1. Article written for the Altrincham Garrick's Blackadder the Third (November 2015).
A Serpent’s Tale: the History of Blackadder
Winner of multiple BAFTAs, voted the second-best British sitcom of all-time and a
springboard for a group of international acting and writing talents, the Blackadder
dynasty dates back not centuries but to 1979. Oxford University students Richard
Curtis and Rowan Atkinson had formed a revue at the Oxford Playhouse and gone
on to work together on the BBC sketch series Not the Nine O’Clock News. Wanting
to write a sitcom as good as Fawlty Towers but without inviting comparison, the pair
hit upon the idea of a comedy with a historical setting.
Curtis and Atkinson wrote a pilot in 1982 and a full series, The Black Adder, arrived
on our screens on BBC1 on 15 June 1983, billed in the Radio Times as “the first of
six horrible situation tragedies”. Set in an ‘alternate’ 1485 at the end of the Middle
Ages, the series starred Atkinson as Prince Edmund, the ‘Black Adder’ and weaselly
son of Richard IV (played by Brian Blessed), who found himself on the throne after
Edmund accidentally killed Richard III (played by Peter Cook). Tim McInnerny played
the dim-witted Lord Percy Percy, while Tony Robinson (who had not appeared in the
pilot) played the servant Baldrick.
The Black Adder was a modest success but not successful enough to justify the
expense of the series. Filming at Alnwick Castle in Northumberland, as well as a cast
of extras, horses and costumes, had cost £1 million. Such extravagance was
unacceptable to new controller of BBC1, Michael Grade, who insisted on a budget
cut if he was to greenlight a second series. This coincided with Ben Elton replacing
Atkinson as co-writer, who agreed that the grandiose location filming was not needed
and that the series instead had to focus on the characters in a smaller studio set.
The second series introduced us to the Blackadder family’s Elizabethan descendant,
who was cut from a different cloth to his snivelling ancestor: he became cunning,
witty and self-serving, “a modern person in the stupidity of ancient times” as Curtis
put it; alternatively, Baldrick became even more stupid. Along with McInnerny
returning as Percy, the main trio were reigned over by Miranda Richardson as a
childish and spoilt Queen Elizabeth I prone to cutting someone’s head off if the mood
took her, alongside Stephen Fry as the sycophantic Lord Melchett and Patsy Byrne
as dotty Nursie.
Blackadder II was a huge success, with 10 million viewers tuning in per week, and a
third series was quickly commissioned. Blackadder the Third was set in Regency
England, and although Elton considered the era less ‘sexy’ than the Tudor age, both
writers thought it had potential. The latest incarnation of Blackadder had fallen from
nobility and served as butler to the Prince Regent, alongside his dogsbody Baldrick,
even more prone to a “cunning plan”. Tim McInnerny returned in a smaller role to
avoid being typecast as Percy, so the main cast was completed by Hugh Laurie as
the idiotic and indulgent Prince Regent and Helen Atkinson-Wood as pie shop owner
Mrs Miggins.
