With its fourth and final chapter the chronicles of the comedy series, “Blackadder Goes Forth” brings us into the twentieth century and into a much darker period of history.
The Western Front 1917: There’s disorder in the ranks when that numb-headed ninny, Captain Edmund Blackadder, stumbles onto the battlefields of WWI and discovers that people are trying to kill him.
Waiting in fear of the dreaded order to go ‘over the top’ from the patently insane General Melchett, Blackadder devises serial attempts to escape the trenches such as joining the Royal Flying Corps or becoming army entertainers, always with the offer of one of Baldrick’s cunning plans.
There can barely have been a less likely setting for comedy than the trenches of the First World War.
Writers Richard Curtis and Ben Elton deserve special plaudits, then, for maintaining their hilarious standards and making this series more pointed than its predecessors; mixing the lighter jokes with a gallows humour in the face of a tragic and harrowing story.
Edmund Blackadder was now a more noble and sympathetic character than his ancestors, and his efforts to evade his inevitable fate provided not only countless laughs but also a real sense of the futility of war.
Starring Rowan Atkinson, Tony Robinson, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie.
Not rated.