The series references famous people of the time and criticises the British Army's leadership during the campaign, culminating in the ending of its final episode, in which the soldiers are ordered to carry out a lethal charge of enemy lines.

[4] Blackadder Goes Forth is set in 1917 on the Western Front in the trenches of World War I. Captain Edmund Blackadder (Rowan Atkinson) is a professional soldier in the British Army who, until the outbreak of the Great War, has enjoyed a relatively danger-free existence fighting natives who were usually "two feet tall and armed with dried grass".

[2] The series thus chronicles Blackadder's attempts to escape the trenches through various schemes, most of which fail due to bad fortune, misunderstandings and the general incompetence of his comrades.

[6] The aforementioned comrades are his second-in-command, idealistic upper-class Edwardian twit Lieutenant George St Barleigh[7] (Hugh Laurie) and their profoundly stupid but dogged batman Private S. Baldrick (Tony Robinson).

The idea that the soldiers suffered whilst their commanders remained safely distant from the action was also referenced on many occasions, such as when Melchett says to Baldrick, "Don't you worry my boy, if you should falter, remember that Captain Darling and I are behind you!

[11] In "Private Plane", after receiving word that Blackadder and Baldrick may have been killed when shot down over German lines, Melchett tries to cheer George up by showing him a life-size model (measuring seventeen square feet) of land recaptured by the British, a commentary on the high human cost and small physical gains achieved by attacks in the middle years of the war.

[12] Field Marshal Douglas Haig, whose orders are alleged to have resulted in hundreds of thousands of British deaths at the battles of Passchendaele and the Somme, is continually referenced.

General Melchett orders Blackadder to find out who is behind the leak in top-secret battle plans and immediately, though erroneously, pins it on a "German spy" (who is later discovered to be one of their own).

In 1917, Victoria's grandson, King George V, changed the name of the royal house from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor in an effort to appease British nationalist feelings.

Disregarding Baldrick's claim to have one last plan to save them from the impending doom, Blackadder delivers the final line:[5] Well, I'm afraid it'll have to wait.

After a date with Melchett, the General asks "Georgina" to marry him, and George, fearing punishment for disobeying a superior officer, accepts.

After a visit from Lord Flashheart, Blackadder, Baldrick and George intend on joining the "Twenty Minuters" of the Royal Flying Corps in order to go to Paris.

Fry, Laurie and Atkinson were comic writers and performers themselves, and having worked together on previous series were not afraid to question the script and make suggestions.

[citation needed] In their guest performances, actors such as Rik Mayall and Gabrielle Glaister reprised versions of characters they had played in earlier series.

[citation needed] Of the series, only Adrian Edmondson and Geoffrey Palmer portray fictitious takes on historical figures as Baron Manfred von Richthofen and Field Marshal Douglas Haig respectively.

This series of Blackadder was one of the first television programmes in Britain to be made and transmitted with stereo sound, using the NICAM digital system, even though most viewers could only afford, or were only able to receive due to their location, the standard FM mono audio carrier signal.

[24] The series was directed by Richard Boden and all interior scenes were shot at BBC Television Centre in front of a live studio audience.

[10][25] Rowan Atkinson recalls that the studio shooting could present him with problems: That sitcom tradition is very strange when you're performing to both a camera and an audience at the same time...The thing that sometimes held us up is my stammer.

I remember one episode in which Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie were going "woof" a lot, and my line was "it's like Battersea Dogs Home in here".

Speaking to Michael Parkinson in 2003, he recalled I remember... in the weeks leading up to the one-day recording of that final episode when we went over the top, for the first time in my acting career... knowing that even though the rest of the episode was its usual standard funny sitcom self, there was this deep twist in my stomach throughout that week thinking along with your character that you were doomed.

To create the flying sequences in the episode "Private Plane", footage from the 1976 film Aces High was re-edited and dubbed over with the actors' voices.

[citation needed] The most challenging scene to shoot was the final "over the top" sequence, which was recorded in a separate studio set, away from the audience, which had been rigged with special effects to simulate a battlefield.

In the closing credits, the full Blackadder theme plays over visuals of armed men marching on a parade ground.

The music was also changed to a slow, echoey solo piano arrangement (recorded in a school gymnasium), finishing with three strong bass-drum notes, interposed with sound effects of gunshot, and later birdsong.

Emma Hanna, in her book The Great War on the Small Screen, has noted that some contemporary reviewers felt the topic of the First World War to be inappropriate for a comedy series, with one newspaper critic uncertain of the writers' motives: "is [the series] justified in using tragic situations as a springboard for comedy merely for entertainment value?".

Atkinson recalled in an interview with Michael Parkinson that the poignant ending of the final episode was in part written to counter the possibility of criticism that the subject was inappropriate for a comedy.

"[33] Michael Brooke, assessing the series for the British Film Institute, suggests that the characterisation and pervading sense of danger prevented the sitcom from trivialising its subject matter: "The prospect of its characters suddenly dying a violent death provided a constant source of tension and gags, though when they really were killed off at the end of the final episode...the result was so unexpectedly moving that the programme was later repeated as part of an otherwise wholly serious BBC2 Armistice Day programme without anyone batting an eyelid.

[36] Military historian Richard Holmes commented in his book The Western Front: "Blackadder's aphorisms have become fact... A well-turned line of script can sometimes carry more weight than all the scholarly footnotes in the world.

"[37] Stephen Badsey, analysing trends in television programmes about the war, remarked that Blackadder Goes Forth as a popular comedy series was subject to particular criticism from historians, remarking that the series "consciously traded on every cliche and misremembered piece of history about the Western Front, and was influential enough to draw a surprising degree of angry criticism from professional historians as a result.