Blackadder: Back & Forth
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Blackadder: Back & Forth (1999) was created for showing during 2000 in a cinema built near the Millennium Dome, by Sky Television and the BBC, with sponsorship from—among others—Tesco PLC.
Blackadder is entertaining guests on New Year's Eve, 1999. As a practical joke, he plans to convince them he has a working time machine (and win £10,000 into the bargain). Having been charged by his guests, Bishop Flavius Melchett, Archdeacon Kevin Darling, Admiral George Bufton-Tufton and Lady Elizabeth, all presumably illegitimate descendants of previous Blackadder characters (Stephen Fry, Tim McInnerny, Hugh Laurie and Miranda Richardson) to travel back through time to bring back: a Roman centurion's helmet, the Duke of Wellington's boots and a really smelly pair of 200 year old underpants, Blackadder intends to scam his guests by dredging the items from his personal store. However, in pulling a lever, he discovers the time machine, built by Baldrick to plans by Leonardo da Vinci, actually works.
Blackadder and Baldrick travel back into the far distant past and put Shakespeare off writing plays, kill the dinosaurs, Robin Hood and Wellington, and give Elizabeth I some Polo mints, before returning to the present day. Having irreversibly changed history, he finds a Britain under the rule of the French, who won at Waterloo, among other irregularities. He immediately travels back to rectify these discrepancies.
In the closing scenes, Blackadder is reminded how problematic it must have been, and that an unscrupulous person could have gained great power and wealth with such a machine, which gives him a cunning plan. As they go for one last trip through time, we see the final scene showing the four friends sitting down to watch live coverage of the Royal Family and the Prime Minister arriving at the Millennium Dome. It turns out that Blackadder is now King Edmund III, alongside Queen Marian of Sherwood (Kate Moss, earlier seen in the episode as Maid Marian), while Baldrick is now (inexplicably) the Prime Minister. Thus, Blackadder is seen to have finally achieved his lifelong dream of wealth and happiness as King of England.
This was a short film commissioned especially for showing in a cinema erected just south east of the Millennium Dome on the Greenwich peninsula in east London throughout the celebratory year 2000. Note: this is the only Blackadder story to be shot entirely on film and with no laugh track, although one was added for a later BBC screening on Easter Sunday in 2002.
The film closes with the promise that 'Blackadder will return in the year 3000 in Blackadder Back and Forth 2.