BLACKADDER GOES FORTH TURNS 33. HOW IS IT 33?! AND HOW DID THEY COME UP WITH THAT ENDING?

Ending a TV show is hard. If you believe the internet, the greatest writers in television history have “failed” at ending their own shows. At the same time, when a beloved TV series not only sticks the ending, as Blackadder did in its final episode, but sticks it with such authority, then the celebrations go on for decades. But here’s the thing with the Blackadder ending: it nearly didn’t happen.

What follows is a lean history of events leading up to the final edit and aftermath. 

The Background

The first season of Blackadder was broadcast in 1983 and set in 1485. It was called The Black Adder and was written by Richard Curtis and Blackadder himself, Rowan Atkinson. The dynamic didn’t quite work. Writer Ben Elton hadn’t come on board and the relationship between Blackadder and Baldrick was a little different. In fact, was Blackadder dumber than Baldrick in season 1?

Three years later, the BBC made a second series, Blackadder II, for half the money. Elton was brought on to partner Curtis on the writing and the show was set in Elizabethan times. The character of Blackadder was rebooted as a shrewd schemer, forever trying to impress Queenie (Miranda Richardson). It was a massive success. 

By the time they got to the Regency-set Blackadder the Third, in which Blackadder was a butler to Prince George (Hugh Laurie at his best), the formula of having Blackadder and his dogsbody, Baldrick, subservient to some idiot nobleperson was well-established.  As Blackadder says: “Toffs at the top, plebs at the bottom, and me in the middle making a fat pile of cash.”

In season four, set in the trenches of World War I, Captain Edmund Blackadder was focused less on scheming for money, power and influence, and more on escaping the War with body intact. 

Going to War

“I think it was Ben’s idea to do the first world war,” says Sir Tony Robinson, who played Baldrick. “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 piss out of those who died, but the madness that led to those people dying.’”

Everybody Argued

Robinson said the problem with having a cast full of writers on the show - like Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Rowan Atkinson - was they constantly wanted to rewrite the script. He said: “Richard Curtis and Ben Elton felt we were unilaterally altering the script for the worse. By the end, they felt we’d run away with it."

But director Richard Boden, who joined the show for Blackadder’s Christmas Carol and Blackadder Goes Forth, thought the cast rewrites actually added value.

“One thing I did find out early on was there was a lot of discussion and talking about, ‘Could we make that word funnier?’” he said. “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.”

And it was this kind of scrutiny that Robinson thought would kill the show. 

“There were a lot of creative tensions around by that time,” he said. “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.”

The Final Episode

The final episode, Goodbyeee, saw Captain Blackadder (Atkinson), Lieutenant George (Laurie), Captain Darling (Tim McInnerny) and Private Baldrick (Tony Robinson) going over the top into No Man’s Land.

But don’t worry – there were jokes. Like the time Blackadder comes to grips with the seriousness of the situation:

“This is…a  large crisis. In fact, if you’ve got a moment, it’s a 12-storey crisis with a magnificent entrance hall, carpeting throughout, 24-hour portage, and an enormous sign on the roof, saying ‘This Is A Large Crisis’.”

He then puts underpants on his head, sticks pencils up his nose and pretends to be mad in a bid to escape involvement, cleverly deploying the occasional use of the word ‘wooble’. The plan fails. As Blackadder himself later notes: “Who would have noticed another madman around here?”

Baldrick meanwhile recites his own war poem, The German Guns: ‘Boom, boom, boom, boom…’

There’s even an attempt to explain the origins of the war –

Baldrick: ‘I heard that it started when a bloke called Archie Duke shot an ostrich ’cause he was hungry.’ Blackadder: ‘I think you mean it started when the Archduke of Austro-Hungary got shot.’

The Ending

It has since been voted one of the greatest TV moments of all time.

The original intention was to show the cast gunned down and end, as previous seasons had, with their deaths. But a combination of factors meant that the footage of the final scene was so bad, it was almost unusable. 

“When we got to the set, the scenery wasn’t finished and we didn’t have time to do proper rehearsal,” says Robinson. “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.’”

But director Boden and editor Chris Wadsworth decided to slow down the footage as the soldiers charged forward, then fade out 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.”

Two Points of Order

In the scripted final scene, which they shot, Blackadder only feigned death. After the bullets, he gets up and sneaks away, leaving his fallen comrades behind. This version of the final scene is available on the remastered DVD collection as part of the documentary Blackadder Rides Again. 

What wasn’t filmed was a further epilogue, featuring Blackadder as an old man and grandfather who had survived the war.

The Future

Blackadder’s creators and cast have often teased the idea of a fifth season. “I do think a new series of Blackadder is in the cards,” Robinson said. “I have spoken to virtually all the cast about this now. The only problem is Hugh’s fee. He’s a huge star now—or so he’d like to think.”

Meanwhile, Atkinson once shared what a fifth season might have looked like. "There was a plan 20 years ago that got nowhere which was called Redadder, which I quite liked,” he said. “It was set in Russia in 1917 and Blackadder and Baldrick were working for the Tsar. They had blue stripes around their caps and then the Revolution happened. And after the Revolution they are in exactly the same office and they have red caps. And it was quite a good idea and it was filmic in scale."

But Some People Are Happy It’s All Over

Says director Richard Boden: “There had been lots of chat about, ‘What if we did another series? Could it be the jazz age? Or the Sixties as a rock band as something like that?’ That died down. I’m personally very pleased that they didn’t. You wouldn’t have been able to top that one.”