Black Adder: All the scripts

Richard Curtis, Rowan Atkinson, Ben Elton. Black Adder: The Whole Damn Dynasty (1998) We watched the series when it first aired. A wonderfully absurd and intelligent send-up of our notions of the past. History ain’t what we think it is, especially when the Adder clan is part of it.
     Here are all the scripts, with some added material that makes better sense on the page than on the screen. As with all scripts, it helps to have seen the performances. Atkinson, Fry, Robinson et al are superb comic actors with impeccable timing and a large range of tone and sneer. The four Black Adder series are worth watching again and again; many episodes are available on YouTube. The series became increasingly dark, and the last one ends in the fog of war. As with all good satire, the targets are the ones labelled the Seven Deadly Sins in another context. It’s really the weaknesses and flaws of human nature that exercise the spleen of the writers. But I suspect that the weaknesses and flaws are the price we pay for the glory.
     Recommended for addicts; I doubt that the casual reader will find much to amuse them, but I have a faint hope I’m mistaken. ****

Public performance and Murder (Marsh's Opening Night & Swing Brother Swing)

 

Ngaio Marsh. Opening Night (1951). Martyn Tarne has come to England to attempt a career in the theatre. She washes up at the Vulcan Theatre, as Dresser to leading lady Helen Hamilton, whose husband Clark Bennington is rapidly declining into a mean drunk. Tensions among the cast and with the author of the play, and Tarne’s uncanny resemblance to leading man and actor-manager Adam Poole stir up a witch’s broth of resentments and suspicions.
     The inevitable murder appears to repeat an earlier one the same premises. Alleyn solved that one and of course solves this one, too. But the investigation, though competently handled, isn’t the focus of the story. This is really a novel about the theatre, and actors, and the ambiance of rehearsal and performance. Worth reading for that alone. For me, it was a reread, and I enjoyed it more than the first read. Recommended. ***

 

Ngaio Marsh. Swing, Brother, Swing (1949) An eccentric and self-centred lord with an overweening notion of his musical talents, his almost equally eccentric family, a band-leader trying to preserve his status as first among equals, a vainglorious but talented accordionist, an unsuitable attachment, drugs, and the desire to maintain family status make for a well-stirred pot of resentments and anxieties. Murder is inevitable. Alleyn and Troy happen to be present when it happens, enjoying a night out. The puzzle is solved fairly, with plausibly distracting facts that have to be cleared away. Marsh has a lot of fun satirising human foibles and vanities. An enjoyable re-read for me. **½

The Empire Builders (Stead): data towards insight into ancestral foibles

R. J. C. Stead. The Empire Builders (1908) Stead’s verses remind me of Kipling in their jingoism and Service in their rhymes and rhythm. They range from sentimentally heroic tales of pioneering homesteaders to abstract paeans on Man, Mother, Empire etc. Stead liked adjectives and Latinate diction, which I suppose he believed made his commonplace prejudices sound not only poetic but thoughtful and weighty. They must have seemed so to his readers in 1908, when he published this book, and which reached its fourth edition (this copy) by 1910.
     An online search reveals many editions in many different formats and price levels. Stead’s verses appealed to a large audience. They don’t appeal to me, except as awful examples of empire-worship in the Edwardian era. And of the wrong-headed belief that anything that rhymes must be poetry.
     A curiosity, data towards a better insight into the foibles of our ancestors, and thereby also a warning that much of what we consider to be proper sentiments will certainly appear wrongheaded to our descendants. *

Footnote: Stead wrote jingoistic novels as well. He worked for the CPR's immigration department, producing "reams of rose-hued prose extolling the clean, healthy vigour of life in the open spaces—spaces opened courtesy of the CPR and available at good prices. On his own time, he writes in the same vein...". The posters were also "rose-hued".  

Grand Old Man of the Theatre painted and murdered (Final Curtain, 1947)

Ngaio Marsh. Final Curtain (1947) Waiting for Roderick to return, Troy is persuaded to paint the portrait of Sir Henry Ancred, Grand Old Man of the Theatre. He’s infatuated with a chorus girl, which the Family of course does not like at all. Troy enjoys painting the old man. But several practical jokes, ascribed to Panty, Sir Henry’s youngest grandchild and favourite person, roil the household, and eventually there’s murder.

    Alleyn has just returned from duty in New Zealand, but he must investigate the crime. Troy being one of his witnesses, complicates their reunion. Marsh plays fair enough with the clues and rosy piscids, but the main interest is the Family. They’re a wonderfully awful collection of eccentrics, all but one carrying the theatrical genes that made Sir Henry an expert ham who could carry any role at whatever pitch of realism or fantasy the director wanted. Or so I infer. The solution involves distorted affection and money, as it often does in Marsh’s tales. Merely average for her, which means it’s very good. ***

 

Addams Family and Others (Night Crawlers, 1975)

Charles Addams. Nightcrawlers (1957) A re-read. I enjoy Addams’s cartoons. They work so well because they show the logical consequences of whatever assumption has created the scene he depicts. Such as a pedestrian noticing a broom leaning against a parking meter. Or four oars protruding from four holes in the hull of a yacht. Or one witch to another, We’re out of dwarf’s hair, dearie. Can we substitute? Or the scenes on the book’s covers. ****

 

Nazi Misrule (Grunberger: The 12-Year Reich)

Richard Grunberger The 12-Year Reich (1971) A carefully assembled and somewhat selective description of daily life under Nazi rule. With every fact property documented, there’s not enough data about ordinary people’s actual feelings. Still, it’s a good overview of how ideological fantasies distort government and everything it touches. The overall impression is how the growth of totalitarian Gleichschaltung (alignment) suppressed common sense and humane values in small increments until the frog was boiled. And of how the near universal desire for a quiet and orderly life can lead people into a ceding control to the tyrants.
    About the only cavil I have is Grunberger’s obvious reluctance to admit the good things that sometimes resulted from bad motives. For example, the concerts arranged for factory workers were prompted by a belief in the superiority of Aryan art, and had the aim of lifting the lower classes to the Aryan heights. The audience comments quoted show that the listeners liked the music and ignored the motivation for presenting it. But Grunberger is I think clearly correct when he suggests that the Germans’ pride in their culture was intricately mixed with a sense of its superiority, which made it easy for the Nazis to spread their cult.
     Recommended. ***

Lynn Truss on courtesy in speech and writing.

 

Lynn Truss Talk to the Hand (2005) Truss is seriously annoyed by rudeness. Not the rudeness of ignoring merely fashionable etiquette, but the rudeness of ignoring other people’s rights, especially the right to be treated with respect. Her reaction is to stay inside and bolt the door. Maybe escaping rudeness can make for a more peaceful life, but it will be lonely one.
Truss’s six reasons for staying inside are:
* Was That So Hard To Say? (about Please and Thank you)
* Why Am I The One Doing This? (about downloading customer service onto the customer, etc)
* My Bubble, My Rules (about being a good guest, among other things)
* The Universal Eff-Off Reflex
* Booing The Judges (about fake egalitarianism)
* Someone Else Will Clean It Up
Of course her remarks go beyond my simplistic summary phrases. She’s well worth reading, more than once, which I intend to do. ****

Lynn Truss. Eats, Shoots and Leaves (2003) Truss’s first book. Her defence of good punctuation has, I hope, done some good. But she doesn’t go far enough: Punctuation is the (inevitably inadequate) method for signalling syntactic structure. The title demonstrates this admirably. But Truss doesn’t follow through. She discusses the conventions very well, and provides wonderful examples of what happens when writers ignore them. But her explanations of the rationales are too often misleading. For example, her differentiation between ; : . These marks correspond to the subtle signals in speech that there’s more to come, with some hint as to how it’s related to what’s just been said. The apostrophe is not a punctuation mark, but a spelling mark, as are the diacritic and the hyphen.

      I guess I want more conceptual rigour. But that’s nit-picking. Truss has done us all a service, and she’s done it with grace, humour, and nuanced awareness of how we differ in our pointing preferences. Buy this book, follow its advice, and read it at least once a year. ****