History has known many great liars. Those who chronicle comedy shows are the worst offenders, and there is no better example of this than the Blackadder story. The received version of events, as documented by journalists, is that the first series had many shortcomings - too many characters, inept sound-mixing, badly-storyboarded and unnecessarily expensive location film inserts, not enough laughs per minute, and Rowan Atkinson's fey voice that you could never hear properly because everyone was too busy giggling at the inherent ridiculousness of Brian Blessed. These journalists will then tell you that the BBC hated it until Ben Elton came along and revamped the programme for its second series. They'll tell you that he insisted the whole thing be shot in the studio, that the dialogue should be made crisp and punchy, that Edmund should be a nasty, malevolent cynic rather than a cowardly loon. He made it better.

Balls. As anyone who has seen the original pilot will testify, the team were employing these techniques (attributed to Elton) from the very beginning.

The pilot (titled The Black Adder) was made in 1982, a few months after the final series of Not The Nine O'Clock News and a year before the resulting first Black Adder series in June 1983. Produced by Geoff Posner and written by Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson, the pilot has never to this day been broadcast, although it has been widely bootlegged. A Doctor Who convention allegedly once ran a print of it, and Curtis once gave away a copy of the script in a Comic Relief competition. But its existence has gone strangely under-publicised.

The pilot is set in Tudor England, and the action takes place in the same Elizabethan period as Blackadder II. However, 'The King' (John Sarident - that ridiculous bloke from Coronation Street) and 'The Queen' (Elspet Gray) are not referred to by name - although The Queen is clearly designed to resemble Elizabeth I - and both play their parts completely straight: the 're-writing of history' angle here being subtly implicit rather than explained with a voice-over.

However, Edmund despises his smug brother Henry (Robert Bathurst), especially since he has delegated to him the job of preparing the entertainments for his mother's birthday. In this, he is assisted by the dim-witted Percy (Tim McInnery) and the calm, wise Baldrick (Philip Fox).

The plot concerns the heroic McAngus (Alex Norton), returning with the spoils of slaughtering Spaniards, who is promptly given land hitherto belonging to Edmund. Edmund is furious, telling McAngus that he's been 'fighting the war against poverty while you were out collecting carpets'. Ignoring Baldrick's 'cunning plan' to blow McAngus' head off with a cannon, Edmund intends to murder McAngus but disguise it as part of a play entitled 'The Death Of The Scotsman'. Just before he can carry out this out, however, McAngus reveals that he has some letters proving that The Queen once slept with his father, pointing to the fact that Henry is illegitimate. After summoning the court and divulging this news, Edmund realises in mid-speech that the letters in actual fact point to his own illegitimacy. Attempting to cover this up, Edmund accuses McAngus of forging the letters, resulting in McAngus challenging Edmund to a duel.

This duel takes place, but is halted as The King pleads for mercy over his son. Edmund then agrees to hand over his land, and apologises on pain of death. Later that day, Edmund blows McAngus' head off with a canon.

The pilot is a strong one, and is (aside from its makeshift title sequence showing the Blackadder crest and little else) certainly broadcastable as an instalment in its own right. It has a solidity and simplicity which the series lacks - there are no awkward filmed inserts, and the dialogue is neat and lucid. The most obvious difference is in the character of Edmund himself, who - in common with the second, third and fourth series incarnations - has the demeanour of a level-headed outcast in a world full of idiots. His speech very much reflects this, speaking in essentially the same way as the Blackadder II voice. The entire programme is shot in the studio, on video, and in front of a live studio audience.

In common with the first series, it demands of the viewer a certain amount of historical knowledge, or at least the ability to digest history-book information very quickly. It is darker, less silly, and more politically-shaped than the later, lighter, Elton-penned episodes, but it has a playful, buoyant atmosphere to it - it seems diligently script-edited and rehearsed, and is performed with great confidence. There is also the sight of something rare in Blackadder: slapstick; both in the lengthy, Three Stooges-esque 'hanging' scene, and in the superbly-choreographed, and genuinely dangerous-looking, duel sequence.

It is, more to the point, a very controlled piece: Edmund's one-liners may not be side-splitting or stand up to transcription, but the sheer menace and contempt with which Atkinson delivers them ('And tell him to bring a bear this time!') imbues them with a delectable terror. At this time, Atkinson had the presence to say 'I'm going to castrate you' and sound like he meant it.

The Baldrick character, as in the first series, is clearly meant to be a 'Foole' in the Shakespearean sense - a character who is superficially insignificant and trivial, but who is blessed with a strange insight into events. Philip Fox plays the part very badly, but it's interesting that the episode makes extensive use of the phrase 'cunning plan', which was to be employed as a cloying, knowing-wink catchphrase in later series.

'Born To Be King', the second episode of the first series (produced by John Lloyd), broadcast on 22 June 1983, essentially carries a Medieval version of the same plot. Richard XII (Brian Blessed) is out slaughtering Turks, whilst McAngus (still played by Alex Norton) gets his hero's welcome at the same time as Edmund is preparing the celebrations for St Leonard's Day. By now, Edmund has lost his gruff voice and is a simpering ninny with pudding-bowl hair whose power is limited merely to his ineffectual bickering with Percy and Baldrick (now played by Tony Robinson). The episode uses passages of dialogue from the pilot (eg, the 'It's all Greek to me' confusions, and the one-liners like 'I wouldn't pass water over Scotland'), but they simply don't have the same weight. When, in the pilot, he had explained to McAngus that he wanted him to be in his play, the audience had guffawed in exactly the right places ('The play is called 'The Death Of The Scotsman',' he had explained, waiting for exactly the right number of beats before adding: 'You can play the Scotsman...'), but - in the actual episode - the scene doesn't seem to work. The slapstick has gone, and the episode is let down by its sheer awkwardness. The entire show, in common with all six episodes, was pre-recorded and edited before being shown to the audience on monitors: what little dialogue isn't drowned out by Howard Goodall's tinny synthesiser incidental music is made even more inaudible by the distant sound of dubbed chuckling.

Why the pilot has never been released on video (perhaps alongside the Comic Relief special 'The Cavalier Years' and any out-takes which survive) remains a mystery. One can conclude that the first series would have been much better if it had been shot in the same way, and that John Lloyd would have had less of a battle to get Blackadder II commissioned as a result. But while we're on the subject of re-writing history, here's one assertion which is completely incontestable: the way Atkinson in the pilot says 'You stupid bastard' is a million times more frightening, moving, poignant and fantastic than all that embarrassing, over-rated nonsense with a field of poppies.