S. Baldrick

Baldrick is Edmund Blackadder's long-suffering servant, a grubby, dim-witted dogsbody who trails his master through schemes and insults with dogged loyalty. He fetches, cooks turnip surprise, offers the occasional catastrophically bad idea, and absorbs abuse without complaint, forever hopeful that this time his cunning plan will actually work.

Tony Robinson plays stupidity as something almost noble, a blank sincerity that never curdles into pathos or cruelty. The scripts use him as the floor beneath which Blackadder's cruelty can't sink without seeming monstrous, and the running joke of his 'cunning plans' turns dimness into its own strange comic engine.