“You don’t think it points to the very clear lesson that bad guys have all the fun!” (Blackadder’s Christmas Carol)
Richard Curtis and Ben Elton decided against doing a fifth series after the broadcast of Blackadder Goes Forth, partly because of how hard it would be to top and partly out of frustration with the writer’s room structure that had developed around their scripts by the cast without them present. Also, it was the 90s and everyone could see it was time to move on. Within two months of the airing of “Goodbyeee” on New Year’s Day 1990, Rowan Atkinson debuted his Mr. Bean character, which would come to dominate his international celebrity status for the next three decades. Earlier in the year, Fry and Laurie broke out on their own by launching their sketch show A Bit of Fry & Laurie, with Jeeves and Wooster soon to follow. 1989 also saw Richard Curtis mark his movie screenwriting debut with The Tall Guy, Ben Elton published his first novel, and even Tony Robinson created his award-winning children’s show Maid Marian and Her Merry Men. The writing was on the wall for the end of Blackadder before the fourth series had even launched, and with its ending the general consensus agreed it was best to go out on that high note.
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Ultimately, that would not be the case: Blackadder would, very briefly, come back a decade after “Goodbyeee” with a one-off special that would expand the continuity of Blackadder into some of those regions of history it didn’t get the chance to explore. Although it wouldn’t be the first. In addition to the four series, there are three one-off television specials generally agreed to comprise the whole of the Blackadder canon: the Comic Relief short Blackadder: The Cavalier Years, the holiday special Blackadder’s Christmas Carol, and the Millennium celebratory “movie” Blackadder: Back and Forth. These are distinct from the various live-performed Blackadder routines, staged Blackadder-like sketches, or that time during a COVID-quarantined telethon Stephen Fry reprised Melchett on Zoom with Prince William, by virtue of them being written by Curtis and Elton to air on television and fully produced with real sets, costumes, and crew. Also, they are, for the most part, good –at least on par with the level of the show proper; while much of the rest of the Blackadder detritus (save perhaps for the “Shakespeare sketch” performed by Atkinson and Laurie) tended to be pale imitation of the kind of thing the show was able to do. Live shows especially are a poor fit for Blackadder -removed from the dressings of whatever era he belongs to, it just looks really awkward. I remember a bit for Comic Relief that brought in Atkinson and Robinson to the TV set in their third series costumes and it just didn’t work at all.
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But Blackadder: The Cavalier Years, which used the actual set from the show -though redressed for the sake of a new time period, did work. It aired in February of 1988 as part of the inaugural Red Nose Day for Richard Curtis’s charity telethon Comic Relief, which has persisted semi-annually to the present day. The sketches and specials made for Comic Relief over the years can vary wildly in quality, but The Cavalier Years remains one of the best -very representative of the show overall and working in some subtle charity-themed humour at the expense of one of Britain’s most noted “philanthropists”. Filmed mostly on the redressed basement set of the recent Blackadder the Third, the special takes place about a hundred and fifty years prior during the English Civil War, as Blackadder finds himself and Baldrick the only royalists between Oliver Cromwell, played by Warren Clarke, and King Charles I -played by Stephen Fry in a satirical impression of then Prince Charles. Looking for a little money, Baldrick of course takes the job of executioner with a dumb plan for faking the King’s beheading in what was probably an unused joke from “Head” in the second series. The novelty of the new time period carries the special a lot, Blackadder seen in a goatee for the first time, and the pacing is very efficient. Some of the Prince Charles bits don’t land anymore simply due to the public perception around the man evolving so much since then (it honestly seems a bit too kind to him) -though Fry’s voice is still funny. For being a special a little at a distance from the rest of the series, The Cavalier Years does have a couple really great jokes -particularly the one where Blackadder can’t be bothered to punch Baldrick and so just has him run right into his fist.
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1988 did not bring a new Blackadder series, but in its stead, the BBC commissioned a Christmas special, which gave Curtis and Elton a pretty golden opportunity to jump forward to the Victorian Age and try their hand at a parody of A Christmas Carol. And the central conceit they came upon was brilliantly obvious: just do the story in reverse, starting with a kind and generous Ebenezer Blackadder who is visited by the Spirit of Christmas and learns to be bad. This would be done not through journeys into his own past, present, and future but by seeing the Christmases experienced by his ancestors, thus giving Curtis and Elton the opportunity to enact short sketches themed around the second and third series (not the first, which is understandable though also a bit of a shame).
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It’s a very well-structured special too, as moustache-shop owner Blackadder and his sole employee Baldrick are introduced beset upon by several successive characters clearly exploiting Blackadder’s goodwill, eating up all his profits and Christmas gifts on a single night –the special teeing them up for an inevitable satisfying comeuppance. Among these are a spoiled giggling god-daughter played by former Doctor Who companion Nicola Bryant and a pair of well-wishers who look suspiciously like Queen Victoria (Miriam Margolyes) and Prince Albert (Jim Broadbent). Robbie Coltrane plays the Spirit of Christmas in a heavy coat and a bushy beard that I am ninety per cent confident is why a certain transphobe hand-picked him for a movie adaptation thirteen years later. The Spirit wandered into his home accidentally, and taking a breather shows Blackadder out of curiosity the scenes of just how bad his ancestors were.
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The scenes that follow are fun enough. Obviously the Blackadder II sequence has a few elephants in the room in the form of Blackadder and Baldrick’s clearly fake facial hair and the conspicuous absence of Percy –Tim McInnerny is the only major cast member not to appear in this special at all, as it came during that period where he had left the Blackadder series. The plot concerns Blackadder and Melchett competing over gifts for the Queen, while she goes back and forth on loving or hating Christmas, ending with Melchett being tricked into signing his own death warrant and Nursie letting out an amazing evil laugh. The Blackadder the Third bit, being from the more recent series, doesn’t have those awkward details and is I think a little bit funnier, as Blackadder schemes to trick the Prince into donating all his Christmas gifts to Baldrick masquerading as a poor old woman, only for an actual old woman collecting for charity to get them all instead. Also a completely unnecessary but very funny unconscious Lord Nelson (Philip Pope) is slumped in a chair all throughout.
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The silly pinnacle of the special though is Blackadder’s glimpse into the future, which the Spirit shows him two versions of: if he stays good or if he breaks bad. It’s the only instance of Blackadder going into science-fiction, and as expected it looks like a goofy Doctor Who knock-off. In the ‘bad’ future, Blackadder is a successful imperial starfleet commander with a speedo-wearing slave (Baldrick) serving a galactic empress (Elizabeth) and her Triple Husbandoid (Melchett, George, and Nursie) –whom he vanquishes and takes their place. In the ‘good’ future, Baldrick is the extremely incompetent commander with Blackadder the barely-dressed slave. His transformation complete, Ebenezer Blackadder dismisses the Spirit, punches out Baldrick and meanly blows off every one of those same characters who had manipulated him earlier, Victoria and Albert last of all –assuming they were just cosplayers essentially and thus losing out on the £50,000 they intended to award him as the most generous man in Britain.
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Blackadder’s Christmas Carol is way more fun and inventive than your standard Brit-com Christmas special. It gets to act as a little addendum to the previous two series whilst also being its own clever take on a classic story. Where it has probably aged the poorest is in the sheer number of fat jokes, even compared to the other series, that it compresses into one instalment -it’s a major gag around three of the five visitors Blackadder receives on either end of the episode, and the final bit with Queen Victoria feels especially mean-spirited, even by Blackadder standards. The end stinger allows it a certain leeway, but it still presents Blackadder in that very cool light I talked of previously. I still love the joke about Baldrick being incapable of spelling “Merry Christmas” with any of the correct letters.
“If history teaches us anything, it’s that the story of man is one long round of death and torture. And burning people as witches just because they’ve got a wart.” (Blackadder: Back and Forth)
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Christmas, or at least the holidays, reared their head again in the last Blackadder special a full eleven years later. And it was an odd beast. As stated earlier, everyone during the 90s had moved on to different avenues in their careers by the time Curtis and Elton were approached to make a special themed around the new millennium to be shown live at the newly built Millennium Dome on New Year’s Eve 1999. Successfully reuniting the cast and writers a full decade after the last episode had aired, Blackadder: Back and Forth, though only a little over a half-hour in length, felt like the Blackadder movie that never was. Its premise was of a grander scope and it was shot in a higher definition widescreen aspect ratio to feel more cinematic. It also had the greatest budget of any Blackadder production since the first series, and made far better use of it I think. Obviously, it was billed around the celebration of the new millennium, but it also was poised as one last grand finale for the Blackadder saga.
In what might be a break of one of the show’s cardinal rules, Back and Forth focuses on a modern-day Lord Blackadder entertaining his friends on New Year’s Eve -likewise contemporary incarnations of Melchett (the Archbishop of Canterbury), Darling (Archdeacon), George (a senior military official), and the Lady Elizabeth. At the back of his dining table in Blackadder Hall is a portrait of his First World War ancestor. As a con, Blackadder tricks his guests into thinking he’s built a time machine -that Baldrick actually constructed off of Leonardo Da Vinci’s schematics. Using various props he intends to win £10,000 off each of them -the only problem is that against the odds, the time machine actually works. And so, Blackadder and Baldrick play Doctor Who trying to get back to their own time while dropping in on various moments in British history along the way.
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Like in past series, this modern cast of Blackadder is introduced fully formed, and because Curtis and Elton were smart enough not to stay in the present long, Blackadder still gets to maintain his role as the contemporary mind commenting on history -and in several cases actively subverting it. He punches out William Shakespeare (who I’m sure Elton must have regretted never got to make an appearance in the second series), played here by special guest Colin Firth, and berates the “torture” he has inflicted on centuries-worth of schoolchildren -getting a dig in also at Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet. He tricks the Merry Men into killing a very Flashheart-like Robin Hood (Rik Mayall) -in what feels like beautiful revenge for Flashheart always upstaging Blackadder and getting the last laugh. And then there are a couple accidents like Baldrick killing the dinosaurs with a whiff of his pants and more drastically, Blackadder accidentally crushing the Duke of Wellington (Fry again) at the Battle of Waterloo.
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The special also facilitates one more return to the Elizabethan court, with a bit that is pretty much the same as in Blackadder’s Christmas Carol, but less good. It includes an awkward and unsavoury advertisement for Tesco’s (which was one of the special’s sponsors) and Elizabeth becoming addicted to mints. Likewise tiresome is the flood of gay stereotypes surrounding the French at Waterloo -though Simon Russell Beale’s camp Napoleon almost makes up for it. Blackadder’s mucking about in time also includes a brief glimpse at a Star Wars-like future and in maybe the pre-eminent historical set-piece of the special, a visit to the Roman era, where Centurion Blaccadius and Baldricus are soldiers at Hadrian’s Wall preparing to fend off a Scottish host. The big joke of this segment (apart from Fry speaking in Latin for a portion of it) is the receding skirts with increasing rank -with Georgius’s being much shorter than Blaccadius, and General Melchius’s being at thigh level.
Of course, disaster comes when Blackadder finally does make it back to the present and finds he has created a nightmare scenario. In addition to no legend of Robin Hood and Shakespeare being remembered as simply the inventor of the ballpoint pen, the Battle of Waterloo being lost now means that everything in Britain is now French: the currency is in Francs, people eat garlic pudding, and men perform ballet (scandalous!). It’s the kind of petty joke you just have to admire: in the grand scheme of British history, the worst possible outcome is that the French took over. So Blackadder has to quickly rush back through history to set everything right again.
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The special is in a single word ‘neat’. It’s neat to see Blackadder in new contexts the show wouldn’t have been able to provide him. It’s neat to see Blackadder play around with time travel, it’s neat to see him confront historical figures, and it’s neat to see all of this in a decently polished, cinematic atmosphere. But it isn’t as sharp as the series, certainly unfocused in both its arbitrary episodic nature and as it aspires towards some kind of unifying theme to British history that feels fairly inorganic and bland –and as I discussed before somewhat antithetical to the show’s general cynicism. By far the biggest issue (unless you only saw it in its initial broadcast at the Millennium Dome) is the canned laughter all throughout –which is some of the worst of its kind this side of Scooby-Doo. The opening titles also feature Blackadders inserted into various works of art through the ages, that is far less Blackadder in style and far more Mr. Bean –especially the one of his face over a reclining woman or pinching his nose next to Margaret Thatcher.
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Blackadder: Back and Forth ends in a curious way. After Blackadder and Baldrick go back and correct their mistakes –disappointingly through a mere minute-and-a-half montage, Blackadder is given one last cunning idea unconsciously by Melchett. He goes back to change history one more time so that on the New Years’ broadcast he is revealed now as King Edmund III, with his Queen Marian (Maid Marian, as seen earlier, played by Kate Moss), and Prime Minister Baldrick –puppet leader of a dissolved Parliament. An autocratic Britain is the happy ending for Blackadder. It’s disturbing but also poetic. Given how little attention The Black Adder has gotten in years since even by its creators, I wonder how much Curtis and Atkinson were conscious of this choice bringing the series full circle. Sure Blackadder became king at the end of the third series, but under a different name and with no heirs. This Blackadder achieved what his medieval ancestor set out to back in the very first episode. The Bastard was indeed now on the throne. In its way it does feel right.
“I think that the Blackadder represented a particular comedy consensus between a group of creative individuals at a particular time in their lives and it worked extremely well.” -Rowan Atkinson (Blackadder Rides Again)
And with Blackadder coming full circle, so too does this essay series. To paraphrase, a rather large, twelve-story essay series with a magnificent entrance hall, carpeting throughout, twenty-four-hour portage and, and an enormous sign on the roof saying ‘this is a large essay series’. After revisiting all of Blackadder, absorbing it more shrewdly, its peaks and valleys, cultural context, and datedness, how does it hold up as a series, a cultural artefact, and in my own estimation as at one time my favourite television show?
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It took some courage to do all this, to examine a thing I once loved uncritically through a new lens. Blackadder holds a special place in my nostalgic heart, and at the end of this journey I can say truthfully that that has not changed. Even amidst all my criticisms around the fractious nature of the first series, my generally more mixed impressions of the second, and how poorly “Private Plane” specifically in the fourth has aged –nothing has been quite so strong or consistently pronounced as to taint those personal feelings irrevocably. But I understand completely where others would be turned off by it. For as witty and charming and sophisticated as it might seem by its comedic style and areas of focus, the show often is, as Tony Robinson remarked in Blackadder Rides Again, “the comedy of adolescent boys trying to impress each other.” For its apparent elegance it does have an awful lot of ‘knob gags’. At the same time, I feel there’s truth to Stephen Fry’s statement in the same: “I don’t think there’d been anything that enjoyed history like that. The relationship between lords and ladies and dukes and peasants and the whole canopy and richness of what it is to come from our culture.” Certainly, I still admire Blackadder a great deal for its uniqueness as a period comedy –and it feels like a shame that the historical sitcom is such an untapped genre in western culture. It’s why I decided to give Ben Elton’s Upstart Crow a go, in spite of its own more modern issues –it plays in the same sandbox and I’d like to see more media do that. And yet the specificity of Blackadder’s structure is part of what keeps it so appealing to me. I imagine to myself the various other eras it might have tried –several of which were conceived by the cast and writers once upon a time, but are all best left theoretical only.
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In rewatching the documentary Blackadder Rides Again, which I initially viewed years ago as the fascinating behind the scenes story of the show, with the cast talking about it so warmly decades later, I notice more the tempered way with which the show is discussed. There is a lot of fondness for sure, but stress is also put on the confluence of lucky factors. There’s less talk of individual episodes or jokes and more on the process of making the show, which could be quite difficult. I certainly never picked up on before the tempestuous nature of the relationship between writers and cast –especially in the last two series where the cast essentially picked apart each script, adding dozens of new jokes or even characters and plot points where they felt appropriate. It was a far more complicated production than it always seemed, and Curtis and Elton mostly think of it simply with pride for its impact rather than a particular fondness for the making of the show itself. Though celebratory, there’s nuance to the memory of Blackadder, which I think also reflects my own feelings pretty aptly now.
I don’t think I can honestly call Blackadder my favourite series anymore. There are others that I love that are far more well-rounded in terms of genre, convention, and style, speaking with greater intelligence and artistry to the culture and world television is primed to reflect. But I also still love Blackadder, a show that is unequivocally the best of its kind, that still greatly entertains me and even perhaps asserts an influence on me still. It’s wider influence of course can’t be denied.
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As Atkinson noted, Blackadder was a product of a collective of talented people at a particular artistic peak of their lives -but it’s important to note that doesn’t just extend to the writers and main cast. Every below-the-line crew member did remarkable work on the show, and especially those in charge of the hairstyling and costumes -way more elaborate on this show than on most other sitcoms, and seemingly quite period appropriate. I haven’t at all shouted out the great work of the directors on Blackadder: Martin Shardlow -who helmed the first series, Mandie Fletcher -director of the second, third, and The Cavalier Years, Richard Boden -director of Christmas Carol and the fourth series, and Paul Weiland -who took up duties on Back and Forth. And one of the most important figures in the Blackadder story is irrefutably producer John Lloyd, who played a crucial part in keeping the series on track, mediating between cast and writers, and contributing in small ways himself to the show’s writing and directing. He is a legendary producer in the world of British television and deserves the utmost credit for his work here.
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In 1983, Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson set out to make a sitcom unlike anything else on television, and while eventually they were forced to abandon some of their ambition for a more conventional production structure, Blackadder nevertheless remained a distinct and highly original work of 80s television comedy -and it has endured in part for that reason. Its way of blending modern sensibilities in humour and style with the aesthetics of history, encouraging (certainly in myself) a curiosity with British history in the process, quite smartly has rendered it both a product of its time and a thing that exists outside of it. That curious immortality alone is compelling. The last line of Blackadder media, sung in the end credits of Blackadder: Back and Forth is “he’s going to rule the world!” An ambitious statement, but Blackadder’s got the legacy to warrant it, and I’m sure more than a few cunning plans.
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