Grand Finale: Blackadder Goes Forth delivers on the most cunning of plans.

Blackadder goes forth

BLACKADDER DIES. WHICH is hardly a surprise. After all, that fate had befallen the title character of Richard Curtis and Ben Elton’s history-spanning sitcom more than once. Admittedly, he cheats death in Blackadder The Third, but in

The Black Adder, Rowan Atkinson’s Prince Edmund is poisoned. In Blackadder II, he’s stabbed to death. So when this latest incarnation, a Captain in the First World War, leads his men on the Big Push that has been hanging over them for the whole series, it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Blackadders die. That’s what they do.

What is a surprise, though, is how different this feels. Or even that it feels at all. Blackadder, both the man and the show, is usually deeply cynical, with no time for genuine, earnest emotion. But something truly astonishing happens at the end of

Blackadder Goes Forth. As Captain Edmund Blackadder and his troops — loyal Baldrick (Tony Robinson), hapless George (Hugh Laurie) and persnickety Darling (Tim Mcinnerny) — launch themselves into the mire of machine-gun fire, we don’t see them die. Instead, set to a mournful version of the

Blackadder theme, director Richard Boden slowly crossfades to an empty, silent battlefield… and then a shot of a poppy field, accompanied by bird song. As an acknowledgement of the senseless slaughter of World War I, it is startling, unexpected, and deeply, deeply moving.

It’s also possibly the only way

Blackadder Goes Forth could have ended. There was nothing great about The Great War, of course. It was a mindless massacre of millions of young men who gave their lives for reasons nobody fully understood. And Blackadder Goes Forth both revelled in and railed against that absurdity from the off, with almost every episode dedicated to Blackadder — the show’s smartest, and possibly only sane character — frantically trying, and failing, to find a way to avoid the Front.

That reaches its apotheosis in the final episode, where an increasingly desperate Edmund tries every trick in the book to get out of going over the top. He even attempts the old ‘underpants on the head, pencils up the nose, say wibble’ method of pleading insanity. Nothing works until Blackadder stands in the trench with his fellow soldiers, waiting for the inevitable. Death has hung heavy over the episode, but never more so than here. The last three minutes are almost unbearably sad, yet Curtis and Elton are careful not to banish jokes completely. There’s still mileage to be eked out of Blackadder simply delivering Darling’s surname. There’s a last cunning plan analogy. And, finally, Blackadder sums the whole thing up with one final withering remark. “Who would have noticed another madman around here?” First comes the punchline, then the gutpunch. This was the last Blackadder series, and that’s for the best. After all, how could you possibly improve upon perfection? ALL SERIES OF BLACKADDER ARE AVAILABLE ON NETFLIX AND TO DOWNLOAD