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
Lions led by donkeys Donkeys" The musical "Oh, What a Lovely War!" (1963) and the comedy television series "Blackadder Goes Forth" (1989) are two well-known works of popular culture, depicting the war as a matter of incompetent donkeys sending noble (or sometimes ignoble, in the case of "Blackadder") lions to their doom. Such works are in the literary tradition of the war poets like Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Erich Maria Remarque's novel (and subsequent film) "All Quiet on the Western Front", which have been criticised by revisionists such as Brian Bond for having given rise to what he considered the myth and conventional