Blackadder the Third (TV Series)

Duel and Duality (1987)

Rowan Atkinson: Edmund Blackadder, butler to the Prince, McAdder

Photos 

Quotes 

• Blackadder : He's madder than Mad Jack McMad, the winner of last year's "Mr. Madman" competition.

• Baldrick : Well my cousin Bert Baldrick, Mr Gainsborough's butler's dogsbody, says that he's heard that all portraits look the same these days, 'cause they're painted to a romantic ideal rather than as a true depiction of the idiosycratic facial qualities of the person in question.

  Blackadder : [impressed]  Your cousin Bert obviously has a larger vocabulary than you do, Baldrick.

• Prince George : Please please. You've got to help me. I don't want to die. I've got so much to give. I want more time.

  Blackadder : A poignant plea sir. Enough to melt the stoniest of hearts. But the answer, I'm afraid, must remain: "You're going to die, fat pig."

  Prince George : Oh, wait, wait, wait. I'll give you everything.

  Blackadder : Everything?

  Prince George : Everything.

  Blackadder : The money, the castles, the jewelry?

  Prince George : Yes.

  Blackadder : The highly artistic but also highly illegal set of French lithographs?

  Prince George : Everything.

  Blackadder : The amusing clock where the little man comes out and drops his trousers every half hour?

  Prince George : Yes, yes, all right.

  Blackadder : Very well, I accept. 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. You're on.

  Prince George : Hurrah!

• Blackadder : Look, for God's sake, McAdder, you're not Rob Roy. You're a top kipper salesman with a reputable firm of Aberdeen fishmongers. Don't throw it all away. If you kill the Prince they'll just send the bailiffs round and arrest you.

• Blackadder : Don't even try to work it out Baldrick. Two people you know well have exchanged coats and now you don't know which is which.

• Blackadder : [reading from a letter]  Sir, prince or pauper, when a man soils a Wellington, he puts his foot in it. This is not a joke. I do not find my name remotely funny and people who do end up dead.

• Blackadder : I want to be remembered when I'm dead. I want books written about me. I want songs sung about me. And then hundreds of years from now I want episodes of my life to be played out weekly at half past nine by some great heroic actor of the age.

  Baldrick : Yeah, and I could be played by some tiny tit in a beard.

  Blackadder : Quite.

• Blackadder : When will the killing end?

  Wellington : You don't think I too dream of peace? You don't think I too yearn to end this damned dirty job we call soldiering?

  Blackadder : Frankly, No.

• Blackadder : Baldrick, does it have to be this way? Our valued friendship ending with me cutting you into long strips and telling the Prince that you walked over a very sharp cattle grid in an extremely heavy hat?

• Prince George : [the Prince has been shot]  I die! I hope men will say of me that I did duty by my country.

  Blackadder : I think that's pretty unlikely, sir. If I were you, I'd try for something a bit more realistic.

  Prince George : Like what?

  Blackadder : Ah, you hope that men will think of you as a bit of a thicky?

  Prince George : All right, I'll hope that.

• Blackadder : Ah, Mrs. Miggins. Am I to gather from your look of pie-eyed exhaustion and the globules of porridge hanging off the walls that my cousin McAdder has presented his credentials?

• Blackadder : One point, sir. I should, perhaps, warn you that while duelling I tend to put on my lucky wig and regimental accent.

  Wellington : That won't help you. It would take a homicidal maniac in a claymore and a kilt to get the better of me!

  Blackadder : Well that's handy.

• Mad McAdder, Cousin of Edmund Blackadder, Esq : I hear you have a cunning plan.

  Blackadder : I do, I do. I want you to take the place of the Prince Regent and kill the Duke of Wellington in a duel.

  Mad McAdder, Cousin of Edmund Blackadder, Esq : Aye, and what's in it for me?

  Blackadder : Enough cash to buy the Outer Hebrides. What do you think?

  Mad McAdder, Cousin of Edmund Blackadder, Esq : Fourteen shillings and six-pence? Well, it's tempting. But I've got an even better plan. Why don't I pretend to be the Duke of Wellington and kill the Prince of Wales in a duel? Then I could kill the King and be crowned with the ancient stone bonnet of McAdder.

• Prince George : It's like that story. "The Prince and the Porpoise."

  Blackadder : "and the Pauper," sir.

  Prince George : Ah yes. "The Prince and the Porpoise and the Pauper."

• Prince George : Ah, Blackadder! Notice anything unusual?

  Blackadder : Yes sir. It's 11:30 in the morning and you're moving about. Is the bed on fire?

• Edmund Blackadder, butler to the Prince : Sir, it may interest you to know that the Iron Duke has always let it be known that he will kill in cold blood anyone who takes sexual advantage of any of his relatives.

  The Prince Regent, their master : Yes, but Bignose Wellington is in Spain fighting the French! He'll never know!

  Edmund Blackadder, butler to the Prince : On the contrary, sir, Wellington triumphed six months ago.

  The Prince Regent, their master : [after a pause]  I'm dead.

  Edmund Blackadder, butler to the Prince : It would seem so, sir.

• [in reference to McAdder, Blackadder's Scottish cousin] 

  Baldrick : He's the spitting image of you.

  Blackadder : No, he's not! We're about as similar as two completely dis-similar things in a pod.

• Blackadder : Fortune vomits on my eiderdown once more.

• Prince George : Perhaps this disgusting fellow is some sort of blessing in disguise.

  Blackadder : If he is, it's a very good disguise.

  Prince George : After all, did the Lord not send Moses a lowly earthworm to comfort him in his torment?

  Blackadder : Nope.

  Prince George : Well, it's the sort of thing he might have done.

• Blackadder : I'm afraid my ambitions stretch slightly further than professional idiocy in West London.