I think all great sitcoms - the sitcoms that I love
Are completely unique.
I think "I Love Lucy" is unique.
And I think the relationship
Between Dick van Dyke and Mary Tyler moore was unique.
I think the people they invented in the Cheers bar were unique
And "Larry Sanders" is unique.
I would hate to say, "Oh, all the American ones are the same,"
Because I think they're miles apart.
There's just a million miles
Between "Friends" and "Larry Sanders".
The same way it would be ridiculous to say that
"Yes, Prime Minister" had much to do with "Ab Fab" or "Father Ted".
I think that we have got these
Lucky little nobbles of funny stuff
And I don't think it matters what country they come from.
One of the laws of newspapers seems to be
That every six months one has to write
An article about the death of sitcom,
And I think that - I think they're all nonsense
Because as far as I can see
There have been about three great sitcoms in Britain
And about three great sitcoms in America
Every ten years.
And the pattern is pretty well the same.
I can't imagine what they are,
But I think every decade you get a few that people adore.
And with any luck it will stay the same.
But now we've got some good sitcoms,
Now in America we've got some good sitcoms,
And I think as many as ever there were.
I'm very passionate about Larry Sanders
Which a very strange, uncomfortable sitcom with no laughter,
But is brilliantly funny and seems to drift off
Into a direction you don't expect it to
And be full of strange sadnesses just around the corner
With all the major characters.
And I loved "Father Ted"
For the sweetness of the characters.
Apart from the bloke in the chair,
The two main characters are just trying so hard
To be nice to each other,
And all of those characters are so thick.
A great joy.
"Fawlty towers", it's the greatest farce
Ever written in the English language.
I think there might be some good French farces,
But there's not been anything that perfect
In the history of English literature.
I mean, it's just so funny.
Sitcom plots are very gorgeous to create.
You don't have plots and sketches.
And film plots are really dull to get right,
Such a long time, such a huge curve,
The characters have to be so deep.
The thing I miss about sitcom
Is not writing funny lines or writing funny scenes,
But just devising a perfect little circle.
That is the fun of the genre.
The only advice I give to people about writing sitcoms is
If they possibly can, don't write a first episode.
For the last three series of Blackadder
We never wrote a first episode.
We wrote a final episode and five other ones
So that you could pick a good one to go first
Because on the whole, first episodes of sitcoms are the worst
Because you don't establish the situation you're going for,
You establish the situation
Before the one you were going for.
And that is the sadness,
That most sitcoms are reviewed
On the back of their first episode,
Which is the one where the old flatmate moves out
And the new flatmate moves in,
And there should be a rule
That they're only reviewed after three of them.
So that you kind of find out what the joke's meant to be.
I've liked those sitcoms that I like.
I find it alarming that people are so keen
To write about sitcoms that they don't like
Rather than celebrate sitcoms they do.
I think we were still in love with how "Fawlty Towers" had been,
I would imagine that "Yes, Prime Minister" was around
And being fantastic in those days,
So what I was trying to do was
Write a sitcom like the ones I liked
And not an attack on those I didn't like.
And "Fawlty Towers" was a huge barrier
To writing anything in those days
Because it had just been so good,
As it turns out, the most popular tv program ever.
After a while we decided that the one thing we could do
Is write a historical sitcom which wouldn't remind everyone
How weak we were in comparison to "Fawlty Towers".
I wonder if other people would admit to this,
I think the most difficult thing about all sitcoms
Is that you write so hard
And you get your little series of six as perfect as you can,
And in retrospect it seems to me
That every sitcom I've ever written, out of six,
Two are good, two are not bad and two are awful.
And no matter how hard you try and no matter how well you do,
I certainly know which is which.
In all the Blackadder and "Vicar of Dibley" series
They're just - some of them don't work.
Plots aren't made in heaven.
BBC cancelled the Blackadder after the first series,
Saying we weren't allowed to do the second series
Because it was unsuccessful and not funny enough.
Then I met Ben and we talked about the fact that
It would have been possible to do Blackadder
In a really traditional studio context.
So that's what we did.
There wasn't any outside filming,
Apart from the credit sequence
In the Elizabethan one.
I don't think there is in any of them.
So that was a new challenge, new fun,
And it came out much more, as it were, like a play.
Some sitcom writers sit together in the same room.
Ben and I never sat together in the same room
Because whenever we sat together in the same room
We found so many subjects that were more interesting than --
During those years
We were obsessed by Madonna, Kylie and Madness,
These were our three, so we only talked about pop.
We'd get to the end of the meeting and go,
"God, we haven't mention the Blackadder once!"
And then we'd go away again.
So this was the first sort of computerized writing.
I'd give him a disk, he'd give me the disk back.
With this one rule that you weren't allowed
To put back in something that the other person had cut,
On the grounds that
If you tell a joke at dinner and nobody laughs,
You don't say, "Oh, no, wait,
"it was absolutely hilarious, I'll tell it to you again."
You have to accept the fact that it hasn't worked.
So even though sometimes he and I both believed
Rather good stuff got thrown out,
It did lead to a harmonious writing,
Where you never went backwards, you always went forwards.
Ben gave it a certain linguistic wildness
And a certain naughtiness and wickedness,
Which I very quickly started to imitate,
But I think his initial contribution
To stick the writer of "The Young Ones"
Into a historical sitcom
Probably made it only able to happen when it did,
And one of the things that's
Sort of cheeky and pleasant about it
Is that it's obviously written by someone
Very much of our time
Even though it is consistently historical.
I don't think we ever had any anachronistic jokes,
That was our big promise, that we wouldn't have any jokes,
"Hello mr. Fordman, meet mr. Mason."
All those jokes.
I think I like the ludicrous lavishness
Of the words in Blackadder,
I think in the end that's what I particularly enjoyed.
I think the relationship between Rowan and Tony developed
To be a good, fun, traditional sitcom relationship.
I think the fact that it was historical
Meant that it was pretty to look at
And that things were happening in half hours which didn't usually happen,
People were being beheaded, people were invading nations,
People were dying at war,
So I think all of that added up
To a slightly different brew to a lot of shows.
We were very strongly advised,
We were very strongly advised not to do Blackadder.
We were told that the two things that absolutely never worked --
And everybody tried --
Were sitcoms set in heaven and historical sitcoms.
But we ignored the advice.
To some extent Blackadder is a joke
About the history that we were taught when we were young.
When series 2, for which we did no research, was finished,
I gave Ben as a birthday present
The ladybird book of Elizabethan history
Which had 13 chapters, of which we'd covered 11.
It was just all the little bits of nonsense
We'd remembered from school that we'd included in it.
The reason we did the historical one was two-fold.
We did it because we were scared of "Fawlty Towers"
And I couldn't imagine putting Rowan in a jacket
And being anything but embarrassed by how much
Less funny he was than Basil Fawlty,
And second because we liked the idea of big plots.
We liked the idea of death and carnage
And kings and princes and chaos
Rather than just writing about your car breaking down.
As it went on Blackadder chand between the 1st and 2nd series,
But talking about the 2nd, 3rd and 4th series,
There was enormous joy in the plots of them.
There was an enormous joy
In trying to set up some big huge problem.
And there Were big huge probls of kings getting married
And getting jobs they weren't suitable for
And sailing around the world and that kind of stuff.
And trying to turn a big plot corner
In half an hour was a lot of fun.
And cracking as many stupid jokes as we possibly could.
It was a lot of fun working with Ben.
We never sat in a room, we never agonized about it.
All that would happen is I would send Ben a disk with my first go
And then he'd send it back
And I'd get to laugh at all his jokes.
Then I'd cross out all the things I didn't like of his
And mine that I'd gotten bored with and then I'd pass it back.
It was a great pleasure.
It was like getting funny letters from a friend.
I think it was by chance that Blackadder 2 and 3
Ended with Blackadder getting killed,
We couldn't think of any other way out.
But series 4 we did it very much on purpose because
We were very keen to do world war I,
But it's recent history,
And terrible and tragic recent history.
So our deal with ourselves was that we would do it
As long as we would kill all the characters
Which is actually what happened in the first world war.
It was full of wonderful clashes
Of class and strangenesses in the trenches,
But the men did go over the top and die
And we felt that or hoped that if we did do that
Really at the end of the episode
It would not be too disrespectful.
And would actually represent
Some of the tragedy of the first world war.
So that was on purpose.
Yeah I think...
The thing about Blackadder
Was that Ben knows a lot about history
And was much more aware of the history than I was,
And so we were quite interested in history,
Even though we didn't research it properly.
Therefore it seemed to us a completely logical end
To a sitcom about the war,
Rather than a brave or heretical thing to do.
I think that's where the history and the comedy
Formed an interesting combination.
The first series we did because we were looking for
A place full of medieval head-hacking and stuff,
And we sort of found it somewhere in the 14th century.
The 2nd one, we decided to make it a proper sitcom
In a sitcom studio.
And I think therefore we were looking
For something courtly and confined
And we knew more about Elizabeth the first than other eras
And there was also something vaguely Shakespearean about it,
Which we liked.
Then I think we picked the 3rd one because
It was another famous area of English drama,
I think restoration comedy is what that reminded us of.
And perhaps there had been a series
Called Prince Regent or something on the telly which we remembered.
Then series 4, I think we'd thought long and hard,
And by that time we'd started to define what made Blackadder work
And the idea of a very confined space
Where he was up against a huge machine above him
That he could kick against, but never defeat.
So we had sort of learned the formula then.
We've got other ideas we might do one day in our 70's.
We always found when we did the sitcoms
That the fewer extra characters we had
And the fewer extra places we went,
For some reason, the funnier they were.
The fact that Blackadder 4 was so confined,
More than any of the other series,
Meant that in the end
The relationships between the people are more satisfying.
Baldrick is actually a tragic figure,
I think all the way through it
Because he really does appear to represent the working man
Who's being really screwed over by the system.
And george is such a touching figure all the way through
That I think that it being really confined
Lead to the inter-relationships
Being more touching and interesting.
Partly because the plots were less big.
You always had on your mind whether or not
Something could lead to a plot.
So if you were thinking about,
Particularly in the Elizabethan one,
You would think there were
Potatoes or puritans or there were executioners
And from that you would then think, is there any little plot
I can do about an execution or a voyage of discovery.
And that was just part of what was on your mind
During the 4 or 3 months that you were writing it,
And I don't know how the plots worked from there,
How we got them to work,
But it was just one of the jobs that you joyfully did.
When we got the character of Blackadder right,
Which it wasn't really right in the first series,
We were using this thing that Rowan does extraordinarily,
Which is just irony and sarcasm and distance --
He did a great sketch as a schoolmaster,
A great one as a father of the bride
Who was being incredibly rude about his new son-in-law --
And so you kind of knew that you could be
As rude as you liked, as scornful as you liked,
And that Row would be funny doing it.
So that was a joy.
When we did the first series we had huge cinematic dreams
And so we got ourselves technically in a dodgy situation
Which was that there was no audience,
And we'd always worked in front of an audience,
Always recorded in a studio or out on film,
So we didn't quite know what we were doing.
We realized on the very first day's filming
That we didn't know what Rowan's character was.
We had a huge argument on day one whether or not
He should play him as a real aristocratic idiot,
And finally we decided that
That would just mean that lots of it didn't work,
So I think Rowan plays rather
A lot of characters during the series
So we hadn't really defined that.
We hadn't defined the relationship with Baldrick.
So I think there are some things about it which are fun
And some bits of the script which are funny
And some sort of hugenesses that are rather sort
Of gorgeous in terms of witches and bishops and stuff.
But we hadn't really worked out how to do the sitcom job yet.
We considered the 2nd series a success
Because the BBC commissioned a 3rd series,
Because after the 1st one they hadn't commissioned a 2nd one.
As always it took time to get
Into the public domain, as it were.
The 3rd series and the 4th won B.A.F.T.A. Awards,
But the 2nd series, which is in some ways the best,
I don't think even got nominated
Because it takes people time
To realize they've liked something.
I suppose I love moments of unexpected emotion.
I think almost my favorite bits are
Percy being very, very wounded about not being asked
To be the best man
And attempting to hide his emotions of excitement
When he thinks he's been asked
And of disappointment when it turns out someone else has been asked.
I love that.
The final episode of series 4 I love,
But I like the middle chunk
Where they're reminiscing about what their lives were like,
Which seems to me something we'd never done,
To look back over our characters.
My one great regret about "Fawlty Towers"
Is I think it's a shame that we never had any -
I wish he'd written one episode where someone
Who knew them when they were young,
When they got engaged or when they got married,
Someone who brought back the past,
Because those characters were so frozen in their middle age.
It would have wonderful to get a glimpse
Of what they'd been like.
The guy who he turned down when he employed Manuel.
So I loved that episode of 4.
And in 3...
And I love, in series 1 --
Some of the guest people did fantastic performances.
I think Rik Mayall's performance in series 2 was fantastic,
The most energetic that I've ever seen.
And Jim Broadbent's performance
In series 1 as the Spanish interpreter
Has the weirdest inflection you've ever heard on television
And is absolutely gorgeous.
Then I think there's a good scene with a squirrel in series 3.
We finished the part for Rik Mayall as Flashheart,
And he didn't perform a single line that we wrote.
I gave it to him and he said, "You -- hmphh."
So we had to push and push to give him
This series of crude, innuendo one-liners
Which I so adore.
Certainly Miranda Richarson's contribution was extraordinary.
We auditioned a lot of people to do her part.
We couldn't get anyone who didn't either do it
As a slow ranger or as a sort of 12-year-old girl,
And then Miranda did this insane, undefinable thing,
But nothing that we'd written really suited it,
It was so much better than anything we had written.
So we had to rewrite the whole part
For the sort of oblique weirdness of her performance.
I think that one of the things
That was educational for me in the end of the Blackadder
Is how close you can bring comedy to tragedy,
And Four Weddings and a Funeral
Which was originally called Four Weddings and a Honeymoon
And had an awful bit with Hugh Grant
Padding around a beach, hiding behind notice boards,
Trying to watch Andie McDowell.
In that I found out that you could go:
Comedy, comedy, comedy and then straight into
The tragedy and then straight out of it again.
I think one of the lessons of Blackadder 4
Is how far you can push it.
I think there's one serious line,
I think Rowan says, "Good luck, chaps."
But until then we tried to crack jokes until the very last moment
And yet still were able to be serious.
And I'd think that seriousness and comedy are very --
They're not very far apart.
They don't need to be.
If you're being funny you're then allowed to be tragic
And if you're being tragic,
You're definitely allowed to be funny,
Shakespeare does it,
I say all the time, but twice.
There were lots of reasons we didn't write any more Blackadders
And we've got a few up our sleeve.
We were going to write one set in the 60's called the Blackadder 5
Where Rowan was going to play a seedy
Manager/exploiter/ photographer/pop musician.
And it was going to transpire that
It was Baldrick who'd shot president Kennedy
While playing with a gun in a Dallas hotel
Waiting for The Blackadder 5 to give a dodgy concert.
But one of the main reasons we didn't do it again
Was because we found we were parodying ourselves.
We were so aware we'd left a lot of time
And so aware of the structures that we'd created,
Such as, "You are as stupid as,"
And "I would rather do this than..." and all of those,
That we got to the point where
It wasn't so much coming out of us
As us thinking, "What normally happens is..."
I think the moment you start following a ground plan
Rather than writing your own jokes
You're probably in trouble.
It's up to other people to judge,
As it were, the curve of your career.
I think you write the next thing you want to write,
And the next thing I wanted to write after Blackadder was -
I lived in a village in the country for 10 years,
I was intrigued by that,
I was interested in women vicars,
I wanted to write something about someone nice,
And so that was what I wrote.
Maybe if I write another sitcom
It will be gorgeously radical.
I was very keen in "The Vicar of Dibley"
To write about the difficulty of being nice.
I don't think there are very many nasty people in the world.
I think most of us try and be nice.
Most of the comedy in our lives comes from the awful problem
Of how to be polite about dreadful things that happen,
How to be nice to your relatives,
How to be friendly, how not to be rude to guests,
To try and be pleasant to people.
I think that is just as funny an idea as somebody
Like in Blackadder who just shouts at everybody.
So I was trying to find someone who was definitively nice,
In fact compelled to be nice
And the point about being a vicar
Is you have to be nice to everybody, it's your job.
So that was one of the reasons we did it.
The second...
The Vicar of Dibley was probably the only political act
Of my life insofar as I went to a registry wedding
Where a woman was officiating
And it struck me as being so correct
That a woman should do it.
I was just 100% convinced
That women vicars were a good idea
Because so many women in my life
Have been so good at dealing with
The complex emotional things that people go through
And that's exactly what a vicar should be able to deal with.
So I was keen to write something
Which just showed a woman vicar
Because I thought if other people had a fictional experience
They would suddenly realize that is completely right,
It's completely natural.
I was eager to get something out into the marketplace
That made this common currency
And so people would have something to refer to and would say,
"You're mad to say there's something wrong with female vicars,
"because even though that's a silly comedy,
"it makes sense emotionally to me."
I've done two things that I mourn like lost children.
One of them was the Madness sitcom
That Ben and I tried to write.
We did a pilot, we were very keen on that.
We did a pilot, but it wasn't a very good pilot
Because it only lasted 7 minutes
And it was filmed on a very grey day.
But it would have been a joy to do
What they did with The Monkees with Madness.
Unfortunately our pilot was nothing as good
As one of their videos so it didn't come off.
I'm sorry that that didn't happen.
I did once write and film the pilot of something called
The Chip Show.
Which was a -
Not a sitcom, but a show set in an Italian restaurant.
It was called the Chip show because it was very cheap,
And Cheap and Chip were meant to be how it sounded
If you said it in an Italian accent.
It starred Miriam Margolyes, Jim Broad- bent, Tim Mcinnery and Tony Robinson
And should have been fantastic,
But we filmed it without an audience
And it was just completely weird.
I wish I had the pilot still
Because I'm sure there were some good jokes in there.
When sitcoms are lovely,
They are the most perfect form and length of television.
I'm a great lover of television.
Something that lasts half an hour
And makes you laugh is so perfect,
It doesn't interfere with the flow of your evening,
You can still talk to your family,
And as a sort of injection of joy into your life,
I don't think you can do much better.
Over the years, watching "Fawlty Towers", "The Young Ones,"
Recently watching "Larry Sanders"
Just gives me so much pleasure.