Content to be snookered
WHAT kind of amusingly alliterative alternatives did they consider, I wonder, before they settled on RICHARD HAMMOND’S CRAZY CONTRAPTIONS (C4, 8pm)? Richard Hammond’s Mad Machines? Richard Hammond’s Daft Devices? Richard Hammond’s Goofy Gizmos? Richard Hammond’s Five Foot Five? (OK, he’s actually 5ft 7, but why waste a good gag?)
Oh, you may laugh, but TV folk take their programme titles jolly seriously.
Over at the BBC, for example, it took a team of consultants six months and several million pounds of licence payers’ money to decide to ditch the “A” from A Question Of Sport, at least according to a report I’ve just made up for comic effect, and in case it’s a quiet Friday on the letters page.
So, yes, they’ll have had a few sleepless nights, will the people at Channel 4, before assuring themselves that, yep, Crazy Contraptions is definitely a winner for them, name-wise at least.
But will the rest of us consider it a winner from a content point of view?
Well, if you flatly refuse to be amused by eccentric engineering (and there we have another – Richard Hammond’s Eccentric Engineering, those names just keep on coming), then, no, you’ll probably be happier with the snooker on BBC2 or with MASTERCHEF (8pm) on BBC1, where in both cases a nail-biting semi-final is nearing its conclusion.
But if you can find room in your schedule to accommodate an hour of oddball, Heath Robinson-ish inventiveness, applied to everyday tasks which in most cases can be performed perfectly easily via other, less convoluted but drearier means, then you might just find this brightens up your evening.
In each episode (there’s going to be seven, just so you know) two teams of amateur engineers are set the challenge of creating chain reaction machines using commonplace items, their purpose being to perform whatever menial task Richard has decided needs performing for him.
So in episode one we have a trio from Loughborough University, who presumably don’t have any work to do right now, taking on three brothers from Somerset, building machines designed to let Richard make his bed while he’s luxuriating in the bath. For this, they’re each given a workshop, an assortment of potentially useful gubbins (croquet mallets, rubber duck, that sort of thing) and a deadline of three days.
And who’s going to judge their efforts? Why, Zach Umperovitch, of course!
“He’s a two-time chain reaction machine world record holder,” Richard adds, before we’ve even had a chance to shrug and say: “Nope, can’t say it rings a bell.”