The silly BBC comedy went over the top with one of the most powerful scenes ever shown on British TV. Yet it almost ended in disaster.
In the final exchange of Blackadder Goes Forth, the Blackadder dynasty’s favourite recurring gag becomes something more powerful: both a punchline to the entire series and one final satirical shot at the “lions led by donkeys” madness of the First World War. “I have a plan, sir,” says Baldrick, as they prepare to climb out of the trenches and charge into German machinegun fire.
“A cunning and subtle one?” replies Blackadder, who’s spent most the episode with a pair of underpants on his head. “As cunning as a fox who’s just been appointed Professor of Cunning at Oxford University? I’m afraid it will have to wait. Whatever it was, I’m sure it was better than my plan to get out of this by pretending to be mad. I mean, who would have noticed another madman around here?”
That Blackadder – which celebrates its 40th anniversary on June 15 – would end with such poignancy is absolutely right. It is a rare comedy series that somehow got better with every series: sharper, wittier, and… well, more cunning. But the very final scene – the fateful “big push” and charge into no man’s land – was almost a disaster.
“When we got to the set the scenery wasn’t finished and we didn’t have time to do proper rehearsal,” says Sir Tony Robinson, who played Blackadder’s ever faithful companion Baldrick. “We just jumped up and charged across the polystyrene. The director went ‘bang bang bang’ and we fell on the floor like plucked carrots, and that was it. We thought, ‘Whatever are we going to do about this? It just isn’t going to work.’”
The final episode was first shown on November 2 1989. But 34 years later it’s still one of the great moments of British television – the dramatic equivalent of bayonet to the heart.
Blackadder had begun way back in medieval times – well, broadcast in 1983, but set in 1485 – with an uneven first series, The Black Adder, written by Richard Curtis and Blackadder himself Rowan Atkinson. Without the edge of Ben Elton’s writing (he wouldn’t join Curtis until Blackadder II) and the dynamic of the characters not yet established – in the first series it’s Blackadder who’s the imbecile and Baldrick who’s the brains of the outfit (though that’s not saying much) – the formula wasn’t quite there.
Even the cast and crew admit that it’s not up to scratch. “In the rehearsal and filming process we could always see what was wrong,” says Robinson. “Television is such a production line that you can’t halt it once it’s started. The best you can do is mitigate the worst bits, but there were some really good bits too.”
Three years later, the BBC agreed to make a second series, but for half the money. Set in Elizabethan times, Blackadder II reinvents the character as a shrewd schemer, forever trying to impress Queenie (the brilliant Miranda Richardson). The Regency-set Blackadder the Third, sharper still, saw Blackadder as butler to Prince George (a series-stealing performance from Hugh Laurie).
The Blackadder formula – with Blackadder and his dogsbody Baldrick subservient to some noble lunatic – was always about class, and the madness at either end of the ladder. “Toffs at the top, plebs at the bottom, and me in the middle making a fat pile of cash,” as Blackadder once said. But the First World War setting of the fourth series, which first aired on September 28, 1989, gave the familiar set-up a plunging, sobering depth.
For Captain Edmund Blackadder, his crafty schemes are no longer about money, power, and influence; escaping the trenches is a matter of life or being shot to pieces. Baldrick, the terminally stupid peasant becomes the honest Tommy. Hugh Laurie’s nice-but-dim George is recast as a public schoolboy – the kind sent off by well-to-do fathers to fight in the war – and naive to fate that awaits him. And the ruling class is personified by Stephen Fry’s General Melchett, a bleating, pile-ridden, walrus-faced loon, always thinking up plans (such as “Operation Certain Death”) to turn his fine body of men into fine bodies of men.
“I think it was Ben’s idea to do the first world war,” says Sir Tony Robinson. “It was a great idea but there was a nervousness about it because it meant we were making jokes about the suffering, and certainly there were people still around who were impacted by the carnage of the First World War. We felt the way not to offend them was to get it as right as we possibly could in terms of costumes, props, and moments in history, and at the end say very clearly, ‘We’re not taking the p––– out of those who died, but the madness that led to those people dying.’”
It’s still roaringly funny stuff, of course. The brilliance of Blackadder is the tightly crafted wordplay, with the beat and bounce of every syllable honed to perfection (often gags about animals and food get the biggest laughs, the best example being “the stickiest situation since Sticky the stick insect got stuck on a sticky bun”).
See also the simple innuendo of Captain Darling, played by Tim McInnerny, who twitches at the mere mention of his own name – “Darling, we’re leaving” – presumably caused by a lifetime of ridicule. By the fourth series, the cast was a formidable team. Watch either of the documentaries made on the series – The Whole Rotten Saga or Blackadder Rides Again – and you’ll see footage of the cast painstakingly pulling apart every single gag during script read-throughs.
“One thing I did find out early on was there was a lot of discussion and talking about, ‘Could we make that word funnier?’” remembers director Richard Boden, who joined the crew for Blackadder’s Christmas Carol and Blackadder Goes Forth. “Ben Elton said it would drive him nuts when they’d spend two hours debating if the word ‘gerbil’ was funnier than ‘vole’. Ben and Richard had already written it – they’d been through all this! But the actors only did it because they wanted it to be as good as it possibly could be.”
“We dissected every line,” says Robinson. “There were very few rehearsals. Most of time we sat around trying to work out the best formulation for every single gag. I think that’s what made it such an enduring piece of television.”
The series has some of entire saga’s very best moments: Speckled Jim, General Melchett’s prized carrier pigeon, shot and eaten by Blackadder (“The Flanders pigeon murderer!”); the return of Rik Mayall’s Lord Flasheart, reimagined as a famous fighter pilot who’s fuelled by raw testosterone and derring-do (“Captain Darling? The last person I called darling was pregnant 20 seconds later!”); and George’s drag act Georgina, with whom Melchett falls madly in love.
But the final episode, Goodbyeee, is undoubtedly the series’ finest moment. Stripped of almost all plot, other than Blackadder sticking some underpants on his head and two pencils up his nose to pretend he’s mad, the episode is just the characters stuck in the bunker and bantering. Baldrick takes a stab at war poetry – “Boom boom boom boom, boom boom boom” – and Blackadder explains to Baldrick and George how the war started (“It was too much effort not to have a war”). Plus, Darling’s coffee – well, mud, dandruff, and saliva (“Ahh, cappuccino”).
“Ben, Richard, and [producer] John Lloyd had always said their ambition was to write a situation comedy like they did in the Sixties, which is about claustrophobia,” says Robinson. “There’s always one person who has aspirations to take over the world but they’re stuck in a room with idiots – Hancock’s Half Hour is the perfect example of that, Steptoe is another very good example.
“One of the reason the trenches setting was so attractive is that is provided exactly that – a load of geezers sat around talking s––– while one of them is desperate to burst out of those confines. It came to be fulfilled in that last episode.”
But there’s much more beneath the smart wordplay: humanity, despair, British imperialism, and the futility or war are all covered. Heavy stuff for a studio sitcom.
In 2014, Michael Gove criticised the series for portraying the First World War as a “misbegotten shambles” – an idea he said was perpetuated by “left-wing academics all too happy to feed those myths”. But Sir Tony Robinson fired back at Gove. “Not to criticise the officers of the First World War seems absolutely foolish,” he says about Gove’s comments.
The notion of “lions led by donkeys”, that the generals and officers stood miles behind the as the soldiers were sent to their deaths, remains the popular consensus about WWI. In truth, a proportionately high number of British Army officers and generals were killed. And the British commanders, trained in fighting colonial wars (such as Mboto Gorge, where Blackadder fought kiwi fruit-armed Watutsi warriors), had to adapt, and by the end very successfully, to the first industrial-scale war, which saw unprecedented carnage and the introduction of new technology such as tanks.
“We have tended to underestimate is how difficult a job it was,” says Dr Jonathan Boff, history lecturer at the University of Birmingham and author of Haig’s Enemy and Winning and Losing on the Western Front. “They were looking after five million men, with 350,000-odd officers – of course there were a few duff officers among them. There were mistakes made. Some were culpably bad, stupid decisions made under difficult circumstances.
“The genius of Blackadder is that it’s truthful in its own terms. It talks to what we think we all know about the First World War, all these myths about ‘lions led by donkeys’ – trenches, mud, blood, endless poetry, all that kind of stuff. That is the perception because what we first learn about the First World War first comes through the war poets and English at school. There’s the worm’s eyes view that you get from people like Sassoon. It’s one man’s experiences – he can’t make any sense of it and war is futile. And then you’ve got the historian’s point of view, when one stands back with a more dispassionate view and sees there was some cause and effect at work, and perhaps it wasn’t all completely meaningless.”
The portrayal of the much-criticised Field Marshall Douglas Haig – seen in Blackadder (played by Geoffrey Palmer) sweeping men off a map of the Western Front, one of its most cutting moments – also plays into the lions led by donkeys myth.
“He saw the situation and was prepared to make the difficult decisions to resolve it,” says Dr Boff, who also tells me he uses Blackadder Goes Forth in lectures. “Haig understood what he was asking his men to do, he had the moral courage to do that. High casualties were a sad but inevitable consequence. Blackadder is a satire, it’s supposed to be funny, it’s supposed to be making a point, and possibly about the politics of the Eighties considering who was writing it. There could be a Haig-Thatcher analogue at work, at least subconsciously, in the minds of Ben Elton and co.”
But still, Blackadder’s commentary of the price of the war – the loss of millions of lives – has lost none of its power in 30 years. Blackadder characters had died before, of course – the entire cast is wiped out by master of disguise Prince Ludwig in Blackadder II, and the Prince Regent is shot dead in Blackadder the Third – but the final moments of Blackadder Goes Forth are all the more devastating for wanting the characters to escape the reality of the war. Blackadder is a conniving antihero; George is the last of the tiddly-winking leap-froggers; and Baldrick is too stupid to feel anything but affection for. But strangely, it’s the fate of Captain Darling that’s the most affecting.
“We debated long and hard about who should die,” says Robinson. “I think it was only during the last week and on Tim McInnerny’s insistence that Darling would have to go over the top.”
Sent to the frontline just minutes before the big push, McInnerny’s performance as Darling is masterfully composed, with that twitch now becoming more of a stiff upper lip. Though he’s been an oily squit of a man for most of the series, Darling is in fact just as cunning as Blackadder. He’s been avoiding the frontline by working as a pen-pushing blotter jotter and helping General Melchett with his dicky bow (and dicky bladder).
No longer Blackadder’s cartoonish nemesis, Darling becomes painfully human as he reveals a glimpse of the life that could have been, if he wasn’t about to be torn apart by machine guns – to go back to his job at Pratt & Sons, keep wicket for the Croydon Gentlemen, and marry Dorris. “Made a note in my diary on the way here,” Darling says. “Simply says, ‘Bugger.’”
Filming the episode, there were two studios: one for bunker scenes and another for no man’s land. With just 10 minutes to go, they had to charge over to second set and rush through the sequence.
“We had to finish at 10pm because if you didn’t, the switches went,” says Robinson. “We overran doing the other scenes and at ten to ten the producer told us we absolutely had to stop and go to the other studio. We didn’t think it was going to work… what you see in that final scene was crafted in post production by the director, producer, and editor who worked out ways of making that scene’s shortcomings absolutely memorable. It was astonishing. That was just telly craft.”
The original footage of them clumping over the rackety set was nearly a dreary end to the series. But director Richard Boden and editor Chris Wadsworth chanced upon an ingenious idea, slowing down both the footage and sound as the soldiers charged forward, then fading to black and white to the sound of a note-by-note piano rendition of the Blackadder theme, before one final heart breaking image – the bright-but-eerie poppy fields.
“When we were editing, we got to that scene at about 10 at night,” remembers Boden. “We were about to put on the end titles and I said, ‘Please let me try something.’ I ran up to the news floor and into their library and found someone still working. I asked if they had any images of the poppy fields from northern France. The other big thing was that I felt strongly that we couldn’t put the end titles on, and that big marching band music. That would pull the rug from under a very sombre moment. There was a lot of debate about that – I had to go to the head of comedy, the controller of BBC One because we wouldn’t be giving anyone a credit at the end.”
There’s perhaps an added poignancy to the final scenes because the cast and writers realised this would be Blackadder’s last episode (if you don’t count the 1999 Blackadder: Back & Forth movie, rightly scrubbed from the history books).
“There had been lots of chat in between rehearsals or whatever, about, ‘What if we did another series? Could it be the jazz age? Or the Sixties as a rock band as something like that?’” says Boden. “That died down, and every now again you hear are they going to get back together. I’m personally very pleased that they didn’t. You wouldn’t have been able to top that one.”
“I thought it probably would be the end,” says Tony Robinson. “There were a lot of creative tensions around by that time. Richard and Ben actually wrote the damn thing and yet there was such a lot of changing by the rest of us going on during the course of the episodes. They both went on to have great careers without the intervention of me, Stephen, Hugh, and Rowan… and we all wanted to have our own careers without having to argue with them! It worked out very well and I think we left on a high, it was a really nice place to end.”
Indeed, as both a commentary on the tragedy of war – surely as moving as any piece of drama film or TV made on the subject – and a finale to the Blackadder saga, it’s a masterful episode. As Blackadder himself might say: a cunning and subtle one.
The 10 greatest Blackadder moments
The final push
Proof that the best comedy is able to handle tragedy – the final episode of Blackadder Goes Forth saw the main characters go over the top and to their deaths. The shot of a First World War war zone faded into a field of poppies – one of the greatest ever conclusions to a TV series ever.
Blackadder gets court martialled
In times of desperation during Blackadder Goes Forth, Captain Blackadder kills a carrier pigeon, not realising it was Speckled Jim, General Melchett’s bird and “only childhood friend”.
Lord Flashheart crashes the wedding
Rick Mayall was always brilliant as the flamboyant Tudor ‘lad’ Lord Flashheart, but his ridiculous portrayal of the Tudor aristocrat’s testosterone-fuelled antics in Bells, Blackadder II, is one of his best moments
C is for Sea
Doctor Johnson, Baldrick’s attempt to define a dog, a bizarre dream sequence: this nautical farce in the middle of Blackadder the Third has many excellent aspects.
The Scottish play
In Blackadder the Third, Edmund is driven to distraction by two superstitious, fruity actors (played by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Connor) who burst into a bonkers ritual every time a certain play by Shakespeare is mentioned: “Hot potato, orchestra stalls, Puck will make amends!”
Never ignore a pooh-pooh
In Blackadder Goes Forth, General Melchett is dispensing some hard-won advice, about never underestimating someone’s unfair dismissal of an idea, or pooh-poohing a pooh-pooh. Of course, it’s all terribly silly, but that doesn’t make it any less hilarious.
Blackadder gets drunk
...in 42 seconds. The notoriously lightweight Edmund attempts to balance both a drinking competition and a sedate dinner with his puritanical, and very wealthy, aunt and uncle. The Drinking Party, who resemble a stag do, wins out – at the expense of Blackadder’s inheritance and the viewer’s amusement.
Edmund’s seafaring failure
Edmund becomes an explorer in an attempt to outdo his rival for Queenie’s affections, Sir Francis Drake. To do so, he hires Captain Redbeard Rum, who has no legs, and the pair of them proceed to get lost near Australia – bringing the boomerang back to the UK in the process.
That infernal drag act
General Meltchett had an eye for the ladies –but things got tricky when he fell for Gorgeous Georgina (actually Hugh Laurie’s George in drag). When beautiful Bob (a girl masquerading as a boy) joined the cabaret act and performed as a woman, a disgusted Meltchett thought it was the end of civilisation.
The Baby Eating Bishop of Bath and Wells
The grotesque and corrupt Bishop (Ronald Lacy) is successfully blackmailed after theatening to do a Chaucerian act to Edmund. One brilliantly dished up moment in the roundly amusing episode, Money, in Blackadder II.