Black Adder: Back and Forth

Black Adder: Back and Forth (see IMDb for working titles). Paul Weiland, dir. Richard Curtis and Ben Elton, script. Rowan Atkinson, star. UK: BBC-Video, 1999. 55 min. as DVD (initial TV run-time 33 min.)

As the blurb on the DVD of this special puts it, "The new 21st-century Lord Blackadder and his scabby, but loyal, servant Baldrick wreak havoc as they tumble through the past in a time machine, with disastrous consequences." The inadvertent disasters are corrected (and an intentional one added), but important here is the Doctor Who-vianish time machine, supposedly based on a design by Leonardo Da Vinci. Blackadder and Baldrick are moved unpredictably through time and space inside a device that seems to combine a cuckoo clock and slot machine, initially without markings on the slot machine to indicate destinations. Cf. and emphatically contrast humans' risking travel in the Heechee ships in F. Pohl's Gateway. (RDE [Steve Mollman, ENG373MASI06], 16/06/06)