Monthly Archives: March 2008

Blackadder costumes go to the Angels

The BBC’s archive of coats, dresses and frilly shirts has been bought by Oscar-winning costume house Angels. It ends a period of uncertainty for the BBC costume department, which ceased trading in February after initial attempts to sell its collection failed.

More than one million items from shows such as Ashes To Ashes and Blackadder will be transferred to Angels’ HQ in Hendon, north London, from next week. Angels is the UK’s biggest supplier of costumes to the film and TV industry.

The family-run business has provided tunics to Star Wars, loincloths to Gladiator and ruffs to Elizabeth: The Golden Age. It won its first Oscar for costume design with Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet in 1948, and has picked up a further 29 Academy Awards. Among those were prizes for films such as Titanic, Gandhi, Memoirs of a Geisha and The English Patient.

‘Chuffed’

The BBC costume department began life on the third floor of Television Centre in west London as a store for the collars and cuffs worn by early TV presenters and newsreaders. Over the next 50 years, it grew into an operation hiring out 15,000 outfits a year, with a turnover of around £1.3 million.

Last year, the BBC announced it was to sell the department as part of a wide range of cuts at the corporation. However, an early bid – thought to be from prop hire company Superhire – fell through. The deal with Angels means that the archive of costumes will remain available for use by British film industry professionals and international productions in the UK.

The BBC’s collection of around 10,000 wigs has been sold separately to a new company formed by former employees of the costume department.

Chairman of Angels the Costumiers, Tim Angel, said he was “very excited” by the acquisition.

“I’ve been working in the costume business for 40 years and one of my first briefs was to try and get BBC work,” he said.

“So I’m quite chuffed we’ve managed to buy the stock, because it keeps it all together, and I think that’s important”.

Angels will also take on four staff from the BBC’s costume department to “provide continuity”. Around 20 staff worked in the department before it closed in February, and several have been made redundant. It will take about six weeks to transfer the costumes to Angels’ warehouses, which already contain six-and-a-half miles of costumes.

Blackadder star Rowan Atkinson to star as Fagin in the West End

Rowan Atkinson is to star as Fagin in the forthcoming West End stage production of Oliver!

The cast will also include the winners of the BBC show I’d Do Anything – one actress will play Nancy and three boys will take turns to play the lead role.

Blackadder star Atkinson, 53, said the role was a long-held ambition.

“In the 1980s I enjoyed doing a lot of West End theatre and since then have been distracted very much by Mr Bean and film-making,” he said.

“I had been thinking for some time about returning to the stage and the idea of the role of Fagin, which has long intrigued me.

“Some time ago I even played the role in a school production [so it] seemed like too good an opportunity to miss.”

’Perfect marriage’

Sir Cameron Mackintosh’s production of the Lionel Bart musical opens at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in December. It will feature a cast 100-strong cast.

Sir Cameron said he had been in discussions with Atkinson “on and off for many years”.

“To me this idea has always promised the perfect marriage of a brilliant mercurial role with a brilliant mercurial comic actor,” he added.

The 1994 London Palladium production of Oliver! played 1,366 performances over three years and made more than £40m at the box office.

Atkinson made his big-screen debut in 1983’s unofficial James Bond picture Never Say Never Again.

His other film credits include Johnny English, Four Weddings And A Funeral and Love, Actually.

Leeds plan to reunite Blackadder cast

It has been nearly 20 years since they starred in the classic TV sitcom, but now the cast of Blackadder Goes Forth could soon be reunited; by Leeds City Council.

It is inviting Rowan Atkinson and the rest of the Blackadder gang, including Tony Robinson who played his turnip-loving sidekick – to its garden exhibition at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show.

The garden design was inspired by the grounds of Talbot House, a rest centre for troops near Ypres in Belgium during the First World War.

Staff working on the entry at Shadwell’s Redhall Nursery recently realised that it includes a plant known as a black adder.

That provided the connection to the final series of Blackadder, set in the First World War and ending in tearjerking fashion as its soldier characters went ‘over the top’.

Other Blackadder actors receiving invitations are Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry, above, as well as writers Ben Elton and Richard Curtis.

Leeds’ 1,800 sq ft garden will be ferried to London by articulated trucks before going on display between May 20 and 24.