The Black Adder
Channel 7, Thursdays 11.05pm
Review by Al McCall
It's back from the video vaults, resurrected on rewind — Black Adder has returned. "Black Adder, Black Adder, with many a cunning plan. Black Adder, Black Adder, you horrid little man."
Over the years I've seen the cult TV shows come and go. I've survived Monty Python, The Young Ones and The Red Dwarf unscathed by never a hint of passion (or at least no desires with which I could not comfortable deal). The surreal, the modernistic grunge and the futuristic of contemporary humour may have their followers, but we Adder-addicted like our cult comedy with its roots firmly planted in rich comic loam of the 15th century.
Ours is a historical romance as we follow the same repertory company of time-travelling players to the court of Elizabeth I, the 18th century palace of George III, and the trenches of World War I. Black Adder was there, along with his bondsman, Baldrick, and a cast of silly buggers who keep cropping up over the centuries as bona fide representatives of contemporary designated authority.
For the generations of Adders, it is written that history always repeats itself as farce.
Unlike its comic peers, Black Adder locates itself firmly within the dastardly deeds of times gone by. Try as he might to rise above his designated station in life, our hero (he is mine I'm proud to say), despite his wit and cunning, remains subservient to entrenched stupidity for no better reason than that of his masters' breeding.
To plunder history for comic situations is a brilliant tactic. The ease with which the succession of episodes harness historical events and characters guarantee that relations of power and class are exploited, rather than simply those that exist between quirky individuals of no fixed historical address.
While Black Adder can technically be labelled a "historical sitcom", the basic tension rests on frustrated ambition. Adder's talent — in spite of his deviousness — remains unrewarded because his potential is suppressed by forces more powerful than he. Despite the number of historical epochs visited, each reincarnated Adder is sentenced to the same earthly toil — forever someone else's dogsbody, with poor old Baldrick the dogsbody's dogsbody. Where would the powers-that-be be without them?
It is not that Black Adder suffers from a surfeit of loyalty. For the want of anything better opportunity knocks no louder than at the door of his current employ — whatever its century — and one learns to make the best of it.
We deserve this fourth or fifth re-run of the series because Mr Bean has gone big time, Rohan Atkinson is a movie celebrity and Channel 7 sees some opportune programming. While it is easy to identify Black Adder's success with Atkinson's portrayal of Adder and the skill of his long-time writing associate, Richard Curtis (who wrote for Adder and Bean), there's more to the medley than that. Ben Elton also scripted and it's difficult to separate the characterisation wrought on screen from the comic skill of folk like Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Tony Robinson (Baldrick). Indeed, the comic talents invested in Black Adder are some of the best Britain in the 1980s had to offer.
Our good fortune is that once upon a time humorists of such calibre came together and created Black Adder. From its beginnings in the 15th century, the lineage of this horrid little man is alive and well ,and living in the hearts and minds of all those who believe upstarts like Adder deserve a fair go, no matter what their day and age.