In British television comedy history, Blackadder attracts almost the kind of reverence given to Monty Python. I don’t know for sure that it came from Dunedin, but at the time enraged Otago University students were making a lot of noise about the editing of their favourite TV programme. I remember the fetid smell, just as you’d expect a sweaty tuber wrapped in newspaper, having travelled 1,430km from Dunedin to Auckland, to smell. I didn’t know it was a turnip until the newspaper wrapping had been peeled back. It was sent as a form of protest against the editing of the comedy Blackadder (burning playgrounds hadn’t been thought of back then). The parcel arrived on my desk at TVNZ in Auckland where I was the TV One programmer. But when a rumour spread that several minutes of every episode were being edited out by TVNZ, things got weird.
When Blackadder arrived on New Zealand screens, the 80s British comedy quickly achieved cult status.
