The sound of hooves is coming back over the glen… Oh yes, the Blackadder 40th anniversary may be in evidence on Channel Davy Gold and suchlike, in the Royal Mail stamps and Sir Tony’s new Cunningcast thing, but some of us have been building up to the 40th anniversary of the greatest sitcom in (and about) British History for nearly two years now!

Knowing that our little fellow Fred was due sometime in July, I spent the spring months of 2022 busily recording my 2012 magnificent octopus THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE BLACK ADDER in its entirety, worrying that recording audiobooks was going to be a great deal more complex with a screaming baby in the house… 

And now, the ultimate Blackadder history has finally joined The Frood, Fab Fools and The Clue Bible on Audible, the cruelly market-cornering and soulless Amazon-owned audiobook platform! That’s not to mention the first two volumes of Tales of Britain, though the sods have sat on Volume 3 for the best part of a year now. 

Download it HERE, and read all about it HERE:

The last few weeks of final error-checks and retakes, coming at the same time as the hugely fraught casting and prep for next month’s live Fab Fools show in Bristol have actually been arse-roastingly stressful for me, but hopefully once this epic historical tale floods into your ears you’ll feel it has all been worth it. 

Besides the book itself, in full, there’s the completely up-to-date ‘FRESH RESEARCH’ new chapter, which pays tribute to Dr The Rik and all those we have lost since 2012, and brings the story right up to today, to the Royal Mail stamps, Sir Tony’s Cunningcast and Comic Relief’s ‘Balderella’… but which also takes time to rail wildly at the Brexit-led degradation of the UK since the book originally hit shops, and the point-missing ‘Blackadder fans’ who use Edmund as a totem for right-wing bullshit. I tried to hold back, but British patriotism was always central to the original book, so it would be neglectful to ignore the obvious snake that our nation has slithered down in the last decade…

But hey, the audiobook also boasts extras including a fresh interview with me by producer Kris Dyer, and then the two of us try our best to perform Richard Curtis’ unmade, unfinished biblical Blackadder special, Blackadder In Bethlehem! With limited success. The whole package ends with selected samples from my original interviews with John Lloyd, Richard Curtis, Ben Elton, Miriam Margolyes and Brian Blessed!

No true Blackadder fan would want to miss all that – or be so Scroogey as to not give the audiobook a fulsome five-star review at the end, naturally. Plenty of good feedback from good people is going to be very much appreciated…

I’m ultimately glad that this new King Chip Windsor bloke they’ve got on the throne these days has so far resisted the temptation to demand any new Blackadder in his reign, despite being a major comedy fanboy… and yet, there’s still this feel that more Blackadder now seems more likely than it has been in a long, long time.

Until such time as a new Blackadder surfaces, then, TTHOTBA will remain the ultimate, all-time, fully up-to-date celebration of the Blackadder legacy. It’s always been my favourite of all my comedy history books, and we’ve bust a gut to adapt it to audio, just in time to land on the 40th anniversary of the very first warm late spring evening when a select discerning few of the British public first sat down in front of BBC1 at 9:25pm to learn of the dirty deeds contained within the Blackadder chronicles, so please do enjoy.

Now we just need to think of a way to adapt Soupy Twists to audio… while Fred is napping, I suppose… oh, and to release the official Stephen & Hugh story in paperback! But that will have to wait until another year…