Sir Tony ‘Baldrick’ Robinson says he has “spoken to virtually all the cast and a new series of Blackadder is ‘on the cards’ – as long as they can afford Hugh Laurie’s wages. Here are some the best quotes from the original four series’.
1. “You ride a horse rather less well than another horse would. Your brain would make a grain of sand look large and ungainly and the part of you that can’t be mentioned, I am reliably informed by women around the Court, wouldn’t be worth mentioning even if it could be.”
2. “Give the likes of Baldrick the vote and we’ll be back to cavorting druids, death by stoning and dung for dinner…”
3. “Baldrick, does it have to be this way? Our valued friendship ending with me cutting you up into strips and telling the prince that you walked over a very sharp cattle grid in an extremely heavy hat?”
4. “Field Marshal Haig is about to make yet another gargantuan effort to move his drinks cabinet six inches close to Berlin.”
5. “You find yourself amusing, Blackadder.” “I try not to fly in the face of public opinion.”
6. “Baldrick, believe me, eternity in the company of Beelzebub and all his hellish instruments of death will be a picnic compared to five minutes with me and this pencil if we can’t replace this dictionary.”
7. “Oh, God. Fortune vomits on my eiderdown once more.”
8. “You mean they [actors] actually rehearse? I thought they just got drunk, stuck on silly hats and trusted to luck.”
9. “Such activities are totally beyond my mother. My father only got anywhere with her because he told her it was a cure for diarrhoea.”
10 “I’ve no desire to hang around with a bunch of upper-class delinquents, do 20 minutes’ work and then spend the rest of the day loafing about in Paris drinking gallons of champagne and having dozens of moist, pink, highly experienced French peasant girls galloping up and down my – hang on…”
11. “They do say, Mrs M, that verbal insults hurt more than physical pain. They are, of course, wrong, as you will soon discover when I stick this toasting fork into your head.”
12. “I couldnt be more petrified if a wild Rhinoceros had just come home from a hard day at the swamp and found me wearing his pyjamas, smoking his cigars and in bed with his wife.”
13. “Bloody explorers, ponce off to Mumbo Jumbo land, come home with a tropical disease, a suntan and a bag of brown lumpy things, and Bob’s your uncle, everyone’s got a picture of them in the lavatory.
14. “Am I jumping the gun, Baldrick, or are the words ‘I have a cunning plan’ marching with ill-deserved confidence in the direction of this conversation?”
15. “To you, Baldrick, the Renaissance was something that just happened to other people, wasn’t it?”
16. “Congrats. Stop. Have discovered only person in world less funny than you. Stop. Name – Baldrick. Stop. PS. Please, please, please – stop.” (Telegram to Charlie Chaplin, after seeing Baldrick’s Chaplin impression)
17. “The path of my life is strewn with cowpats from the devil’s own satanic herd.”
18. “I think the phrase rhymes with Clucking Bell!”
19. “There hasn’t been a war run this badly since Olaf the hairy, King of all the Vikings, ordered 80,000 battle helmets with the horns on the inside.”
20. “If Baldrick served a meal at HQ he would be arrested for the biggest mass poisoning since Lucretia Borgia invited 500 friends for a Wine and Anthrax Party.”
21. “I will return before you can say ‘antidisestablishmentarianism’.”
22. “Worst idea since someone said ‘yeah let’s take this suspiciously large wooden horse into Troy, statues are all the rage this season’.”
23. “I’m sorry I’m late.” “No, don’t bother apologising. I’m sorry you’re alive.”
24. “Baldrick, you wouldn’t recognise a subtle plan if it painted itself purple and danced naked on a harpsicord singing ‘subtle plans are here again’.”
25. “A man may fight for many things. His country, his principles, his friends. The glistening tear on the cheek of a golden child. But personally, I’d mud-wrestle my own mother for a ton of cash, an amusing clock and a sack of French porn.”
26. “Baldrick, I want you to take this and go out and buy a turkey so large, you’d think its mother had been rogered by an omnibus. I’m going to have a party, and no one’s invited but me!”
27. “This place stinks like a pair of armoured trousers after the Hundred Years War. Baldrick, have you been eating dung again?”
28. “I don’t take kindly to insults.” “Funny, with a face like yours, I’d have thought you’d be used to it by now.”
29. “I’m as poor as a church mouse, that’s just had an enormous tax bill on the very day his wife ran off with another mouse, taking all the cheese.”
30. “I think I’ll write my tombstone – ‘Here lies Edmund Blackadder, and he’s bloody annoyed’.”
