Blackadder/Trivia

Present Across the Series

• Hey, It's That Guy!:
  • Doctor House is George in seasons 3 and 4.
  • In Blackadder II, he also appears as one of Blackadder's friends in "Beer" and is the Big Bad as Prince Ludwig in "Chains".
  • On that note, Mr. Bean (or, if you like, Johnny English) is the title character.
  • And Baldrick is that bloke from Time Team.
  • And there's also that really clever guy from QI as the Melchetts and the Duke Of Wellington.
  • Actually, most Brits would probably recognise Stephen Fry (Melchett) and Hugh Laurie (George) from A Bit of Fry and Laurie. Or Jeeves and Wooster.
  • Rita Skeeter as the Queen, the highwaywoman and the nurse (from Goes Forth).
  • The Fourth Doctor shows up as a drunken sea captain. Arrrr...
  • And Horace Slughorn (or Inspector Butterman) as the Spanish Interpreter in the first seasons 'Queen of Spain's Beard'
  • And Professor Sprout as an Infanta of Spain in series 1, Blackadder's aunt in series 2 and Queen Victoria in Blackadder's Christmas Carol.
  • Three of The Young Ones have also guest starred on the show - Rik (Rik Mayall) as Mad Gerald in series 1 and Flashheart in series 2 and 4, Neil (Nigel Planer) as Smedley, the Scarlet Pimpernel's associate in series 3, and Vyvyan (Adrian Edmondson) as the Red Baron in series 4.
  • Arnold Rimmer as the French prison guard in Blackadder the Third.
  • Hagrid plays Dr. Samuel Johnson, inventor of the Dictionary, in series 3. He's also the ghost of Christmas in Blackadder's Christmas Carol.
  • Ebenezer Blackadder's niece is Peri.
  • Major Toht is the Baby-Eating Bishop of Bath and Wells! Eep.
  • Angus Deayton makes an appearance in season 1.
• What Could Have Been: There were plans for a fifth series but the Troubled Production of Series 4, and everyone feeling that it was a Tough Act to Follow, made sure it didn't happen. Several ideas were tossed out; including one in World War II, one with Blackadder as part of Margaret Thatcher's inner circle in the 1980s, one featuring Blackadder as a professor at Oxford university; with the most well known being The Blackadder Five, set in the 1960s where Blackadder, the frontrunner of "the Blackadder Five" band, was the illegitimate child of Queen Elizabeth II.

Present in The Black Adder

• What Could Have Been: The original pilot episode was much more similar what the later Blackadder installments would be like, but Executive Meddling resulted in the version of The Black Adder that we know and... well, treat as a valued and respected friend, but not really love, per se. Most fans believe that had the finished series combined the pilot episode's characterisations with the cast that we ended up with, it would have been vastly superior.

Present in Blackadder Goes Forth

• Actor Shared Background: Melchett and George are both implied to have gone to Cambridge, just like Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. (Averted with Blackadder, who didn't go to university, unlike Oxford graduate Rowan Atkinson.)
• Casting Gag: Adrian Edmondson (playing Richthofen) often worked with Rik Mayall, and generally was a tormentor to Mayall's characters. In this show, Mayall (playing Flasheart) kills him mid sentence and calls him a poof.
• Troubled Production / Wag the Director: According to Stephen Fry and Tony Robinson, there was a lot of friction between the cast and writers during the making of this series, with the actors frequently rewriting the script on the set, which the two have admitted doing themselves. The resulting atmosphere on-set — together with producer John Lloyd leaving the BBC and the knowledge that any hypothetical Blackadder 5 would be eviscerated by the critics if it was even slightly worse than the previous series — made it certain that this would be the final Blackadder production until Back & Forth ten years later.
• What Could Have Been: The legendary Tear Jerker ending to the final episode was actually thrown together in post-production due to the scripted ending going catastrophically wrong in filming. Originally, everyone was supposed to be dramatically gunned down, with Captain Blackadder being the only survivor and sneaking away, before being seen as an old man in an epilogue scene that never got filmed. Thanks to a combination of limited filming time, the director having no experience with action scenes and there being no money for a stunt co-ordinator in the budget, it ended up being so horribly executed that the footage was unusable. As a result, the crew ended up slowing down what little usable footage they had, breaking it down into several short shots, and then crossfading to a photograph of some poppies.
• Write What You Know: Originally, the character of Kevin Darling was Kevin Carthwright. Stephen Fry suggested "Darling" based on a boy he went to school with who had similarly awful experiences with that last name.

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