Blackadder Goes Forth is the fourth series of the BBC sitcom Blackadder, written by Richard Curtis and Ben Elton, which aired from 28 September to 2 November 1989 on BBC1. The series placed the recurring characters of Blackadder, Baldrick, and George as British Army soldiers in a Flanders trench during World War I, and followed their various doomed attempts to escape from the trenches to avoid death under the misguided command of General Melchett. The series references famous people of the time and criticises the Army's leadership during the war, culminating in the ending of its final episode, in which the soldiers are ordered to carry out a lethal charge of enemy lines.
Plot
Blackadder Goes Forth is set in 1917 on the Western Front in the trenches of World War I. Captain Edmund Blackadder (Rowan Atkinson) is a professional soldier in the British Army who, until the outbreak of the Great War, has enjoyed a relatively danger-free existence fighting natives who were usually "two feet tall and armed with dried grass". The series thus chronicles Blackadder's attempts to escape the trenches through various schemes, most of which fail due to bad fortune, misunderstandings and the general incompetence of his comrades. The aforementioned comrades are his second-in-command, idealistic upper-class Edwardian twit Lieutenant George St Barleigh (Hugh Laurie) and their profoundly stupid but dogged batman Private S. Baldrick (Tony Robinson).
More than the Germans, who are generally unseen, Blackadder's nemesis come in the form of his superior, the eccentric General Melchett (Stephen Fry) who rallies his troops from a château from the front, and Melchett's bureaucratic assistant, Captain Kevin Darling (Tim McInnerny). Despite the two being of equal rank, Blackadder treats Darling with contempt – while the former is on the front line, the latter is "folding the general's pyjamas".
In "Private Plane", after receiving word that Blackadder and Baldrick may have been killed when shot down over German lines, Melchett tries to cheer George up by showing him a life-size model (measuring seventeen square feet) of land recaptured by the British, a commentary on the high human cost and small physical gains achieved by attacks in the middle years of the war. Later in the same episode, Blackadder describes the Great War as "a war which would be a damn sight simpler if we just stayed in England and shot 50,000 of our own men a week".
Field Marshal Douglas Haig, whose orders are alleged to have resulted in hundreds of thousands of British deaths at the battles of Passchendaele and the Somme, is continually referenced. Blackadder himself describes Haig's attempts at an advance as no more than "another gargantuan effort to move his drinks cabinet six inches closer to Berlin" and, when asked by Melchett for suggestions to improve the troops' morale, jokingly suggests Haig's resignation and suicide. In "Goodbyeee", a scene parodies Haig's professional abilities by depicting the field marshal (portrayed by Geoffrey Palmer) playing with toy soldiers, which he sweeps nonchalantly from trench to trench and then into a rubbish bin, while listening to Blackadder's plea to get out of the big push on the telephone.
In the fifth episode "General Hospital", the anti-German sentiment in Britain during the war is repeatedly referenced. General Melchett orders Blackadder to find out who is behind the leak in top-secret battle plans and immediately, though erroneously, pins it on a "German spy" (who is later discovered to be one of their own). Blackadder interrogates Captain Darling, who vehemently denies being a spy and says that he is "as British as Queen Victoria", to which Blackadder sarcastically replies "So your father is German, you're half German and you married a German?". Blackadder's retort references the fact that Victoria was a member of the House of Hanover and that her husband Prince Albert was a prince from the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. In 1917, Victoria's grandson, King George V, changed the name of the royal house from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor in an effort to appease British nationalist feelings.
The final episode of this series, "Goodbyeee", although true to the series' usual comedy style through most of the preceding scenes, featured a non-comedic final scene, in which the main characters (except General Melchett) are finally sent over the top. Darling keeps some sense of hope, saying this may be the very last battle and history will write the conflict as "The Great War, 1914–1917!". Disregarding Baldrick's claim to have one last plan to save them from the impending doom, Blackadder delivers the final line:
To the sound of a slow, minimal piano version of the title theme, the four are seen in slow-motion, charging into the fog and smoke of no man's land, with gunfire and explosions all around. The script states that they "will not get far". The scene then fades into footage of a sunny poppy field and the sound of birdsong.
Episodes
The series aired for six episodes broadcast on BBC1 on Thursdays at 9.30pm between 28 September and 2 November 1989, ending nine days before Remembrance Day.
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Production
Writing and rehearsals
Writers Ben Elton and Richard Curtis wrote the scripts for Blackadder episodes separately using word processors and then swapped the disks containing the scripts for each other to add or remove jokes and dialogue. Curtis recalls that they stuck to a policy whereby if one removed a line for not being funny, then it was never put back.
During rehearsals, the script was exhaustively discussed and redrafted by the cast, with Richard Curtis having the final say on the content. Fry, Laurie and Atkinson were comic writers and performers themselves, and having worked together on previous series were not afraid to question the script and make suggestions. For example, Captain Darling was originally called Captain Cartwright and was renamed when Stephen Fry recalled a boy at his school with the surname Darling, who had found his own surname a constant embarrassment. Curtis recalls that he was initially reluctant to change the name, as he considered it a one-off joke. Twenty years on, Curtis recalled in the documentary Blackadder Rides Again that: "They would literally sit around for the entire time discussing the script... sometimes we would just say to them 'if you stood up and tried to act this script out, you would find out things about it.'" Ben Elton stated that by opening it up, they allowed the cast to question every aspect of the script.
Producer John Lloyd, speaking to The Times in 1989, hinted that it was the draining scripting and rehearsal process that led to the writers deciding not to make another series: