Perversity; or, why I like The Black Adder

It may not be a terribly fashionable thing to say, but I LIKE the first series of Blackadder.

I don't just find it watchable, or an okay way to pass half an hour (or 33-odd minutes) of my time. I really like it. I admire it. No, no, I adore it.



It's always been the outcast son, the pariah, the black sheep of the Blackadder clan; people write it off as 'too big', or else they say they don't like the voice that Rowan Atkinson gives his character in that initial series, or else they just say, 'Well, it's just not as funny as the other series, is it?'

True. I'll second that. It isn't as funny as the second series, or the third series, and definitely nowhere near as ball-crunchingly hilarious as the fourth and final series. (But then, what is?) But then lots of comedies are well liked - indeed, loved - when they are not particularly funny. Friends, for example. Oh, how I've tried and tried to come to terms with Friends. I've tried to like it, I really have. I've sat down with others and watched entire episodes in the hope that I would find something funny, or like the characters, or like the absurd situations in which the characters find themselves ... anything, a foot in the door, a way in to discovering what it is about it that other people obviously love so much. But I've failed. I know, I'm rubbish. Evidently I am. But that's just the way it is. I cannot make myself like Friends, or The Mighty Boosh, or Russell Howard, or Russell Brand, or Russell Kane, or Russell Gekko, or whoever the new twenty-something unfunny lad from Essex or Dorset or Surrey or wherever whose name is Russell happens to be. Just as I cannot convince most people I know - even diehard Blackadder fans - to like the first series of one of the most celebrated sitcoms ever produced.

Hardly surprising. I'm not even sure I could convince myself of why I love it so much. Perhaps it's the thirteen-year-old boy in me (hold those lame paedophile-cum-catamite jokes right there please), who sat down having bought his first ever video one day in 1996, and who discovered six whole episodes of a series of his favourite comedy which he'd never seen before, no, not so much as a five-second clip (this was, of course, the days before Youtube, and even the days before clip shows and Top 100 countdown compilation programmes became popular). Maybe it's just nostalgia, a return to the native land of pain (what 'nostalgia' literally means, sort of). Maybe. Or maybe it's something slightly perverse in me, akin to George Bernard Shaw's slightly twisted admiration for All's Well That Ends Well (hardly a classic Shakespeare play).

So perhaps that's it. Perhaps The Black Adder (1983) is my All's Well That Ends Well. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

But whatever it is, something about it charms me. I like the Middle Ages, and I like the 1980s, and that slightly outdated 80s charm of the studio set trying to recreate a fifteenth-century castle. Perhaps it's the lines that still crack me up, and which, like Shakespeare for the English language as a whole, have entered the common currency of my language: 'Well, splendid!', 'I thought we all were', 'This enormous nonsense' (a personal personal favourite), and so on. I'll leave it with you, dear reader.

Does anyone else out there love this first series? I'm not even saying I like it more than the other series. Or maybe I am. Hmm... I suppose the best way I can think of framing it right now is that while I know it isn't the best series of the four, it's my favourite.

I think. I don't know. I surmise. But I still love The Black Adder. Yes. I do. And I'm not ashamed.