Blackadder Back and Forth

Alternative title: Blackadder Back & Forth
Synopsis: A film charting British history since Roman times, made especially for the Millennium Dome in London. In the Shakespeare sketch at a 1999 New Year’s Eve dinner party given by Edmund Blackadder for old friends, his servant Baldrick builds a time-machine from designs by Leonardo da Vinci, using old cereal packets. The machine is difficult to control, and the duo spin randomly through history. Blackadder meets Shakespeare (Firth) and punches him.
Blackadder: This is for every schoolboy and schoolgirl for the next four hundred years. Have you any idea how much suffering you are going to cause. Hours spent at school desks trying to find one joke in A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Years wearing stupid tights in school plays and saying things like ‘What ho, my lord’ and ‘Oh, look, here comes Othello, talking total crap as usual’. Oh, and..
He kicks Shakespeare, who is still on the ground.
... that is for Ken Branagh’s endless uncut four-hour version of Hamlet.
Shakespeare: Who’s Ken Branagh?
Blackadder: I’ll tell him you said that. And I think he’ll be very hurt.
Language: English
Country: Great Britain
Medium: Film
Technical information: Colour / Sound
Year of release: 2000
Transmission details: 21 Apr 2002 (Channel: BBC2)
Duration: 65 mins

Director

Paul Welland

Producer

Sophie Clarke-Jones

Writer

Ben Elton; Richard Curtis

Cast

Notes: The full script of the Shakespeare scene can be read at http://www.firth.com/BA.html
General: Filmed on Hankley Common, Elstead in June 1999
History: First shown on PBS March 2001 but not shown on UK terrestrial television until its transmission on BBC1 21 April 2002.
Figures: 5.9 million viewers for the UK television transmission.

Shakespeare, "Blackadder Back and Forth". https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/shakespeare/search/index.php/title/av36782 (Accessed 12 Nov 2024)

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