The Black Adder

Have you ever browsed the DVD selection at Costco recently?  In addition to recent US releases, they feature quite a few obscure British shows.  I’ve yet to see this one there, but it certainly belongs.  I can’t say I recall seeing this on UK TV, as the last time I was there was in 1985, which would have allowed me to see (should I have been inclined to do so) season 1.  This was a British comedy series from 1983 to 1989, featuring Rowan Atkinson as the title role.  All four seasons are only six episodes long, 30 minutes each.  The DVD has no subtitles.   I can’t recall WHY I rented these from Netflix, but for some reason I did. 

Season 1 (1983).   Richard III era, England 1485.   Adder plays a dimwit, Edmund, who accidentally kills Richard III, which puts Edmund’s father Richard IV (Brian Blessed) on the throne.  Harry, Prince of Wales (Robert East) is Richard IV’s more favored (and more intelligent) older son.  Lots of medieval humor and some Shakespeare references.  

Season 2 (1986).  Queen Elizabeth I.  Miranda Richardson plays the Queen, and Stephen Fry her courtier.  She summons BA several times solely to the sake of her amusement when he arrives promptly only to find no particular meaning or purpose behind the summons.   This time around he’s a Tudor courtier, and now of normal intelligence and so begins his acidic insulting wit.  Baldrick is his servant. Rik Mayall makes a brief appearance.

Season 3 (1987).  Napoleonic Era.  Hugh Laurie is here, as the Prince Regent (George IV) – the typical clueless upper class twit, though not insane like his father.  BA is his butler, and Baldrick his turnip-obsessed servant.  Nigel Planer has a brief role as the Scarlet Pimpernel.   Pitt the Younger is here as Prime Minister – they make him seem like a college student who became PM.   Quite a few Napoleon references plus an entire episode on the French Revolution. 

Season 4 (1989).  World War I.  Ah, here is my favorite.  “Edmund Black Adder” is an English officer (captain) unhappily serving in the trenches with Private Baldrick and a (yet again) dimwitted officer Lt. George (Laurie).  Fry is here as the Lord Kichener type General Melchett – the kind who blithely orders men to their deaths in unimaginative offensives.  McInnerny returns as Melchett’s ADC, Captain Darling, a name which causes much confusion.  The general idea is that the war is a colossal mistake but everyone is too stupid to stop it.

House & Hugh Laurie fans rejoice:  he has minor roles in season 2 (last two episodes) but is a main character on all 12 episodes of 3 & 4, although playing a dimwit on all of them. 

The Young Ones.   If you liked this show, Rik, Nigel and Vivyan have roles here.  Not big ones, mind you, but you can certainly recognize them.  Rik Mayall is back – as a flamboyant RFC (WWI version of RAF) pilot, while Ade Edmonson is the Red Baron. 

Supporting Actors.

Baldrick (Tony Robinson).   In season 1 he’s fairly smart, but in the subsequent series he devolves into being stupid, but in a humorous way – and perpetually the butt of BA’s jokes and contempt.  Or he has a “marvelous plan” that’s either bewilderingly stupid or impossible to effectively execute. 

Tim McInnerny typically takes irregular supporting roles.  S1 & S2 saw him as a regular, but only one episode in S3.  His best was Captain Darling in Season 4.  Apparently he was trying to avoid being yet another Baldrick. 

Miranda Richardson stars as Queen Elizabeth (S2), a would-be bride to Prince George (season 3) (and another mystery role!) and returns in Season 4 as a nurse who helps the injured Lt. George write letters and offers physical affection to Captain Blackadder. 

Stephen Fry mainly acts as Queen Elizabeth’s chamberlain (S2) and General Melchett (S4).

Generally the humor varies from classic slapstick to Black Adder making verbose insults, e.g. “I’d sooner [do something extraordinarily painful or unpleasant rather than] [proferred suggestion] or implausible insults of Baldrick and other characters, especially those such as a Laurie’s who are not bright enough to recognize them as insults.  I have a difficult time avoiding the affectation of talking like him for some hours after watching the show.

The Young Ones

Ages ago, it must have been in the 1990s, I was with my buddies Ken and Dave, at Ken’s apartment (lower level of an early twentieth century house) in Bloomfield, New Jersey.  We watched this TV show called “The Young Ones”.  My initial impression was highly unfavorable, as 90% of the plot seemed to be some snotty jerk named “Rick” constantly arguing with, and yelling at, a punk named “Vyvyan” (why he had a girl’s name was never explained – even when his own mother was asked).  There was a normal guy named Mike and a hippie named Neil, who liked Hawkwind.

 Fastforward to the present.  I successfully endured 90-some minutes of “The Trailer Park Boys” movie, set in a trailer park in Nova Scotia, Canada.  And I thought to myself, “if I can endure these three clowns [Ricky, Julian and Bubbles], then surely I can tolerate the Young Ones.”  So I rented the shows from Netflix.

 As it was, “enduring” the Young Ones means watching all of 12 episodes.  Even the “bonus bits” are only one extra DVD.  Despite the short nature of the series, I won’t summarize all 12 episodes, but rather simply summarize the show itself.  So here goes.

 Rick (Rick Mayall).  Always snotty, always in his 80s suit & skinny tie, with buttons all over the lapel and nonstop anarchist/revolutionary rhetoric.  Rick is by far the most annoying asshole of the group and the least popular.  He’s fixated on Cliff Richard.  He also goes off about “The revolution”, “fascist pigs”, etc. but shows little true understanding of these issues and clearly spouts the crap solely to impress people with his political sophistication, a “wanna-be leftie”.   He roars about Margaret Thatcher fairly often.  Mayall goes out of his way to make the character as unlikable as possible – and clearly succeeds.

 Vyvyan (Adrian Edmondson).  The punk – he has four stars pressed into his forehead, wears Doc Martens, jeans, a jean vest, and a variety of black t-shirts – which include Motorhead and Saxon.  Despite being fairly belligerent and violent, mindlessly so (somewhat of a parody on the punk movement as a whole) he is fairly intelligent – it kind of shines through the “ultra-violence”.  He has a hamster called Special Patrol Group.  Vyvyan is most often at odds with Rick, giving him some much-needed and well-appreciated (by everyone except Rick) slapstick physical abuse.  To the extent that windows or furniture gets broken in the house, Vyvyan can be blamed for the devastation.  He is also decapitated (“Bambi”) yet survives to reattach his head on his shoulders – after kicking the head for awhile.

 Mike (Christopher Ryan).  He’s the shortest but also the handsomest, usually wearing black sunglasses and stylish clothes.  He’s by far the most normal and well-adjusted of the group and tries to coordinate them – to no avail.  He’s also often angling some scam or dishonest scheme which rarely even comes to fruition, much less success, though I do recall him converting Rick’s bedroom into a roller disco.  Mike gets the least abuse or attention from the other three characters and is practically ignored.  I find him the least interesting member of the group.  He reminds me of Buck Dharma from Blue Oyster Cult.

 Neil (Nigel Planer).  The tallest, and an obvious hippie.  Neil is charged with cooking for the group, but no one really likes his food (mostly made with lentils).   Despite being the usual target of abuse and exploitation – or perhaps because of it – in one episode he turns into the Hulk and beats the crap out of the other three.  Or was it just a dream?  If so, why are his clothes still ripped up?  He also remarks about the music on TV, “why don’t they have any good bands on, like Hawkwind or Marillion?”  His most common expression is “heavy” (US hippies would probably say “beat” instead). 

 + Alexei Sayle.   Sometimes he acts like a Russian, but other times he simply talks with a Liverpool accent (“I’m not really foreign, you know – I just do it to appear more sophisticated!”…if only Rick could admit the same about his politics!).  The Fifth Beatle, so to speak, AS takes on various miscellaneous roles, most often their landlord Jerzei Balowski, several of Balowski’s relatives, or even Mussolini (of whom he does a damn good impression).

 Musical Guests.  With the exception of Motorhead and The Damned, these were insipid 80s Brit-pop bands.  Motorhead played “Ace of Spades” (even back in 1984 they had Phil Campbell and Wurzel, but still had Phil Taylor on drums) in the “Bambi” episode, while The Damned showed up dressed as vampires.  By including music on the show, the group qualified as a “variety show” which gave it a larger budget, though you’d hardly guess that from the incredibly squalid conditions existing there.  In fact, Rick specifically argues that as students, they have a duty not to clean the toilet or do laundry and revel in their dirt and poverty.

 Emma Thompson (Miss Money-Sterling) and Hugh Laurie (Lord Monty) show up as upper class twits in “Bambi”, and Terry Jones (the Monty Python member, not the Koran-burning pastor) plays a vicar in “Nasty”.

 Highlights.  In “Flood”, Vyvyan walks into a wardrobe to play “hide & seek”, and finds himself in a snowy forest.  The White Queen unsuccessfully seduces him with Turkish Delight (in which he has no interest) and freaks out when he refers to a lion.  In “Bambi”, the group competes on a college quiz show.  In “Cash”, Neil successfully joins the London police.  In “Nasty”, the boys attempt to set up a VCR and watch a “video nasty” (porn) without success.   In fact, this business of frequently cutting away from the main plot to a completely different scene is lifted from Monty Python (a “Cheese Shop” reference gets thrown in, and Terry Jones appears in one episode) and is subsequently regurgitated constantly by Seth McFarlane in “The Family Guy”.

 Bonus Disc.  The third disc contains a brief bit of interviews with Planer, Mayall, Sayle, Paul Jackson, and a few others associated with the show, plus episodes of two post-YO shows featuring some of the cast members:  "Filthy Rich And Catflap" (Mayall,  Planer and Edmondson) and "Bottom" (Mayall and Edmondson).  What I found most interesting is that Mayall these days has a goatee and long hair, actually quite handsome, and personality-wise is nowhere close to the total asshole of “Rick” – then again, it was clear (as noted above) that “Rick” was merely an exaggerated character.  Planer’s character on “Filthy Rich” is completely different than Neil, and both Edmondson characters are far more intelligent and articulate than Vyvyan.