Blackadder Rides Again Page #5

Oh, God, it's a dream, isn't it?

It's a bloody dream.

But the fundamental idea of the plot was a brilliant moment for us.

Baldrick, where's the manuscript?

You mean the big papery thing tied up with string?

Yes, Baldrick, the manuscript, belonging to Dr Johnson.

So you're asking where the big papery thing tied up with string,

belonging to the batey fellow in the black coat who just left, is?

Yes, Baldrick, I am.

And if you don't answer,

then the booted bony thing with five toes on the end of my leg

will soon connect sharply

with the soft dangly collection of objects in your trousers.

I can remember Richard saying, "I've had a great idea.

"It took Dr Johnson 25 years to write his dictionary.

"How about he finishes it, lends it to Blackadder,

"Baldrick puts it on the fire, Blackadder's got a weekend to rewrite the dictionary."

Now what about D?

- I'm quite pleased with dog.

- Yes, and your definition of dog is?

Not a cat.

And I just thought, that is such a beautiful conceit,

and that's a lot better than writing three good knob gags,

which is what I was sort of trying to do.

The dictionary episode was an appropriate highlight for a series

that revelled in the richness of the English language,

and was never shy of a scintillating simile.

He's madder than Mad Jack McMad, the winner of last year's Mr Madman competition.

You look as happy as a man who thought a cat had done its business

on his pie but it turned out to be an extra big blackberry.

I'm as poor as a church mouse that's had an enormous tax bill

on the very day his wife ran off with another mouse taking all the cheese.

- A burned novel is like a burned dog...

- Oh, shut up!

The Blackadder scripts are so revered that all these years later,

the team still pore over the subtleties of their trade

with fellow literary luminaries, wherever they can be found.

- Do you want it dedicated to somebody?

- To Derrick, please.

- Thank you.

- I love Time Team.

You really are a national treasure.

Have you got a favourite quotation?

We used to play the game of guessing who had written which line.

We were invariably wrong.

Thanks.

When it came to the rehearsals, and this got more intense series by series,

everyone became fantastically and wonderfully greedy.

We'd do no rehearsing, we'd sit around at a table,

arguing about the script and pulling the script to pieces.

There was one where I said, "I have a message, my lord",

and Rowan said, "That's the worst message I've ever read",

and we all went, "Urgh", and it ended up...

"That's the worst message I've ever heard since..."

..Lord Nelson's famous signal at the Battle of the Nile,

"England knows Lady Hamilton

"is a virgin, poke my eye out and cut off my arm if I'm wrong."

People fought for their patch.

Nobody just toed the line and stood where they were told to stand

and did what they were told to do.

Everyone stood up for themselves and their characters.

- It was very free...

- Yes.

- And creative.

- Richard wouldn't have said that.

No, no! "Just read it out" was Richard's... "Just read it out!"

They would sit around for the entire time discussing the script.

We'd sometimes say,

"If you stood up and tried to act this script out,

"you might find out things about it."

I hate to raise this having worked on it for three hours

but is it a good joke, Hugh, since you suggested it?

This was nothing to do with me.

It was!

It was up on the board. I just read it out.

John and Richard and Hugh and Stephen

conduct themselves in a very affable way,

and when they talk about Blackadder now,

it all seems like it was a bit jolly,

slightly sticky sometimes, but basically fine.

I don't remember it quite like that. It was hard.

Hours would pass and packets of cigarettes would be got through,

huge quantities of polystyrene hideous muddy coffee would be drunk

in an effort to try and get the script right.

Hang on, there's something wrong here.

Surely if you're ordering a cab for a Mr Redgrave... oh, from Arnos Grove?

Sometimes it was very tense, I remember some difficult times

when we appeared to be just sitting around for 2.5 hours,

bemoaning the lack of writing clarity in a particular scene

and desperately trying to think how it might be re-orientated to work.

Just change it to "for".

If you're a young writer and in with your mates,

and because you've known them for a long time,

they're going to be able to slag you off in a way other people

probably won't now because you're becoming successful.

That's going to be difficult.

I remember this like a heart attack....

That was when I felt the analysis was getting overblown

and I remember feeling it was better,

we're now feeling a duty to open everything up at all times.

I thought it was Mr Redgrave ordering the cab but in fact

what you're saying is Mr Redgrave is the person who's going to be picked up who's on the top bell, yes?

'That's roughly how it was when it was good.'

And when it wasn't so good, it wasn't really like that.

It was more strained.

I'm not saying those moments were rare because they weren't.

They were quite commonplace. There were lots of longeurs between.

'People sitting with their heads in their hands.'

And a cab...for a Mr Redgrave,

picking up from 14 Arnos Grove, ring top bell.

On the back of the third series, Blackadder was awarded its own Christmas special,

a parody of Dickens' Christmas Carol with Ebenezer Blackadder in very different form.

But the fourth series would take our comic anti-heroes into a place where heroes dwell - the First World War.

Writer Ben Elton and producer John Lloyd

have come to the Somme to reflect on the setting of the final series.

I've always been so interested in the First World War.

Yet I've never been to the cemeteries.

We've all seen the footage,

many a panning shot, as we're doing now, but until you actually stand amongst

tens of thousands of crosses, each with a name on it, it's really...

- I had a grandfather fight on either side. Did you know my German grandfather got an Iron Cross?

- No.

Yes, he got an Iron Cross.

Which, actually, is buried in England because as Jewish refugees, they escaped

from Nazi Europe...escaped, got out,

my grandad brought his Iron Cross with him and my grandma,

on discovering it, was horrified.

Here we are, German accents, Iron Cross,

people might put two and two together so she buried it in a garden in Hampstead.

What we discussed back in '88 when we were writing it was not

taking easy laughs at the expense of such mass heroism.

Coming here today, I'm very glad we didn't.

By the time we got to Blackadder Goes Forth, we'd always said that, more than anything,

we'd like to create a series

that was very claustrophobic

where the five or six of us who were the performers

were trapped in a space

and what better way to feel that notion of claustrophobia than in the trenches in the First World War?

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