Kitty Chrisp
Published December 2, 2025 4:17pm
Updated December 2, 2025 4:17pm
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Tony Robinson and Rowan Atkinson’s 1988 Christmas Carol wasn’t their initial plan (Picture: Don Smith/Radio Times/Getty Images)
Key Points
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- An unpublished Blackadder Christmas special script is up for sale for £10,000, deemed too offensive for TV in the 1980s
- The script features Blackadder as an innkeeper in Bethlehem interacting with Mary and Joseph
- Proceeds from the script’s sale will go to the children’s education charity Theirworld
A Blackadder script which never made it to screen because it was deemed ‘too offensive’ is on sale for £10,000.
The Rowan Atkinson-fronted sitcom, which ran for four seasons on BBC One in the 1980s, was due to have a different Christmas special in 1988 before Blackadder’s Christmas Carol came along.
Blackadder in Bethlehem, written and created by Richard Curtis, was scrapped ‘for fear it would cause too much offence’, the Love Actually writer explained on a typewritten page accompanying the script.
Instead, he and co-writer Ben Elton decided to work on a different idea, which became Blackadder’s Christmas Carol.
Richard admitted the script – which he dubbed ‘a strange mixture of Fawlty Towers and Life of Brian’ – was never even sent to Elton before it was abandoned.
Reflecting on the product of their festive special efforts in Blackadder’s Christmas Carol, Elton admitted in his memoir What Have I Done? it was his ‘least happy memory on the Adder’.
Blackadder in Bethlehem was the first iteration of their Christmas special for 1988 but it never made it (Picture: Tim Roney/Radio Times/Getty Images)
Richard Curtis thought it was perhaps too offensive to be aired (Picture: Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Global Goals)
While he loved his and Richard’s script, ‘about 50 per cent of it had been f***ed up in the rehearsal room … It could have been so much better.’
Blackadder in Bethlehem would, of course, have featured Johnny English actor Rowan as the titular character and Tony Robinson as Baldrick.
This time, Blackadder was a Basil Fawlty-esque innkeeper in Bethlehem who bosses around skivvy Baldwick, when a young couple – Mary and Joseph – knock on their door.
Turfed out of usual lodgings to accommodate the couple, Blackadder threatens to cut out Baldrick’s tongue with scissors in one moment, as shepherds, kings and a Roman -requesting strippers, lion tamers and magicians – descend on the inn.
One joke saw Joseph thinking of ‘Jesu’ as a first name for a boy after mishearing ’tishoo!’ from a sneezing Baldrick, while another scene featured a talking turkey learning it’s on the menu.
Richard and Rowan have discussed working together for one last time, but for now it’s TBC on that (Picture: Max Mumby/Indigo/Getty Images)
Whether the Christmas special was indeed too blasphemous for 1980s audiences, we will never know – but the eventual buyer of the original script can have fun imagining it on screen and stage.
The extract from the script was published in comedy historian Jem Roberts’s 2012 book The True History of the Blackadder.
In his note Four Weddings and a Funeral writer Richard said: ‘Now that the Blackadder series has definitely and definitively come to an end, there’s no harm in people reading it – if only to see just how far things used to improve before first draft and recording.’
The sale is in aid of children’s education charity Theirworld, and the buyer will also get handwritten notes from filming of famous episode Blackadder Goes Forth: Corporal Punishment.
Co-created by Rowan and Richard, historical comedy Blackadder became a cultural phenomenon, spawning 24 episodes over a six-year period as well as four specials, the last of which aired in 1999.
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Each series of the sitcom was set in different time periods, including the First World War and the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.
Last December in an interview with Metro Blackadder fans were fed some fresh hope by Richard, who suggested there could be a revival of some description in the works.
‘Well, oddly, Rowan and I have a plan for something we might do which would just be a bit of fun sometime in the next few years,’ he shared.
‘I’d love to work with Rowan one more time on something.’
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