The Lost Project: "A Fifth of Black"
A Fifth of Black
by J. Robinson Wheeler
- Ep1 - "The Film Promo." Ed Black, a frustrated editor at a book publishing corporation, tries to raise his profile at the company by producing a promotional video, with the help of his irrepressably cheerful co-worker George.
- Ep2 - "The Xmas Party." In another scheme to advance himself, Ed takes on the responsibility of throwing the annual company holiday party - and making it turn a profit, or else - meanwhile trying to avoid the amorous intentions of his boss's wife.
- Ep3 - "The Busy Day." On the last day before the company closes for holiday, Ed is hoping to punch out early to go on a much-needed vacation. Unfortunately, everyone else has beat him to it, leaving him to cope with finishing everything himself.
- Ep4 - "The Big List." Sensing a corporate reorganization might be his opportunity to move up, Ed commits to swaying the entire Board of Directors by performing favors for all of them, throwing away all of his integrity in the process.
- Ep5 - "The New Office." Promoted at last, Ed moves from a cubicle on the lower floors to an upper floor office of his own at last. Two problems: one, it's the size of a utility closet. And two, there's someone named Baldrick living in it.
- Ep6 - "The Top Spot." The corporate reorganization has come at last, and Ed puts everything on the line to take over the heralded Top Spot, the big penthouse office with a skyline view, and control over the entire corporation. First he has to get a couple of pesky things out of the way - namely, George and Baldrick.
Ah, yes. "A Fifth of Black."
Long story.
About 11 years ago, in February of 1998, in fact, I made a random video rental choice that upended my world, because I had discovered a new favorite thing for the first time in a long time. Most of my favorite things came along when I was a teenager. Here was a new one. It'd been, especially, a very long time since I'd seen something so hilariously funny I couldn't help but laugh out loud over and over again. Or something as wonderfully catchy in my imagination as to rattle around all day up there in my head in repeated cycles, little loops of my favorite bits, since the day (roughly 12 years before that) when someone gave me a tape of Beatles songs to listen to.
It doesn't seem so monumental now, but the tape I rented was the second half of the second season of Blackadder, a BBC series by Richard Curtis and Ben Elton, and starring Rowan Atkinson. I had chanced to see some of the original, first series, simply called "The Black Adder," a sitcom set in medieval Britain, on occasion, but I didn't particularly like it, nor did I like Atkinson's craven, simpering character and irritating whining voice. Based on this, I'd avoided watching any other Blackadder episodes, which by 1989 had concluded its fourth of four total seasons: "The Black Adder" (1983), "Blackadder II" (1985), "Blackadder the Third" (1987), and "Blackadder Goes Forth" (1989).
What I didn't know was that the series and its central character had been invented anew, its focus sharpened, and its hilarity level raised an order of magnitude between the first and second seasons. I'd seen Atkinson play variations on the simpering wretch character in other places - sketch revues, I think - but I didn't know how terrifically equipped he was to portray a character of lacerating verbal acuity. This new Blackadder was a rather brainy fellow living in a backwards time, surrounded by idiots and toadies, and always cursed to be stuck just a peg or two down from a place of authority where he could do as he pleased. He was within sight of it, but it was unattainable, and so the character was continually in a state of frustration, which he vented in bursts of the most wonderfully scripted sarcasm I'd ever heard.
The first episode I watched was called "Money," and was this farcical racing about as Edmund Blackadder keeps trying to make money to stave off a rather sadistically perverted bishop who has a debt to collect. Every time he manages to make a little, someone snatches it away, not having any idea of the straits he's in. There was one bit of dialogue that made me fall over at my first viewing, and it's a little hard to explain why. Edmund has gotten to the point where he's forced to try selling his house, and he's showing a prospective couple around the place, and cracking sarcastic asides as he goes, partly because he holds them in contempt, and partly because he's frustrated by the whole situation he finds himself in. After one of his asides, the man looking at the house says, "You've really got your patter worked out, haven't you." Edmund glares at him, drops the friendly demeanor, and says, "No, this is a different thing, you see. It's spontaneous, and it's called 'wit'."
It wasn't just that I thought it was very funny, but there was just something so refreshingly new about it. I'd never heard a line like it before. Or maybe, horribly, there was something vicarious about it. It is possible I was relating to this horrible character and his point of view on people that were rather slower than he was, which was everybody.
In very short order, a matter of days, I watched the rest of season 2, then watched season 3, which was delightful all over again in new ways, especially the invention of the utterly withering stare that the season 3 Edmund - butler and manservant to the Prince Regent George III - delivers whenever someone says something just inconceivably stupid that brings the conversation to a halt. Before he makes any sarcastic retort at all, he just impatiently glares, a statue of livid restraint. Then I watched season 4, which was very good indeed, with an Edmund who was still sarcastic, but on the whole a nicer and kinder fellow than his predecessors, partly owing to his Edwardian upbringing and manners, and partly because of the doomed situation he found himself in this time, as a Captain in the trenches of World War I. This series famously has a fittingly somber ending episode. Then I watched season 1, and tried to appreciate it as best I could. Then I re-watched selected bits of seasons 2, 3, and 4 again. It was a Blackadder fest.
By that point, I decided I wanted to write my own fifth series. I guess this is basically a fanfic impulse. I was just insanely keen on doing so, especially while my synapses were still fizzing with white frothy energy in the excitement of having discovered this whole little Blackadder world. The series itself provided a wealth of inspiration as well as this strict structure to it that was a creative aid. Six episodes, each with a title; the notion that the character was always striving to climb above his station and frustrated by circumstance and hierarchy; and the patterns of jokes that had become staples of the series.
First I did a little more homework. I went on a tear of watching everything I could get my hands on that was also written by Richard Curtis, which included Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Tall Guy, a Rowan Atkinson special, and Mr. Bean. I liked much of what I saw there quite a lot. I also watched the Ben Elton series The Thin Blue Line, also starring Rowan Atkinson, which I really disliked quite a lot. I began to see the differences between Richard Curtis jokes and Ben Elton jokes, and then when I thought about Blackadder it seemed like all of the jokes I thought were painful and unfunny were like the Thin Blue Line jokes written by Ben Elton, and everything I thought was hilarious was a lot like the solo material by Richard Curtis.
In retrospect - and having recently watched an interview with Curtis where he says that he can no longer remember which jokes or lines were written by which of them, since the writitng process was one of trading the scripts back and forth, crossing out and adding things on each swap - I was probably wrong about which one of them wrote the jokes I liked 50 percent of the time. However, that didn't matter. What I decided to do was only write the types of Blackadder jokes I liked, and ditch the other kind.
Then I started writing.
Six weeks later, I'd finished six scripts. It was blazingly fast. I started with what I later slotted as the fourth episode, then went back and wrote a first one, and filled in the rest. I got a bit tired by the fifth episode, and that one started with some of my favorite material but then pizzled out into meta-jokes that were clearly me showing signs of fatigue and a lack of faith in the supposed plot of that episode. But I marched on, and wrote what I always thought was a cracking good sixth and final episode.
One thing I did that the series didn't do - although season 1 sort of did - was have it tell one long, six-part story. The first two episodes are more or less self-contained, but still contain a hint of advancement along the arc. The last four episodes chain together and tell a story that builds to a big climax, followed of course by a tragi-comedic undoing of all the striving that got him there. In my episodes, Edmund (known just as Ed Black for most of it), actually manages to rise above his appointed place in the pecking order and reach the grand seat of authority he craves. Naturally he has to completely sell out and embarrass himself at every turn in order to do so, but he manages to do it. For a few minutes, anyway.
By now there is actually a fifth installment of the Blackadder series, a one-episode movie set on midnight at the turn of the recent millennium. This was fascinating to me, since my series straddles the same moment in time. Episodes 1-3 are in the closing months of 1999, and episode 4 starts up in January of 2000 and continues on. I decided to set it in the corporate world of the dotcom boom. This was actually slightly in the future from when I wrote it, but it seemed like an appropriate time and place to plunk the characters. Rather than some high tech company, they were actually all stuck in a book publishing company, which probably has something to do with the fact that I'd worked for one for a while a couple of years earlier.
There are, in fact, a lot of what now seem to me to be rather skeezy autobiographical notes stitched into the script and into the character of Ed. Rather obviously, he seems to have some background in filmmaking, which he attempts to use to make a promotional corporate video for the company in order to impress the higher-ups in the first episode. I can see that I was writing a lot of my own frustrations at my inability to really "get anywhere" into some of the acidic comments he makes throughout the series. Then again, if I hadn't had all that to draw on, it's unlikely I could have written six episodes so quickly. It was more a channeling of things I'd had pent up rather than an ex nihilo act of creation.
So of course for this and many other reasons, including thinking I'd written a lot of clever and funny jokes, I have always been very proud of this piece of work. I even made a go at producing it at the time, including putting out a casting call. There was one day when I met two young hopeful actresses who hadn't the slightest clue what I was going on about, who took home two expensively photocopied copies of the entire set of scripts and were never heard from again. I showed it to a former teacher of mine, now an actor and a drama teacher, who said this about it: "It's genuinely funny." I recorded myself performing part of one of the scenes from episode one, and doing a complete read-through of the last two episodes, playing all the parts myself.
Then I kind of stuck it on a shelf and time moved on. Eighteen months later, I started making The Krone Experiment instead. Then, somehow, another 8 or 9 years passed.
There was always a tension within it for the fact that it was a derivative work, which introduces a lot of copyright problems as well as the sense that it's just plainly not very original. I did my own thing with it, and changed the names slightly, but who are you fooling?
This was actually dramatized in the series itself. One of the central characters of all four Blackadder seasons was, of course, Baldrick. For the first four episodes of my series, there was no Baldrick. I think it was my way of pretending that I was writing an homage, but obviously not a copy of, except slyly, the source material. Then I couldn't stand it any more, and introduced him in episode 5. This is partly motivated - Ed gets a promotion at the end of episode 4, and moves upstairs in the building to a brand new office of his own. When he gets there, Baldrick is living in his desk.
I had so much fun writing scenes with Baldrick I couldn't stop, and Baldrick is indispensible to the last two episodes, and a lot of the reason why they're funny. However, it may also be true that if I'd tried to have him there for all 6 episodes I would have had to spread the inspiration a little thinly. Instead I got to pack all the gags very tightly together. They also move the plot along.
These days, I suppose, one is allowed to make fanfic episodes of things and post them to YouTube, but I can't imagine actually making the show. Sometimes I think I should do the cheap version and record it as a radio play, except some of the jokes are visual, so that doesn't work very well.
It's also dated, of course. I was just looking at the episodes for the first time in a decade, and some of it makes me cringe to see now. There's also a problem in that the files have gotten slightly corrupted at the tail ends, so I'd have to do a bit of archival restoration work to assemble complete versions of all of them again. But truly, I don't see how I can really do anything with them, which is a shame. Here I've got this thing I'm terrifically proud of having written, and it might as well not exist, because it doesn't exist in any real sense, except for me.
It was a rather audacious achievement just in the act of writing six episodes in six weeks. I look back on that and think, "Ah, those were the days! When I could do that!" And sometimes daydream of having that same energy again, that same prolific urgency.
About the title. The title is obviously an allusion to being a fifth season of Blackadder, but it eventually has another meaning within the story. In episode 4, as part of his efforts to sway the Board of Directors, Ed buys a case of Johnnie Walker Black Label whisky for one of the board members - whom Ed knows is an alcoholic. While the man is delighted by this, it seemed to me to embody the moral nadir of Ed's get-promoted-at-all-costs journey. Buying a huge supply of Scotch for someone who you know really needs to go into rehab - that's pretty low. That's why it seemed fitting to me to work that in as the second meaning of the title of the series.
Ah yes. It's obvious I am still proud of this, after all.