To be absolutely fair, if you wanted a way to pass the time, it did have a nice line in anachronisms (deliberate, that is). In one case, aged Merlin states that "Times arrow only flies in one direction" which has a lot of interesting cross references in and out of Arthurian literature, immediately followed by a Puck character (under another name) appearing in a tricorn hat left over from Gulliver, and blowing a bosun's whistle. And then there was Rutger Hauer's Vortigern's dealings with his architects. But closeness to sources was not its strong point.