A take on the Nativity story that never got beyond a draft

A script for a Blackadder take on the Nativity story that was never made ‘for fear it would cause too much offence’ is going under the hammer.

Richard Curtis started writing the episode with Ben Elton for a possible Christmas special in 1988, before abandoning it.

In Blackadder In Bethlehem, Rowan Atkinson’s title character would have been the innkeeper who turfs Tony Robison’s Baldrick out of his lodgings when Mary and Joseph arrive.

One scene in the script has them mulling a name for their newborn son, and thinking ‘Baldrick’ might work. Instead Joseph opts for ‘Jesu’ after mishearing a sneezed ‘atishoo’.

Another scene features talking turkey, learning it’s destined to be eaten as Baldrick plucks it.

In a note accompanying the unfinished 20-page script, Curtis notes: ‘It was begun in 1988 and then abandoned for fear it would cause too much offence.’

But another reason, he concedes, may be that ‘it’s a strange mix of Fawlty Towers and Life Of Briain’.

Instead he and Elton wrote Blackadder’s Christmas Carol.

However, in his recent memoir, Elton lamented that the Scrooge parody was ‘my least happy memory on the Adder,’ writing than he loved the script but ‘about 50 per cent of it had been fucked up [by changes] in the rehearsal room … It could have been so much better.’

Extract from the script were published in comedy historian  Jem Roberts’s 2012 book The True History of the Blackadder.

In his note Comic Relief co-founder Curtis says: ‘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 draft up for auction here in aid of the children’s education charity Theirworld – though you’ll need deep pockets as bidding currently stands at £10,000. 

The lot also includes a studio script – complete with handwritten notes – from filming of the Blackadder Goes Forth episode Corporal Punishment.

Published: 1 Dec 2025