Contextualizing Blackadder Goes Forth

Blackadder Goes Forth (Lloyd, 1989) aired between 28th September and 2nd November 1989. It won the 1990 BAFTA awards for Best Comedy Series and Best Light Entertainment Performance (BAFTA, 2023), and the Royal Television Society award for Best Situation Comedy (Royal Television Society, 2023, p.22). It has an 8.8 out of 10 user rating on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb, 2023) and a 92% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes (Rotten Tomatoes, 2023).

Blackadder is often listed highly in “top of all time” lists (EMPIRE, 2021, para 73; McIntyre, 2022, para 42; Shepherd, 2022, para 23) with many of these lists primarily referring to Goes Forth, and it has also been reproduced for the stage (Williams, 2018), permanently solidifying its place within British television comedy history. Each series was based within a specific historical period, but Goes Forth is based in the year 1918, which is modern history and within living memory, more so within the lives of an audience in 1989, meaning it is a particularly emotive subject for the general public.

Before production began, Ben Elton decided historical research was a necessity, quoted by J. F. Roberts “With Blackadder two and three, we weren’t particularly respectful of the periods, but I don’t think we were really into any blatant howlers. [. . . ] Obviously, with World War I we had a very different approach.” (2013, p. 297), with Roberts noting “Ribbing the attitudes of centuries gone by was one thing, but finding humour in the deaths of 35 million people within living memory was not a task that anyone connected to Blackadder Goes Forth could countenance taking lightly.” (p. 297).

(“Blackadder goes Forth Theme”, Fereos, 2012)

Roberts continues to explain how Curtis and Elton read history books and noticed that “all of the stuff [Curtis & Elton] wanted to write about, which was a sort of the clash of the classes, and getting stuck in a small confined space, was funny.” (pp. 297-298). Roberts also quotes Rowan Atkinson discussing the representation of the characters and situations they find themselves in:

It is clear from this that the creators intended to form Goes Forth into a commentary on the clash of classes and an insight into the absurdity of situations that occurred within the trenches. They wanted these situations to be believable, however, but allowed the escalation of the situation to be just so unbelievable that it could clearly be construed as fictional and funny, not a historical commentary.