Thanks to everyone who joined us last night at Marlborough Town Hall for our special LitFest Plus event with Sir Tony Robinson.
His fabulous energy radiated from the stage from the start as he regaled us with tales from his career (including calling out the legendary Rex Harrison during his Chichester Theatre days). It was fascinating hearing especially about the Blackadder years: the generosity of Rowan Atkinson and producer John Lloyd in allowing Robinson to “have loads of laughs… I don’t know of another lead performer at that time who would have had the confidence or the emotional generosity to allow me to create Baldrick in the way that he did.”
We heard about the intense workshopping that happened on each Blackadder episode from the collected talent of the cast (some “paranoid perfectionists” among them apparently), creating their own writers’ room in effect. And how the infamous final, poignant Blackadder scene came to be (by accident, not design)…
Robinson’s boundless enthusiasm for history (evident from his many years on Time Team, combined with a childhood love of the King Alfred story and, according to Robinson, being surrounded for many years by a number of Oxbridge-educated history buffs on Blackadder) shines through in his new novel ‘The House of Wolf’ – the perfect Christmas present!
Photo credit: marlborough.news Neil Goodwin
