Blowing up the rule book
Reality series ventures into forbidden thrills, all in the name of science
Never Ever Do This At Home
Discovery, Monday
“It is ridiculous and awesome!” Teddy Wilson says in a tense moment during the Season 2 premiere of Never Ever Do This At Home.
Wilson and his co- host Norm Sousa are in the midst of launching a 150- kilogram cast- iron bathtub up a ramp, into the air and into a secondfloor bathroom. But Wilson’s unbridled enthusiastic outburst is also a spot- on description of the show. ( Did I mention the bathtub- launching mechanism is a bungee cord anchored to a pickup truck?)
“We’re like children when things happen around us: ‘ This is crazy! We should get out of here, but we won’t!’ Common sense never kicks in,” Sousa confesses during a phone interview.
Over the course of 12 half- hour episodes, the duo plays a grown- up version of “What if?” on a rural property in Bradford, Ont. What if we motorize a lazy Susan to make it even lazier? What if we transform a couch into a motorized boat? What if we turn the bed of a pickup truck into a hot tub heated by the engine? The condemned ( but still lovely) farmhouse is trashed, bit by bit, and the addition of a pond and guest house creates new possibilities for shenanigans. While some of the segments are fun, most are downright dangerous, hence the title of the show.
“We have a big and very qualified crew, but at the same time it’s legitimately terrifying. We’ll be 10 feet
We have a big and very qualified crew, but at the same time it’s legitimately terrifying. TEDDY WILSON CO- HOST, NEVER EVER DO THIS AT HOME
away from an incredibly dangerous experiment, then 30 feet away will be the qualified people who know what they’re doing,” Wilson says. “So sometimes,” his voice goes up a register or two, “it’s ‘ What? Should we be doing this?’ ”
They should! They should! The series channels that inner yearning to elbow past the allowable and charge headlong into the realm of the forbidden. It’s all in the name of science — this is, after all, a Discovery Channel series — but that doesn’t mean viewers don’t dig it when things blow up real good.
There’s still plenty of that in Season 2, with “bigger and more ridiculous experiments,” they promise. But there are fewer overall, which allows a more in- depth exploration of the how and why of it all.
“The results of actual science can often seem like the stuff of science fiction,” says Wilson, who is also known to viewers as the host of Innerspace on Space. “We play with chemical compounds like thermite, and when you see the chemical reaction, it seems like a computer- generated effect, but it’s not. It’s real science at work. We’re
always blown away by that.”
And by the blowback from explosions, of course. Just kidding (sort of). Safety is always of primary importance on the series. When shooting first started, however, the hosts were skeptical that the clear plastic Lexan shields they take shelter behind would offer them much protection, seeing as they are about two centimetres thick. Viewers have been wondering about the magical properties of the shields, too, so the show is turning its weapons on the material in Season 2. They pepper it with bullets, torch it with a flame- thrower and even try taking it down with cannonballs.
All the action is caught on a multitude of cameras, including “Phantom” units that can record up to 5,000 frames per second, perfect for a slo- mo depiction of, say, a pineapple exploding, or the moment a spark becomes a blaze.
That feature will come in handy on the episode when the lads are handed a thermal lance, a tool every bit as dangerous as it sounds.
“It’s a terrifying device, one I never would have imagined myself using,” Sousa says. “It burns at something like 3,000 C. To put it in our hands is just insane.”
Again, they are surrounded at all time by people who know what they’re doing and everything is designed to maximize safety.
That said, accidents happen. Have they ever been hurt? Once the pair stops laughing, Wilson answers: “I tend to get grazed. Norm tends to get injured. Nothing serious, thank goodness. … Oh, Norm, you had a bit of an incident with some thermite on your head.”