Review: Blackadder: Back and Forth

A veritable masterpiece. A mediocre attempt at comedy. A steaming pile of horse manure. All of these descriptions come close to describing Blackadder's Millenium Special, Back and Forth. I simply can't decide whether to love this special or hate it, because despite it's rather simple premise it manages to be incredibly devisive in quality...
      The modern-day Blackadder is hosting a Millenium dinner party for his friends (of course played by Richardson, Fry, Laurie and McCinnery). As usual, he intends to scam his guests, instructing Baldrick to create a fake Time Machine from some plans by Leonardo Da Vinci. He bets his guests that he can get several items from history, and, using props, plans to reap in £30,000.
     However, Blackadder's plan doesn't go quite right and it turns out that Baldrick has constructed a working time machine. In their attempts to get home, Blackadder meets dinosaurs, gives Elizabeth I a Polo mint, punches William Shakespeare (Colin Firth, everybody), kills Robin Hood (wooing Maid Marion - played by model Kate Moss), accidentally kills the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo, and then visit Hadrian's Wall in the Roman Period. When they finally return home, they find that no-one has heard of Shakespeare or Robin Hood, and that the country is French. Blacky goes back and fixes all of his mistakes, and then changes a few more things to become King Edmund III.
     Everything is done with a good sense of fun to preceedings, with a jolly few references to the original series, but it's not as interconnected as I would have liked. The Duke of Wellington, for example, is a vastly different character to the Wellington satirically portrayed in Blackadder III - it would have been so easy to insert a quick "Baaugh!", as is characteristic of Fry characters, just to have a slim connection to that earlier portrayl.
     The humour also seems to have jumped down a notch. Scatological and rascist humour in the original series was done with some historical context in mind, and things were usually kept as realistic as was possible on the budget. Following the Inverse Law of Budget and Quality, the jokes regarding Baldrick's disgusting habits (his revolting underwear and Tony Robinson's bare arse) and the constant bashing of the French ("They call us pansies, and whoopsies, and big-girl's blouses!" "But we are, Monsieur President. We will be killed the moment we mince up the hill") feel a little tasteless and wrong, if the latter are a little entertaining.
     Nevertheless, it does a decent job of bringing the series to a final and satisfying end, and for that I must give it credit. Blackadder has been one of the greats in British Comedy, beaten only, in my opinion, by the likes of Monty Python and in some places Red Dwarf. I've enjoyed my Blackadder marathon, and I hope you have too. Thanks for reading.

Thanks.