A Blackadder script that never got made and which only a handful of people have ever read? Surely it’s the ultimate Christmas gift for the comedy fan who has everything.
Blackadder in Bethlehem was written to be the first Christmas special of the Rowan Atkinson sitcom that ran for four series on BBC1 between 1983 and 1989. The script has never been published, except for an extract in Jem Roberts’s 2012 book The True History of the Blackadder. Now its creator, Richard Curtis, has put his first draft up for auction to benefit the children’s education charity Theirworld.
Richard Curtis with the script for Blackadder in Bethlehem
“It was begun in 1988 and then abandoned for fear it would cause too much offence,” Curtis explains in a single typewritten page. He and his co-writer, Ben Elton, instead got working on another idea, Blackadder’s Christmas Carol, which was broadcast in December 1988. Curtis never even sent Elton his draft at the time. He describes it now as “a strange mixture of Fawlty Towers and Life of Brian”.
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Did they make the right choice? Elton has said that Blackadder’s Christmas Carol was one of his biggest disappointments on the show, writing, “That’s my least happy memory on the Adder” in his recent memoir What Have I Done?. He loved his and Curtis’s script but “about 50 per cent of it had been f***ed up in the rehearsal room … It could have been so much better.”
Might Blackadder in Bethlehem have been better, once developed (Elton and Curtis always rewrote each other’s drafts) and performed by the cast, headed by Atkinson as Blackadder and Tony Robinson as Baldrick? A preliminary reading of the very enjoyable Blackadder in Bethlehem reveals that some of it is close to fully formed, with barbs aplenty from the rapacious innkeeper Blackadder to his skivvy Baldrick, turfed out of his usual lodgings in the manger when Mary and Joseph arrive at the otherwise fully occupied inn.
Some of it is deliberately sketchy, as when Curtis writes in the stage directions “Then perhaps on with the proper plot”. There is no role for Tim McInnerny’s character Percy, a regular in the first two series, although the script describes the hotel assistant, Rachel, as “the female Percy substitute”. An exasperated Blackadder threatens to cut out Baldrick’s tongue with scissors — a heftier punishment than Basil Fawlty ever dished out to Manuel.
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Meanwhile, Blackadder is dealing with a rich Roman, some singing shepherds and three kings, only one of whom can really speak the language (a role intended for Stephen Fry). These are lines it’s easy to imagine Atkinson having deadpan fun with, not least when he responds to the Roman’s lavish request for fire-eaters, jugglers, strippers, lion tamers, magician and snake charmers as that night’s entertainment: “Oh great — so just the usual sort of thing.”
Blackadder spanned four series and numerous specials
DON SMITH/RADIO TIMES/GETTY IMAGES
Would it have caused offence? Would Joseph thinking of “Jesu” as a first name for a boy after mishearing “tishoo!” from a sneezing Baldrick have made it to the screen? It would have been a testing balancing act. Curtis told Roberts that Life of Brian and Fawlty Towers were “too good to match up to” — but there is all sorts of promise here. The following year’s Blackadder Goes Forth has gone down in TV history for the artful way it dropped the laughs when the central characters were finally gunned down after going over the top of their First World War trench. Here Curtis’s script outlines the way the caustically atheist Blackadder ends up “totally dazed” after walking into the manger to see angels attending the Nativity.
The auction winner can have fun figuring out all the what-ifs that go with something unfinished like this. How would they have staged the scenes in which Baldrick interacts with a talking turkey? (Was this an echo of the talking Dish of the Day in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?) Would a modern-day epilogue still have ended with Blackadder turned into a stuffed hedgehog? (Another comic echo, perhaps, of a running gag about a hedgehog in Not the Nine O’Clock News, which Curtis, Atkinson and the Blackadder producer John Lloyd had all worked on.) It’s the cunning plans that don’t come off that are almost as interesting as the ones that do.
Bids close at 10pm on Dec 1, jumblebee.co.uk/blackadderchristmas