“More of A triumph for comedians…than historians”

 

Blackadder Goes Forth and the Legacy Of War Comedy.

 

Blackadder: It started badly, it tailed off a little in the middle and the less said about the end the better – but apart from that it was excellent. (Plan F: Goodbyee)

 

       Blackadder Goes Forth was a sitcom first aired in 1989. Created by Ben Elton and Richard Curtis, it was described by The Guardian as “One of the key sitcoms of the 80’s” (Andrew Pulver, 30/4/99). As the name suggests, the programmes were the fourth in a cycle, each featuring the same characters from different eras. The Blackadder (1983) was set in 1484, Blackadder II (1985) in “The Early Tudors”, Blackadder The Third (1987) in Regency Britain, and lastly, Blackadder Goes Forth (1989) in 1917. The programmes starred Rowan Atkinson as Blackadder, Tony Robinson as his vassal Baldrick, and a supporting cast of popular comics and actors, including Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Miranda Richardson and Brian Blessed. The Blackadder series was extremely successful, and is still regularly repeated over ten years later. However it was the last series that attracted the most attention, both critical and popular. Although the Blackadder series as a whole is regularly voted as one of the greatest comedies ever, and in the 1999 poll by the Observer (televised 31/4/00) it was only one of two comedies to feature in the top 10, it is the infamous last scene of the final episode in Blackadder Goes Forth which receives the most praise.

 

       Blackadder Goes Forth is the only comedy to directly tackle the subject of the war on an offensive front. The forerunner to Blackadder Goes Forth was Dad’s Army. Dad's Army was about a small fictional seaside town called 'Walmington-on-Sea' somewhere on the South coast of England, set during the outbreak of the Second World War, and followed a group of men who set up the towns' Local Defence Volunteers (later the Home Guard). The comedy was doubly displaced from the war situation by featuring old men obviously incapable of fighting, and a town under no threat whatsoever. Curtis and Elton decided to eschew this technique, setting their comedy in the trench system of the Somme.

 

       This is the basis for the first clash between the Blackadder genre and the subject of the war. Blackadder thrived on repetitive interpretations of its main characters. Between each series characters shared the same names or personality, enforcing the concept of the same group of people cropping up throughout British history. Over the previous series, the only two characters to deviate from this were the central figures of Blackadder (Rowan Atkinson) and his lackey Baldrick (Tony Robinson), where the stupid lord and crafty servant relationship of The Blackadder gradually reversed itself. Baldrick’s catchphrase “I have a cunning plan” had changed from really cunning plans, to ridiculously foolish plans without a shred of plausibility. In reinterpreting Blackadder for the Great War, Curtis and Elton easily slotted these figures into the standard roles of the caddish captain (Blackadder), the over-enthusiastic, upper class volunteer (Private George), the stupid General (General Melchett), and the loyal, working-class private (Baldrick). As a character driven creation, the interrelation between these people takes precedence over the background situation. The authors reintroduced familiar characters from old series – a cross-dressing woman (“Bob”), and the garrulous Lord Flashheart. Because of these repetitive techniques, it is easily arguable that the comedy itself is not really about the war – concerned more with the dynamics between the five main characters and the continuation of the distinctive Blackadder humour. The war is merely another location in which the characters repeat the same jokes and behave in the same way towards each other. This is demonstrated through the structure of the script, in which the jokes are primarily linguistic. A typical one runs:

 

 

(In an attempt to be sent away from the front, Blackadder is trying to become a war artist by making Lieutenant George paint a picture called “The Nun and The Hun”)

 

Blackadder: Splendid, no time to lose. George – set up your easel. Baldrick and I will pose. This is art’s greatest moment since Mona Lisa sat down and told Leonardo Da Vinci she was in a slightly odd mood. Baldrick, you lie down and be the nun.

 

Baldrick: I’m not lying down there – it’s all wet!

 

Blackadder: Let me put it this way – you can either lie down and get all wet or you can be knocked down and get a broken nose.

 

Baldrick: Actually, it’s not all that wet is it?

 

Blackadder: No.

 

(Plan A: Captain Cook)

 

        A problematic element for the scriptwriters is the characterisation of Blackadder. In the earlier series he has a simple motivation – money. As the series progress, Blackadder’s character becomes steadily poorer. He also becomes more unpleasant, but his intelligence increases. Rowan Atkinson summed this up when he told the Radio Times “in the first series, Blackadder was just an idiot. In the second series he was dashing but weak. As the butler, he became cleverer and nastier. This time he is more cruel and careworn.” To pursue the negative aspects of Blackadder’s character in a war situation would be inappropriate – Blackadder regressing to nothing more than a cold-footed swine (Sassoon). In the context of the Great War, there was no way a contemporary audience would accept this portrayal as had already been demonstrated in 1987, when the BBC series The Monocled Mutineer caused outrage by depicting a soldier who defrauded, stole and absconded from the army before being shot by the police for murder. However, there was a way around this. Blackadder is always portrayed as the most sensible character – a sharp man surrounded by fools. Therefore the authors shifted the motivation towards this facet of his characterisation. In Blackadder Goes Forth, Blackadder’s primary motive is escape - each episode involving his attempts to avoid going over the top. Prefixes to each episode reflects this trait, referring to each one as plans A-F

 

       As a historical construction, Blackadder Goes Forth had to be far more specific than it’s precursors. The previous series used vague connotations of the time periods they were set within, but generalisations, and “modern” jokes were rife. The war posed the problems of being not only recent history, but also a history period with very specific encoding. Elton and Curtis refuse to challenge these parameters. As comedians who used to court controversy, their view of the war is relentlessly uniform. The media agreed:

 

“If Edmund Blackadder now seems more weary than wittily vicious, that’s because the more convoluted conceits of the Richard Curtis/Ben Elton scripts sound right in doublet and hose but sound strained in khaki.” (Hugh Herbert, The Guardian, October 1989).

 

       Curtis and Elton were entirely taken in by the war myth. Every aspect of the fighting on the Western Front is seen through the reinvented history, all of which is assumed to be both historically and socially accurate. The working class private has no opinion of the war, whereas the young lieutenant thinks it’s a game. The overbearing general does not understand his men or their situation. Central to these characters is the lower middle-class officer (Blackadder) who sees the war as futile and pointless. There is no recognition anywhere in the programmes that this was not the correct or proper attitude of any intelligent man fighting in the war. Insurrection, disobedience of orders and malcontent is seen by the audience as a commendable and sensible thing to do. There is also the suggestion in the script that if escape is not initiated, all the men involved will certainly die (there are no casualties, no-one envisages survival until the war ends.) The most aggressive character in the series, Lord Flashheart, says “Just because I can give multiple orgasms to the furniture just by looking at it doesn’t mean I’m not sick of this damn war. The blood, the noise, the endless poetry” (Plan D - Private Plane). In this way, standardised readings of the war are aggressively reinforced within the programme – any deviant actions performed are immediately contained, with the mythological reading of the war presented as historical fact. Whilst reviewing Naill Ferguson’s The Pity of War, Desmond Christy summed this up

 

“War and the pity of war. What with Wilfred Owen, Oh! What a Lovely War and Blackadder, we know what to make of the First World War. Upper-class twits running the show, the ordinary, dispensable soldier suffering the bullet, the shell and the bayonet and dying in the muddy, rat-infested trenches. Our collective image of the war might seem more of a triumph for comedians, thespians, filmmakers and war poets than historians.”  (Fighting Blackadder, The Guardian, October 30^th, 1999)

 

       But it is the last episode of the series which had the most impact on the public, and is arguably one of the most damaging cultural depictions of the Great War. This is also the episode which polled 9^th place in the “100 best Television moments”, and was 5^th in the “100 best comedy moments.”

 

(Read the last scene. Be a glutton for punishment and read all of the episodes)

 

        The last scene mentions every aspect of the war myth, all of which are presented as “truth”. Cunning comments “As the signal is given, Blackadder simply wishes his troops good luck, signalling that the time for jokes is over.” (p.152). The table below shows how the last two minutes of the script do this:

 

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       In the last scene of Blackadder, the war myth is coalesced, and because all of the characters die, any dissident behaviour they may have exhibited during the episodes is contained. Each facet of the myth is re-established in the last scene – the lost generation, the glorious summer of 1914, the incompetence, ignorance and callousness of senior officers behind the lines, the realisation of futility by each soldier. As readings of the war suggest, there is no room for these men after the war has ended. The conclusion is utterly unsurprising because the war has been re-written as a situation lacking alternative endings. However it is this reason that the scene has become the most popular and well-remembered part of the Blackadder quartet. Members of the Blackadder Webring are entirely typical in their views on the programme:

 

Whether or not the last episode does either comedy or the war justice, it obviously had an effect on lots of people having being voted no. 9 on the 100 greatest TV moments. Personally I think its one of the most emotional scenes ever shown on television. The contrast between the splinter on the ladder and the massacre that followed is something I will never forget. (Phil)

 

It is one of the finest comedy episodes of all time. It goes to illustrate beautifully that the greatest and most powerful comedy is directly proportional to the depravity of the situation: a fabulous example of gallows humour. (Graeme)

 

       There is nothing funny about the last episode of Blackadder. It is not because it mixes tragedy with humour, it is because of the ways that the war is presented. To have contained the Great War as harshly as Blackadder does, within the tightly defined mythologisation of the war writers, is both offensive and demeaning. It is especially unpalatable that people find this scene moving because they are unwilling to challenge these enforced recreations. Of course it was a tragedy, but to present it in such a facile way is something that does neither writers or viewers credit. Blackadder Goes Forth, perpetuates the war myth rather than to provide a more subversive view. Additionally, it portrays the war through a modern perspective, forgetting that the cultural understanding of people at the time was far different. In the Blackadder universe, Chaplin is not funny (because we do not find him amusing anymore), King and Country Magazine (A fictional propaganda magazine) is amusing to the new recruits, loathed by the more experienced staff and used as toilet paper by everyone, and all intelligent men see the futility, horror and irony of war. There are no challenges to this and so the motifs of the mythology surrounding the war are exacerbated in an offensive and patronising manner. To cite it as an exceptional and moving piece of war comedy is distressing but ultimately unsurprising, resting as it does within a perception of the war which has evolved so far that it has regrettably become historical truth.

 

Read the Scripts. Just the Last Scene. See the Art,  Hear The Sounds.

 

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