Now we've had three previous incarnations,
...and this time he comes fo(u)rth to the 20th century,
...and the trenches of the First World War.
So while you have a look at the making of the program,
I shall go off scouting around the corridors of Television Centre.
Rotters.
OK opening titles...
Two, one...
I think Baldrick has got stupider and stupider...
...as the centuries have gone on.
In the first series he was actually the brightest out of Baldrick and...
...out of Baldrick, Percy, and Blackadder.
And then he got a bit stupider, and now, he's terminally stupid.
It's impossible to see how he actually gets through a day.
Hugh, just remember to look the other way, OK?
Five, four, three...
I don't find it terribly difficult to be stupid.
I spy with my little eye something beginning with...
...M.
Uuhhmmm...
Mmm...
Ma... ma...
Mug!
Oh I say, sir.
We wanted a place and a time that could reproduce to a certain extent
...the claustrophobia, and the sordidness of medieval England.
And the best way to do that is to set it in the middle of a war.
It seemed the perfect place for the kind of plots...
...that we like in The Black Adder where the Black Adder thinks...
...that he's going to get out of trouble by doing a cunning plan,
...and then gets into more so.
Good sitcoms, so the com wisdom guys,
set in places were you can't get out. Porridge in prison, Fawlty Towers...
Basil's trapped with a ghastly wife that he can't escape from,
and a business which is oviously going bust but which is his only livelihood.
And we've set ours in a trench dug out and there is only two ways to escape,
one is forward to the German machine guns,
the other's backwards to the British firing squads.
Uhm, yeah...
The producer is basically a man who has no talent whatsoever.
Except the talent to criticize everyone else's talent.
I hate to raise this, I mean we worked on it for three hours,
but do you think it's a very good joke? These orders Hugh's suggested?
This has nothing to do with me.
- It was. - It was nothing to do with me, I just wrote it out.
It's a good joke. - It's alright, it's good, it's good.
All it was was that the pilau sketch wasn't quite good, so...
Because right at the end of the word
An order for six lengths of Hungarian crushed velvet curtain material.
- ...curtain material, that's good. - You know, that's something...
Six lengths of Hungarian crushed velvet...
...curtain material.
in seresin banana.
We don't do any rehearsals like actors are supposed to do.
Going over the thing again and again and again learning your words.
All we do is argue about the best way of doing it.
I'm still labouring under the belief...
that no-one ever ordered anything by the phone in 1917. I ...
It's true, it wasn't that kind of country, was it?
- It was not a telephone ordering country. - Certainly not pilau rice.
The rehearsal process is a big chunk of what makes Blackadder funny,
...I think, because...
we have a business called tweaking or sometimes known as plumpening.
If someone says, you know, "I'm going to...
...the general" and somebody else has the line "Why?", and then,
let's say Blackadder has a reply,
will attempt to pep up "why", say, you know, odds 'n bods, "I'm as confused
as a man who's had his head cut off, and put on the wrong way round.
I have to say that the writers are saintly men,
and who put up with an awful lot of brutality. Richard's...
Richards Curtis' constant cry to me is, "You wouldn't do this to Shakespeare".
And I said, I think I would. I think a lot of those plays are far too long.
No hang on-hang on, there's something wro... wrong here.
Because surely if you're ordering a cab for a mr. Redgrave...
Oh, from Arnos Grove, in that case, it should be rather than to Arnos Grove.
I thought it was mr. Redgrave who was ordering the cab.
But in fact,
what you're saying is that mr. Redgrave expertise on the top bout
- Crazy Rowan and logic. - No that's fine, just change it to 4.
Who are we getting to play the cab driver?
The hardest thing about writing Blackadder is in the end, you know,
when you love a joke and when the cast don't love it,
and you have to argue a way around.
But the, the highest hope is that eventually you'll come up together
with a line that they like and you like more than the one you wrote.
On the contrary George, we've had plenty of orders. We've had orders for:
Six meters of Hungarian crushed velvet curtain material...
4 pilau rice...
- And 1 chicken massala. - 4 pilau rice and 1 chi-chicken massala.
And a cab...
...for a mr. Redgrave, picking up from 14 on Osgrove, ring top bell.
The rehearsal process certainly is a wonderful therapy,
because you can laugh yourself sick for forty minutes on end helplessly.
Come and join me Stephen, come on, come over here.
It's very difficult to sit next to Baldrick because he's so smelly.
This is Stephen Fry, who plays general Melchett.
Who is a complete utter vicious duffer.
Ooh, now, you're just going to be lovely.
It's not true, it's not true, it's not true.
I'm really rather awful.
Speckly? Aaah!
You shot my Speckled Jim?!
I've never played him quite so mad before, the previous Melchett,
I played in Blackadder II was rather sort of grave.
And uh... quite, quite good, really.
Grey, I suspect, majesty.
I think you'll find it was orange, lord Melchett.
Grey is more usual, ma'am.
Who's queen?
As you say, your majesty.
There were these magnificent orange elephants...
Whereas this chap is blustering and really quite seriously deranged.
He shot my pidgeon!
Blackadder always seems to work best in times of absolute madness.
When the whole world is mad, and it's as though Rowan's character
is the only sane person. And I don't think there are many times in history
that were madder than the period around the First World War.
1978 springs to mind in Britain, I don't know why, why am I saying that.
Early '79... - Early '79, yes, that's right.
I spy with my little eye something beginning with R.
Army!
For god's sake Baldrick, "army" starts with an A.
He's talking about something that starts with an R, "rrr".
- Motorbike! - What?
Motorbike starts with a 'RRR'.
RRRRRRR! - Right!
Right, my turn again, what starts with "come here" and ends with "ow"?
- Don't know. - Come here.
- Ow!
Sure. OK. Fine. Great.
Time for some poolside gossip. This is what I found out this week:
Well, Rowan Atkinson's ambition was to be a cameraman.
He originally applied to the BBC to be an engineer, and was turned down.
Tony Robinson really wanted to be a romantic hero.
He'd like to play Romeo to Victoria Woods' Juliet.
Or vice versa.
Alexei Sayle whose "Staff" starts on Thursday is a closet ballet dancer.
He goes to a gym for dance classes, but won't go to a dance studio,
...as he can't cope with the idea of wearing pink leg warmers.
And Michael Palin, while he was trying to go around the world in eighty days,
...which starred on BBC 1 last Wednesday, he was spotted in Cairo,
and ended up with a small walk-on part in an Egyptian gangster movie.
Bizarre, hey? Well that's all for this week.
Tune in next week, when we'll be looking...
at a new drama serial starring Diana Rigg, and I'll be in the bath.
So, cheers!