The True History of the Blackadder (46 page)

Putting his anger to good use, this gave Curtis the inspiration to see just what the Bard did have to put up with from the Tudor equivalent of Mad Jack Lloyd. Laurie was happy to drop the inbred toff act to take on the more naturalistic role of a morose, arrogant ‘Shakey’, while Atkinson, still sporting his World War I tache, made very little effort to disassociate his character from the Blackadder family.

Between Atkinson’s arch, anachronistic characterisation and the sitcom’s preoccupation with Shakespeare, it’s little wonder that the sketch was taken as a lost Blackadder Chronicle by everyone who saw it until Curtis specifically confirmed that it was completely unconnected.
^fn11
That
Hysteria II
came right in the middle of the biggest burst of
Blackadder
creativity made erroneous links inevitable, especially when the sketch had to be hurriedly presaged by Stephen, lager can still in hand, due to his ‘ex-friends’ deciding that ‘it would be amusing to get pissed instead of going on and doing a carefully rehearsed sketch’. The
Hysteria
benefits would continue to be an occasion for
Blackadder
congregation, with the final show in 1991 featuring Rowan and Hugh reuniting to perform sophisticated safe-sex vignettes (alongside Helen Atkinson-Wood’s boyfriend at the time, Craig Ferguson, and the sole female performer, TV presenter Emma Freud, who was by that stage Richard Curtis’s girlfriend, and remains so to this day).

More reunions were in store the Sunday following
Hysteria II
, as Miranda Richardson resurfaced to take her place in Blackadder’s War, as Nurse Mary Fletcher-Brown. In yet another echo from the past, for her third incarnation Richardson was to play a fluffy funbundle of a lass who ultimately reveals a darker side to her personality, more palatable to the Captain. The big difference in ‘General Hospital’, however, was that for the first recorded time, Edmund got the girl – only to immediately lose her again, thanks to his own surfeit of cunning. Bill Wallis also made his final appearance in the show, as the unconvincing spy Brigadier Smith – the second red herring in the test case for Operation Winkle.

Despite the deliberate limitations of the trench warfare set-up, then,
Blackadder Goes Forth
managed to expand and enrich existing
Blackadder
lore, from the field hospital to up-diddly-up in the sky with
the 20-Minuters.
^fn12
But, as Curtis acknowledges, there was only one place the series was ever going to end up. ‘It was the condition on which we wrote the series. In a way it had been the arrow shot off at the beginning, that it was always going to land in No Man’s Land … In a way, that set us free to be as disrespectful as we wanted to be at the beginning, because we were going to be respectful, or at least truthful, at the end.’ And McInnerny recalls the looming threat of the final big push: ‘The world-weariness of Blackadder was something kind of extraordinary. He was beaten down, he wasn’t necessarily going to win every time, and knew he wasn’t. Which gave it a kind of darker edge, I think … The extraordinary thing was that there really was only one plot, which was “how can we get out of here?” I mean, every episode. But at the back of your mind, you think, “They can’t get out of it every week, they’re not going to be able to get out of it … Oh, they’re not going to get out of it.”’

Good Luck, Everyone

Goes Forth
contained two musical motifs – ‘A Wand’ring Minstrel’, with echoes of
Blackadders
past, and Weston & Lee’s 1915 hit ‘Goodbyeee’, the full lyrics of which, telling the tale of ‘Brother Bertie’ on his way to the front, not only have a surprisingly biting irony, but could almost have been written for Lt George himself to lustily and brainlessly sing at an annoyingly loud volume.

Goodbye-ee, Goodbye-ee,
Wipe the tear, baby dear, from your eye-ee
Tho’ it’s hard to part I know,
I’ll be tickled to death to go …
Bonsoir, old thing, cheerio, chin, chin,
Nah-poo, toodle-oo, Goodbye-ee!

As a valedictory theme for the Black Adder’s last reincarnation, swapping the military rank-related episode titles for ‘Goodbyeee’ was an inspired move, leaving little doubt in the minds of those who read the synopsis for the conclusion in the TV listings before settling down to watch on Thursday 2 November 1989, several days off Remembrance Day, that this was the end of the road for the anti-hero. And yet, as Blackadder’s last desperate escape plan unfurled (pretending to be mad by putting two pencils up his nose and his underpants on his head), there was still hope that the scheming cad could somehow pull through.

For the cast and crew, however, the knowledge that such hope was fruitless made for a uniquely difficult week of recording. Laurie recalls, ‘It had as its backdrop the greatest tragedy of modern man, and that gave the thing a poignancy and a texture that few other things I’ve been involved in have had, or could have had. We had various histories of the First World War lying about – I don’t know who supplied them, where they came from, I suppose the designers wanted photographs – and in an idle moment I think we were all sort of gradually soaking up these absolutely heartbreaking details of life in the trenches, and the loss of that generation.’ Atkinson, despite being well versed in dying at the end of the series, concurs: ‘I do remember throughout the whole week of rehearsal leading up to “Goodbyeee”, and indeed the recording of the episode, having this nasty knot in the pit of my stomach, which reflected the dilemma of my character. It may well be that if you’re a serious actor then you experience that kind of thing all the time, you acquire the mentality and the physicality of the character you’re playing, but I’d never experienced it before. It was very, very odd, and it was only in that episode … The feeling that you were going to die. This was not like your normal pratfalling comedy death either. There was just this extraordinary feeling of dread that I’ve never felt before.’ And even the usually unflappable producer had to admit, ‘I went on the trench set for the first time on the last episode. I was usually sitting up in the gallery with the director, and I actually went on the set for
some reason, and it was really scary, a really odd feeling, even with an audience there and everything.’

Nevertheless, there was the best part of half an hour of laughs to be had before any conclusion, and at last, the episode attained the truly claustrophobic atmosphere desired by Lloyd for so long, as the old comrades awaited their fate.
^fn13
Even then, one final guest star joined the cast for this ‘last waltz’, with sitcom icon Geoffrey Palmer receiving the first star billing in the opening credits since Frank Finlay six years earlier. Palmer was an inspired spot of casting as Field Marshal Haig, carelessly shovelling toy soldiers off the map (a nightmare to reset when a take went wrong) as yet another attempt to move his drinks cabinet six inches closer to Berlin was set in motion. The veteran actor’s presence did nothing to alleviate the episode’s feeling of claustrophobia, however, only having one scene, far from the trenches.

Atkinson and Palmer would eventually appear on-screen together six years later, in
Full Throttle
, an episode of the BBC drama series
Heroes & Villains
, dramatising the lives of great Britons. In the only dramatic TV role in his career, Atkinson played one of his own heroes, maverick pioneering interwar racing driver Captain ‘Tim’ Birkin (an ancestor of his friend, the TV director John Birkin), with Palmer playing his despairing father. Even then, the shadow of World War I played a part, allowing Rowan an unabashedly straight reflection on the bloodshed, as the daredevil looked back on his life with his biographer:

Ben Elton had personal reasons for steering the final episode away from gay banter towards real tragedy, having famously been contacted by his historian uncle Geoffrey Elton before the series had even been completed, haranguing his nephew in ‘high dudgeon’. ‘He thought we were taking a cheap shot at the British Army and the suffering of the soldiers during the war. He served in the army as a Jewish refugee … In his letter he said, “Your father, who sired you (bit of a tautology) would not be here today if it wasn’t for the British Army.” And I was, and am, damn well aware of that, and feel exactly as he does about the debt we all owe to the sacrifice of the past. I was stunned that he had this reaction, because I thought the satire was loving, and took into account the bravery … My hand would wither if I was guilty of disrespect. I wrote back to him and said I had every bit as much respect as him, and I was quite aware of how much we owe Britain. By which time he’d watched another episode, and realised he had been a bloody idiot. He wrote back and said I shouldn’t be so sensitive to criticism. He was clearly a grumpy old man by that time.’

Ben continues, ‘It was brilliantly performed, great dramatic acting – although I think there was worth in the script, and we’re proud of
it. That emotional moment I think came from the fact that everybody involved has some sort of sense of the tragedy of World War I. And everyone gave their best – the acting, the writing, and particularly the editing and directing at that point. It was a very brave decision to take them over the top – we wrote, “They put their first step on the ladder …”’ Twenty-two years on, the finale of
Goes Forth
has in some ways been affected by over-saturation, having come so high on so many ‘Top 100 TV Moments’ shows, being aired as often as Del Boy falling through the bar in
Only Fools and Horses
, but to a generation of viewers used to
Blackadder
’s silliness, and flippant attitude to death, the resoundingly profound final sequence’s power to shock and move was a punch to the gut which still aches. Elton himself admits that there wasn’t exactly anything new in a sitcom – or any ‘light entertainment’ – having some kind of weight to it, when paying tribute to past greats: ‘Galton & Simpson really proved that the sitcom – whatever that means – is a medium for real drama, and the more dramatic and, in a way, heartrendingly serious, bleak it gets, the funnier it can be. Obviously they weren’t the first to discover that comedy is very close to tragedy, but goodness gracious, in terms of sitcom, they probably showed us and exploited that fact more effectively than any other writers have done.’