21/09/2026
Classic Masterpiece
One of the cleverest things about Blackadder is that it never simply repeated itself. Across four television series between 1983 and 1989, Edmund Blackadder was repeatedly reinvented, shifting centuries, status and personality while Rowan Atkinson, Tony Robinson and a growing ensemble turned the same basic family line into something remarkably different each time.
The Black Adder, first broadcast in 1983, remains the oddest member of the family. Created and written by Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson, it placed Edmund in a deliberately distorted medieval England, with Brian Blessed thundering through proceedings as King Richard IV. This Blackadder was considerably more foolish than his descendants, while Baldrick was noticeably brighter than the servant audiences later came to know.
The transformation arrived with Blackadder II in 1986. Ben Elton joined Curtis as writer, Edmund became the sharp-tongued schemer familiar to generations of viewers, and Baldrick travelled rapidly in the opposite intellectual direction. Elizabeth I’s court also introduced Miranda Richardson’s unpredictable Queenie, Stephen Fry’s Melchett and Patsy Byrne’s endlessly reminiscing Nursie.
A year later, Blackadder the Third moved into the Regency period and created another memorable partnership. Edmund was now butler to Hugh Laurie’s cheerfully vacant Prince George, giving Blackadder the intelligence to understand the absurd world around him but rarely enough power to escape it. Politics, literature, revolution and fashionable heroism all became targets.
Then, in 1989, Blackadder Goes Forth made perhaps the boldest change of all. Captain Blackadder was placed in a First World War trench in 1917, alongside Robinson’s Private Baldrick and Laurie’s Lieutenant George, while Fry’s General Melchett and Tim McInnerny’s Captain Darling operated safely behind the lines.
The six episodes remained packed with elaborate insults, misunderstandings and increasingly desperate schemes to avoid the next offensive. Yet Goodbyeee, broadcast on 2 November 1989, allowed the comedy to fall away as Blackadder, Baldrick, George and Darling finally climbed from the trench and advanced into no man’s land.
That extraordinary ability to change tone helps explain why choosing a favourite Blackadder series remains so difficult. Medieval farce, Elizabethan intrigue, Regency satire and wartime tragedy each produced a different version of the programme — and together they made Blackadder one of British television comedy’s most enduring creations.
