Blackadder Rides Again Page #2

hanging off the end of your nose because it was so cold.

- Oh, yes, yes.

- The raindrop there,

and then you said,

"What voice shall I use?"

Help! Help! We haven't thought about this at all.

Get out of my way!

Are you going on a journey, my lord?

No, I thought I'd stand here all day and talk to you.

Well, you'll be needing someone to tend your horse then.

What is your profession?

One two three, one two three!

My God, a retired Morris dancer.

I found this the other day. I actually kept a diary of a few days.

"12th February 1983.

"Filming has been fantastically slow and tedious.

"The snow comes down on the words 'turn over'

"as if summoned by an incantation and a remarkable variety of textures.

"Often it's as big as gravel stones,

"and the flagstones look like a working model of Brownian motion."

Oh, that's rather...

Some lyrical writing!

- Very well written.

- Thank you so much!

Rather better than the series!

"On Monday, Tuesday, worried dreadfully that

"Rowan's character was a disaster, but it seems to be gelling well."

Oh, oh. It's gelled.

"Tim McInnerny is brilliant, as is Tony Robinson,

"quite splendid juices being squeezed from a rather shrivelled selection of lemons."

What comes in my head first about series one

is freezing to death in Alnwick Castle.

I can remember on the very first day, Tim McInnerny and I

started to get the giggles

because in the previous hour,

we'd been subjected to five different kinds of snow.

It was everything the north-east had to throw at us.

"The hailstones are as fat as Mint Imperials

"and it's so cold, we have to wear our long-johns in the bath."

Despite its quite graphic description of the difficult conditions,

actually, the tone is quite optimistic.

I mean, you don't sound like a man about to jump off a cliff.

What used to be strong about British comedy

was that people went from writing sketches

to writing a sitcom, and their sketchcraft was carried through.

- Let's get down to business, shall we?

- Business, my lord?

Yes. Baldrick has been looking at some of the ways we can actually make a bit of money at this job.

Some of the things that are best in series one are really sketches.

There appear to be four major profit areas.

Curses, pardons, relics and selling the sexual favours of the nuns.

Selling the sexual favours of nuns?

- Yeah.

- You mean some people actually pay for them?

Well, foreign businessmen, other nuns...

'We weren't an ensemble at that time'

and, in a way, for me, I think,

that scene was the first time that it really gelled.

Moving on to relics, we've got shrouds from Turin.

Wine from the wedding at Cana.

Splinters from the Cross.

And of course, there's all the stuff made by Jesus in his days in the carpentry shop.

We've got pipe racks, coffee-tables, coat stands.

Waterproof sandals. That's what I remember.

This was my one good scene in the first Blackadder series.

'I was so pleased I got this.'

I haven't finished this one yet.

It's so verbal, isn't it?

Nice props, I'm not knocking them at all,

but just the three of us being serious and pulling faces.

'Absolutely.'

I have here a true relic.

What is it?

It is a bone from the finger of our Lord.

It cost me 31 pieces of silver.

'Baldrick, you stand amazed.'

I am. I thought they only came in boxes of 10.

'Look at you!'

You should be shot for that kind of acting.

No, I could have been much worse.

I remember Blackadder being lots of fun.

In the end, you are about as much use to me as a hole in the head -

an affliction with which you must be familiar,

having never actually had a brain.

Hello!

The Spanish Infanta didn't know she was ugly.

That's the sad thing, really, about it.

Here I am, awaiting the arrival of the most beautiful, ravishing...

Hello!

Leave me alone, will you? I'm trying to talk to someone.

..while you're wittering away like a pox-ridden moorhen.

SHE SPEAKS SPANISH

She loved Blackadder, and she was electrified, sexually, by him.

SHE SPEAKS SPANISH

I've waited for this moment all of my life

SHE SPEAKS SPANISH

Your nose is smaller than I expected.

For him, it was tough.

He felt a huge responsibility,

kind of carrying the show.

It's extraordinary, the physical difference with Rowan,

- between the first and second series.

- Yeah.

Do your funny walk then, Adder.

- Moi?

- Do the funny Blackadder walk.

I haven't got a funny Blackadder walk.

You did one like that!

'Or something weaselly.'

What seems odd now is that

Tony was the streetwise, smart guy, and Rowan was an idiot.

Incredibly dysfunctional, almost twisted person.

A bit like what Mr Bean became.

Rowan wasn't entirely relaxed in the first series,

as were none of us, because we weren't quite sure...

not quite sure what we were doing.

Rowan's character wasn't properly sorted out.

Oh, my God, this is impossible! I can't do this.

We tried to do too much with Rowan's character in series one,

cos he was sort of aggressive and stupid and posh and cowardly and brave,

so it was a sort of agglomeration of quite a few funny things

that we knew Rowan could do.

But it's interesting how, you know,

an amusing costume and a daft haircut an amusing character doth not make!

I sat there wanting to laugh and unable to, a lot of the time.

I did laugh quite a lot, but I hope desperately that I shall laugh more the next week.

What exactly is funny about this?

What is funny about having that character?

Farewell, sweet England, and noble castle!

First watering place in the desert of my life.

Farewell, gentle giblets and sweet crenellations,

and farewell, dearest gutters!

I remember that famous comment of yours.

It looks like a million dollars but it cost a million pounds.

I suppose a good thing about the modern BBC is that they would never have allowed us to do this.

You know, to do what we did.

I mean, you know, they would never, you know, have just let

a few young, you know, creative people come up to Alnwick and shoot.

Well, no, they wouldn't, but then, on the other hand,

we were very proud of it at the time we did it.

The basic fault is the script, because Rowan Atkinson

and this chap who he writes with, have written an awful lot,

and it seems that six episodes are too much for them.

There are a lot of half-employed script writers who could have been brought in to good effect.

There was in fact a slightly more than half-employed scriptwriter knocking about.

Ben Elton was behind the cult series of The Young Ones

and was brought in to hone the writing of the second series.

Is the sitcom written?

- I mean, not the sitcom, the drama, the comedy.

- Well...

- That sounds like a good idea.

- I'm working on a pilot, I'm working on a pilot episode.

I've now had a screening council, and the end is hard to get right,

and I don't know how to get the special effects right.

I think we met at a script meeting for what was going to turn into Spitting Image,

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