'Lions led by donkeys'? Blackadder Goes On By BBC
In the final dialogue of «Blackadder Goes On», the beloved recurring joke of the Blackadder dynasty becomes something more powerful: both the climax of the entire series and the final satirical shot of the «lions led by donkeys» madness. First World War. “I have a plan, sir,” Baldrick says as they prepare to climb out of the trenches and into the German machine gun fire.
— Cunning and cunning? replies Blackadder, who spent most of the episode in his shorts over his head. “As cunning as the fox who has just been appointed professor of cunning at Oxford University? I'm afraid we'll have to wait. Whatever it was, I'm sure it was better than my plan to get out of here by pretending to be crazy. I mean, who would notice another crazy person here? This is a rare comedy series that somehow got better with each episode: sharper, wittier and … well, smarter. But the very final scene—the fatal “big push” and thrust into no man’s land—was almost a disaster.
“When we got to the set, the sets weren't ready yet and we didn't have time to rehearse properly,” says Sir Tony Robinson, who played Blackadder's faithful companion Baldrick. “We just jumped up and raced across the polystyrene. The director said bang-bang-bang, and we fell to the floor like plucked carrots, and that's it. We thought, “What are we going to do with this? It just won't work.»
The final episode premiered on November 2, 1989. But even after 34 years, it is still one of the greatest moments of British television — the dramatic equivalent of a bayonet to the heart.
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Blackadder started back in the Middle Ages—well, it was broadcast in 1983, but it was set in 1485—with the uneven first series of The Black Adder, written by Richard Curtis and Blackadder himself, Rowan Atkinson. Without the poignancy of Ben Elton's writing (he didn't join Curtis until Blackadder II) and the character dynamics not yet established — in the first series, Blackadder is the idiot and Baldrick is the brains of the whole team (although that doesn't say much) — the formula was not quite there.
Even the cast and crew admit that she is not up to par. “During rehearsals and filming, we could always see what was wrong,” says Robinson. “Television is such a production line that you can't stop it once it's running. The best thing you can do is to soften the worst moments, but there were some really good moments as well.”
Three years later, the BBC agreed to make a second series, but for half the money. Set in Elizabethan times, Blackadder II reimagines the character as a shrewd schemer, forever trying to impress Queenie (the brilliant Miranda Richardson). In «Blackadder the Third,» even more edgy Regency style, Blackadder was Prince George's butler (a victorious performance by Hugh Laurie).
The Blackadder formula — with Blackadder and his canine body Baldrick subdued by some noble lunatic — has always been associated with class and insanity at both ends of the ladder. «The Toffs are at the top, the plebeians are at the bottom, and I'm in the middle making a fat pile of money,» as Blackadder once said. But the World War I setting in series four, which first aired on September 28, 1989, gave the familiar plot a deep, sobering depth.
For Captain Edmund Blackadder, his cunning plans are no longer about money, power and influence; Escape from the trenches — a matter of life or be shot. Baldrick, an incurably stupid peasant, becomes an honest Tommy. Handsome but lackluster Hugh Laurie's George is recast as a high school kid — the kind sent to fight in the war by wealthy fathers — and naive about the fate that awaits him. And the ruling class is Stephen Fry's General Melchett, a bleating, breasted, walrus-faced loon, always contemplating plans (such as Operation Certain Death) to turn his fine male body into a fine male body.
Rowan Atkinson in Blackadder Goes On
“I think it was Ben's idea to make the first world war,” says Sir Tony Robinson. “It was a great idea, but there was a nervousness to it because it meant we were joking about suffering and of course there were still people around who had been affected by the carnage of the First World War. We felt that the only way not to offend them was to make everything as good as possible in terms of costumes, props and historical moments, and at the end very clearly say: «We can not stand f … those who died, but the madness that led to death these people.”
Of course, it's still very funny stuff. The beauty of «Blackadder» lies in the elaborate pun in which the beat and rebound of each syllable is honed to perfection (often jokes about animals and food are the most laughable, the best example being «the most embarrassing situation since Sticky's stick insect got stuck on sticky bun»).
See also the simple innuendo of Captain Darling, played by Tim McInnerney, who twitches at the mere mention of his name — «Honey, we're leaving» — presumably fueled by lifelong ridicule. By the fourth series, the cast had grown into a formidable team. Watch any of the documentaries based on the series — «The Whole Rotten Saga» or «Blackadder Rides Again» — and you'll see footage of the actors painstakingly deconstructing every joke as they read the script.
«One thing that I really discovered early on was that there was a lot of discussion and talk about 'Can we make that word funnier?'» recalls director Richard Boden, who joined the crew for A Christmas Carol. Blackadder» and «Blackadder Goes Ahead». “Ben Elton said it would drive him crazy if they spent two hours arguing about whether the word gerbil is funnier than vole. Ben and Richard have already written this — they've been through it all! But the actors only did it because they wanted it to be as good as possible.”
“We analyzed every line,” says Robinson. “There were very few rehearsals. Most of the time we sat around trying to work out the best wording for each joke. I think that's what made it so enduring on TV.»
Madness; Hugh Laurie, Rowan Atkinson and Tony Robinson in Blackadder Goes On. Photo: bbc
The series has some of the best moments of the entire saga: Spotted Jim, General Melchett's prized carrier pigeon, is shot and eaten by Blackadder («The Flanders Killer Pigeon!»); the return of Lord Flashheart Rick Mayall, reimagined as a famous fighter pilot fueled by raw testosterone and recklessness («Captain Darling? The last woman I called my love was pregnant in 20 seconds!»); and drag queen George Georgina, with whom Melchett falls madly in love.
But the last episode, Goodbyeee, is undoubtedly the show's best moment. Stripped of almost all plot except for Blackadder wearing underpants over his head and sticking two pencils up his nose to pretend he's crazy, this episode is just characters stuck in a bunker joking around. Baldrick takes up war poetry: «Boom-boom-boom-boom, boom-boom-boom» — and Blackadder explains to Baldrick and George how the war began («It was too much effort not to have a war»). Plus Darling's coffee — well, dirt, and dandruff, and saliva («Ahh, cappuccino»).
“Ben, Richard and [producer] John Lloyd always said that their goal was to write a comedy about claustrophobia, like they did in the sixties,” says Robinson. «There's always one person who dreams of taking over the world, but he's stuck in a room with idiots — Hancock's Half Hour is a great example, Steptoe is another very good example.
«One of the reasons why the setting in the trenches was so inviting, is that it provided for just that — a bunch of old geezers sat around and talked shit, while one of them was desperately trying to break out of these restrictions. It was fulfilled in the last episode.”
But behind the clever pun lies much more: humanity, desperation, British imperialism and the futility of war. Heavy material for a studio sitcom.
In 2014, Michael Gove criticized the show for portraying World War I as «an illegitimately generated ruin», an idea he said has been perpetuated by «leftist scholars too happy to feed these myths». But Sir Tony Robinson fired back at Gove. “Not criticizing World War I officers seems absolutely stupid,” he says of Gove's comments.Rowan Atkinson and Tony Robinson in Blackadder Goes On
The notion of «lions led by donkeys», that generals and officers stood far behind the soldiers who were sent to their deaths, remains a commonly held view of the First World War. In truth, a proportionately large number of British Army officers and generals were killed. And British commanders trained in colonial warfare (for example, in the Mboto Gorge, where Blackadder fought watutsi warriors armed with kiwi fruits) had to adapt, and by the end quite successfully, to the first war of industrial scale, which led to an unprecedented massacre. and the introduction of new technologies such as tanks.
“We tend to underestimate how difficult this job was,” says Dr. Jonathan Boff, professor of history at the University of Birmingham and author of Haig's The Enemy and Victories and Defeats on the Western Front. “They looked after five million people, with more than 350,000 officers — among them, of course, there were a few simpleton officers. Mistakes were made. Some of them were culpably bad, stupid decisions made under difficult circumstances.
“The genius of Blackadder is that it is truthful in itself. It goes to show what we think we all know about World War I, all those myths about «lions led by donkeys» — trenches, mud, blood, endless poetry and the like. It's a perception because what we first learn about World War I first comes through war poets and English at school. People like Sassoon have the look of a worm. This is one man's experience — he cannot understand it, and war is useless. And then you have the historian's point of view, when someone stands aside with a more dispassionate eye and sees that there is some kind of cause and effect, and maybe it wasn't all completely meaningless.»
The portrayal of the widely criticized Field Marshal Douglas Haig seen in Blackadder (played by Geoffrey Palmer) sweeping people off the map of the Western Front, one of the most poignant moments, also plays into the myth of donkey-led lions.
Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig Credit & Copyright Pennsylvania
“He saw the situation and was willing to make difficult decisions to resolve it,” says Dr. Boff, who also tells me he uses Blackadder Goes Forth in lectures. “Haig understood what he was asking his people to do, he had the moral courage to do it. The unfortunate but inevitable consequence was heavy losses. «Blackadder» is a satire, it's supposed to be funny, it's supposed to get the point across, and maybe about the politics of the 80s, considering who wrote it. There may be an analogue of Haig-Thatcher at work, at least subconsciously, in the minds of Ben Elton and company.
Nevertheless, Blackadder's commentary on the cost of war — the loss of millions of lives — has not lost its force in 30 years. Of course, Blackadder's characters have already died — the entire cast is destroyed by the master of disguise Prince Ludwig in Blackadder II, and the Prince Regent is gunned down in Blackadder III — but the final moments of Blackadder Goes On are even more devastating. for the characters' desire to escape the reality of war. Blackadder is an insidious anti-hero; George is the last of the leapfrogging winks; and Baldrick is too stupid to have anything but affection for him. But strangely enough, what worries me most is the fate of Captain Darling.
“We argued long and hard about who should die,” Robinson says. «I think just last week and at the urging of Tim McInnerney, Darling had to overdo it.»
Sent to the front lines just minutes before the big tug, McInnerney as Darling is masterfully put together, and that twitch now becomes more like a stiff upper lip. Despite being an oily man for most of the series, Darling is actually just as cunning as Blackadder. He avoided the front line, working with a notepad and helping General Melchett with his clumsy bow (and clumsy bladder).
No longer Blackadder's cartoonish nemesis, Darling becomes morbidly human when he gives a glimpse of the life that might have been had he not been torn apart by machine guns to return to his job at Pratt & Sons, hold the gate for the gentlemen of Croydon and marry Dorris. “I made a note in my diary on the way here,” Darling says. «Just says 'Bastard'.»
Two studios were involved in filming the episode, one for the bunker scenes and one for the no man's land. With only 10 minutes left, they had to move on to the second set and rush through the sequence.
«We had to finish at 10:00 pm because if you don't, the switches will go off,» says Robinson. “We overloaded other scenes and at ten minutes to ten the producer told us that we should definitely stop and go to another studio. We didn't think it would work… what you see in that final scene was created in post-production by the director, producer and editor who devised ways to make the imperfections of this scene absolutely unforgettable. It was amazing. It was just TV craft.”
The original footage of them huddling over the noisy set was almost a dismal end to the series. But director Richard Boden and editor Chris Wadsworth came up with a brilliant idea: slow down the footage and sound as the soldiers race forward, and then turn them into black and white to the sound of a musical piano rendition of Blackadder's theme. before the last heartbreaking image — bright, but eerie poppy fields.
Blackadder's Last Stand: Goodbyeee's Last Moments
“When we were editing, we got to this scene at about 10 pm,” Boden recalls. «We were about to put on the last headlines and I said, 'Please let me try something.' I ran to the newsroom and their library and found that someone was still working. I asked if they had pictures of poppy fields from northern France. Another important thing was that I strongly felt that we could not put the final titles and this big marching band music. It would pull the rug out from under a very dark moment. There was a lot of controversy about this — I had to go to the head of comedy, the controller of BBC One, because at the end we did not give anyone credit.
Maybe there is an addition. the poignancy of the final scenes, because the actors and writers realized that this would be the last episode of Blackadder (with the exception of the 1999 film Blackadder: Back and Forth, rightly expunged from the history books).
“There was a lot of talk between rehearsals about what if we did another episode? Maybe it's the Jazz Age? Or the sixties as a rock band, like something like that?” says Boden. “It's quieted down and every once in a while you hear again if they're going to get back together. I personally am very glad that they are not. You couldn't beat him.”
“I thought it would be the end,” says Tony Robinson. “By then, there was a lot of creative tension around. Richard and Ben actually wrote the damn thing, and yet we changed so much over the course of the episodes. They both had great careers without the interference of me, Steven, Hugh and Rowan…and we all wanted to make our own careers without arguing with them! It worked very well and I think we finished at a high level, it was a really good place to end.”
Really like a commentary on a tragedy of war – certainly as touching as any piece drama film or television series made on the subject, and the finale of the Blackadder saga, is a masterful episode. As Blackadder himself would say: crafty and subtle.
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