2. Blackadder Goes Forth - Goodbyeee
Is there a sitcom with a more perfect ending than Blackadder? (this is not an invitation for debate, it's a yes/no question and if you say 'yes' you're wrong) Knowing full-well that their series four setting of World War One was not one to be tackled with the flippancy of earlier series, writers Richard Curtis and Ben Elton chose to bring the show over its six episode run, to a sombre, moving and deadly serious denouement, reiterating the horror and massive waste of human life that the First World War was. Comic hi-jinks were had at Blackadder's fruitless attempts to find a way out of 'going over the top,' but there was always a lingering undercurrent of tragedy, unprecedented for a Blackadder series, that dogged the central characters right until that heart-wrenching final scene. The sequence itself is one of the most beautiful ever broadcast Blackadder, Baldrick, George and Darling leap over the lip of the trench and -in agonising slow motion- tear through no-man's land toward the enemy as bombs and machinegun fire explode and cackle around them. Before their fate is shown, the scene fades to one of the barren, empty ground on which they previously stood, before moving gently to a present-day poppy field, all the while a haunting piano rendition of the series' theme tune plays funereally over it. But it wasn't always to be this way. The original cut of the push scene is available to see and it was quite terrible, bereft of all the poetic ambiguity that made the final version so impactful. In the original, there is no slow-motion and our heroes are seen grotesquely collapsing to the ground as they are rather unconvincingly killed by gunfire. Baldrick actor Tony Robinson has said how his heart sank when he stepped onto the atrocious no-man's land set, and the series creators were equally horrified when looking back at the finished scene, feeling they'd completely ruined the whole series with such a naff, tacky ending. The solution? Fade out before the actual death shot, slow the whole thing down to obscure the cheapness of the set and add that beautiful piano. Hey presto, you have yourselves one of the most perfect television endings in history.