Something wrong, Mr. B?
Oh, something's always wrong, Balders. The fact that I'm not a millionaire aristocrat with the sexual capacity of a rutting rhino is a constant niggle! But today, something's even wronger: that globulous fraud, Dr. Johnson, is coming to tea.
I thought he was the cleverest man in England.
Baldrick, I'd bump into cleverer people at a lodge meeting of the Guild of Village Idiots.
That’s not what you said when you sent him your navel.
Novel, Baldrick, not navel. I sent him my novel.
Well, novel or navel, it sounds a bit like a bag of grapefruits to me.
The phrase, Baldrick, is “a case of sour grapes,” and yes, it bloody well is! I mean, he might at least have written back, but no, nothing! Not even a "Dear Gertrude Perkins, thank you for your book, get stuffed, Samuel Johnson"!
Gertrude Perkins?
Yes, I gave myself a female pseudonym. Everybody's doing it these days: Mrs. Radcliffe, Jane Austen...
What, Jane Austen's a man?!
Of course! A huge Yorkshireman with a beard like a rhododendron bush!
Oh, quite a small one, then?
Well, compared to Dorothy Wordsworth's, certainly. James Boswell is the only real woman writing at the moment, and that's just because she wants to get inside Johnson's britches.
Perhaps your book really isn't any good?
Oh, codswallop! It's taken me seven years, and it's perfect. Edmund: A Butler's Tale. A giant rollercoaster of a novel in 400 sizzling chapters. A searing indictment of domestic servitude in the eighteenth century, with some hot gypsies thrown in. My magnum opus, Baldrick. Everybody has one novel in them, and this is mine.
And this... [takes a small piece of paper out of his trousers] is mine. My "magnificent octopus".
[inspecting it] This is your novel, Baldrick?
Yeah, I can't stand long books.
[reading] "Once upon a time, there was a lovely little sausage called Baldrick, and it lived happily ever after."
It's semi-autobiographical.
And it's completely, utterly awful. Doctor Johnson will probably love it.
More from this episode
All quotes from this episode →More Blackadder quotes · These quotes come from Wikiquote's Blackadder pages and are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.