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Blackadder stars meet to discuss Series 5

The university setting can only work if it's made explicit that they're all aging has-beens, out of touch with the world and the youth they're suppposed to be teaching. I suspect it will instead be a bunch of out-of-touch aging has-beens unironically moaning about millenials and mixed gender bathrooms.
 
I just can't see it being funny regardless of the setting. Comedians like musicians have limited run on creativity. Is there any precedent for things like this that have been any good / funny?
 
Teaboy said:
I just can't see it being funny regardless of the setting. Comedians like musicians have limited run on creativity. Is there any precedent for things like this that have been any good / funny?
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T2: Trainspotting was a successful attempt at returning to/updating a much-loved film and its characters in a way which was both sympathetic to those characters, but also showed them to be utter dicks and out-of-step with the world around them as it now is, without caricaturing those younger than them or those peers who grew up.
 
Teaboy said:
I just can't see it being funny regardless of the setting. Comedians like musicians have limited run on creativity. Is there any precedent for things like this that have been any good / funny?
Click to expand...
Curb Your Enthusiasm returned for season 9 after a 6 year break when Larry David was pushing 70, and that was good.

It won't happen here though
 
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Crispy said:
The university setting can only work if it's made explicit that they're all aging has-beens, out of touch with the world and the youth they're suppposed to be teaching. I suspect it will instead be a bunch of out-of-touch aging has-beens unironically moaning about millenials and mixed gender bathrooms.
Click to expand...
Maybe if they got Alexei Sayle in as a diehard 1968er, who plays a sort of ARP warden Hodges role.
 
Better after a five-year break:
  • Lovejoy
Most certainly not a creative peak after an eighteen-month break:
  • Homicide: The Movie
Really not great after a three-year break:
  • Exiled: A Law & Order Movie
Mediocre is the best we can say about this after a ten year break (though better than the previous +1 effort Lucky White Ghost):
  • Cracker: A New Terror
Frankly quite shit after a ten-year break:
  • This Life: +10

 
The University one would be rubbish; half the fun out of Blackadder came because the audience knew he would be killed if his schemes went properly wrong (and of course "Blackadder" was killed at the end of all of them), and the other half came out of the absurdity of the times.

If they have to move it on in chronological order, then surely the winter of 1939-40 would be a much better bet. They could all be civil servants or backbench Tory MPs and do crazy things like claim barrage balloons will protect London, organize blackouts that kill hundreds in road traffic accidents, rearrange everyones kids around the country, and try to finish at 4pm on the dot every Friday whilst plotting to wreck the careers of anyone who actually wants to do anything like fight the war properly or work weekends.
 
If they want to do a fifth series (and I agree it’ll be shite and they shouldn’t), the only chance of making it work is to break with tradition and go back rather than forwards in time. Plenty of time periods to explore — how about the early Enlightenment? Glorious Revolution, the founding of the Royal Society, the Mint, Great Fire of London, plague — all sorts of history. And the characters — Newton, Hooke, Pepys, Charles II, William of Orange etc etc.

Modern day Blackadder would really be terrible.
 
kabbes said:
If they want to do a fifth series (and I agree it’ll be shite and they shouldn’t), the only chance of making it work is to break with tradition and go back rather than forwards in time. Plenty of time periods to explore — how about the early Enlightenment? Glorious Revolution, the founding of the Royal Society, the Mint, Great Fire of London, plague — all sorts of history. And the characters — Newton, Hooke, Pepys, Charles II, William of Orange etc etc.

Modern day Blackadder would really be terrible.
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Rowan Atkinson IS Oliver Cromwell, in the heart-warming romantic comedy no one will forget.
 
Teaboy said:
This is a much much longer break though.



Not as funny though.
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I don't know about that.

Dougie drinking coffee, being stuck in a lift, eating cake, and having a first piss in 25 years was hilarious.

And this was the funniest thing in it for me :D

 
mwgdrwg said:
I don't know about that.

Dougie drinking coffee, being stuck in a lift, eating cake, and having a first piss in 25 years was hilarious.

And this was the funniest thing in it for me :D
Click to expand...

And Lynchs 'he's dead' line. And the Polish accountants run-in with Hutch & Chantel, and Wally Brando, and Jerry Horne, and some of doppelganger Dianes language, and Jacobi as Dr. AMP.

There was some sexist leering in it that felt way more than 25 years out of date though.

As a whole it probably worked because it wasnt trying to be the same, and I suspect great swathes of it were playing off of audience anticipation that they would see certain characters in a more familiar mode and setting, and refusing to deliver very much of that till right near the end when it was almost too late (eg the good Cooper as opposed to the Dougie zonked out version). Lynch has his faults but I dont think many others would have attempted that or been prepared to keep that aspect going for so long, and I dread to think what a new Blackadder would be like in contrast.

If the writing is good enough then a new Blackadder might not be too shit I suppose, but the pressure of what it has to live up to may magnify even small failings. I'm far from convinced they are stupid enough to attempt it.
 
am i alone in thinking that Blackadder: the Brexit years could be an inexhaustable comedy mine?

ludicrous, deranged politicians, and a cynical - and yet endlessly appalled - civil service.
 
kebabking said:
am i alone in thinking that Blackadder: the Brexit years could be an inexhaustable comedy mine?

ludicrous, deranged politicians, and a cynical - and yet endlessly appalled - civil service.
Click to expand...

So far I have assumed there is a cautious approach to all things Brexit in many creative circles. And endless handwringing in writing meetings about whether something is too obvious or what will work for the audience as a whole. Many Brexit ideas in the bin already I reckon.
 
The '80s might be a rich period for the series to mine - set it in Liverpool and it could be the Boys From the Blackadderstuff.
 
Anybody else have any vague memories of seeing a Comic Relief Blackadder mini special and thinking oh that was a nice little bit of nostalgia, but I'm glad it ended when it did? And that was a long time ago!
 
Actually I wonder if I am conflating one or two tv charity specials with the one off Sky+BBC show from the millenium (dome) celebration era, which it seems I had largely expunged from my memory until I started researching:

Blackadder: Back & Forth - Wikipedia

Even reading the description of it I'm still not even sure whether I saw this at the time. I'm going to guess that I did and wasnt that impressed, but I have no idea really.
 
One year they did a special where Blackadder was a Cavalier but then he cut his hair and became a Roundhead.
 
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