The end of Blackadder – 1989

Never before have so many stiff upper lips made so many chins tremble. The beloved Rowan Atkinson sitcom Blackadder Goes Forth went out on an emotional high as Edmund Blackadder, Baldrick and Co ran out of cunning plans – even those “as cunning as a fox who’s just been appointed professor of cunning at Oxford University” – and went over the top in the trenches. Running slow motion towards enemy lines, our heroes – for that is what they finally were – charged towards the German guns for king and country.

Then the Blackadder theme played slowly and the scene changed from the explosions and barbed wire of no man’s land to the tranquil poppycovered fields of Flanders today.