Elton: I’m lost when fans quote Blackadder

BLACKADDER writer Ben Elton said he does not recognise lines from the show when fans quote them at him.

The comedian admitted he never watches episodes back so can’t answer when adoring members of the public joke about whether he’s going home for rat au van.

Elton, 65, said the process by which he and Richard Curtis wrote the BBC comedy show means neither of them have the “faintest idea who wrote which line anymore”.

It means that Baldrick’s best-known lines from the fourth series, in which Tony Robinson plays the character as a lowly Army cook in the First World War, are lost on Elton.

Speaking on Robinson’s Cunningcast podcast, he said: “I don’t remember much of it. People are always sidling up to me at stage doors and saying ‘I expect you’re going home for a bit of rat surprise tonight, the surprise being there’s only rat in it’.

“And then I go ‘what, I have no idea what you’re talking about’.

“I don’t watch them again.

“The funny thing about Blackadder is the only people who don’t talk about the lines they wrote are me and Richard.

“Richard and I never ever take credit for each other’s work, because we know every single line of it was done as a mutual passion project. And the honest truth is, neither of us have the faintest idea who wrote which line anymore.

“Some of them were crafted over three or four drafts, sometimes they were a line that was beautiful the first time, and hence it was either written by me or by Richard.

“But I can honestly say that neither Richard nor I remember who wrote 99 per cent of the lines in the Blackadder that we did write.”

When discussing how the show was written, director Richard Boden once recalled Elton becoming frustrated at actors spending hours discussing a single word. Boden said: “One thing I did find out early on was there was a lot of discussion and talking about, ‘Could we make that word funnier?’ Ben Elton said it would drive him nuts when they’d spend two hours debating if the word ‘gerbil’ was funnier than ‘vole’.

“Ben and Richard had already written it – they’d been through all this! But the actors only did it because they wanted it to be as good as it possibly could be.”

‘People say: “I expect you’re going home for a bit of rat surprise”... And I have no idea what they’re on about’