“History has known many great liars: Copernicus, Goebbels, St. Ralph the Liar. But there have been none quite so vile as the Tudor King Henry VII. It was he who rewrote history to portray his predecessor Richard III as a deformed maniac who killed his nephews in the Tower. But the real truth is that Richard was a kind and thoughtful man who cherished his young wards; in particular Richard, Duke of York, who grew into a big strong boy. Henry also claimed he won the Battle of Bosworth Field and killed Richard III. Again, the truth is very different. For it was Richard, Duke of York, who became King after Bosworth Field, and reigned for thirteen glorious years. As for who really killed Richard III and how the defeated Henry Tudor escaped with his life, all is revealed in this, the first chapter of a history never before told, the History of the Black Adder!”
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So opens The Black Adder’s debut episode “The Foretelling”, broadcast on 15th June 1983; a monologue that since about seventeen I’ve been able to recite by heart. It sets up the fictional historic premise of this first series and it carries a lot of weight, partially through the equally comic and grandiose writing of Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson, partly through the stirring delivery by narrator Patrick Allen, and partly through the epic theme music that carries it off composed by Howard Goodall. Whether or not this episode of television or the initial first run it belongs to are looked upon favourably in retrospect, it was a hell of a unique way to start a comedy series. And ultimately fitting too in its bombast, given the scope and the scale the series would occupy over the next decade.
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The Black Adder came about through the success of the double-act of Atkinson and Curtis. The pair had met at Oxford University (alongside Goodall), where they gained recognition for their comedy sketches for the Oxford Revue –Curtis writing and Atkinson performing, usually monologues designed around wordplay and double entendre. Eventually they transferred their partnership over to the classic British sketch show Not the Nine O’Clock News, where Atkinson quickly became the breakout performer. On developing their own idea for a sitcom, they looked to Fawlty Towers –the prevailing British sitcom of the era- and decided they wanted to go as far from that as possible, eventually settling on a period series, something that hadn’t been much attempted in the format up to that point.
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An unaired pilot episode experimented with an Elizabethan setting and a lead character who bore more than a little resemblance in personality to the Blackadder of later series. But this was scrapped in favour of the late Middle Ages and a character who was more of a scheming, chaotic clown, presumably to play up Atkinson’s skill for broad physical comedy (the pilot’s story would later be re-worked into the second episode “Born to be King”). Filmed largely around Alnwick Castle in Northumberland during a harsh early winter in 1983, the show’s premise would centre on an alternate history, where Richard of Shrewsbury, younger brother of Edward V and one of the mysteriously vanished Princes in the Tower, ascended his uncle Richard III to the throne in 1485 –not due to Richard dying at Bosworth Field, but being accidentally killed in the battle’s aftermath by his incompetent grand-nephew Edmund. Edmund, Duke of Edinburgh (ignoring the anachronism that fifteenth century England had no jurisdiction over Scotland), the second son to the newly crowned Richard IV later styles himself “The Black Adder” and spends the series plotting to attain the throne in fulfilment of a prophecy mistakenly given to him by three witches.
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For a series that begins with the death of Richard III, it’s rather fitting that the story plays out as a comic variation on the plot of Shakespeare’s Richard III, with that little bit of Macbeth thrown in. Shakespearean allusions are by design, the Bard is credited with “additional dialogue” on every episode, as the shows plays around with some of his most famous lines. Otherwise, a lot of fun is had with the medieval context, a specific subject of medieval history informing each episode, from birthrights and bastardy (“Born to be King”), the influence of the Catholic Church (“The Archbishop”), royal arranged marriages (“The Queen of Spain’s Beard”), and the pandemonium around witchcraft (“Witchsmeller Pursuivant”). Around a mugging and gesticulating Atkinson are a gloriously boisterous Brian Blessed as King Richard, Tony Robinson as Edmund’s clever ‘dung-gatherer’ servant Baldrick, and Tim McInnerny as his other foppish sidekick Lord Percy. Rounding out the main cast are Elspet Gray as the Flemish Queen Gertrude and Robert East as Edmund’s older more favoured brother Prince Harry.
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But Atkinson himself is the centre of attention (in spite of Blessed’s best efforts), and not always in a good way. Curtis revealed that before filming, the character was barely developed at all. As a result, he and Atkinson try to play to every one of Atkinson’s comedic capabilities: grandiloquence, verbal wit, mugging, and slapstick –and the result is a character who’s not all that consistently written, but more detrimentally feels performatively strained. “We tried to do too much with Rowan’s character in series one,” admitted Curtis for the 25th anniversary documentary, Blackadder Rides Again. “Because he was sort of aggressive and stupid and harsh and cowardly and brave. So I think it was a sort of agglomeration of quite a few funny things that we knew that Rowan could do.” With the exceptions of the rambunctious Blessed and the dim-witted McInnerny, all of his regular cast-mates are essentially straight men –he’s left to do most of the comedic heavy lifting. And with that affected silly voice and over-the-top mannerisms (both according to Atkinson, improvised on the first day of shooting) characterizing much of it, it’s not a winning combination –it can even get annoying. The fact is that Prince Edmund “The Black Adder” is not much of a fun or likeable character. He’s a schemer but also a coward, smart but also dumb as hell, and as a prince of the realm he’s on a social level that unlike several of his descendants, no one in the audience can relate to.
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On top of that, the series is rather technically awkward. It loves to showcase the scale in its budget, on par with any British period drama at the time, but the cinematographer isn’t very competent with outdoor sequences; I don’t know if it’s a camera issue or reliance on natural lighting but the outside location scenes always look grainier and fuzzier than the stuff shot interiorly. Some of the plotting is more complex than the time allotment allows, leading to an episode like “The Archbishop” feeling very directionless as it attempts to tackle every Catholic joke Curtis and Atkinson can think of, or “The Foretelling”, which ends without any kind of narrative resolution. The final episode, “The Black Seal” feels notably stuffed, as it introduces a bunch of new characters, plus an old arch-enemy of Edmund’s, and even sends him to prison for a year two thirds of the way through. Curtis has spoken about how nobody really knew what they were doing on that first series, everyone was fairly young and inexperienced in working on television. And it does show in both the writing and production.
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Another problem is that while the period sitcom was a relatively untapped genre on television, the inspired medieval comedy of Monty Python and the Holy Grail cast a long shadow over any other attempt to find humour in the Dark Ages. Obviously this was a series nowhere as irreverently funny or visually appealing, committed to a kind of realism the historical sketches of comedians like the Pythons tended to avoid. It’s worth noting too that the series doesn’t function well as a sitcom. Again, there’s something to be admired in how Curtis and Atkinson opt to throw out the rulebook, but the status quo (a necessity for the format) is constantly shifting; and while much of the series is filmed in that one castle it’s not particularly distinct. Each of the subsequent series would feature two regular sets as the familiar locales for the characters: a home base and a more formal space, but The Black Adder, with its freedom to film outdoors and in new spaces, lacks that grounding. This also connects to the poor characterization of much of the supporting cast, especially the Queen and Prince Harry –not permitted to leave the kind of impression that might have brought Gray and East back to following series the way Robinson and McInnerny were.
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This series is by a sizeable margin the least relevant politically of the Blackadder series too, both in allusion and style. That semi-anarchic sharpness is missing from the writing, as is a particular above-it-all attitude in the title character. Sequestered in its own little box in terms of its style of humour, it doesn’t respond to shifting comedy trends, and compared to later series feels out of step with the times as a result. The Young Ones first aired the year prior and really reshaped the British comedy landscape for the decade. The Black Adder, perhaps intentionally, did not engage with it, nor with the pervading sentiments of young British culture, the demographic it was otherwise trying to court. Indeed, it often doesn’t seem to know who it is for beyond –retroactively of course- Blackadder completionists. The only real sign of the times present are its casual bits of sexism and homophobia –especially in “The Queen of Spain’s Beard”.
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However, for its reputation as the misbegotten first son of the Blackadder series, there is plenty that I have always liked about The Black Adder, starting with Howard Goodall’s bombastic score and opening theme, unsurpassed by all but maybe the third series. I also think the alternative history take is fascinating –something that is largely unique to just this entry in the Blackadder mythos. The scale and locations do give it an authenticity that’s missing from the next two series at least, there’s a charm to its ambition. And while jokes tend to drive story perhaps too much, they can often be very good jokes –as different in nature from the prevailing winds as they were. Curtis and Atkinson are smart writers, the distinguished John Lloyd a good producer, and medieval history does make for a great creative canvas on which to set their comedy. The series additionally managed some wonderful guest stars, with Peter Cook as Richard III in the first episode (what was considered a kind of torch-passing), Patrick Allen as both the narrator and final antagonist, Frank Finlay as an insane witch-hunter, and (in spite of the inherent misogyny to her character) Miriam Margolyes as a horny Spanish princess with Jim Broadbent as her baffling interpreter. Margolyes in fact would go on to become indisputably Blackadder’s guest star MVP. And in fact the strength of hers and these other guest’s performances often cast Atkinson’s own in sharper relief.
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Disjointed and clumsy though it may be, The Black Adder laid the necessary groundwork for the better series that would succeed it. More than that it quite possibly laid some of the groundwork for Mr. Bean as well, as it gave Atkinson the early opportunity to play off his astounding physical comedy gifts. I also have a lot of love for what its ambitions were, what Curtis and Atkinson seemed to envision for it as something wholly unique for a British comedy. It demonstrably comes up short in this enterprise, in style and execution, in structure and cohesion, but I find it is not an unforgivable series. Even now, it has a few real charms to it, and though it is dwarfed by those series that followed, I still think fondly enough of at least parts of it not to exclude it from the Blackadder rotation. Warts and all, it is a vital part of the Blackadder legacy.
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