tag:theconversation.com,2011:/au/topics/blackadder-8570/articlesBlackadder – The Conversation2023-08-14T15:36:33Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2100242023-08-14T15:36:33Z2023-08-14T15:36:33ZBlackadder at 40: the difficult birth of a classic TV comedy<p>As part of this year’s 40th anniversary celebrations of Blackadder, the classic historical BBC comedy series, the pilot episode from 1982 aired for the first time in years on Gold. It’s been hitherto kept under wraps, never broadcast or released on DVD. Why? It’s because it’s simply not Blackadder as we know it.</p>
<p>In a classic episode, you want Blackadder to be a scheming, conniving character who has a hopeless, dimwitted underling named Baldrick and a domineering but clueless master above him. Except it didn’t start that way.</p>
<p>I spoke about the pilot with Lucy Lumsden, boss of <a href="https://www.yellowdoorprods.com/about-us">Yellow Door Productions</a> and former Head of BBC TV Comedy Commissioning, for a book I am in the process of writing on comedy. Lumsden agrees the pilot is all over the place.</p>
<p>Played by Philip Fox, Baldrick is not yet the fool he was to become. He’s slightly useless, as Lumsden notes, “but you’ve got to pull hard in the opposite direction. You want Baldrick to be the total opposite of Blackadder”. </p>
<p>As a writer, if you really embrace the idea of opposites, all you need is one strong, clearly defined character. Then for your next character you just go to the complete opposite of this first one. And now suddenly, you’ve got another good character and the two of them are going to be really funny together.</p>
<p>At least Blackadder is exactly as we want him to be – smart, cynical, sarcastic. </p>
<p>And yet, as Lucy observes, in the pilot, “Blackadder, the character that’s absolutely going to draw the eye and you’ll want to just spend every scene with, doesn’t appear for five minutes! As a viewer, I don’t know where my attention should go in that pilot”.</p>
<p>If you didn’t know otherwise, you’d probably think the protagonist was Robert Bathurst’s Prince Harry character who is alongside the queen in the opening scene. Note to writers: unless there is an absolutely compelling reason not to, introduce us to your brilliant protagonist right away.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, Blackadder is his cynical self in the pilot, so at least they have that to build on as they go into series one, right? No, they throw away the one thing that was working about the pilot and instead of being witty and cutting, in the first series Blackadder becomes a Baldrick-style fool. </p>
<p>Baldrick meanwhile, although now played by Tony Robinson, is at this point the smarter one. It’s like coming across an early Jeeves and Wooster novel where Bertie Wooster is level headed and mature and Jeeves is an idiot.</p>
<p>But happily following the pilot and the misfiring first series, they got another chance and the Blackadder we know and love was born.</p>
<h2>A trusted comedic structure</h2>
<p>With a smaller budget than series one, no on location filming and a new writing team (Ben Elton now writing with Richard Curtis), series two returned to Elizabethan times. The domineering master is still Elizabeth I but Elspet Gray’s rather dull queen is replaced by Miranda Richardson doing her now legendary shriekingly childish performance.</p>
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<p>You have the return of the cynical Blackadder from the pilot. With the crazy Queen Elizabeth above him and the – at last – stupid Baldrick below him, you have an ensemble that works. </p>
<p>As I write in my book <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/creating-comedy-narratives-for-stage-and-screen-9781350155787/">Creating Comedy Narratives for Stage and Screen</a>, the classic shape of an ensemble of comedic characters is what I term the boss, striver, fool dynamic. </p>
<p>The boss is the one who is in charge by dint of their role, position in the family or simply because they are the alpha figure. The key to the comedy though is that they are dysfunctional boss figures. </p>
<p>At the opposite end is the self-explanatory fool and stuck in the middle is the protagonist, the striver. Being stuck in the middle is the plight of scores of sitcom characters. They are sitcom’s dreamers. Aspiring to a better life, free of their bookends. </p>
<p>So many sitcoms have this dynamic at their heart, or as part of a wider ensemble. It’s the Sybil, Basil and Manuel of Fawlty Towers. Or the Martin Crane, Frasier and Niles in Fraiser (your fool can be intelligent, what makes them a fool can be their lack of self-awareness or naivety or social awkwardness).</p>
<h2>Seasons of bosses, strivers and fools</h2>
<p>Blackadder is an interesting case to consider with it’s shifting cast of characters from series-to-series. As we’ve seen, in the first Blackadder, he himself was the fool which is unusual for a central character but he was shifted to striver for series two, with the boss Queen Elizabeth I and the fool Baldrick (and Percy).</p>
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<p>In Blackadder the third, set during the Georgian era, Mr. E. Blackadder is a butler to the Prince Regent. Baldrick the fool is Blackadder’s dogsbody. Here Blackadder is of course the striver, the boss became the Prince Regent.</p>
<p>Transported to the trenches of the first world war, Blackadder Goes Forth doubles up all the slots with General Melchett and Field Marshall Haig as bosses. In the striver slot we have Blackadder again, alongside his antagonist Captain Darling. Fools also double up with Baldrick and George, one working class and one upper class.</p>
<p>Looking back to that first season 40-years-ago, it is odd to think that such a beloved comedy could initially have got it so very wrong. While Blackadder was afforded the kind of trial and error that would be unheard of today, for today’s new comedy writers it can be encouraging to see that even masterpieces can have a difficult birth. </p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Chris Head does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The first series had the characters’ roles all the wrong way round. Blackadder was dim, Baldrick clever and the queen was dull. Thankfully they got a second try.Chris Head, Teaching Fellow in Comedy, Bath Spa UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1927572022-10-18T15:27:27Z2022-10-18T15:27:27ZRobbie Coltrane: a free-styling talent suffused with intelligence and humour<p>“I believe that men are here to grow themselves into the best good that they can be,” the iconic saxophonist <a href="https://www.johncoltrane.com/biography">John Coltrane</a> once said. Anthony Robert McMillan chose his stage name as a homage to the jazz great and, as the actor <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-31150653">Robbie Coltrane</a>, went on to grow into the best good that he could be. Both Coltranes possessed notes that had a unique flavour and could be delivered with singular skill.</p>
<p>Robbie Coltrane, who died on October 14, leaves behind a rich stage and screen legacy that audiences will continue to admire and enjoy for decades to come. Much of the world will remember him for his performance was as <a href="https://hogwarts-life.fandom.com/wiki/Rubeus_Hagrid">Rubeus Hagrid</a>, full of warmth and humour as the benevolent groundskeeper at Hogwarts in the Harry Potter films.</p>
<p>Being half-giant exposed Hagrid to prejudice, but he vowed to “never be ashamed” of his heritage and advised Harry: “You’ll be just fine. Just be yourself.” That seems to be the mantra Coltrane embodied throughout his own lengthy career. He wasn’t afraid to be himself.</p>
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<p>On graduating from Glasgow School of Art, he connected with fellow artist and GSA graduate <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-john-byrne-is-one-of-scotlands-greatest-artists-186961">John Byrne</a> in the comedy play <a href="https://digital.nls.uk/scottish-theatre/slab-boys/index.html">The Slab Boys</a>, based on Byrne’s experiences working in a Paisley carpet factory in the 1950s. Both had strayed from their brushes into drama, but in Coltrane’s case, it would lead to a permanent separation as he launched headlong into the heady world of theatre, film and television. </p>
<h2>Finding his comedy feet</h2>
<p>His first film was Bernard Tavernier’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/jun/03/death-watch-review-bertrand-tavernier">Death Watch</a>. A bleak prophetic 1980 Glasgow-set sci-fi starring Harvey Keitel, this was a typically unusual debut, where his scene-stealing turn in a run-down flea market searching for Romy Schneider was the start of a varied and never predictable career.</p>
<p>Coltrane then embraced the ascendant left-wing “<a href="http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/1085514/index.html">alternative comedy</a>” scene in London that was boisterously sweeping away the well-worn tropes of predominantly male post-war British comedy that was often sexist and racist. Coltrane cut his TV comedy teeth on a variety of shows, most notably <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2007/oct/20/comedy.television">The Young Ones</a>, <a href="https://www.channel4.com/programmes/comic-strip-presents">The Comic Strip Presents …</a>, <a href="https://nostalgiacentral.com/television/tv-by-decade/tv-shows-1980s/laugh-i-nearly-paid-my-licence-fee/">Alfresco</a> and <a href="https://www.comedy.co.uk/tv/blackadder/episodes/">Blackadder</a>. In this series, Coltrane’s Samuel Johnson is one of many memorable larger-than-life comedy characters Coltrane is associated with.</p>
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<p><a href="https://www.scotsman.com/heritage-and-retro/retro/tutti-frutti-30-making-bbc-scotland-cult-classic-1437061">Tutti Frutti</a>, John Byrne’s comedy about a second-rate band on the road in Scotland, was a departure for Coltrane. It returned to the rock'n'roll-inspired Glasgow of the Slab Boys, but this time in the 1980s, with the actor clearly enjoying himself as big loud rock'n'roller Danny McGlone. </p>
<p>With Emma Thompson as his love interest Suzi Kettles, it was exuberant and wildly funny. But at the edges it was painted black, with an air of menace suffusing the character of McGlone. </p>
<p>Coltrane moved on from comedy in Cracker, where the dark notes he captured in Danny McGlone deepened and extended in his portrayal of the physician who could not heal himself. Writer <a href="http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/510555/index.html">Jimmy McGovern</a> consulted Coltrane as he was writing the character of Fitz. Coltrane spoke about drawing on the atmosphere that pervaded his youth in Glasgow to create the intoxicating rhythms of a man of vices, frailties and a genius for criminal profiling.</p>
<p>Coltrane seemed to instinctively recognise this troubled dark edge in Fitz, and indeed his the actor’s own reputation for drinking was legendary. But British audiences really connected with Coltrane’s performance as a criminal psychologist and he won three consecutive Baftas for the role. </p>
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<h2>Exploring his passions</h2>
<p>Throughout his career he had a chance to freestyle like his namesake, to improvise from nobody’s script but his own. He presented a number of factual series that indulged his passion for cars and engineering including <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0130393/">Coltranes, Planes and Automobiles</a>. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/tvandradioblog/2007/aug/16/lastnightstvrobbiecoltrane">Robbie Coltrane’s B Road Britain</a> saw him take an appropriately unconventional route around the UK via back roads in a jaunty red Jaguar XK150, and ended with a paean to his beloved city of Glasgow.</p>
<p>There was also an American road-trip travelogue, <a href="https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/12364365.robbie-coltrane-puts-tv-cadillac-up-for-auction/">Coltrane in a Cadillac</a>, where he crossed the country from LA to New York in a 1951 convertible model of the iconic car. His warm personality shone through with his constant witty quips, and a natural ease with people everywhere he went.</p>
<p>This warmth was clear in his portrayal of Hagrid, which brought him the global fame any actor dreams of. It was a fame, he reflected, that was difficult at times to negotiate as someone so used to playing interesting roles for select audiences, but he made his peace with it. He seemed to recognise that immortality doesn’t always depend on your most challenging solos: </p>
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<p>The legacy of the movies is that my children’s generation will show them to their children. So you could be watching it in 50 years time, easy. I’ll not be here, sadly. But Hagrid will, yes.</p>
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<p>When Coltrane’s death was announced it felt like a real loss to Scotland, and clearly to the world of comedy, which inundated the media with affectionate remembrances. Such warm regard says a lot about the man, his talent and the way he embodied and humorously reflected Scottishness for a wider world.</p>
<p>I will always remember him as a master of many morally ambiguous roles, but most fondly as Victor Hazell, the larger than life villain in the TV adaptation of Roald Dahl’s book <a href="https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/roald_dahls_danny_the_champion_of_the_world">Danny Champion of the World</a>. He was so suitably menacing that my siblings and I would shout at the screen to warn Danny of his approach, little knowing that I was witnessing an artist at work, making his noise, the best noise it could be.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/192757/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kate Cotter does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A talented comedian and serious dramatic actor with a gift for accents, Robbie Coltrane is a huge loss to TV and screen.Kate Cotter, Broadcast Lecturer, University of the West of ScotlandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/831862017-08-30T07:56:13Z2017-08-30T07:56:13ZBen Elton’s wrong – TV sitcoms aren’t dead, they’ve just changed since his day<p>In his recent Ronnie Barker Comedy Lecture, the comedian and writer Ben Elton <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/aug/25/snobbery-is-killing-the-great-british-sitcom-says-ben-elton">lamented that</a>, in the case of the British sitcom, “a great and original television art form is dying”. </p>
<p>Elton claims that the demise is due to two major whammies. The first is commercial. A three-camera sitcom filmed in front of a live studio audience, which is then allowed to grow an audience over several seasons is, simply, no longer economically viable, due to the exponential escalation of its stars’ salaries <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/features/the-return-of-the-sitcom-2201279.html">in line with its success</a>.</p>
<p>The second killer blow is, Elton claims, due to the “snobbery” of social commentators who reinforce their class-based viewpoints that sitcoms (and laughter tracks) are unworthy of cultural consideration.</p>
<p>Elton’s first charge has much currency. We exist in an era where multiple channels for comedy proliferate and where endless reruns abound. Producers of new sitcoms are fragmented across a variety of networks, while online producers can push out small-scale, inhouse, comedy formats on tiny budgets in the hope of them being picked up and remade for the mainstream. </p>
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<p>So-called reality shows of the <a href="http://uk.businessinsider.com/reality-show-secrets-2016-4?r=US&IR=T">Made In Chelsea/TOWIE</a> school simply appropriate the tropes of sitcom and soap opera to recreate a new, cheap and popular “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2011/jun/01/reality-tv-only-way-essex">structured reality</a>” format. Sitcom has had to adapt to these new forms to fit in with new viewing patterns and appeal to the increasingly individualised and solo consumption of the 21st-century media viewer.</p>
<p>Elton’s second claim, that “snobbery” and an <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/jun/29/can-it-why-studio-laughter-has-no-place-in-modern-sitcoms">anti-laughter agenda</a> are precipitating the demise of the sitcom in the UK is less convincing. Commentators’ objections seem more likely to be accusations that new sitcoms are just not particularly funny. </p>
<p>Tastes change – and it may be that what Elton characterises as metropolitan elite condescension is actually more a case of comedy that is no longer seen by its consumers as fit for purpose. <a href="https://theconversation.com/demise-of-count-arthur-strong-signals-the-end-of-the-family-sitcom-82292">Traditional sitcoms</a> may simply no longer chime with modern appetites or hit contemporary funny bones.</p>
<h2>Theatrical tradition</h2>
<p>Arguably, the real problem is that early sitcoms, both here and in the US, drew very heavily on the theatre model. Sitcoms stole freely from classical comic plays – pinching their larger-than-life plots, twists, archetypal characters, central “trickster” figures, class plays, ersatz families, happy endings, the lot. The style of the sitcom was unashamedly theatrical. </p>
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<p>In order to replicate the conditions of theatre experience, the shows were filmed in front of a live studio audience. The audience at home was meant to vicariously experience the communal laughter. The “British television classics” that Elton cites – Dad’s Army, Fawlty Towers and Only Fools and Horses – would all have been largely recognisable in terms of plot, character types and situations to the audience for the <a href="http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/comm/hd_comm.htm">Commedia dell’ arte</a> or to the spectators of a <a href="https://www.usu.edu/markdamen/ClasDram/chapters/141plautus.htm">Plautus comedy</a>. </p>
<p>However, a blanket rejection of theatricality has become endemic in modern visual media. The sitcom, which relies on an acceptance of theatricality in text, characterisation, performance style, plot, resolution and execution, fares badly in the modern eye. It looks phoney, overly fictional, manipulative, old hat. </p>
<p>Recent mainstream sitcoms such as <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2016/10/16/sarah-hadland-miranda-is-coming-back/">Miranda</a> and <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00x98tn">Mrs Brown’s Boys</a> deliberately play up the theatricality of their conceit as a reflexive, knowing gesture to the audience. Viewers, more sophisticated than ever in their understanding of how dramatic manipulations are effected, reject the sheer over-the-topness of traditional sitcom. </p>
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<p>They are, moreover, fully aware that the use of the laughter track (often augmented and central to the old school sitcom) is a manipulation. So, it is audiences, not critics, who reject the falsities that they are served up and who remain unconvinced of the funniness of the formulae.</p>
<h2>Shock of the new</h2>
<p>Along with awareness of the overly staged and formulaic nature of the form, another nail in the coffin of British sitcom has been the renunciation of lazy and formulaic comic tropes (of which Ben Elton himself, ironically, was at the forefront of exploding) when the alternative comedy boom changed everything. Pre-alternative “comic” preoccupations of race, gender, and postcard bawdry were annulled – rendering the themes of many older sitcoms unwatchable.</p>
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<p>Elton notes that the “sea change” came with “the single camera, non audience comedies” and The Office marked a significant transition. Ricky Gervais would also go on to fatally spoof the “classic” sitcom in all its phoniness and cliché in his sitcom-within-a-sitcom <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/organgrinder/2006/sep/22/extrasworkneededricky">When the Wind Blows</a> in Extras.</p>
<p>In a recent piece in The Guardian, critic <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/aug/25/tears-of-clowns-who-are-the-saddest-of-tvs-sad-comedians">Simon Miraudo asks</a> “Who are the saddest of TV’s sad comedians?” He highlights the growth of the cultish, small-scale, downbeat TV sitcom, mentioning <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/mar/15/how-catastrophe-became-even-more-excruciating-tv">Castastrophe</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/aug/05/fleabag-a-hilarious-sitcom-about-terrible-people-and-broken-lives">Fleabag</a> as successful exponents of this different school in the UK.</p>
<p>So, low-key, anti-theatrical sitcoms are currently in vogue. This suggests that, rather than “dying”, the sitcom is merely morphing. At the moment, it is in perfectly good health – perhaps just a little more introverted in style.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/83186/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ian Wilkie does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In his recent Ronnie Barker Memorial Lecture, the comedian and writer said social media and technology are killing traditional TV comedy. Not so.Ian Wilkie, Lecturer in Performance, University of SalfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/708412017-01-04T16:26:28Z2017-01-04T16:26:28ZBrexit, comedy and ‘Britishness’ – what to do when parody becomes real<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/151728/original/image-20170104-18659-dg6db3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A local shop, for local people.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">BBC</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>If as it is said <a href="http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/06/25/comedy-plus/">comedy is tragedy plus the benefit of time</a>, sometimes time allows things to come full circle. When in 1999 Edward and Tubbs, characters from the BBC’s <a href="http://www.leagueofgentlemen.co.uk">The League of Gentlemen</a>, declared their Royston Vasey village store “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meF7NmfnXZ0">a local shop for local people</a>” I laughed because their narrow-minded localist zeal seemed so grotesquely out of step with the UK’s global and multicultural attitudes. But in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, where not being “local” became a figurative, legal or literal stick with which to beat others, Edward and Tubbs have lost some comic lustre and gained an eerie relevance. </p>
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<p>In much film and television comedy of the New Labour years – such as the Simon Pegg film Hot Fuzz (2007), where <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiYvyIltqcs">civic pride concealed satanic rituals of local “cleansing”</a>, or Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005), where the threat to local produce instils villagers with a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7MDXFiMMGQ">mob mentality</a> – it is an inclusive, plural, playful sense of “Britishness” that is the implied alternative to these excesses. When I recognised the Britishness of these films and how I identified with it, I realised that, to a large extent, this Britishness did not really exist – or at least, it only existed as an ironic gesture or parody. The alternative, of course, was to assert the sort of cultural and racial essentialism that has long been among the unpalatable myths used by nationalists the world over.</p>
<p>In laughing along, I feel that Britishness is here defined by not taking the concept of Britishness at all seriously. This isn’t itself an innately British quality, but it could be thought of as a certain post-imperial tendency in the comedy that has shaped a prevalent part of British culture since the 1960s. The sort of comedy that is as much obsessed by historical myths of Britishness as it is derisive of them: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZaBbH4bCjY&list=RDZZaBbH4bCjY#t=31">Beyond the Fringe</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrzMhU_4m-g">Monty Python’s Flying Circus</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeE133Wu96c&list=PLPaC5ts4ofWMj9av8dGQR45H7AZ0Ve38c">Ripping Yarns</a>, Blackadder, and The League of Gentlemen.</p>
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<p>This comic playfulness regarding Britishness has become a key vehicle for promoting British culture abroad through hugely successful rom-coms such as Notting Hill or <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdzH6a-XEGM">Love Actually</a>. That the UK <a href="http://portland-communications.com/pdf/The-Soft-Power_30.pdf">tops recent indexes of global soft power</a> owes much to the self-effacing and metropolitan charms of films such as these. It is also apt that Rowan Atkinson’s Mr Bean persona, Britain’s most exportable comedy brand, should have found a central role in the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. </p>
<p>The inspired choice to have Atkinson’s weary keyboardist daydream his way through <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwzjlmBLfrQ">a travesty of Chariots of Fire’s opening scene</a> – a film more often associated with flag-waving jingoism – helped rework the ceremony’s traditional cultural remit towards less aggressively nationalistic or historically essentialist terrain. Recall also that the show began with <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AS-dCdYZbo">Her Majesty jumping from a helicopter</a> strapped to a Union Jack parachute. Yet this same send-up of British iconography also served in the context of the ceremony as a form of soft patriotism: one that while drawing a line under Britain’s imperial past, was no less assertive even through parody of its new cultural standing in the world.</p>
<p>But that was 2012. The events of 2016 point towards political isolationism and more tightly prescribed notions of national identity, with significant repercussions for British comedy. How do we reconcile, for example, the divergent comedic impulses to leave or remain? The League’s village of Royston Vasey is taken from the birth name of Roy “Chubby” Brown, a foul-mouthed and anarchic British comedian who has mined cultural and ethnic prejudices to perennially popular effect. The uncomfortable potency of the League’s dark comedy comes from their willingness to flirt with sentiments that have clearly not been banished to the past, but which still churn away just under the surface.</p>
<p>The lessons of “Chubby” Brown and a whole other tradition of British comedy dating from the 1970s (oddly enough, the decade that Britain entered the European Economic Community), such as the Carry On films, <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2133506/It-Aint-Half-Hot-Mum-screened-BBC-deem-racist-modern-society.html">It Ain’t Half Hot Mum</a>, and Mind Your Language, are that comedy can as easily reinforce exclusive and culturally fixed notions of national identity as it can dispel them. Nor can we simply laugh away such comedy’s potent appeal, however much it might make us squirm.</p>
<p>The role of comedy in negotiating not only a hard or soft Brexit, but hard and soft conceptions of Britishness, will be a pressing concern both for comedy producers and those who write about it. It was perhaps fitting that this of all summers should see the BBC attempting, in an evidently nostalgic gesture, to <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p045jktf">revive popular sitcoms from the 1970s</a>, and just as apt that the week after the EU referendum saw the release of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dj3ZWhlmexw">Absolutely Fabulous</a> – a very knowing comedy portrayal of national self-denial. The wider impact of the events of 2016 on the cultural and comedic tendencies to come remains to be seen.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/70841/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Neil Archer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>British comedy has always revelled in self-reflexive parody. Now, following Brexit, perhaps the re-nationalisation of British comedy is nigh.Neil Archer, Lecturer in Film Studies, Keele UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/220162014-01-14T13:59:11Z2014-01-14T13:59:11ZYoung Brits think WWI was futile, but don’t blame Blackadder<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/39041/original/c6tp2dkf-1389697322.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Forget Blackadder, these are the guys Gove should be worrying about</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ian West/PA</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>As Britain starts four years of commemorating the centenary of the First World War, Blackadder Goes Forth, first broadcast on BBC1 in 1989, has, bizarrely, taken centre stage.</p>
<p>To rather less fanfare than <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/04/first-world-war-michael-gove-left-bashing-history">Michael Gove’s claim</a> that Blackadder made Britons think the war was a “misbegotten shambles”, last autumn Defence minister <a href="http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/cmhansrd/cm131107/debtext/131107-0003.htm#13110788000001">Andrew Murrison</a> and <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Great_Britain_s_Great_War.html?id=0CH6wTuGjggC&redir_esc=y">Jeremy Paxman</a> said very much the same thing. And before Gove turned the issue into a party spat, Dan Jarvis, Labour’s shadow Justice minister, argued Blackadder promoted an erroneous <a href="http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/cmhansrd/cm131107/debtext/131107-0003.htm#13110788000001">“pointless futility” narrative about the war</a>.</p>
<p>Blackadder is not alone in constituting that which Gove described as the “fictional prism” through which we now see the war. The 1963 musical <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/07/michael-gove-oh-what-a-lovely-war">Oh! What a Lovely War</a>, the 1986 BBC drama series <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/the-monocled-mutineer-is-innocent-466366.html">The Monocled Mutineer</a> and the war poets have all been mentioned in dispatches. But it is the comedy series written by Ben Elton and Richard Curtis upon which the fire has been fixed.</p>
<p>There is a long history of authority figures blaming films, television shows, plays or even pop songs for causing people to think or do things they don’t like. But why is there such concern about how Blackadder has affected perspectives of a war at whose outbreak fewer than 11,000 of today’s population was alive?</p>
<p>Gove appears to be on a personal mission to persuade the British to adopt a view of the conflict which emphasises the “patriotism, honour and courage” of those men who fought in what he describes as a “just” war. But there is more at stake than that, and it is something that unites all members of our political class.</p>
<p>Murrison told fellow MPs that he wants the centenary commemorations to rehabilitate those political leaders that the Blackadder version presents as “willing consigners of other men’s sons to hideous death”. Even Nigel Farage – for the moment at least, no friend of Britain’s current political elite – has defended the generals from their <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/british-incompetence-in-world-war-one-has-been-overestimated-its-politicians-not-the-military-who-deserve-censure-9039985.html">sitcom depiction as incompetent fools</a>. </p>
<p>While Jarvis conceded Blackadder “serves as a powerful testimony to the savagery of World War One” he still argued that it distorted historical reality. Even more tellingly, at the same time Tristram Hunt attacked Gove for playing party politics with the conflict, he highlighted those “patriotic” Labour MPs who were recruiting sergeants for the trenches. If he suggested that more countries than Germany were to blame for the war, Hunt did not question its status as “just”.</p>
<p>It is perhaps no coincidence that authority figures of the present want to rescue the authorities of the past from the comedic contempt of posterity. Nor is it surprising that critics of the Westminster consensus, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/08/first-world-war-imperial-bloodbath-warning-noble-cause?CMP=twt_gu">like Seamus Milne</a>, claim the Blackadder version reflects the truth of what they see as an imperial conflict that sacrificed millions in the deadly pursuit of profit.</p>
<p>But what does everybody else think about the war? Think-tank <a href="http://www.britishfuture.org/publication/do-mention-the-war/">British Future tried to find out last year</a>. They discovered that that while 19% of Britons believe the World War I was “futile”, 33% consider it to have been “just” – between one-third and a half simply did not know what to think. </p>
<p>On that basis Gove et al might stand easy. But a more detailed breakdown of the figures suggests otherwise. The survey revealed that only 16% of 18-24 year olds think the war “just”, while 24% believe it “futile”: it is the only age cohort in which more favour the Blackadder version over the one promoted by Gove and the rest.</p>
<p>The young’s greater scepticism about the “just” character of World War I probably has less to do with Blackadder - first broadcast before most of them were born - than their more general mistrust of contemporary political authority. </p>
<p>But if Westminster wants to worry about the influence of a television show, MPs might be better advised to stop obsessing about a two decades old sitcom and turn to BBC2’s 2013 drama <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EM12mcTEI88">Peaky Blinders</a>. </p>
<p>Clearly aimed at a young demographic, it depicts a generation of men who are brutalised by trench warfare and alienated from all forms of authority as a result. Just demobilised, the gang swells to include a corrupt police force and politicians, notably a Winston Churchill who is willing to turn a blind eye to murder. </p>
<p>Depicting a futile war followed by an unjust peace, if Peaky Blinders has any resonance with its audience – and it will be coming back for a second season – Gove, Hunt and even Farage should be very worried indeed.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/22016/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Steven Fielding does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>As Britain starts four years of commemorating the centenary of the First World War, Blackadder Goes Forth, first broadcast on BBC1 in 1989, has, bizarrely, taken centre stage. To rather less fanfare than…Steven Fielding, Professor of Political History, University of NottinghamLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.