The True History of the Blackadder (71 page)

The Elizabethan Bilko, and cohorts. ‘
Blackadder
worked the way it did because someone was at the top and someone was at the bottom and there was a real threat of punishment or death’.

Stephen Fry says. ‘And as in Goldoni and Ben Jonson, you don’t always find that the one on top is the smart one… that tradition connects all the way up to Jeeves & Wooster of course.’

In a lifetime’s worth of hard-man roles, Arthur the Sailor must be the high point in actor John Pierce Jones’ long career – it’s certainly one of the most celebrated one-scene-wonders in the
Blackadder
canon. ‘Now how much do you charge for a GOOD – HARD – SHAG?’

Long after Baldrick’s last cunning plan, Robinson has perennially been happy to ease back into the stinking trousers over the years, largely for Comic Relief – his Christmas Card is now a collector’s item.

George Augustus Frederick, the Prince of Wales: as thick as a whale omelette, but with a wig like an exceptionally attractive loaf of bread.

‘Toffs at the top, plebs at the bottom, and me in the middle making a fat pile of cash out of both of them.’ Fine words for any budding politician.

Mr E. Blackadder’s dogsbody, The Lord Baldrick, with intellectual equal.

The Prince and the Pauper – the porpoise, presumably, being just out of shot.

Fry could have found a regular role for himself in Regency England, but says, ‘It probably was due to
Me and My Girl
commitments that we just did the Wellington episode. It was pleasing though as it was the last of the series anyway and ended in a great heap of bodies…’

Lord Smedley: a perfect example of the milk-livered Restoration fop, as Nigel Planer’s colleague, the seasoned actor Nicholas Craig, could tell you.

The immortal Miggins. ‘I think when Richard and Ben were creating the character,’ Helen Atkinson Wood says, ‘the fact a horse’s willy got mentioned is no accident, me being the keen horsewoman that I am…’

Two of
Alfresco
’s finest reunited in a historically impossible, but humorously crucial, sticky situation. Coltrane would get to reprise the role of Dr Johnson in a little more depth for
Screen Two
a few years later.