Bad Grandad’s Biscuit-Powered Time Machine

The premise is gloriously simple: Bad Grandad invents time travel for biscuits. Naturally, he is less interested in changing history than in finding the perfect snack before somebody else eats it.

In Andy Fanton’s comic universe, this kind of scheme belongs to a character who treats common sense as an optional extra. A biscuit is not merely a biscuit. It is breakfast, currency, scientific evidence, emergency rations, and possibly the key to rewriting the past.

The result is a comic adventure packed with crumb trails, unreliable machinery, and the sort of grand plan that collapses as soon as someone mentions tea. It gives Bad Grandad a suitably ridiculous mission while opening the door to historical jokes, inventive drawings, and escalating snack-based chaos.

The Biscuit Problem

Bad Grandad’s time machine begins with a pressing discovery: the last biscuit has vanished. The tin is empty, the packet is suspiciously crinkled, and every witness claims innocence. Rather than visit the kitchen, he decides to travel backwards through time and intercept the missing treat at its point of origin.

His logic is flawless in the way only bad logic can be. If biscuits existed yesterday, then yesterday must contain more biscuits. If one could visit the moment a biscuit was baked, one could bring it forward to the present. Any complications involving paradoxes, causality, or food safety are dismissed as “young people’s excuses.”

That single-minded mission gives the story its comic engine. Bad Grandad is not trying to save civilisation. He is trying to avoid sharing a biscuit.

A Machine Made From Pantry Parts

The invention itself should look less like a polished laboratory device and more like a kitchen appliance that has lost an argument. A biscuit tin forms the control panel. A kettle supplies the temporal steam. A clock, three wires, and a suspicious spoon complete the apparatus.

Every component has a questionable purpose. The oven dial selects the century. The timer determines how long the traveller remains in the past. A slot marked “digestive” and “shortbread” may control the destination, although nobody has tested the settings in the correct order.

This gives the artwork plenty of visual jokes. Cables can snake around teacups, historical maps can be stained with jam, and the machine can produce a puff of flour whenever it misfires. The more homemade the invention appears, the more confident Bad Grandad becomes.

The Crumb-Based Timeline

Time travel needs rules, even when those rules are scribbled on the back of a shopping list. Bad Grandad’s version operates according to a simple principle: the further back he goes, the fresher the biscuits become.

Destination	Expected Result	Likely Complication
Five minutes ago	Recover the missing biscuit	Bad Grandad meets himself chewing it
Yesterday	Visit the original biscuit tin	The tin has already been hidden
The Victorian era	Acquire an authentic afternoon snack	He is mistaken for a very rude guest
Prehistoric times	Find the first crunchy treat	The “biscuit” is actually a fossil
The distant future	Discover perfected biscuits	They are kept behind a password

The trouble begins when each trip alters the next one. Taking a biscuit from yesterday means someone remembers having fewer biscuits today. Moving a tin from the Victorian era changes the location of a cupboard. Eating a prehistoric snack may cause Bad Grandad to develop an alarming interest in geology.

The jokes work because the stakes remain tiny while the consequences become enormous. A ruined empire is unfortunate. A ruined tea break is personal.

Every Era Has A Tea Break

A medieval castle provides an especially good stop for the machine. Bad Grandad could arrive during a royal banquet, mistake a ceremonial wafer for a biscuit, and complain that the serving sizes have declined since the old days. A dragon might guard a hoard of treasure, only to reveal that the real prize is a packet of ginger nuts.

That medieval flavour fits naturally beside Fanton’s broader comic sensibility, where familiar situations are pushed into silly, sharply drawn extremes. A time-travelling grandfather can encounter knights, inventors, pirates, and future snack scientists without ever learning the most important lesson: leave the biscuit tin alone.

The historical settings also create visual contrast. Bad Grandad’s dressing gown, slippers, and battered machine can stand out against armour, royal robes, or futuristic uniforms. Wherever he lands, his priorities remain exactly the same.

Bad Grandad On The Small Screen

The concept has the fast rhythm of a strip cartoon: establish the craving, activate the machine, create a historical misunderstanding, and finish with a punchline that leaves the biscuit further away than before. Each panel can add a new malfunction, from backwards speech to a teacup that ages several hundred years in seconds.

It would also sit comfortably alongside Fanton’s work in comics and television. Readers interested in his wider creative output can explore his television projects, where the same instinct for visual gags and comic escalation finds another format.

A screen version could make the time machine especially expressive. It might shudder before every jump, announce the wrong destination, or return Bad Grandad with an unexpected beard. The final gag could reveal that he has travelled through centuries only to discover the missing biscuit in his dressing-gown pocket.

Rules For A Better Snack Expedition

A successful biscuit-based time-travel story needs a few dependable comic principles:

• Give Bad Grandad an urgent reason that is completely disproportionate to the problem.
• Make every machine control sound scientific while clearly referring to a biscuit variety.
• Let each historical visit create a new snack-related misunderstanding.
• Keep the visual design cluttered with crumbs, clocks, mugs, and badly labelled switches.
• End with the original biscuit still out of reach.

These rules preserve the character’s stubborn energy while leaving room for surreal discoveries. Bad Grandad can meet his younger self, bargain with a medieval dragon, or accidentally become the inventor of the biscuit he originally wanted to steal.

Send Bad Grandad Back Through Time

Bad Grandad’s biscuit mission is a perfect comic premise because it turns an ordinary craving into an absurd historical quest. The machine may bend time, but it cannot improve his judgement. Every jump creates another problem, every solution adds another crumb, and the final prize remains just tantalisingly beyond his grasp.

Explore Andy Fanton’s comics, drawings, writing, and mischievous characters at Andy Fanton Dot Com, then follow the crumb trail back to Bad Grandad’s next impossible invention.