With a ying and a yang and yippeedeedoo

By Blog on the Box on Dec 23, 08 03:46 PM

Fans of Blackadder will be top-hole, sir, with a ying and yang and yippiedeedoo.
That's because Rowan Atkinson has finally decided to take part in a documentary celebrating 25 years of the comedy show.
Previous attempts earlier in the year were fine but there was something missing.
And that was Atkinson's own comments on the comedy phenemenon.
But the BBC had a cunning plan and managed to get the famously-private star to recall the success and failures (and there were some failures, remember the first series - there's a reason it's not often repeated).
Blackadder Rides Again is on BBC1, Christmas Day, 10.30pm if you want to watch or record it.

It includes a sketch from the pilot show, not previously broadcast, worth recording for posterity in this very blog.
The clip shows how Blackadder's acerbic dialogue was an early feature of the character.
In the 1982 pilot Blackadder is arranging a performance for royalty when one of the acts pulls out.
He says: "The eunuchs have cancelled. Now, let's make one thing clear, this is a Royal Command Performance.
"There are two options. Either you do it or you don't.
"If you do it you don't get paid. If you don't do it you get beheaded.
"These damn eunuchs won't get away with it. I'm going to remove whatever extraneous parts of their bodies still remain."

We all have favourite dialogue. How about this one from Edmund Blackadder:
You see the ancient Greeks, your Highness, wrote in legend of a terrible container in which all the evils of the world were trapped. How prophetic they were. All they got wrong was the name. They called it 'Pandora's Box', when of course they meant 'Baldrick's Trousers'.

Or this one:
Morris dancing is the most fatuous, tenth-rate entertainment ever devised by man. Forty effeminate blacksmiths waving bits of cloth they've just wiped their noses on. How it's still going on in this day and age I'll never know."

There is also a glimpse of Rowan's famous reserve in the documentary when he recalls how he watched an episode (the nurse one) of the fourth series on a plane.
He said: "I am not a great laugher. I might have sniggered at it which is my way of saying it was very funny."