Trivia / Blackadder S 4 E 6 Goodbyeee

• Actor-Inspired Element: Blackadder attempts to feign madness by wearing underpants on his head and sticking two pencils up his nose. This plan was based on Rowan Atkinson's habit of sticking pencils up his nose to entertain his castmates during read-throughs and script editing sessions.
• Life Imitates Art: In a retrospective documentary, Ben Elton recalls being delighted when attending a school's poetry recital, and one boy stepped up to the mike to perform "The German Guns" by S. Baldrick.
• Referenced by...: The regiment in the Endeavour episode "Colours" fought at Mboto Gorge, although the heroism of Edmund Blackadder is not mentioned.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: The ending, in which the main characters charge into no-man's land but are then obscured by a huge explosion before the image fades to a field of poppies, had to be thrown together in post-production. There was limited filming time, and the director had no experience with action scenes, and there was no money for a stunt co-ordinator in the budget. The resulting footage of Blackadder, George, Baldrick and Darling charging through No Man's Land while shells blew up around them looked distinctly underwhelming (they just fell over and lay on the ground looking not very dead), but the explosion effects were also so terrifying for the actors that Rowan Atkinson refused point-blank to do any retakes. The footage was deemed unusable, but while the film editor was cycling through it and trying to figure out what to do, he realised that slowing it down made it far more effective. As a result, they re-edited the footage, slowed it down, dropped the audio out and replaced it with the theme music played as a Lonely Piano Piece, and then at the moment a large explosion obscured the actors from view, crossfaded to a still photograph of some poppies. The result was the most hard-earned Downer Ending to any situation comedy.
• Throw It In!: According to Tony Robinson, the gag about Baldrick making coffee from mud expanded in rehearsals.
• What Could Have Been: 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. This didn't happen due to Serendipity Writing The Plot: see above.

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