I have a cunning plan...

I have been lent the entire box-set of Blackadder dvds, and last night we watched the first series.

For years, I have been telling everyone that I have only seen one Blackadder episode, but when I watched the first lot last night, I suddenly found that I had seen them all before. Christ knows when or how, as I haven't owned a T.V. since long before they were filmed, and I don't recall sitting down in a friend's house to watch television for any longer than a few minutes.

Now I think about it, I remember one particular bore who worked quite close to me at the time, who was obsessed with Blackadder to such an extent that he had the ability to memorise entire scripts at one sitting, and irritatingly spoke everyone's lines from the previous night's showing, long before the days of iPlayer.

I think it was he who put me off watching them - or I used to think that, before I discovered last night that I actually had.

I have also told everyone that I have only seen one episode of Mr Bean as well - the one where he extracts his own teeth at the dentist using a back-to-front x-ray - but I could well be wrong about that too.

I think that Mr Bean could have been one of our greatest foreign exports of the last 30 years or so, before the advent of Downton Abbey. There is no need for subtitles or dubbing, because there is no script - it's all slapstick of the most basic, Jaques Tati or Benny Hill sort.

There were parts when we both laughed out loud last night, and they were the usual dark-humour things involving severed heads and death. A welcome bit of light relief from severed heads and death.