Black Adder
1 9 8 3 (UK) The Black Adder
1 9 8 6 (UK) Blackadder II
1 9 8 7 (UK) Blackadder The Third
1 9 8 8 (UK) Blackadder: The Cavalier Years, Blackadder's
Christmas Carol
1 9 8 9 (UK) Blackadder Goes Forth
2 0 0 2 (UK) Blackadder Goes Back & Forth
26 x episodes
The premise behind the original Black Adder series is
that Richard III didn't murder the princes in the tower and one of
them grew up to be Richard, Duke of York, heir to the throne.
Henry VII also didn't win the battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, it
was won by Richard who went on to become Richard IV.
 When
Henry VII came to the throne 13 years later he changed to the
Gregorian calendar, put the date back 13 years and destroyed all
traces of the reign of Richard IV - all but one document, that is,
recording the exploits of Richard IV's younger son, Edmund, Duke
of Edinburgh, who styled himself 'The Black Adder'.
Edmund was decidedly hard-of-thinking but still much sharper
than his two cohorts, Baldrick (dumb) and Percy (dumber). Together
they schemed for an easier life, a better position and perhaps
even a shot at the throne itself.
But all of these ambitions were doomed to failure by the sheer
incompetence of the three protagonists, who managed to combine
their monumental stupidity with laziness and overwhelming
cowardice.
Producer John Lloyd and actor Rowan Atkinson had conceived the
notion of a period-piece sitcom when they were growing weary of
working with contemporary sketch material in Not The Nine
O'Clock News but The Black Adder, although a fine idea,
had more than its share of problems. It was an ambitious concept
that turned out to be extremely costly - location shooting, locale
dressing and set and costume design all pushed the budget up, and
made the series difficult and timely to produce.
Although the finished product had obvious potential, the mix
wasn't quite right and, strangely, the extensive location work
seemed to work against the whole. But, although flawed, the series
struck a chord with many younger viewers and won an international
Emmy in the popular arts category in 1983, enough (just) to
convince the BBC to commission a second series.
Blackadder II moved forward to 1560, and the flawed
genes of the Blackadder family have resurfaced in the melting pot
of history, giving us another Edmund, the bastard great, great
grandson of the original Black Adder.
Now with Blackadder as an established surname, this latest
Edmund is markedly different from the first. As greedy, indolent
and cowardly as his ancestor, this Blackadder has brains and
cunning aplenty.
Tudor England proved to be a dangerous time for the scheming
Edmund, especially with a childlike and selfish Queen who could
turn instantly from being enamoured with her subject to wanting
him beheaded. Elsewhere, he had an enemy in the court, Lord
Melchett, a favourite with the Queen.
Melchett regarded Edmund as a transparent yet still dangerous
rival. By Blackadder's side was another Baldrick, whose family
seemed compelled to produce sub-human specimens destined to serve
the dastardly Blackadders.
Blackadder II nearly didn't happen, the cost of the
first series deterring BBC executive Michael Grade from permitting
a second. But major changes to the series were afoot: Atkinson
realised that the location scenes got in the way of the comedy,
and that by filming nearly everything in a studio, with an
audience, they could cut costs and heighten the humour.
Atkinson stepped down from writing duties and Ben Elton was
brought in to work with Curtis on the scripts. He was an inspired
choice, bringing to the production quick fire dialogue, rich
verbal weaponry and a fitting dose of vulgarity.
Atkinson was in his element as the sneering, superior Edmund, a
cold and calculating man surrounded by fools. The new-style
dialogue particularly suited him, his character revelling in
wonderfully convoluted insults such as, 'Your brain is like the
four-headed man-eating haddock-fish beast of Aberdeen. It doesn't
exist'.
The following years Blackadder The Third found the latest
Blackadder (200 hundred years on) as butler to the Prince Regent,
a man of severely limited intellect and foppish habits. Once
again, this Blackadder has a stinging wit and a cowardly cunning,
and once again he is aided, abetted and hindered by a virtually
brain-dead member of the Baldrick family.
Here we find a Blackadder no longer a member of the aristocracy
but still ambitious to better himself by foul means. His demeaning
position, in service to a man with a 'brain the size of a peanut',
only strengthens his resolve to move up in the world.
A one-off special entitled Blackadder The Cavalier Years
was presented as part of the 1988 Comic Relief telethon,
with dashing Sir Edmund Blackadder trying to save Charles I
(Stephen Fry playing the character with the mannerisms of the
current Prince Charles) from Oliver Cromwell and his Roundheads.
Also in 1988, Atkinson appeared in a Christmas special,
entitled (appropriately enough) Blackadder’s Christmas Carol,
as Ebenezer - the white sheep of the awful Blackadder clan.
Far from being mean, spiteful, greedy and cowardly, as his
Dickensian name suggests, Ebenezer is a kindly, generous man. He
is visited by the spirit of Christmas who, in the spirit of A
Christmas Carol, takes him through time to witness the past,
present and future. He encounters the Blackadders from Blackadder
II and Blackadder The Third and travels to the future
to spy on one of his descendants.
All these Blackadders are loathsome creatures who seem to
derive some pleasure out of their wickedness, thus Ebenezer
returns to the present having learnt the moral that 'bad guys have
more fun'. His personality changes accordingly, and he heaps
insults upon Queen Victoria and Prince Albert who arrive to offer
him a baronage and £50,000. Needless to say, he promptly loses
both.
Blackadder Goes Forth (1989) was set during World War I with
Captain Blackadder as a career soldier who enlisted to escape the
rigours of civilian life and who has enjoyed an action-free
existence across three continents. He's a man of simple ambitions:
an easy life, the occasional drink and promotion to an even safer,
higher-paid position.
Unfortunately, the Great War has interfered with his plans and
he has found himself stuck in the trenches, uncomfortably close to
the front. With him, as always, is a prize idiot from the Baldrick
clan - this time a particularly unpleasant army private, serving
as Blackadder's batman.
 Also
present was Lieutenant George St Barleigh, a keen, vacuous type
anxious to volunteer for all sorts of loony escapades and devoted
to Captain Blackadder.
Their very lives are in the hands of General Melchett, a direct
conduit to General Haig, who delivers the plans and orders that
dictate their movements. Melchett is quite mad - a gung-ho,
bloodthirsty armchair warrior from a military family - and is
assisted by an aide-de-camp, the sycophantic Captain
Darling.
Blackadder's main concern is how to dissuade Melchett from
sending him and his men to certain death.
This was a marvellous finale to the Blackadder saga, bringing
the tale to the 20th-century and the killing fields of the WWI.
More serious in approach than its predecessors, Blackadder Goes
Forth still managed to mine many laughs out of the hopeless
situation, with the sheer horror of their environment and the
delicacy of their position adding to the blackness of the
comedy.
In the end, the creative team stuck to their guns and, instead
of having Blackadder succeed in his quest, had him and his men
forced to join the advance and fulfil their fears by going 'over
the top' to their deaths.
This grim image, the frame frozen and then dissolving into one
depicting the same field full of poppies, memorably ended the
series on a note of dark satire and was a fitting conclusion to a
comedy premise that had always sported an underlying intelligence
beneath its farcical surface.
A one-off edition of the series (Blackadder Goes Back &
Forth) was made for showing in the Millennium Dome at the turn
of the century. A new 21st century Blackadder has built a spoof
time machine which he plans to trick his friends on millennium new
years eve. The plan backfires when the time machine actually
works.
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