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Blackadder's two sidekicks - Baldrick and Percy - were retained as his servant and dumb friend respectively. Edmund would now be a regular face at Elizabeth's court, his favour changing haphazardly with the childlike whims of England's monarch. His new rival was Lord Melchett, the Lord Chamberlain, and completing the regular cast was the Queen's insane old nursemaid.
Curtis and Elton's collaboration on the scripts was achieved by use of the new-fangled medium of computer disc, with electronic drafts mailed back and forth between them. Each agreed that if the other cut a joke out for not being funny enough, it would not be reinstated. The decision to take a new tack on production was of immense benefit. "Let's forget the budget," said Elton. "Let's get into the studio and have two wooden cardboard sets, because the money's in Rowan's face. It gave us the opportunity to develop dialogue, and the actors an opportunity to do their facial gymnastics". The cunning plans glimpsed in the first series benefited from the extra discourse between characters. Of the resulting flavour from the two writers, Miranda Richardson commented in 1998: "It was the combination of, if you like, Ben the yobbo and Richard the scholar...That sort of anarchy is very English".
Unfortunately there was still another hurdle, as Elton explained in 2003: "It was just at the point when we'd finished the sixth script that Michael Grade, Controller of BBC1, cancelled The Black Adder. He took a look at [it], looked at what it cost, looked at the reaction it got, and said 'I'm not spending that on a sitcom. I don't care if it is Rowan Atkinson. I'm going to cancel it'." It transpired that what Grade did not know was that the reformatted series would be so much cheaper. Two scripts were hastily compiled and handed to Lloyd who, according to Elton, "ran to Michael Grade and said 'Look, I know exactly why you cancelled it, but we knew that too! That's why we've done Black-Adder II. This is the new thing. It's different. It costs half as much. It's three times as funny. You're gonna love it.' And to Michael Grade's great credit he read it and reinstated it."
As with the first series, the scripts continued their sideswipes at the work of William Shakespeare (who helped Queen Elizabeth with the title of her rather awful poem Edmund and whose comedies Blackadder considered so unfunny that Baldrick would laugh at them). In Head, Horatio's speech "May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest" from Hamlet Act V is adapted for Lady Farrow's gratitude to the Queen (and had been spoofed by Curtis before in The Foretelling from the first season). Bells included the greeting "Hail Edmund, Lord of Adders Black!" from the Wise Woman, which derived from the Witches "All hail Macbeth, hail to thee Thane of Glamis..." from Act I of Macbeth. The imprisoned Melchett in Chains bemoans his situation by corrupting Gloucester's line "As flies to wanton boys, are the gods. They kill us for their sport" from Act IV of King Lear. In Money, a solemn Percy misquotes one of the King's speeches - "For God's sake let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings" -from Richard II Act III, and the mad beggar, poor Tom, encountered in the same episode, was derived from the disguise adopted by the nobleman Edgar in Act IV of King Lear ("Poor Tom's a-cold"). From a different source, the William Greaves who died in 1563 with a spike up his bottom referred to in the same sequence was named after Curtis' neighbour, whom the writer had promised would be written into the script. This method of execution was the fate of King Edward II and featured in the work of Christopher Marlowe. Queen Elizabeth's legendary speech about facing the Armada at Tilbury in 1588 - "I may have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a King" - was reworked in Beer with reference to a concrete elephant.
The new scripts also included the first references to a character who would appear in subsequent years - Mrs Miggins, the bedridden owner of a local pie shop, who is mentioned in Bells, Potato and Money. The publicity material for the season indicated that the episodes took place in 1560, 1561, 1562, 1564, 1565 and 1566 (in real history, Elizabeth reigned from 1558 to 1603).
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