Tom Baker says 'no fun' Rowan Atkinson feared being upstaged while making 'Blackadder'

Tom Baker has said that Rowan Atkinson was anxious he’d be upstaged while the pair were filming his memorable cameo in Blackadder.

The Doctor Who star went as far as to say that a run-in with the actor made the experience far less fun than he’d hoped.

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Baker played the salty sea captain in the episode Potato, when Edmund, in the hope of displacing Sir Walter Raleigh as the new favourite of Queen Elizabeth, promises to sail the deadly Cape of Good Hope and win her hand in marriage.

So as part of a cunning plan, he hires Baker’s Captain Rum (‘You have a woman’s hand!’), a lunatic sailor with no legs, to take him, Percy and Baldrick to France, hide out, avoid the deadly Cape, and return victorious.

Baker’s performance is a comedy tour de force, but it was almost rendered far less interesting by Atkinson, so Baker claims.

“Rowan Atkinson was so anxious – he wasn’t very fun to work with,” Baker recalled to the Radio Times.

“He took me aside the first afternoon of recording and he said, ‘You know, Tom, I’m very experienced in this and the part you’re playing here, this sea captain, I think you’re actually doing too much. I think he should be as boring as you can make him.’

“So, we then had the final run-through, and I did this boring routine, and the producer came down and said, ‘What’s going on, are you ill?’ I said, ‘No, no, no, I’m just taking in the notes from your boss.’

“And he then said, ‘Tom, he does that every week. He gives those same notes to the visitors every week.’ Weird, isn’t it? A comic genius and yet he has these anxieties.”

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Baker made the comments in an interview conducted by David Walliams for the magazine, who proclaimed the episode, first broadcast in 1986, was ‘one of the funniest half-hours of comedy I have ever seen in my life’.

Concurring Baker added: “Oh, yes, it was an incredible performance. Some people were amazed I ever worked again.”