After Dark: Fictional Elections – Blackadder with William Pitt the Younger (Simon Osborne)
We are stepping into the world of satire with the classic BBC comedy Blackadder. In one of its sharpest episodes, ‘Dish and Dishonesty’ we’re taken to the so-called Dunny-on-the-Wold by-election — a contest for a “rotten borough” so small it has only one voter… and even he’s dead.
Our guest for this episode will be none other than William Pitt the Younger, himself. Played by Simon Osborne in the Blackadder episode he will give his insights into the election and what went wrong for his part and whether he should have had a cunning plan!
In true Blackadder fashion, Edmund Blackadder seizes the opportunity to parachute his servant Baldrick into Parliament, manipulating the rules of the system with ruthless cunning. What follows is a hilarious but biting parody of the unreformed British electoral system, showing just how absurd, and how open to abuse, those pocket boroughs really were before the great parliamentary reforms of the 19th century.
