The New Zealand-born co-creator of 'Blackadder', Richard Curtis, says he thinks the series is still popular because its subject matter was already out of date when it was made.

The New Zealand-born co-creator of 'Blackadder', Richard Curtis, says he thinks the series is still popular because its subject matter was already out of date when it was made.

Richard Curtis never expected it to turn out like this - that an idea of toying with the comedy and sheer idiocy of pivotal moments in British history would end up a whole generation later as a hefty, multi-volume resource for teachers.

Blackadder, the most successful historical television sitcom yet conceived, is more than a quarter of a century old.

When the blundering Edmund Blackadder, with his absurd pointy shoes, basin haircut and equestrian ineptitude, made his first appearance in 1983 (inadvertently decapitating Richard III at Bosworth Field), Margaret Thatcher was crushing Michael Foot at the polls in real life.

Between mouthfuls of porridge, Curtis, 52, offers his theory on the lasting appeal of the show, which he co-created with its star, Rowan Atkinson.

"It seems to have been a trick of fate that something historical finds it easier to last, because it was out of date when it was made," he says.

Since that first medieval incarnation of Edmund, Atkinson has embodied successive generations of the Blackadder dynasty, from the Elizabethan and Regency periods and then, perhaps most poignantly, as an army officer in the First World War trenches. That series - Blackadder Goes Forth - was made in 1989, since when Curtis (who co-wrote the last three series with Ben Elton), has gone on to become a successful screenwriter and film director.

While box-office favourites such as Four Weddings And A Funeral, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones's Diary and Love Actually flowed from Curtis's pen, he was also writing another hit television comedy, The Vicar Of Dibley.

As his working relationship with Atkinson, a friend from their days at Oxford University, evolved into another endearingly uncoordinated comic icon, Mr Bean, Blackadder appeared to have been consigned to the TV archives - yet it had not gone away.

When Curtis recently returned to Harrow School, where he was once head boy, he was pleasantly surprised to find that the pupils, without exception, asked him not about his blockbusting cinematic romcoms but about a geek of ages past.

"They didn't give a damn about the movies," he says.

It is not only at Harrow either. "I think [Blackadder] is taught in schools, definitely the First World War series is. I think teaching might be a slightly rich interpretation of it; I think it is background atmosphere. I've got a feeling that when they do the Regency or the Elizabethan period, at some point after exams or a particularly hard prep, the DVDs go on," he says.