Awards and Criticism
The series won an International Emmy award in the popular arts category in 1983. The four series of Blackadder were voted into second place in the BBC's Britain's Best Sitcom in 2004 with 282,106 votes, although the series' advocate, John Sergeant, was not complimentary of the first series, suggesting it was "grandiose, confused and expensive".
Members of the cast and crew, looking back for the documentary Blackadder Rides Again, are also not particularly complimentary of the first series. John Lloyd recalls that a colleague commented at the time that the series "looks a million dollars, but cost a million pounds", although admits that they were proud of the result at the time. Due to the high cost of the first series, the controller of BBC1 at the time the second series was commissioned, Michael Grade, was reluctant to authorise a second series without major improvements and cost-cutting, leaving a gap of three years before Blackadder II was broadcast, on the condition that it remained largely studio-bound.
Read more about this topic: The Black Adder
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“Like speaks to like only; labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the East, how little to the West.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)