‘Who Would have Noticed Another Madman Around Here?’ Four Decades on from Blackadder

I met up with a friend from our undergraduate liberal arts degree time in university over the weekend and, as always, we got chatting about the ‘old days’. It’s difficult to conceive of a time in university with no smartphones, tablets or MacBooks, no digital currency to pay, no screens in fast food outlets and limited access to television in our bedsits and shared housing. But, my friends, we had gems amongst us in those days and perhaps none more than the BBC series, Blackadder in all its glory. We sat through each episode and marvelled at the script writing, the acting, the humour, the pathos, the cynicism and the poking in the eye of authority and establishment.

Of all the series and the episodes, the final episode of Blackadder Goes Forth achieved something almost impossible. It took a very British sitcom, what I might term a savage, clever, gloriously cynical British comedy and ended it with one of the most devastating anti-war statements ever put on television. And this was at a time where we were in a depressed socio-economic era yet again.
For years, Blackadder had mocked history. Kings were idiots, nobles were frauds, generals were buffoons, and survival belonged only to the sharp-tongued cynic standing in the middle of the madness. Or did it? In the final moments of “Goodbyeee,” the laughter stopped. Completely. And, I think it’s fair to state, that forty years later, it still lands like artillery.

First broadcast in 1989, Blackadder Goes Forth was set in the trenches of the First World War. Rowan Atkinson’s Captain Edmund Blackadder is trapped in a world governed by absurdity: endless offensives, pointless deaths, and catastrophically incompetent leadership. Around him orbit the childish optimism of Lieutenant George, the dim but hilarious fatalism of Baldrick, and the terrified officiousness of the pampering Captain Darling. Above them all stands General Melchett, a walrus-moustached aristocratic fool directing slaughter from the safety of a château miles behind the lines. The joke, of course, is that the joke was at least partially true depending on whose version of history one reads.

The ‘Great War’ (a title I’ve always detested) led to industrialised death on a scale Europe had never seen. Between 1914 and 1918, around 20 million people died. Entire villages lost all their young men with Britain alone losing nearly a million soldiers. France lost so many soldiers that some regions have never recovered demographically. Germany emerged shattered, bitter, and primed for another catastrophe just two decades later.

The Western Front became a machine for converting human beings into mud. The Somme. Verdun. Passchendaele. Names that still sound like open wounds. And yet the war was all-too-often directed by men educated in nineteenth-century ideas of honour and cavalry while wielding twentieth-century technology: machine guns, barbed wire, poison gas, heavy artillery. Soldiers advanced in lines against weapons capable of mowing them down by the thousands in hours. And they did.

Blackadder’s bitter genius was recognising that the war’s horror and its absurdity were inseparable. For most of the series, the comedy acts like emotional armour. Blackadder sneers because sincerity is impossible in hell. Baldrick survives because he barely understands the situation. George clings to patriotism because the alternative is terror. Even Darling’s pathetic ambition becomes understandable. Everyone is just trying to survive the machinery around them as individuals but caught up collectively.

The writing by Richard Curtis and Ben Elton understood something essential about trench warfare: boredom and stupidity were not interruptions to horror. They were part of it. Soldiers spent weeks waiting, freezing, rotting, joking, smoking, and trying not to think about the whistle. War is not constant heroism as we are led to believe by the propagandists. Mostly, it is waiting for random death.

For me, the episode’s emotional power comes from the gradual collapse of the show’s comic defences. One by one, the characters stop pretending. George finally realises he is going to die. Darling admits he is frightened. Blackadder himself, the man who always has another scheme, runs out of exits. His final line before going over the top is perfectly written precisely because it is so understated:

“Good luck, everyone.”

No speech. No patriotic swell. No glorious rhetoric. Just resignation. And, then comes the scene that was so difficult to watch. A whistle blows in the distance. The men climb from the trench. It’s all in slow motion. We hear gunfire. Cut to a field of poppies with no laugh track we had become so used to throughout the series. No punchline. No return. Just silence.

I would argue in any pub, parish hall or meeting room that it remains one of the greatest endings in television history because it refuses comfort. There is no triumph. No meaningful victory for the individuals we have come to love. History crushes them without even noticing.

Now, I’ve read that the transition from battlefield to poppy field was reportedly created partly because the filmed explosion sequence looked unconvincing (and, to be fair, it did). Happily, budget limitations accidentally produced poetry. The dissolve into flowers feels less like death than memory itself softening horror into symbol.

But beneath the beauty lies accusation. These men did not have to die and that’s the episode’s central rage. Historians still debate whether Blackadder Goes Forth unfairly caricatured British generals as ‘donkeys leading lions’. Some argue the series reinforced myths about total incompetence and futile sacrifice while ignoring the strategic complexities of the war. And they have a point as the reality was more complicated. The British Army adapted enormously between 1914 and 1918 with many commanders learning quickly under impossible circumstances. Germany was hardly led by geniuses either. The war became a brutal contest of industrial endurance where every side was trapped inside systems larger than themselves.

But emotionally and morally Blackadder captured a truth statistics cannot. The individual soldier rarely experiences war as grand strategy. He experiences fear, mud, confusion, bureaucracy, and arbitrary death. The series understood that governments speak in abstractions while ordinary people bleed in particulars and, sadly, that lesson did not end in 1918. It seems the twentieth century learned nothing quickly.

Within twenty years came another global war, even more mechanised and catastrophic. Then Korea. Vietnam. Afghanistan. Iraq. Syria. Yemen. Ukraine. Gaza. Different flags. Ho-hum.

Every generation insists its wars are uniquely necessary, uniquely moral, uniquely unavoidable. Sometimes they are necessary. Fascism had to be fought. Genocide cannot simply be negotiated away. Some conflicts are forced upon nations. But every war also arrives wrapped in language designed to make death digestible. We hear phrases like ‘strategic necessity’, ‘collateral damage’, ‘limited operation’ and ‘surgical strikes’. The vocabulary changes but the mourning does not.

Perhaps the single genius of Blackadder Goes Forth is that it strips away all abstraction. It reminds us that every communiqué, every military briefing, every map marker eventually resolves into frightened young people waiting for explosions. And still we continue.

Incredibly, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has returned trench warfare to Europe artillery duels, mud, drones hovering over shattered ground, soldiers living underground for months. Images from Bakhmut sometimes resemble photographs from the Somme with updated technology. In Gaza, civilians are trapped inside devastation measured in rubble and funerals. In Sudan, families disappear into famine and displacement while much of the world barely notices. Across the globe, war persists because human beings remain extraordinarily talented at turning political failure into organised killing.

Technology evolves faster than wisdom. It always has. Most anti-war art eventually becomes historical and belongs to a particular conflict. Blackadder Goes Forth escaped that trap because it was not really about 1917. It was about the permanent machinery of war. About leaders insulated from consequences. About patriotism colliding with reality. About ordinary people swept into events they did not create. And about the very thin line between comedy and despair.
That final fade into poppies still hurts so much because we recognise all-too-well the pattern. We know there are always more trenches to be dug somewhere in the world. More young men desperately joking to hide fear. More civilians and politicians convincing themselves that this slaughter will somehow end slaughter forever.

History keeps changing uniforms while repeating idiotic dialogue. And perhaps that is why the episode matters more now, not less. Because in an age of livestreamed conflicts, drone footage, propaganda feeds, and algorithmic outrage, Blackadder Goes Forth still insists on the one thing war depends upon us forgetting: The dead were individuals before they became numbers.

‘Who Would have Noticed Another Madman Around Here?’ Indeed.

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