Idea for a movie
In an effort to spur scientific research, the government sponsors a TV show in which scientists are encouraged to compete to make discoveries. The scientists taking part quickly realise that they become much more popular if they discover trivial and amusing things, or mess up their experiments in entertaining ways: experiments that blow up in their faces, robots that get out of control, devices that fail hilariously. In the act of setting up one of these 'accidents', one of the scientists makes a genuinely important discovery: time travel. However they realise that if they tell anyone they have 'won' the show and have to leave, so they set about using it to make sure that no one ever finds out what they have done while making themselves the star of the show.