Bells (Blackadder) marks the first appearance of the Bob/Kate and Flashheart archetypes that appear again in "Blackadder Goes Forth". Rik Mayall, who played Lord Flashheart, allegedly designed the character's costume himself. John Lloyd has said that Mayall virtually rewrote his part to feature "loads of jokes", which annoyed the writers, Curtis and Elton. It was the only episode of the series to feature location filming, at Wilton House in Wiltshire. The music performed as Blackadder courts "Bob" is Vaughan Williams' "Fantasia on Greensleeves". In 1993, in conjunction with Comic Relief, this episode was given away free on cassette tape with boxes of
Blackadder Goes Forth for the "Blackadder" series: We wanted a place and a time that could reproduce to a certain extent the claustrophobia and the sordidness of medieval England, and the best way to do that is to set it in the middle of a war. Co-writer Richard Curtis has said that before writing the series, the writers read a number of books about the war and decided that the First World War was a particularly apt subject for a situation comedy, finding that "actually, all the lead up to the first world war was very funny, all the people coming from communities