Forty years ago tonight, television viewers settled down for their first sighting of a comedy character who would become a long-standing favourite. The Chronicle’s TV pick of the night on June 15, 1983, was episode one of a new historical sitcom called The Black Adder.
The preview declared: “Black Adder’s slimy reign of terror begins a series of six horrible situation tragedies, or sitcom at its bloodiest and most-gripping.” Featuring comedy legend Peter Cook and mega-mouthed Brian Blessed, the show starred, of course, Tyneside-born funnyman Rowan Atkinson.
The comic was already a familiar face on TV due to his role in the Pythonesque sketch show Not The Nine O’Clock News, and he would later achieve massive international success with Mr Bean, but it was his caddish Blackadder character which would earn him a place as a household name.
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The Chronicle had caught up with Atkinson during filming at Alnwick Castle in February, 1983.
He said: “We set the show in the 15th Century. Times were more violent then. It bears no resemblance to Not The Nine O’clock News, but it has the same element of humour.” The actor added: “Alnwick Castle is one of the best castles in the country for a historical series of this kind.”
Success was not slow in arriving as November of that year saw the series scoop a prestigious Emmy award. As early as 1978, the Chronicle reported how Atkinson, still a university student, was earning rave reviews for his comedy performances.
Nominally researching engineering science, he was hailed as "the undisputed funniest man in Oxford ever since he arrived there a couple of years ago."
The Black Adder would spawn three more even funnier series over the next decade and a half. The second series was the first to establish the familiar Blackadder character – cunning, shrewd and witty, in sharp contrast to the bumbling Prince Edmund of the first series.
Regular co-stars, and big names in their own right, would appear in subsequent series. Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, and Robinson, as the hapless Baldrick, all played brilliant parts in the different historical settings.
Blackadder II was set in England in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Blackadder the Third was set in the late 18th and early 19th Century Regency period.
The last series Blackadder Goes Forth was set in 1917, on the Western Front in the trenches of the First World War. There have been a handful of one-off specials, but the last Blackadder series proper was aired in 1989.
And the chances of any more seem slim, as Rowan Atkinson, now 68, said: “Times past, that's what they were.”
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