Jeremy Paxman has accused education secretary Michael Gove of "wilfully misquoting" a Cambridge University professor in a row about the first world war and its portrayal in Blackadder.

The Newsnight presenter, speaking at a preview of his new BBC1 series, Britain's Great War, on Tuesday, said he had no problem with the Rowan Atkinson show being used to encourage schoolchildren to talk about the war, "as long as it was not taught as fact. It's not fact. It was a brilliant comedy."

Gove caused controversy earlier this month when he attacked Cambridge historian Professor Sir Richard Evans as a leftwing academic who was happy to "feed the myth" perpetuated by programmes such as Blackadder, that the war was a "misbegotten shambles [and] series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite". Evans later said the attack showed Gove's "ignorance of history".

"I think he wilfully misquoted Richard Evans, the Cambridge historian, and rather unfairly I think," said Paxman.

Paxman, whose four-part series largely investigates the impact of the war on people living at home, and how it changed Britain, said the received wisdom of the war was that "this whole thing was a disaster foisted upon people by a governing class which had no instinctive understanding of the plight of ordinary people".

"I do not believe that to be the case," he said. "If you read the accounts of ordinary soldiers, it seems to me in the early stages of the war there was a conviction that the war was a justified enterprise.

"Michael Gove uses this phrase a 'just war'. I don't really want to get into the theology of a just war because I don't really understand it, but I'm not sure it's a really helpful phrase. But an understandable war, yes."

Asked what he would have asked General Sir Douglas Haig, a British commander on the western front for most of the war, Paxman said: "I would have asked him why he was so bloody stupid of course. I don't quite know what he would have answered."

Had he been alive when war broke out, Paxman said: "Personally, I think I probably would have gone [to war] and I wouldn't be here, I suspect."

Paxman said he hoped people would use the series to look again at the war without "100 years of post-facto wisdom. We know it wasn't the war to end all wars, but that knowledge wasn't available to people in 1914.

"I hope we can get back to a more sympathetic appreciation of what it must have been like at the time."

The programme features Julian Fellowes, the Downton Abbey creator whose wife is Joy Kitchener, the great-great-niece of Lord Kitchener, and an eye-witness account of the German attack on Hartlepool by 105-year-old Violet Muers, who died just before Christmas.

Paxman said he did not subscribe to the "lions led by donkeys" description of the British infantry in the first world war which was the source of much of Gove's anger.

Gove wrote in the Daily Mail on 2 January: "The conflict has, for many, been seen through the fictional prism of dramas such as Oh! What a Lovely War, The Monocled Mutineer and Blackadder, as a misbegotten shambles – a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite. Even to this day there are leftwing academics all too happy to feed those myths."

Paxman said: "The series was made before Michael Gove made his comments. Doubtless they will be co-opted by one side or the other. I find it a slightly artificial debate. A few moments thought will convince you that the 'lions led by donkeys' argument is a really pretty silly analysis.

"To suggest that generals deliberately set out to throw away the lives of men in order they would be more likely to lose the battles in which they were engaged, that doesn't make a great deal of sense.

"The generals were like everyone else – confronted by something they had never seen before. That they repeatedly made the same mistakes just betrays their ignorance. There were battle plans, they were just ineffective."

Paxman said Blackadder Goes Forth, which was set in the first world war, was "brilliant comedy, I really enjoyed it, but it was comedy". The BBC has said it has no plans to repeat the show as part of a year-long season about the war comprising 130 programmes across TV and radio.

Paxman added: "To me the great mystery of the war, and I still can't answer this properly, was why people kept faith with this enterprise. I was really struck by how people kept with it, they endured. It is something we have never had to endure and can't really imagine enduring, and certainly woundn't be countenanced now because of social changes."

Adrian Van Klaveren, the BBC's controller, Great War Centenary, said it was the biggest and "most ambitious season of programmes the BBC has ever mounted. There will be many highly charged debates over the next four years. Our job as the BBC … is to give people the facts, and different opinions, and let them make up their own minds."

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