Celebrating Blackadder
TONY Robinson is on sparkling form today – chatty, quit-witted and ebullient as you’d expect – and he puts it down to having had his coffee: “It’s like cocaine for the older man, isn’t it?!”
We’re discussing the enduring appeal of Blackadder, the TV comedy which made his name – and which is being celebrated with a special season over Easter on Yesterday.
“You don’t look at a Holbein and go, ‘God that’s dated!’, do you? You think it’s a Tudor painting – and likewise with our Tudor stuff.” He produces a newspaper article with a picture showing the familiar cast of the second series, Blackadder II – Rowan Atkinson, Tim McInnerny, Miranda Richardson as Queen Elizabeth I and Stephen Fry – all posing together.
“The wigs, the costumes, each individual person looks like someone out of a Holbein, don’t they? It’s quite extraordinary. The look of it doesn’t date.”
The laughs don’t date either – just a quick search for clips online shows Robinson’s lines as Edmund Blackadder’s dim-witted sidekick Baldrick seem as fresh now as they were when the four series aired throughout the 80s.
“Well that’s the kind of comedy I had worked towards for years. I was really interested in trying to do stuff that was as spare as possible, which was one of the reasons the notion of the white-faced clown was very much part of Baldrick, as far as I was concerned. The audience had to do the work in their imagination. Who is this person? Why is he like is? Is he actually very smart and is avoiding problems? Is he really as stupid as he appears?”
In the first series, set in 1485, the dynamic between Blackadder, played by Rowan Atkinson, and Baldrick was slightly different – Blackadder coming across as far more bumbling and Baldrick far less of an idiot than in later incarnations.
Robinson, who received a knighthood in 2013 and turned 70 last August, explains the “gear change” for Baldrick was driven by Ben Elton, who came on board as a writer, joining Richard Curtis and producer John Lloyd, for the second series.
“Although he was a fan of the first series, he recognised its shortcomings, which were legion, and said that to give the storyline a dynamic, you needed a Blackadder who was smart when surrounded by his own people, but when he transferred that smartness, those cunning plans as it were, to the court, he was completely at sea, at a loss, struggling.
“So to do that, you had to make sure that the people in the kitchen with him were virtually brain dead to make him look better. Once we were in that position, we realised what comedy gold there was to mine by having [Baldrick] really stupid.”
“Once you were aware that was like a little comedy hand grenade, how could you not want to say it?” he says, adding that he doesn’t recognise himself when he catches repeats on TV these days: “I’ll often stay with it for about five minutes and I forget it’s me.”
He’s quick to burst another myth – none of those times Baldrick was hit by Blackadder hurt a bit.
“Rowan was such a pussycat. If you look very closely, all of those swipes he took are miles away from me. It was me who was going, ‘Come closer, come closer’, and he didn’t want to because he didn’t want to hurt me.”
London-born Robinson honed his craft from a young age – at just 13, he appeared on stage in the original West End version of Oliver! as a member of Fagin’s gang, before training at the Central School of Speech and Drama and setting up his own theatre company, as well as small stints on TV.
When Blackadder came calling, he was 38 and very much in parenting mode (he has a son and a daughter from a relationship that lasted 17 years), so success was secondary.