Dom Robinson reviews
The Black Adder 1 The Historic First Series Distributed by
Producer:
Screenplay:
Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson
Music:
Cast:
Edmund, The Black Adder: Rowan Atkinson (Bean, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Hot Shots! Part Deux, The Witches, TV: Blackadder 1-4, Doctor Who: The Curse of Fatal Death, Mr. Bean, Not The Nine O'Clock News, The Thin Blue Line )
Baldrick: Tony Robinson (Never Ending Story 3, TV: Black Adder 1-4, My Wonderful Life, Time Team )
King Richard IV: Brian Blessed (Flash Gordon, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, TV: The Avengers, I Claudius, Z Cars )
Percy: Tim McInnerry (Notting Hill, TV: Blackadder 1-4 )
The Queen: Elspet Mary
Prince Harry: Robert East
The Black Adder Rowan Atkinson as the
eponymous put-upon anti-hero who attains to achieve greatness and nobility
but never quite manages it. For the first series Rowan Atkinson
(Not the Nine O'Clock News ) and Richard Curtis , creator of two
of Britain's biggest home-grown hits, Four Weddings and a Funeral and
Notting Hill ), bring about a comedy packed full of dry humour in which
Edmund is the butt of almost every single joke. After the first series, Rowan
was replaced by Ben Elton (The Young Ones, Filthy Rich and Catflap,
Stark and Popcorn )
The first episode, The Foretelling , Edmund inadvertantly helps his
father become King of England by accidentally bumping of the current leader,
King Richard III (the late, great Peter Cook ), who then comes back to
haunt him and point out the error of his ways. Born to be King , sees
Edmund discovering that with his father away on a possibly-fatal mission and
a mysterious orange-faced stranger pointing out that his brother was not born
of his father's loins, he could indeed become King. However, he first has to
put on a show to celebrate St. Leonard's Day including the eunuch's, the bearded
lady - neither of which will be making an appearance - and the Jumping Jews of
Jerusalem, who sadly turn up.
In The Archbishop , Edmund is under the impression that his brother, Prince Harry,
is to become the new Archbishop of Canterbury and since no-one has lasted in the job for
longer than a few months before being mysteriously killed off, it means that Edmund can
become the next King. However, it is Edmund who attains this appointment and has to find a
way of getting out of it. The Queen of Spain's Beard spells doom for
Edmund as he is forced into an arranged marriage with the most hideous of
women, Princess Maria, the Spanish Infanta (Miriam Margolyes , most
recently seen giving Arnie a kicking in End of Days ) and he tries a
myriad of ways to escape getting hitched.
For Witchsmeller Pursuivant , Frank Finlay stars as the Witchsmeller and
with the King suffering with the Black Death, Edmund is unwittingly tried and convicted
of being a witch. Can he be saved from being burnt at the stake before it's too late?
Finally, in The Black Seal , Edmund makes one last bid for the throne by going out
to find the Seven Most Evil Men in the land in an episode that features appearances from
Rik Mayall as Mad Gerald and Patrick Allen , also the narrator of this series
and those old Barratt Houses adverts, as The Hawk.
Running from June 15th 1983, through all four series, The Black Adder,
Black Adder II, Black Adder The Third and Black Adder Goes Forth ,
the latter of which ended on November 2nd 1989, to date 26 episodes have been
filmed including those series plus two specials: The Cavalier Years and
Black Adder's Christmas Carol , not to mention a Doctor Who spoof for
the 1999 Comic Relief telethon and the forthcoming one-off for the Greenwich
White Elephant, er..I mean, The Millennium Dome, entitled Black Adder: Back
and Forth .
The picture here is by no means perfect but it's certainly watchable. There's
no artifacts on view but it does look a little hazy from time to time. It's
presented in its original fullscreen ratio, being a TV series from the early
80s and the average bitrate falls between 4.60Mb/s and 5.89Mb/s, depending on
which episode you're watching.
The soundtrack is labelled as stereo but is actually mono in both speakers.
The dialogue is clear and has no problems, but it's obviously not a
surround-sound fest.
Extras :
Chapters :
Languages & Subtitles :
Booklet :
Menu :
Overall :
The other titles now available are Monty Python: Best of Vol.1, The Five
Doctors, Noddy In Toyland, Persuasion and coming in January 2000,
The Planets .
Scheduled for Spring next year are :
Monty Python: Best of Vol.2, Gormenghast, Walking with Dinosaurs and,
of course, Black Adder II .
As for which DVDs I'd like to see from the BBC in future. They include :
Red Dwarf (in their original versions, not the remastered form),
The Young Ones, Filthy Rich and Catflap, Fawlty Towers and, depending
on whether I could bribe the new DG with enough cash, Eldorado ...
FILM : ****½ (or **** compared to the other Black Adders)
PICTURE QUALITY : ***½
SOUND QUALITY : **
EXTRAS : *
-------------------------------
OVERALL : ***
Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 1999.
The following is a list of all the Black Adder DVDs reviewed online to date :
1999 The Black Adder Black Adder II Black Adder The Third Black Adder Goes Forth Black Adder: Back And Forth Blackadder's Christmas Carol
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Amazon.co.uk Widgets
DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TXW32R4 32" widescreen TV
connected to either a Creative Dxr2 DVD-ROM player or Microsoft Xbox and
played through a Sony STR-DB930 amplifier.
PC games reviewed by the editor are on:
Since Nov 2005: Intel Pentium D 830 3.0Ghz, 1Gb RAM, 128Mb nVidia GeForce 6700XL, Windows XP
Since Aug 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.66Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb GeForce4 MX440 graphics, Windows XP
Since May 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.6Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb ATI Radeon 9600TX graphics, Windows XP
Since Jun 2002: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, 64Mb ATI Radeon 8500LE
Since May 2000: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
