty has managed to survive
on their wits, craftiness and the odd cunning plan.
A man may fight for many things; his country, his principles, his friends.
The glistening tear on the cheek of a golden child.
But personally, I'd mud-wrestle my own mother
for a ton of cash, an amusing clock and a sack of French porn.
You're on! Hoorah!
It's 25 years since Blackadder burst on to our screens and blew away its comedy rivals.
Tonight we're celebrating this monumental, multi-award-winning sitcom in all its magnificent glory.
You've really worked out your banter, haven't you?
Not really. This is a different thing.
It's spontaneous and it's called wit.
25 years of Blackadder - it's, first of all it's...
very depressing that it's 25 years ago that we started doing it.
I do remember whistling on the way to work. It was very good fun...
to sit in a room and try and make each other laugh.
Blackadder was, was tremendously enjoyable from the point of view
of a shared responsibility. The fact that it's not all on your shoulders.
I think I just feel lucky, you know.
You do your best that you can in your 20s to try and do the thing that you
think is funniest and it's a fluke and a miracle if it turns out that the one that you wrote has lasted.
I was nearly 40 when we did the first episode, er, of Blackadder.
It transformed my career and, and my life.
You made...
Baldrick a lord?
It made household names of its stars.
Tony Robinson has made archaeology cool in the UK.
Stephen Fry is now the most well-respected actor, writer
and all-round clever clogs on telly today.
Oh! I've just had another brilliant thought.
Hugh Laurie has become one of the most famous faces on American TV with House.
And Blackadder himself, Rowan Atkinson, is the most recognisable comedian in the world.
It also brought together two of today's most celebrated comedy writers - Ben Elton and
Richard Curtis, who have since gone on to conquer the stage and screen.
He shot my pigeon!
I've only just started watching it again cos
my kids are sort of 9 and 7 and, and, um, they're really loving it.
I'm reminded, particularly in terms of the performances, I actually wrote to Stephen the other day
about Melchett just cos I couldn't believe how...
I mean, I knew how good it was but I, er, it just was even better.
Tonight we reveal the exclusive inside story of Blackadder
from the comedy greats who made this must-see TV.
You, you twist and turn like a twisty, turny thing.
I say you're a weedy pigeon and you can call me Susan if it isn't so.
'I do remember'
inventing the line "you twist and turn like a twisty, turny thing."
And since then it has become a kind of comedy staple to do that.
First I'm going to have a little drinky and
then I'm going to execute the whole bally lot of you.
'I think I thought of her'
as somebody with too much too soon, you know,
far too young.
Lucky, lucky us.
Lucky, lucky, luck, luck, luck, la, la. La, la, la.
'Ben and Richard had written some fantastic jokes and some great opportunities'
to shout and pull faces,
which is sort of what I do or what I did at the time.
I've moved on since then oh, yes. I've grown.
This epic sitcom spanned a decade and brought 500 years
of British history right into our sitting rooms.
Edmund Blackadder has been a medieval prince... Hooray!
A pompous peer... Get stuffed.
A royal pain of a butler... Da-da!
And a conniving captain.
We're in the stickiest situation since Sticky the stick insect got stuck on a sticky bun.
He's an absolute bully to the people below him
and sucks up to the people above him.
He was a guy who was out for all he could get. He was sort of on the make, er, he was a cynic.
It's a modern person
in the stupidity of ancient times.
That it be.
"Yes, it is," not "that it be".
They all had in common a belief, a strong belief, er, almost raised to
the pitch of religiosity, that their skin and their wellbeing was more important than that of anybody else.
Tell me, Edmund, do you have someone special in your life?
Well, yes, as a matter of fact I do.
Who? Me.
And let's not forget his smelly, turnip-loving sidekick called Baldrick.
Your brain, for example, is so minute, Baldrick, that if
a hungry cannibal cracked your head open there wouldn't be enough inside to cover a small water biscuit.
Tony Robinson was so great in Blackadder, just so deadpan.
Name? Baldrick.
First name? Er, I'm not sure.
You must have some idea.
Well, it might be sod off.
I've never been offered a comic character on television since
that in any way
matches up to the comic potential of Baldrick.
We go behind the scenes with exclusive rehearsal footage
of the supremely clever Blackadder team at work.
On the contrary George, we've had plenty of orders.
We've had orders for six metres of Hungarian crushed velvet curtain material.
Four pilau rice. And one chicken tikka masala.
And, four pilau rice and one chicken tikka masala.
And a cab...
for a Mr Redgrave, picking up from 14 Arnos Grove - ring top bell.
With the passing of the years an, any sort of anguish or difficulty or tiredness or you know, panic,
frequent panic has sort of melted away and all I can remember was all the jokes, you know.
And the fact how much fun it was to do.
And we re-live those memorable scenes that marked Blackadder out
as one of Britain's best loved comedies.
This book, sir, contains every word in our beloved language.
Every single one, sir?
Every single word, sir.
Oh, well in that case, sir, I hope you will not object
if I also offer the doctor my most enthusiastic
contrafibularities?
What's that? Contrafibularities, sir?
It is a common word down our way. Damn!
Coming up, a unique insight into how Blackadder was born.
Fawlty Towers seemed so perfect to us at that point
that the idea of writing a modern sitcom was too demoralising.
How it nearly never made it to a second series.
Michael Grade had just come, become controller of BBC1 and he'd
looked at what was on commission
and he obviously decided he didn't want The Black Adder.
And how one of the greatest comedy writing partnerships was created.
As far as I know, they never wrote a line together in the same room.
Ben would write three of each series and Richard would write the other three and then
they'd swap them over and change about 84% of each other's work.
So stay tuned for the exclusive story of Blackadder in all its rotten glory.
Ha, ha, ha - very amusing.
25 years after its debut, Blackadder is now the most successful historical sitcom ever.
And this tale of skulduggery began in 1979 when two Oxford University
students, Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson, met.
I saw this little advert in the university newspaper saying, you know,
we're thinking of getting a comedy revue together,
meetings at University College at a certain time.
So I thought I'd beetle along because I felt as though I had an interest.
And, um, and Richard was there.
He was one of the sort of six or eight of us I used to meet every
Thursday evening or something to plan a show which we did at the Oxford Playhouse.
The first time I met Rowan I thought he was a...
piece of furniture - he didn't say anything at all for two hours.
And then the first time I saw him perform it was instantly clear that he was a real genius.
My daughter could not have chosen
a more delightful, charming,
witty, responsible, wealthy - let's not deny it -
well placed, good looking and fertile
young man...
than Martin as her husband.
And I therefore ask the question,
why the hell did she marry Gerald?
The first time I saw Rowan
was one of the great moments of my life.
I, I don't mince my words.
I was a young Radio 2 producer doing a show called Late Night Extra
and every year we used to go to the Edinburgh Festival and cover the shows there.
And me and a young sound recordist called John Whitehall went to see what was billed as The Oxford Revue,
er, which I understood originally had six or eight undergraduates in it.
But Rowan had decided that they weren't terribly funny but Richard Curtis was funny
and so the two of them ended up doing the revue on their own.
And then several years later when I was starting Not the 9 O'Clock News,
obviously he had to be the man.
His timing is the thing that makes it superb.
Er, he could time something musically -
a mime or, or an attitude or there'd be a flicker in
his face that would turn something that would be seemingly not very funny, someone playing a scale,
into something hilarious.
He is the rubber-faced clown that we all used to call him at that time.
He has a kind of feline physicality about him
which I've never seen reproduced by any of our other comics.
Rowan just creates a whole, bizarre, weird world.
The comedy performance of the year winner, Mr Rowan Atkinson.
With the 26-year-old's career climbing, Rowan Atkinson,
accompanied by Richard Curtis, turned his hand to the British comedy staple of sitcom.
The reason we wrote Blackadder was because of Fawlty towers.
Fawlty Towers seemed so perfect
to us at that point
that the idea of writing a modern sitcom was too demoralising.
So the first thing I did was try and write a detective sitcom.
I thought it'd be fun to do something which had a real plot where there was a murder or something like
that so it wouldn't be an incident in a domestic situation but would have some kind of extra dimension to it.
I couldn't make that work.
And so the next thought to try and avoid this almighty
shadow of Fawlty Towers was to do something set back in, in history.
The first script that I saw, King Edmund and his two friends,
I thought was very, um, er...
soft and a bit sentimental. I couldn't see the point of it, really.
My sort of contribution, if I might call it that, was to try and say
"this should be set in real history"
so that you've never heard of Blackadder or Baldrick but you've heard of all the people around them.
So that's why the first series was set in this mythical...
piece of forgotten history between Richard III and Henry VII.
And I think they'd got the title Blackadder not from Dr Blackadder,
the BBC doctor, as he sometimes likes to claim, but from, I think it was
The Black Knight of Falworth, which was a Tony Curtis movie.
It was those sort of medieval Hollywood type movies that, that
seemed to have the word black or the colour red - The Red Badge Of Courage or whatever - in front of it.
And then, God knows where adder comes from.
As I shall be known from now on.
The Black Vegetable.
My Lord?
Wouldn't something like The Black Adder sound better? No.
Wait.
I think I have a better idea.
What about The Black Adder?
Written by Curtis and Atkinson,
The Black Adder hit our screens in 1983 and took us back to the bloody and
debauched days of 1485 and medieval England to tell the tale of Prince Edmund, the first Blackadder.
What's his name?
Edmund. EDNA! Fight you with us on the morrow?
No, no, I thought I'd fight with the enemy.
'I remember it being sort of loose.'
It was kind of, er, big and sprawling. It looked incredibly...
extravagant and it was exciting, actually, it was exciting to see people doing, er,
anything comic outside an ordinary sitting room with a sofa and two chairs.
You're, er, not putting him anywhere near me, are you?
Oh, no, no... He'll be somewhere amongst the rabble.
Oh, arrow fodder.
Precisely. Yes.
What a little turd.
'One of the pleasures of, er...'
the very first Blackadder was that it had Peter Cook in it.
It gave it a kind of blessing from the original god
of this kind of comedy. So to have him...
dying in the first episode is like a...
passing on, as it were, of the great, er, comedy tradition.
Rowan had to be on his toes quite a lot because, er, Peter
wasn't content with doing the lines as written on the page.
He would, um, there was quite a lot of improvisation going on.
Er, so Rowan had to get over his shyness quite quickly with Peter.
Frankly... Yes?
Well, well, well, frankly, er,
gosh, you look well.
Frankly what? Spit it out, you horrid little scabby reptile.
Um, well frankly, everyone thought you were dead.
Well, frankly...
I am.
'We thought the funniest thing'
in the first series was, um, Jim Broadbent
as the, er, Spanish translator and I've never worked out why it's so perfect.
But I think it's that he mis-stresses every single word.
It's just a sort of astonishing technical feat to get the rhythms of
the English language so completely wrong.
Edmundo. Que tales?
Now Edmund, what HE like?
Well, I told you... HE MURMURS
No, no, no, en la camba?
No, what he LIKE in BED?
Yeah, well in bed
he likes hot milk with just a litle touch of cinnamon.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
What is...
HE...
like?
Well, he's like a little rabbit really.
SPANISH
I'm embarrassed to say that I had
no, um, idea really of what a Spanish accent was so I just came up
with this thing which I suppose is a very bad cod-Italian accent.
But, er, it's, it's seemed to be funny and nobody
questioned it and, er, but I'm embarrassed now because I should have done my research.
Oh, mummy, mummy, how much I love him.
In many ways, the first series was the most ambitious of all the series.
There was at least five minutes of film in every episode,
it wasn't shot in front of a live audience.
For that reason, I think it should be cherished.
Having said that, it was kind of rough and messy, and some things didn't work.
The first series was ghastly.
I...I... I can't think of another word for it, it was, er, really difficult.
We were young, we'd just won a Bafta for
Not The 9 O'Clock News, we really thought we knew what we were doing.
And we bit off far more than we could chew.
My memory of it was that it was very, very expensive and that it had some fantastic things in it
which I remember as being fun in it but I'm a bit scared to watch whole episodes in case they're not perfect.
Thin on laughs and with its star, Rowan Atkinson, not wanting to co-write a second series,
a radical overhaul was needed to stop The Black Adder hanging up his codpiece forever.
Enter a 23-year-old motormouth comic.
Wow wacky!
It's amazing! Anything could happen on this programme. It's fab!
'I got involved with Blackadder because of Richard Curtis.'
He'd contacted me with an idea
that we should work together after he'd seen The Young Ones.
We decided to do a sitcom about Madness which we actually
did try and do but we came in just a little bit late in Madness's career.
At some point we thought that if he were to do
another Blackadder, we should try and write it together.
My sort of memory of it is him basically saying "Look, it sort of only half worked,"
we think we got a lot of it right and a lot of it wrong
and would you like to come in and, and we'll write it?
And of course I thought fantastic, the opportunity to write lines for Rowan Atkinson.
So we set about writing six episodes together.
You are safe and I am a prince of the realm.
Ben Elton, coming from a completely different
direction, a comedy direction, had said "The problem with it is you see, there's no focus.
"There are all these horses and outdoor scenes and castles and guards. You don't want any of that.
"You just want the people at the centre."
Dear Big Boy,
sail south, as you know your galleon is always assured a warm welcome in my harbour.
So Ben was really keen to reduce it.
As it happened, what he wanted to do in comic terms
also meant that it would have a drastically slashed budget.
And at the point the bombshell dropped.
Michael Grade had just become Controller of BBC1 and he'd taken a
look at what was on commission and he obviously decided he didn't want The Black Adder.
'I felt the show was kind of indulgent'
and a bit lost, er, but I could see there was something there
and I wanted to do it again and I laid down the condition that I would
do another series provided they came in to the studio with audience, got the show on its feet,
shot it in sequence and they'd find out what they had.
Which I didn't think they did on location.
My memory is that the scripts were written, they were basically finished and the decision to go into studio,
er, and to avoid the big filmic sort of vibe of the previous
series was one that we took on, Richard and I took on day one.
The idea that it was a financially canny executive that sort of pushed us
back into the studio is not true.
I'm pretty sure that Ben's version of events is right which is that we wrote a new series on spec,
um, that they then made up their minds not to do it.
And then when we showed them what we were actually
going to do which was a studio sitcom at half the price with twice as many gags that they changed their minds.
Thankfully, the filthy genes of the Blackadder family bubbled back on to our screens
on the 9th of January 1986, a full three years after the first series.
Lord Edmund, a pompous peer, reappeared in Elizabethan England.
That was a terrific joke, wasn't it?
Oh, magnificent. That was so naughty.
What, my lady?
I do know why I wanted to see you and I just pretended I didn't and I fooled you and it
worked brilliantly, didn't it?
It was terrific, madam.
I thank God I wore my corset because I think my sides have split.
The first series, we thought originally was a funny period.
And when that didn't really work and Ben came on board he said I hate that period, it's muddy
and filthy and horrible and we should do the Elizabethan thing which is dead sexy.
Hello there.
Edmund, you didn't tell me we were expecting guests. And such a pretty one, too.
Oh, God.
We'd kind of talked Elizabethan period through and
come up with a number of things -
discovery, disease, tobacco, beheading, that sort of thing.
And we felt instinctively we were on the right track for touching certain
sort of half-remembered school history memories with people.
And yet actually, you know, playing very fast and loose with them.
Using text book history as a backbone, a new Edmund
was needed to plot and connive his way through the Elizabethan court.
Bloody explorers, ponce up to mumbo jumbo land, come home with
a tropical disease, a sun tan and a bag of brown lumpy things and
Bob's your uncle, everyone's got a picture of them in the lavatory.
What about the people who do all the work?
The servants? No, me! I'm the people who do all the work.
Ben and I sort of went through the vocabulary of the first series
and then went through what we knew Rowan could do.
And decided that someone that sharp and sarcastic would be fun.
Between us we decided to reverse the dynamic and make Baldrick the idiot and Rowan the cunning one.
Baldrick I would advise you to make the explanation you were about to give phenomenally good.
You said get the door. Not good enough, you're fired.
But my Lord, I've been in your family since 1532.
So has syphilis, now get out.
Still to come - we look at the method behind the madness.
I know that I was referencing a friend I had at school.
Splice me, Sir Walter, it's bucko to see you, oh, matey!
And reveal an insight in to the writing partnership that would make Blackadder a sitcom legend.
I can't imagine I will ever have a more satisfactory or satisfying,
um, you know, artistic experience with anyone else.
He may have started as a snivelling, blithering cretin,
but the latest Blackadder descendent was rather more debonair.
Farewell.
And, er,
don't wait up.
Gosh!
I think series two, Rowan wanted to be handsome.
He's the court favourite, he has to be dashing, he's wearing an earring.
And he carried it off, I have to say.
The moment that Rowan stepped out of the makeup caravan at Wilton House
dressed in all that garb and all us girls went, "ooh!"
Oh, Edmund - you're so naughty.
Well, I try Madam. And then ten minutes later,
when I've got my breath back, I'll try again.
Unfortunately for Edmund, he's still saddled with the same brainless servant.
If I have two beans and then I add two more beans. What do I have?
Some beans.
Yes.
And no. Let's try again, shall we?
I have two beans, then I add two more beans.
What does that make?
A very small casserole.
It wasn't until the second series
when Ben Elton joined the writing team that he had this idea,
why don't we turn Baldrick into the stupidest most brain-dead creature that has existed
in the whole course of human history.
And the clever thing about that is that it meant that Blackadder could be as stupid as
the scriptwriters wanted him to be but there would always be someone
who was even more stupid than Blackadder.
Do you have a knife? Yeah.
Good. Because I wish to quickly send off some party invitations and to
make them look particularly tough, I wish to write them in blood.
Your blood, to be precise.
How much blood will you actually be requiring, my Lord?
Oh, nothing much - just a small puddle.
Oh. Will you be wanting me to cut anything off?
Er, an arm or a leg, for instance?
Oh, good Lord no, a little prick should do.
Very well my Lord, I am your bondsman and must obey.
Oh, for God's sake Baldrick, I meant a little prick on your finger.
I haven't got one there.
Oh, forget it, forget it. Personally, I think Percy's my favourite character.
Bob, this is Percy - a dimwit I don't seem to be able to shake off.
He's like the runt of the litter.
You want to kick him just because he's so desperate to please
that you just want to go, "oh, go away."
Simpering twit, wasn't he?
He was great, fantastic.
Um, Blackadder. Just, er, so pleased with himself.
He's just such a prat. I mean, poor love.
Edmund - come quickly, the Queen wants to see you. What...?
I said Edmund, come quickly, the Queen wants to see you.
Please let me finish. What are you wearing round your neck? Ah! It's my new ruff.
You look like a bird who's swallowed a plate, Percy.
It's the latest fashion actually and as a matter of fact it makes me look rather sexy.
To another plate-swallowing bird, perhaps.
I remember people asking me at the time
whether Percy was actually based on anybody.
He just naturally grew out of the writing and the rhythm of the writing.
Every time you looked at a page of Richard's writing, it was just there and very clear.
I'm very aware of the fact that Percy is Sir Andrew Aguecheek from Twelfth Night.
I did a production of Twelfth Night, I used to find that sort
of mixture between arrogance and insecurity of Aguecheek very funny.
I must say, Edmund, it was jolly nice of you to ask me to share
your breakfast before the rigours of the day begin.
Well, it is said Percy that civilised man seeks out good and intelligent company,
so that through learned discourse he may rise above the savage and closer to God.
Yes, I'd heard that.
Personally however, I like to start the day with a total BLEEP head, to remind me I'm best.
One of my favourite moments is him trying to get
Blackadder out of his financial difficulties and...
discovering the secret of alchemy.
Behold!
Percy, it's green.
That's right, my Lord.
Yes, Percy - I don't want to be pedantic or anything, but the colour of gold is gold.
That's why it's called gold.
What you have discovered, if it has a name, is some green.
Ah, Edmund!
Can it be true
that I hold here in my mortal hand
a nugget of purest green?
Indeed you do Percy, except of course it's not really a nugget,
is it, it's more of a splat.
Percy was so thrilled to have created this, this thing.
We could actually probably have made a fortune by creating lots of bits
of green and selling them to the public.
Maybe I could still do that now?
Of course you know what your great discovery means, don't you, Percy? Perhaps, my Lord.
That you, Percy, Lord Percy...are an utter berk.
Having two stupid sidekicks was the least of Edmunds worries when facing
the threat of losing his head to a rather psychotic queen.
I only didn't laugh at loud
because I was afraid if I did, then my head would have fallen off.
If you don't start soon,
your head will fall off!
Glenda Jackson, Helen Mirren, Cate Blanchett,
Judy Dench have all played Queen Elizabeth I.
None of them played her as well as Miranda Richardson.
SHE SQUEAKS
The essence of caprice in a monarch that she played as the young Queen Elizabeth, it is one of the most
joyous experiences of my life would be standing next to her, watching these incredible contortions
and writhing and hearing these phenomenal squeaks and squeals and noises come out of
this incredible woman. It was really remarkable performance, I think.
Do you know what I'm going to do? What?
I'm going to go along and find out exactly what happens at these boys' nights.
Oh, good idea, poppet.
And I'll wear a cloak with a cowl so no-one will recognise me.
Oh, that's another good idea.
You're so clever today you better be careful your foot doesn't fall off.
I thought of her as somebody with too much too soon, you know, far too young.
She's just got so much power you know, she can just like, snip off somebody's head
if she feels a bit moody that day and you know, she's a girl, girls get moody.
Grey, I suspect, Majesty.
I think you'll find it was orange, Lord Melchett.
Grey is more usual, Ma'am.
Who's queen?
Yes, yes, Majesty. Er, there were these magnificent orange elephants.
She takes the character and, and of course looks terrific in the costume
and then makes the contrast as sharp as possible with the real person.
The real person was a, was a fantastic politician
and a tremendous figure in British history, no doubt about that.
The Elizabethan age, she gave her name to an age.
Well, you don't do that by speaking as a five-year-old child.
The other day there was this enormous tree
and I was sitting right on top of it.
And then I dreamt once that I was a sausage roll.
Majesty... Sorry.
So exciting.
Don't know what I'm saying.
I know that I was referencing a friend I had at school.
We'd sort of talk in this sort of silly language to each other and...
Going just sort of you know,
sort of exacerbated small girl kind of voice.
Just tell me one thing.
Is her nose as pretty as mine?
Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, Ma'am.
Oh, good! Because otherwise I would have cut it off
and then you'd have had to marry someone without a nose
and that wouldn't be very nice, would it? No, Ma'am. No.
I mean, imagine the mess when she got a cold - yuk!
She gave a performance of sustained imagination
and she's just so clever.
Helping Queenie rule were a sycophantic Lord Chamberlain
and a very jolly podgy nursemaid named Nursie.
I had three sisters and they were called Donald, Eric and Basil.
Then why is your name Nursie? That isn't my real name. Isn't it?
No. What is your real name then?
Ha! Bernard.
Suits you, actually.
It ought to have been deeply weird, pervy, peculiar, wrong in Queenie's relationship with
Nursie but it, instead of making the Queen less dignified, it somehow made her more so.
I added just a little kind of, um, colouring.
She's an earthy character and I think you've got to have a certain roundness perhaps to the vowels.
Or she would probably think more of the bowels than the vowels.
A tush and fi my tiddly. You didn't always make such pretty speeches.
Oh, lor. Twas but the twinkling of a toe since you could say nothing but, "Lizzie go plop, plop."
"Lizzie go..." Well, put a bung in it, Nursie.
It was close knit and, er, we knew how one another worked.
It was a family of characters and a team of actors who got on extremely well.
It's extraordinary how if you grow a beard it doesn't really...
irritate you but when it's applied, it's absolutely maddening.
The Melchett of series two was was a rather a cowardly double dealing political sort of figure
who was a flatterer essentially, a sycophant of the queen.
Um, whom the queen put up with because
a part of the queen liked having people saying nice things to her.
But the other part of her of course realised that Melchett was just silly old Melchett.
Oh, but I must profess, madam, I am astonished that
Blackadder could possibly have eyes for any other woman than yourself.
Good point. Though slightly grovelly. And he was someone to be made fun of by Blackadder.
Er, there was a definite rivalry between them.
Blackadder would always win in terms of style but Melchett would always
be secure in terms of you know, political face-saving.
Ah Melty, you really are a beginner, you're not even wearing a pair of comedy breasts.
Au contraire, Blackadder.
Combining toilet humour and great plots, the newly formed writing team
took Blackadder from strength to strength.
Richard and I had I think
the best imaginable, um, writing collaboration.
We, we very quickly, um, evolved a work method
that stood with us through all three series.
As far as I know they never wrote a line together in the same room.
Ben would write three of each series
and Richard write the other three and then they'd swap them over
and change about 84% of each other's work.
Basically it was a relationship based on the handing over of those square computer disks.
And the fantastic thing was that, um, you end up morphing in to each other
you know, you end up actually trying to write to please the other person.
So you might think that I was in charge of plots and history
and Ben was in charge of knob gags but in fact, er, I used to
write jokes to try and make Ben laugh and Ben used to try and write plots in order to impress me.
We had a sort of rule that we would not
question the other's edits, ie, you wouldn't fight for a line that had been cut which was quite difficult,
cos often Richard would cut stuff I thought was good and vice versa.
The theory was you don't tell a joke at dinner
and then if no-one laughs say, wait a minute, you weren't listening.
I've just said something really funny. You just move on.
So that was very relaxing, not having to rake back through the stuff you did before.
If he'd read it before, if I'd read it before, um, it was, and not laughed, it was out.
This collaboration together with Rowan's
rather peculiar pronunciation created one of the most mimicked names of the second series.
What do they call you? Kate.
Isn't that a bit of a girl's name?
Oh, it's, um, short for, um, Bob.
Bob? Yes.
Well...Bob - welcome on board.
Rowan won't mind me saying that he has in real life a slight
and entirely erotically splendid, stutter or stammer - I never know quite which is which.
Um, and particularly on the letter B which makes him saying words like Bob, very funny.
The way that he combats that - as a lot of stutterers do -
is to in his mind, as he comes up to that word that's got the plosive B
or P in it, just to visualise it and then say it.
So that rather than just say the word "Bob", he'll go "..Bob."
Well, Bob we're a couple of fine lads together, aren't we.
Let's get ratted and talk about girls, eh?
B-O-B.
It is an absolute joy to hear how much he can get
from those three letters.
But as I say, the O, I think I've known other people that can
do better O's but his B's,
beginning and ending B's... un...beatable.
I find you curiously pleasant company, young Bob.
There was a famous moment in Blackadder where his stammer
came to, er, into play where he had the line, "God it's like Battersea Dog's Home in here."
And he got stuck on the Ba... Battersea and he couldn't say it
and we did about 25 takes in front of the live audience.
And I got on to the earpiece and said tell him to say Crufts instead.
Woof! Woof!
God, it's like Crufts in here.
And of course the audience goes insane.
But isn't that brilliant on the part of John Lloyd?
What other line is there, except for Battersea Dog's Home?
Crufts was the answer. Superb on-the-wing producing.
Coming up, the man who not only stole Blackadder's bride, but also stole the best lines.
Flash by name, flash by nature.
Hooray. Rick, he said, "I'm not coming in unless every single line
"is much funnier than every line that Rowan has in the whole series."
And we leap forward in time to when our great nation was ruled by a complete foppish fool.
What a pair of trousers. I shall be the belle of the Embassy ball.
The first series may have been light on laughs but the latest Blackadder proved to be a rip roaring success,
packed with gags and unforgettable characters,
including a scene-stealing performance from this flash git.
It's me.
Flash by name, flash by nature.
Hooray! ALL: Hooray!
Of course I have a particularly fond memory of Rick Mayall's creation of Flashheart.
I was working with Rick very closely at the time on The Young Ones and
Filthy Rich and Cat Flap and
it was written very specifically
with him in mind. I thought it was quite brilliant.
I remember meeting Rick and he said, "I'll do your scuzzy series
"as long as every single line is much funnier
"than every line that Rowan has in the whole series."
Thanks bridesmaid, like the beard.
Gives me something to hang on to.
Whenever he, er, arrives in something, he always, um,
gives it a good kick up the behind so everybody has to look up
and pay attention and, and actually, er,
look to their own game plan and, er, improve it.
All through rehearsal he played it as the dashing character.
But on the night, my goodness, he gave it rock all
and if you look at the scene you will see that everyone's
standing around on that set looking completely amazed at what's the force of nature that's just arrived.
And Melchy.
Still worshipping God? My Lord.
Last thing I heard he started worshipping me.
A-ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. ALL: A-ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
Ruh! Nursie!
I like it firm and fruity.
Am I pleased to see you or did I just put a canoe in my pocket?
Down boy, down.
And now,
where's this amazing bird?
The sheer opposite nature of his character from Rowan's
both in the narrative terms
and as performers made it a fabulous contrast.
Two of the most talented comic performers of their day
facing off against each other, er, using their different styles.
Rowan just gently stepped back during those weeks
and did his homework in private while we indulged Rick's magnificent, um, firework personality.
So long suckers, next time you get bored of your lives, give me a call and I'll come round and kill you.
Bye Edmund and thanks for everything. Hooray!
Um, it is customary on these occasions for the groom to marry the bridesmaid.
I presume you intend to honour this, um?
I do.
Someone once said a very sweet thing to me about liking, um, the second series because of all the IE's.
And I said, what's that mean? And he said well, it was Nursie,
Queenie, Melchy, Percy - that it was the cosiest of series,
that they were like a, they were really like a family
and a family that played with each other and teased each other.
And I think there is a warmth about that series which makes it unique.
After six episodes and with more than ten million viewers tuning in weekly,
the series ended in spectacular style when Hugh Laurie popped up as a mad German Prince.
I shall return and reek my rewengey.
And massacred all of our favourite characters.
I won't take much credit for much of Blackadder but I will
take credit for the closing title sequence on the series two.
We had a day's filming down in Wilson House in Salisbury and this was His Lordship's back garden.
We put the camera back to the window, locked it off
and everyone came up with an idea of what the minstrel could do and what Rowan could do to the minstrel.
And it just worked a treat.
These credits were accompanied by the now iconic tune created by an old uni mate of Richard and Rowan's.
They were fun doing those songs at the end although my memory is that,
er, Richard would give us the lyric
about a minute before it had to be recorded.
So it was always a bit tense to be honest cos, um,
we were never quite ready to do it.
I feel slightly nostalgic about it because these days you couldn't do that.
Firstly you're only allowed a tiny amount of time at the end of the programme and secondly,
they show you the next programme over the credits and talk over it.
So, I look back on it rather with sort of familiarity,
how nice it was that we were able to do that extra gag,
bonus gags, um, during the final credits.
Da-daa.
By 1987, the next reincarnation of Blackadder had not only slipped
down the social scale from Lord to butler...
Something wrong, Mr B?
I've had it up to here with that prince. One more insult and I'll be handing in my notice.
Ooh, does that mean I'll be butler?
But had lost his faithful and dim-witted friend, Lord Percy.
The idea of it being fun and friends together making something, you know,
that we'd enjoy even if other people didn't had snowballed into such a huge success that,
um, I felt it was getting in the way of, of my, er,
of the public perception of me and my perception of myself as an actor.
And I didn't want it to, er, overpower other things I was doing.
When I heard that Tim wasn't going to do it, you think oh, dear,
this is a bit of a disaster because he'd become so much part of the second series.
And if Tim had wanted to do the third series and had he been free,
he might well have played the Hugh Laurie part.
But there's always an advantage to it.
Actually, in some ways, Hugh Laurie's character is a sort of,
a sort of Percy, similar sort of twittish type.
We took Percy who hadn't been clever and, and scooped out the final
teaspoonful of brains and, and presented, um, Hugh Laurie.
We now find ourselves in 18th century England during
the reign of mad King George III and his dotty son the Prince Regent.
I was conscious of filling the great Tim McInnerny's shoes
and that's, um... And he takes, in comic terms, a size 22.
He's, er, very big-footed comically.
I suppose George was sufficiently different, um, rather than being a sidekick of Blackadder's,
he was his you know, the actual dynamic of it was different.
Oh, oh, oh, Blackadder, Blackadder!
Your Highness. Wha... What what time is it?
Three o'clock in the afternoon, your highness.
Oh, thank God for that - I thought I'd overslept.
Ben and Richard had written some fantastic jokes and some great opportunities to shout and
pull faces which is what I do or what I did at the time.
I've moved on since then. Oh, yes - I've grown, um, matured.
But at the time, shouting was very good fun, very enjoyable.
Marry? Never.
I'm a gay bachelor, Blackadder.
I'm a roarer, a rogerer, a gorger and a puker.
I can't marry. I'm young, I'm firm-buttocked, I'm...
Broke.
Well, yes, I suppose so.
I found shouting very easy. Talking quietly I find extremely difficult.
Not now, but in front of an audience it just makes me want to shout. I think its nerves.
Hugh wears his heart on his sleeve, you know, he doesn't conceal anything.
If Hugh is nervous or depressed, you see it, it's all over him, you know.
Hugh would be beating himself up going, "oh, God, God, oh, God,
"I'm so unfunny, I'm the least funny person in the world."
They must throttle him on the House, mustn't they?
Now come on Blackadder, let's get packing.
I want to look my best for those fabulous French birds.
He never thinks he's good enough.
But really honestly I think the prince is just
such a fantastic buffoon and he's so consistently buffoon-like
in the characterisation, he works a treat.
I think Hugh is being a little self-deprecating there.
Honestly Blackadder I don't know why I'm bothering to get dressed.
Soon as I get to the Naughty Hellfire Club I'll be de-bagged and radished for non-payment of debts.
Radished, sir?
Yes, they pull your britches down and push a large radish right up...
Yes, yes, yes, all right.
There's no need to hammer it home.
As a matter of fact, they do often...
No, no!
I thought he was dreadful.
I couldn't bare, I couldn't bare watching... No!
Um, I thought it was brilliant and I thought it worked terribly well and it wasn't the same as Percy anyway.
Hugh's Prince Regent I think perhaps you know, should be celebrated more.
I mean a truly brilliant performance of a foppish regency idiot.
Thank God you're here, we desperately need you. Who, me sir?
Mr thicky Black thicky Adder thicky?
Oh, this nonsense. Just the hopelessly drivelly can't write for toffee crappy butler...
Yes, well... Mr brilliantly undervalued butler who hasn't had a raise in a fortnight?
Take an extra 1,000.
Guineas, per month?
All right, what's your problem?
Underlying all this stupidity there's a desperate loneliness.
The reason I think why he craves Blackadder so much is it's somebody to talk to and somebody
who'll talk to him on a level that won't make him feel too threatened.
Even though Blackadder is manipulating him shamelessly.
It was an absolutely perfect triangle really that Blackadder has a...
..a cretin, as a master and a cretin as a servant.
Then he's stuck in a cretinous triangle.
You made...
Baldrick a Lord?
Oh, yes. One who has recently done sterling work matching the political machinations of the evil Pitt.
Good old Lord Baldrick. It's all right, Blackadder - you don't have to curtsey or anything.
Sir, might I let loose a short, violent exclamation?
Oh, why certainly.
DAMN! (Thank you, sir.)
Even though Edmund is reduced to serving and saving the skin
of a bumbling Prince Regent, he does have his faithful dogsbody to bully.
MIAOW! >
Oh, sir - poor little Mildred the cat.
What's he ever done to you?
It is the way of the world Baldrick, the abused always kick downwards.
I am annoyed and so I kick the cat.
The cat... SQUEAK! ..pounces on the mouse and finally the mouse... Ah!
..Bites you on the behind.
Baldrick puts up with all the physical and mental torture that
he receives from Blackadder cos he thinks that's the way of the world.
He suffers pain and he accepts it because that's what people do to people like Baldrick.
Um, he doesn't notice it most of the time.
Takes a very long time for pain to get from any part of his body, er, up to his brain and by the time
it gets there it's tired and doesn't really register very much.
And what do I do? Nothing, you are last in God's great chain.
Unless of course there's an earwig around here that you'd like to victimise?
However, for all his stupidity, Baldrick did come up with the show's only catchphrase.
Don't worry Mr B, I have a cunning plan to solve the problem.
Yes, Baldrick, let us not forget that you tried to solve the problem
of your mother's low ceiling by cutting off her head.
Ben Elton wrote this line which was I have a plan, for me.
And I said, can I not say, "I have a CUNNING plan?"
Cos that way "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.
Am I jumping the gun, Baldrick, or are the words,
"I have a cunning plan" marching with ill-deserved confidence in the direction of this conversation?
You certainly are.
Well, forgive me if I don't jump up and down with glee. Your record in this department is not exactly 100%.
So what's the plan? We do nothing.
Yes, it's another world-beater.
The phrase "I have a cunning plan" seems to have lasted
and I always feel a sort of strange sense of warmth when I use it in a letter.
Cos I think oh, I'm allowed to.
Some people would get bored when they had that called to them in the street
ten times a day, but it never fails to amuse me.
The Duke of Wellington. Have I the honour of...
A familiar face from the second series reappeared to fill a rather large pair of Wellington boots.
Take my hat at once, unless you wish to feel my boot in your throat
and be quicker than you were with the door. Yes, my Lord.
I'm a duke, not a lord.
There wasn't even a part for me in all of Blackadder the Third
but they did offer me this part of Wellington in the last episode
which I was delighted to play.
Especially as it involved hitting Hugh Laurie
which is the thing that I had become very expert at.
I remember him arriving to do this, the violent stuff, the slapstick stuff with some trepidation
because I've doe things with Stephen before, physical things,
where he's had to act punching me and his acting... Well, how can I put it?
He's punched me basically, he's just punched me.
As anybody who's ever done that kind of slapstick knows, the skill is not
in the person punching or throwing the slap, it's always in the person receiving it.
Anyone can do that or that.
It's the timing of your "ow!"
And Hugh is an absolute genius at being hit.
And something about those enormous blue lagoons of eyes,
um, and their sorrowfulness, um, makes it all the funnier
because he doesn't really understand why he's being hit.
Oh, hell and buckshot, here's that tiresome servant of yours again.
Oh, budge up, budge up.
How dare you sit, sir, in the presence of your betters? Get up!
Oh, Christ yes, I forgot, I'm so sorry. You speak when you're spoken to.
Unless you'd rather be flayed across a gun carriage. Well?
Sir, I fear you have been too long a soldier. We no longer treat servants that way in London society.
Why, I hardly touched the man.
I think you hit him very hard. Nonsense! THAT would have been a hard hit.
I just hit him like that.
No, sir. A soft hit would be like this.
Whereas you hit him like this.
Mercy.
I, um, I wonder if I might be excused your highness, your highness?
Most certainly. Both Rowan and I had a great time punching him
in one scene and kicking him and generally, um, yelling at him, shouting at him. Um, very enjoyable.
Coming up, Blackadder is given the ultimate accolade by the BBC.
Your series has made it if you are asked to do a one-hour Christmas special.
< Humbug.
Humbug, Mr Baldrick? Oh, thank you very much.
And an exclusive glimpse into the rehearsal rooms where the Blackadder magic was created.
A wandering minstrel wandered.
It was very, er, you know, difficult and testing,
but the pain in the BLEEP about it was that it was effective.
Medieval madness, Elizabethan glory and Regency pomp. Tally-ho, Blackadder.
By 1988, Blackadder had wiped the floor with its sitcom rivals
as its third series picked up a Bafta for Best Comedy.
Well - hoorah for that.
Building on this success, Blackadder's Christmas Special
delved into Victorian history and saw our anti-hero completely muck up Dickens classic, A Christmas Carol.
There is a sense in which
a Christmas Special is a kind of accolade, er, it is a kind of decoration.
Your series has made it if you are asked to do a one-hour Christmas Special.
You may not do it, but you want to be asked to do it.
They in fact did deliver, which was great.
Um, so it was kind of mark of, you've arrived,
you've been asked to do a Christmas one-hour special.
That's pretty important.
< Humbug! Humbug!
Humbug, Mr Baldrick? Ah, thank you very much.
The Christmas Blackadder, again a brilliant Richard idea,
we, why don't we play Christmas Carol in reverse -
let's make him start off good and turn horrible.
A brilliant plotting idea and I think we wrote a great script.
Baldrick, I want you to take this and go out and buy a turkey so large
you'd think its mother had been rogered by an omnibus.
I'm going to have a party and no-one's invited but me.
Between us, and it really was an ensemble piece,
between us we produced some pretty good bits of comedy.
Almost 12 million viewers tuned in to Blackadder's Christmas Carol.
What are you doing Albert? Nothing.
Oh, yes, you are, you naughty German sausage.
Tell me what you're doing? I just said, I'm not doing anything!
Woman, when you're busy ruling India you don't tell me what you are doing so why should I tell you
what I am doing when I am busy wrapping up this cushion for your surprise Christmas present?
Damn!
Now I have only two surprise presents for you.
Oh, dear Alby - don't worry, I don't mind.
Building on the success of my, er, my Spanish,
I thought I could do a German accent and God knows
what I did for, for, er, Albert. It probably wasn't German or any other recognisable accent.
I love surprises.
Christmas without surprises is like ze nuts wizout the nutcrack.
Which is why I have bought you this surprise nutcracker for...
Damn!
Richard and I share a huge love of history, I know that Stephen and Hugh
love history, er, and John, I'm certain of that.
I think it gave us a a rich... I think history gave us
a rich comic you know, smorgasbord to pluck from.
Blackadder is a bit like taking a bunch of guys who got history GCSE and just letting them
run wild with a budget and lots of really good actors,
right the way through British history.
Although they went to enormous lengths to construct
this historical setting and the props
and the incidents, er, and the backdrop are historical,
the joke of the whole thing is that the attitudes are the same.
The attitudes are contemporary - some things never change, people never change.
But the backdrop changed dramatically for the 4th series
when Blackadder moved to modern history and confined itself
in the claustrophobic trenches of the First World War.
All of those of us who were performing in Blackadder had this
ambition that we would do a series which was a genuine situation comedy.
In other words, you would just have the characters
who were your main characters. They would be trapped in an environment.
And in a way, the trenches was the perfect place for that to happen.
We wanted a place and a time that could reproduce to a certain extent
the claustrophobia and the, er,
the sordidness of medieval England.
And the best way to do that is to set it in the middle of a war.
Baldrick, what are you doing out there?
I'm carving something on this bullet, sir. What are you carving?
I'm carving "Baldrick", sir.
Why? It's a cunning plan, actually.
Of course it is. You see, you know they say that somewhere there's a bullet with your name on it?
Yes... Well, I thought if I owned the bullet with my name on it, I'd never get hit by it.
Cos I won't ever shoot myself.
Oh, shame.
I was very anxious to do the First World War period, it's a period I'm very interested in
and have read a lot about and both my grandfathers served in it on either side as it happened.
From the beginning, Richard and I were absolutely committed to being
extremely respectful and aware of the unimaginable human tragedy that the First World War was.
Do you know, we did a lot of research.
Ben knew it all, I read a few books
and they were interesting all the books about the First World War
because all the stuff we'd wanted to write about, the clash of the classes
and getting stuck and everything in a small confined space, were funny.
There was a lot of funny stuff and then you just had the astonishing tragedy at the end.
Er, so we felt it was OK on the condition that we ended the series the way we ended it.
That was the feeling that, er, it was quite true, but it had to be very harsh at the end.
Sir? Yes, Lieutenant? I'm...scared, sir.
I'm scared too, sir.
I mean I'm the last of the Tiddlywinking leapfroggers from the Golden Summer of 1914.
I don't want to die.
Really, not over-keen on dying at all, sir.
How are you feeling, Darling?
There was, as far as I know, no complaints apart from famously
my uncle who's a, was a famous historian and had served in the British army and had felt
very, very committed to Britain and the army as a Jewish refugee
from Nazi Germany and he felt that I was being disrespectful to the British armed services.
And he quickly changed his mind, he was oh, it was only one episode and I changed.
He actually totally agreed that it was, respectful to all.
And yes, we had some fun with the old lines led by donkeys idea, um,
but you know, that's legitimately part of our world experience as Britons and Europeans
inheriting the memories and the history of our forefathers of the First World War.
At this very moment over three quarters of a million Germans
are leaving the Russian front and coming over here
with the express purpose of using my nipples for target practice.
There's only one thing for it,
I'm going to have to desert and I'm going to do it right now.
Are you leaving us, Blackadder? No, sir.
Well, I'm relieved to hear it, because I need you to help me shoot some deserters later on.
Throughout it, Blackadder's endlessly trying to find a way
of not going to fight.
Everybody watching that is sort of with him on that one,
understanding why you would not want to go through with that.
He was the person that could see the madness all around
whilst everybody else, particularly Hugh's character there,
who was always sort of saying, "yes, certain suicide, I'll volunteer, sir."
And Baldrick was Baldrick.
He saw the madness in his own trench, let alone what was going on outside and into No Man's Land.
My instincts lead me to deduce that we are at last about to go over the top.
Great Scott, sir, you mean...you mean the moment's finally arrived
for us to give Harry Hun a darn good British-style thrashing, six of the best, trousers down?
If you mean are we all going to get killed, yes.
George's sort of happy-go-lucky
home-in-time-for-tea attitude was especially tragic.
Don't forget your stick, Lieutenant.
Rather, sir. Wouldn't want to face a machine gun without this.
His ideas about war come from games.
George could only see real warfare in those terms.
He genuinely was a lamb to the slaughter.
Yes? And how are all the boys now?
Oh, well, er, Jocko and the Badger bought it at the first Ypres unfortunately. Quite a shock that.
I remember Bumfluff's housemaster wrote and told me that Sticky had
been out for a duck and McGubber had snitched a parcel sausage end and gone goose over stump frog side.
Meaning?
I don't know, sir, but I read in The Times that they'd both been killed.
And Bumfluff himself?
Copped a packet at Gallipoli with the Aussies.
So did Drippy and Strangely Brown.
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.
Oh, now sir, I will not have that.
Baldrick and I will always be more stupid than you.
Isn't that right, Baldrick? Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Yeah stupidy, stupidy, stupidy.
Stupidest stupids in the whole history of stupidityness.
Although written by Richard Curtis and Ben Elton, the scripts were
given added comedy value by its cast behind the scenes.
One of the great things about Blackadder was
you used to go whistling to work cos it was so funny in rehearsal.
What would happen was just so very, very entertaining and the rehearsal was often funnier than the show.
Every single line in the rehearsal script was challenged, always.
Tim or Stephen or Hugh or Rowan would be asking questions of it. How can we make this better?
It was really, really rigorous and incredibly frustrating when we could all see that something was wrong
and weren't quite sure how to make it right.
I hate to raise this having worked on it for three hours,
but do you think it's a very good joke this, since you suggested it?
Richard took the brunt of that...
We'd say well, I mean this doesn't work and then re-writing it.
Um, or not or arguing as to why it did work.
It was very exasperating because you'd say, actually this scene will work if you act it out.
It's a scene about one person talking very loud to a person
on a balcony while another person whispers to them.
You won't be able to understand the scene until we do it like that.
And they'd say no, no, no - but surely he should say this thing about that and the other.
So sometimes it was frustrating cos the actors didn't get on their feet as much as you'd like.
No, hang on, hang on, there's something wrong here.
Because surely if you're ordering a cab for a Mr Redgrave...
"From Arnot's Grove", in that case it should be, rather than "to Arnot's Grove".
I thought it was Mr Redgrave who was ordering the cab, when in fact
what you're saying is that Mr Redgrave is the person
who's going to be picked up and who's on the top bell.
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.
It's a good joke.
So because they come right at the end of the word...
But an order for six lengths of Hungarian crushed velvet curtain material.
You know, it's something. Six lengths of Hungarian crushed velvet.
This is after the... Curtain material. In cerise,
in cerise and banana.
The legendary coffee scene is an example
of the improvisation that we all used to do in the rehearsal rooms.
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 have sugar, er, dandruff?"
And we all giggled like the naughty late adolescents we really were.
Baldrick, fix us some coffee, will you?
And try to make it taste slightly less like mud this time.
Not easy, I'm afraid, Captain. Why is this? Cos it is mud.
We ran out of coffee 13 months ago.
So every time I've drunk your coffee since, I have in fact been drinking hot mud?
With sugar. Which of course makes all the difference.
Well, it would do if we had any sugar but unfortunately, we ran out New Year's Eve, 1915.
Since when, I've been using sugar substitute.
Which is? Dandruff.
Brilliant.
Still, I could add some milk this time.
Well, saliva.
It was very, you know, difficult and testing
but the pain in the BEEP about it was that it was effective.
On the contrary, George, we've had plenty of orders.
We've had orders for six metres of Hungarian crushed velvet curtain material.
Four rock salmon and a ha'p'orth of chips.
And a cab for a Mr Redgrave.
Picking up from 14 Arnot's Grove, ring top bell.
One of the examples of how everyone would join in with ideas
and suggestions would be in those long Baldrick or Blackadder similes of sort of,
"Baldrick, you are as much use as a..." and then you could go on for ages.
We're in the stickiest situation
since sticky the stick insect got stuck on a sticky bun.
The more these things got laughs in front of the audience,
the more it got ridiculously overblown.
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 little aspects of that simile and pull it back so it wasn't over-weighted.
Baldrick. Captain B? This is a crisis. A large crisis.
In fact, if you've got a moment, it's a 12-storey crisis with a magnificent entrance hall,
carpeting throughout, 24-hour porterage
and an enormous sign on the roof saying, "This is a large crisis."
I remember saying to Hugh and to Rowan and to John Lloyd,
I said, "What will happen in six months' time
"when a taxi driver says to you, 'Oh, those Blackadders,
"'I bet they're fun to make, aren't they?'
"Will you go, 'Yes, they're marvellous fun'"?
And they all said, "No, we'll be honest and say they're hell, they're absolute hell."
Wibble.
Still to come, we reveal how these barking mad characters were created.
It was done as much as anything to amuse Rowan and Hugh, to do this rather bizarre way of speaking.
Um, and of barking.
And how Britain's smelliest underdog became a national hero.
The healthy humour of the honest Tommy.
Somebody once told me that more than half the regimental goats
in the British Army are now called Baldrick.
Over four series, the Blackadder family have fumbled their way through history.
The latest conniving kinsman is desperate to flee the trenches.
I'm going to have to desert and I'm going to do it right now.
And escape the commands of a totally incompetent general.
What have we here? Name?
Permission to speak. Baldrick, sir.
Oh, tally-ho, yibbidy dap and zing-zang spillet.
Looking forward to bullying off for the final chukka?
Permission to speak.
Answer the General, Baldrick. I can't answer him, sir, I don't know what he's talking about.
Ha-ha.
Are you looking forward to the big push?
No, sir, I'm absolutely terrified.
The healthy humour of the honest Tommy. Ha ha!
The Melchett in Series 4 was a very different character to the one in 2.
He was much, much more aggressive, much more insane, much more powerful.
He was really for almost the entire series, THE source of power.
He represents the absolute insanity of the war.
Our battles are directed, sir?
Of course they are, Blackadder, directed according to the grand plan.
Would that be the plan to continue with total slaughter until everyone's dead
except Field Marshal Hague, Lady Hague and their tortoise, Alan?
Great Scott! Even you know it!
With Stephen playing General Melchett,
he had this madness in the character and he started to develop the madness.
And that sometimes just came out as being extraneous noises that he would put on at the end
of a sequence. So he would say, "Off we go Blackadder, baa!" and then that would be off.
And you'd think, "What was that?"
Ha, ha, ah!
And it was done as much as anything to amuse Rowan and Hugh,
to do this rather bizarre way of speaking.
Um, and of barking.
So that you knew he was coming
just because you heard a noise somewhere in the background.
Ah, Blackadder, so you escaped?
Yes, sir. Bravo. Don't slouch, Darling.
I was wondering whether having been tortured by the German army,
I might be allowed a week's leave to recuperate, sir?
Excellent idea. Your commanding officer would have to be stark raving mad to refuse you.
Well, YOU are my commanding officer. Well?
Can I have a week's leave to recuperate, sir?
Certainly not. Thank you, sir.
One of the things I gave him, that just sounds ridiculous,
was the idea that he had piles so that every time I sat down,
he went, "Ah!"
Right, ooh, ah!
And I would try and make Rowan laugh by sometimes sitting down like that
and going, "Urgh!" like that
and only Rowan knew it was cos I had these apparent piles.
Ooh, ah! So, any news of the spy, Blackadder?
Yes, sir. Excellent. The Germans seem to know every move we make.
I had a letter from Jerry yesterday.
It said, "Isn't it about time you changed your shirts, Walrus face?"
Even though we of course were the same age, or very often older
than the characters we were playing, slightly older,
Stephen seemed to be more like Melchett
than the real Melchett ever could be.
He just physically carried off that sort of wine-soaked barking fascist
more convincingly than a real wine-soaked barking fascist could ever do.
The court is now in session.
General Sir Anthony Cecil Hogmanay Melchett in the chair.
The case before us is that of the Crown
versus Captain Edmund Blackadder, the Flanders pigeon murderer.
My favourite episode was probably the court martial episode, Corporal Punishment,
for all kinds of reasons. Personal ones, it was one of the best ones to play Melchett in.
He had the full range of shuddering emotions.
The Lear-like, I like to think, response to the death of his favourite pigeon, Speckled Jim.
General, did you own a lovely, plump speckly pigeon...
..called Speckled Jim which you hand-reared from a chick
and which was your only childhood friend?
Yes! Yes, I did.
And did Captain Blackadder shoot the aforementioned pigeon? Yes, he did.
Can you see Captain Blackadder anywhere in this courtroom?
That's him, that's him, that's the man!
Argh! No more questions, sir.
Excellent, first class.
Aiding General Melchett is the pencil-pushing Staff Officer, Captain Darling.
What do you want, Darling?
The reincarnation of Percy as Kevin Darling was masterful.
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 way of hoping people might forget a little bit about Percy.
Come on, Darling. Just give me an application form.
It's out of the question. This is simply a ruse to waste five months of training
after which you'll claim you can't fly after all because it makes your ears go pop.
I wasn't born yesterday, Blackadder.
Pity - we could have started your personality from scratch.
To play Darling, who hated Blackadder and throughout the series wanted him
to go on the front line and be killed, is quite extreme.
And would love when he was in a position
to mock and ridicule him, was great.
Good luck, Blackadder.
Why, thank you, Darling.
And what's your big job here today?
Straightening chairs?
No, in fact, I'm appearing for the prosecution.
I wouldn't raise your hopes too much - you're guilty as hell, you haven't got a chance.
Why, thank you, Darling.
And I hope your mother dies in a freak yachting accident.
One thing I always give credit for is, as far as I recall,
it was Stephen who came up with the name Darling,
which I think is one of the truly great Blackadder jokes.
Next to me, Darling. Thank you, sir.
I can remember the very first read-through of the first episode
of the last series, Blackadder 4.
Tim was a bit distressed, cos 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 name that was a constant torment to him.
For the next three days, his name was changed to Darling and we all, you know, fell about.
How dare you, Darling.
And then I remember we actually had a vote and said,
"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, "No, please let me keep it."
Because Tim being the wonderful actor he is knew how to play someone
who all his life had been called Darling in a sarcastic way.
We thought the name Darling was funny,
but it really didn't occur to us that people would pick it up in the way that they did.
Which is very stupid of us obviously, but
the idea that in every single scene, whenever Melchett called me Darling,
that there was a double entendre there.
We just thought it was a silly, embarrassing name,
we didn't realise what it would mean for the other character.
What is the matter with you today, Darling?!
I'm so sorry, Blackadder. Come on, Darling, we're leaving.
The fact that Tim was able to play
a sort of annoyance at his own name, it was sort of Tim,
he sort of twitched at the use of his own name as if it still...
it was a dagger in his ribs.
The twitch stayed with me for months, actually.
It was really difficult. I did actually get quite scared that it was never going to go.
I'll deal with this, Darling. Delicate touch needed, I fancy.
The scene when Melchett is getting ready for dinner with Georgina,
who is of course you know Hugh Laurie anyway,
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.
I think it's a fantastic piece of writing.
God, it's a spankingly beautiful world and tonight's my night.
I know exactly what I'll say to her.
Darling. Yes, sir?
Um, I don't know, sir.
Well, don't butt in. Sorry, sir.
I want to make you happy, darling.
Well, that's very kind of you, sir. Will you kindly stop interrupting?
If you don't listen, how can you tell me what you think?
I want to make you happy, darling, I want to build a nest for your 10 tiny toes,
I want to cover every inch of your gorgeous body in pepper and then sneeze all over you.
Really, sir!
I must protest. What is the matter with you, Darling?
Well, it's just all so sudden, sir,
and I mean the nest bit's fine, but the pepper business is definitely out.
How dare you tell me how I may or may not treat my beloved Georgina?
Georgina?
Yes. I'm working out what I want to say to her this evening.
Oh, yes, of course.
Thank God. All right? Yes, sir, listening, sir.
Honestly, Darling, you really are the most graceless, dim-witted bumpkin I ever met.
I don't think you should say that to her, sir.
One of the things I love about Series 4 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
I think happened right at the end of that series when he did suddenly seem to represent the working man.
We've been stuck here for three flipping years.
We haven't moved.
All me friends are dead.
My pet spider, Sammy.
Katie the worm.
Bertie the bird.
Everyone except Neville the fat hamster.
I'm afraid Neville bought it too, Baldrick.
Baldrick is the hero really because wherever you go, every school,
organisation, every company, every shop, whatever, has got a Baldrick.
They just loved that character.
Baldrick, I love you!
There's such affection for Baldrick, it's quite amazing.
I spy with my little eye something beginning with M.
Er, um. Mm.
Ma, ma, ma.
M... M...
Mug!
Oh, I say. Well done, sir, your turn.
I spy with my bored little eye, something beginning with T.
Breakfast! What?
My breakfast always begins with tea.
Then I have a little sausage. Then an egg with some little soldiers.
I think Baldrick has got stupider and stupider as the centuries have gone on.
In the first series, he was actually the brightest out of Baldrick, Percy and Blackadder.
Um, and then he got a bit stupider and now he's terminally stupid.
Right, my turn again, what starts with a "come here" and ends with "ow"? Don't know. Come here.
Well done.
Who would have thought that this smelly, turnip-loving sidekick
would become the nation's favourite underdog?
Even the armed forces fell for Baldrick and Blackadder.
It does seem to be the case that the Army, or at least
an awful lot of people in the Army love the fourth series.
And I think that's probably because it expresses
a part of their experience which isn't allowed to be expressed.
You've got it, mwah!
Well, if I've got it, you've got it too now.
Blackadder was so funny because it reflected so many aspects of army life.
So many of the words now have gone in to sort of Army vocabulary
and we use them on operations, for example.
Wibble wobble.
Cunning plan. We use them all the time.
I used them all the time when I was in Bosnia or in Northern Ireland.
In the first Gulf War, many of the emplacements and headquarters buildings
around Iraq were named after characters in Blackadder.
There's the Melchett lines and the Baldrick lines and so on.
And somebody once told me that more than half the regimental goats
in the British Army are now called Baldrick.
So that's a rather an honour.
Right, so what do we do now? Shall I do my war poem?
How hurt would you be if I gave the honest answer which is, "No, I'd rather French kiss a skunk?"
So would I, sir.
All right, fire away, Baldrick.
Hear the words I sing
War's a horrid thing
So I sing, sing, sing
Ding-a-ling-a-ling.
Ah, bravo, yes, yes.
Yes. Well, it started badly and it tailed off a little in the middle
and the less said about the end, the better. But apart from that, excellent.
Shall I do another one, sir? No, we wouldn't want to exhaust you.
I could go on all night. Not with a bayonet through your neck, you couldn't.
This one is called The German Guns.
Oh, spiffing, yes, let's hear that.
Boom, boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom.
Boom, boom, boom, boom.
Boom, boom, boom? How did you guess, sir?
I say, sir, that is spooky.
I'm sorry, I think I've got to get out of here.
I just had a touching thing the other day, I might have been judging
a poetry competition at my son's school.
And one of the boys, they were doing, you know, Rudyard Kipling and Roger McGough
and lots of other serious long poems.
And then one of the boys stood up and said, "This poem is called War, by S Baldrick."
And just said "boom" 10 times.
Boom, boom, boom, boo... I've forgotten the rest of it.
Still to come, an insight into how one of the greatest scenes in sitcom history was created.
I just cried.
Er, partly because it was so beautifully done, it was as well done
as any scene like that in a drama.
And you're also saying goodbye to your character at the same time.
And Blackadder leaps to the big screen.
'The final guest of honour arrives at the Dome.
'Many of the crowds have been here for up to 36 hours waiting for this moment.
'But I'm sure they won't be disappointed.'
This multi-award winning sitcom produced some of the best-loved moments in comedy.
I want to be remembered when I'm dead.
I want books written about me, I want songs sung about me and then hundreds of years from now,
I want episodes from my life to be played out weekly at half past nine
by some great heroic actor of the age.
But perhaps the finest and most poignant episode was saved until last.
Hello, the Somme public baths.
No running, shouting or piddling in the shallow end.
Ah, Captain Darling.
Tomorrow at dawn.
Oh, excellent.
See you later, then. Bye.
The luxury of the final episode is that we were allowed to start
to play with emotion and we made an effort to do that.
Clearly, the atmosphere of the last episode was deliberately thought provoking.
I mean, the whole idea you have to be mad to be in it.
And I hope that the tone was set not just by the script, but by the fantastic performances.
Captain Darling.
Captain Blackadder.
Here to join us for the last waltz?
Um, yes.
Tired of folding the General's pyjamas.
Well, this is splendid comradely news.
Together we'll fight for king and country and be sucking sausages in Berlin by teatime.
Did feel immensely sad at times, immensely sad.
Sad that these characters who we all liked were going to die,
but sad because we were representing the deaths of, you know,
even for comic effect, we were representing the deaths of many hundreds of thousands of people.
Don't forget your stick, Lieutenant.
Rather, sir. Wouldn't want to face a machine gun without this.
Someone in Rowan's office once told me that 93% of the mail
that he got, I can't believe he ever got 100 letters but anyway,
93% of the mail they got was about the final five minutes.
And I do think it was one of those lucky occasions where we got it mainly right and where
each of the little lines that come before they go over the top
has a particular point to do with defeatism and optimism.
And then the final twist when he says it's the end of the war
and it's 1917 and you know that that's not right.
Listen, our guns have stopped. You don't think?
Maybe the war's over.
Maybe it's peace.
Oh, hurrah! The big nobs have got round the table and yanked the iron out of the fire.
Thank God. We lived through it.
The Great War, 1914 to 1917.
Hip-hip, hooray!
I'm afraid not.
The guns have stopped because we're about to attack.
Not even our generals are mad enough to shell their own men.
They think it's far more sporting to let the Germans do it.
The icing on the cake, if such a sort of naff expression can be used
for such an intensely moving bit of television,
was this brilliant freeze frame and fade to poppies.
I think John and Richard between them, Richard Boden, produced
one of arguably the greatest or one of the greatest moments in the Blackadder.
That scene came out by accident because we'd built this enormous set in the other studio
and the actors went over the top in pitch darkness
with pyrotechnics going off and it wasn't a very good take.
So I just got on to the PA and said they've got to do a take two.
And Rowan got on the line he said "I'm sorry, we're we're not going to do that, John."
I said, "What do you mean?"
He said, "It's really the most frightening thing I've ever done
"and we all agreed we're not going to do it, I'm very, very sorry."
Clicked off the mike.
So I turned to Richard the director and, "Ooh, blimey, this is a disaster,
"cos it was going so well, it was so good,
"the acting was so good in that episode and we've got this awful end which doesn't work."
When we came to the editing of the show, we then started investigating with slightly slow motion.
And that we would then freeze the slow motion of them going across no man's land with the explosions.
It was very poignant, very moving.
And I had always had an image in my mind from the First World War of the poppy fields.
Richard Boden went up to the news library in the BBC and found a still of a poppy field.
And as I mixed between the shots just to sort of, you know,
just see what it looked like, it was a yes immediately.
This was a moment.
Good luck, everyone.
WHISTLES BLOW
SHOUTING, GUNFIRE
I just cried. Partly because it was so beautifully done.
It was as well done as any scene like that in a drama.
And you're also saying goodbye to your character at the same time.
It's a very odd feeling.
I thought it was absolutely brilliantly done and I thought it was kind of groundbreaking for comedy.
I think it was always the idea that that last episode
would be this kind of tragic thing with all the colour draining out of it slowly.
But I don't think we ever decided it would be the last series
and I suppose in many ways, we still haven't decided.
These final moments helped bag Blackadder
two Baftas for Best Comedy and Best Performance by Atkinson.
And apart from a short Millennium film shown exclusively at the Dome,
a fifth series is yet to be made.
Look, lads, we've captured Lord Blackadder!
The possibilities for Blackadder going, you know, further back
into the past or into the future, or to other continents.
I mean, there are always possibilities, because
Richard Curtis and Ben Elton are immensely talented writers
and they could make, you know, an awful lot of different kinds of thing work.
There was a great idea that was around at one time
which was that it would be a 1960s Blackadder with Rowan as the bastard son of Queen Elizabeth.
Um, but he's also a loose swinging '60s type who hangs round
in the King's Road and he's got this rock band
with a drummer with no hair in it called Bald Rick.
I would love us to do that one.
We once thought of doing one set in a university and everybody would be there as dons
and they would just hate all the students.
Um, so I think that we might, I think we might, you know, do one when we're old.
But Tony Robinson is so old now, I mean, he's in his early 80s now.
I'm not sure he'll be alive when we want to go back to work.
I have a cunning plan.
Oh, ... off, Baldrick!
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