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Dom Robinson reviews

The Black Adder 1

The Historic First Series

Distributed by

Cat.no: BBCDVD 1001
Cert: 15
Running time: 190 minutes
Year: 1983
Pressing: 1999
Region(s): 2, 4 (UK PAL)
Chapters: 38 plus extras
Sound: Mono
Languages: English
Subtitles: 9 languages available
Fullscreen: 4:3
16:9-enhanced: No
Macrovision: No
Disc Format: DVD 9
Price: £19.99
Extras : Scene index, Booklet

Director:

Martin Shardlow

TV: Only Fools and Horses

Producer:

Screenplay:

Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson

Music:

Howard Goodall

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 is the first of four sitcoms featuring 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 :

There are 38 chapters throughout the disc, with anything between 5 and 8 chapters spread across each episode which serves the series very well indeed.

Languages & Subtitles :

All the dialogue is in English and has subtitles in English (for the deaf and hard of hearing), Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Dutch.

Booklet :

While there are no extras, as such, on the disc, a plush booklet tells you plenty of info about the cast and crew behind the series.

Menu :

Static and silent, but elegant-looking and setting the scene for what's to come. You can choose to watch every episode in order, choose a particular one, or select your favourite scene.

Overall :

This is one of the BBC's first DVD releases and while The Black Adder isn't quite as good as its sequels, it's still head-and-shoulders above most sitcoms. For a penny under twenty notes, you get all six episodes on a dual-layered DVD which makes this a must-buy for the content alone despite the lack of extras.

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
2001	Black Adder II
2001	Black Adder The Third
2001	Black Adder Goes Forth
2001	Black Adder: Back And Forth
2002	Blackadder's Christmas Carol

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