History: The Sitcom, England: The Theme Park — Blackadder’s Retrovisions as Historiographic Meta-TV

Abstract

In 2000, a survey conducted by military history publishers, Osprey, suggested that the 1980s television sitcom Blackadder has entered the collective memory of British schoolchildren to a great extent: many of them thought that the title character of the series was a historical person.¹ This arch-misunderstanding of historiographical re-imagining speaks both for the cultural power of the TV sitcom and for the peculiar conditions under which the metahistorical series Blackadder operated in 1980s Britain. What a shock it must have been for historians to realize that the next generation’s historical knowledge is to some extent being shaped by a television sitcom, which has been largely neglected in accounts of how national history has been conceived of in audiovisual media. In this chapter, I shall outline how the serial narrative of the television sitcom has contributed to a postmodernist, metahistoric social construction of history.

I would like to thank Gaby Allrath, Katherine Williams, Alexander van de Bergh and Meike Röhl for additional ‘input’ after their reading of earlier versions of this chapter.

For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably…

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.

(Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’)