Idiot Box 2
Created | Updated Apr 2, 2003
Weird Scientists
The law of diminishing returns was displayed complete with interactive computer graphics as the BBC, having already done dinosaurs and prehistoric beasts, pressed on through the fossil record with the inaccurately-named Walking With Cavemen (BBC1).
Neither caves nor men were especially prominent in this opening installment, with the only manlike hominid on display being Professor Robert Winston, who has been drafted in to make this new series even more absurd than its predecessors. Having got hold of a time-travelling landrover from somewhere or other the Prof popped back 300,000 generations to pay a visit to our earliest known relatives and their offspring, who bore a striking resemblence to extras in monkey costumes and rubber muppets respectively.
Sadly the australopithecines did not mob and slaughter Professor Winston, being more concerned with re-enacting the opening scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey and braining each other with sticks - when they weren't tastefully copulating, of course. Our upright posture is all down to sex, said the Prof with a twinkly smile - anything which means you have more energy for a spot of rumpy-pumpy is good news, in evolutionary terms too. He helped himself to a thermos of coffee and a chocolate digestive while the extras behind him faked prehistoric orgasms.
Elsewhere in the programme he went even further back in time, to the primeval rainforest our ancestors' ancestors had skulked about in. Clearly not having read his Ray Bradbury the Prof displayed a shockingly lackadaisical attitude to the integrity of the space-time continuum by being irresponsible with a grapnel-firing gun. One grapnel accidentally fired into the wrong lemur's skull and the entire population of Chiswick could have been erased from history. Professor Winston explained the role played in our evolution by the birth of the Himalayas, displaying impressive gravitas for a man swinging from a tree in a silly hat.
There was proper science on the other side as Techno Games 2003 (BBC2) neared a climax, with such events as the Robot Football, the Natural Rope Climb, the Submersible Swimming, and the Lone Gunmen Lookalike Contest.
Professor Martin Smith BSc MSc CPhys MInstP SMIEEE CEng FIEE FCybS FRAS FRSA FRI showed Simon Scott a robot he had brought along especially. If this had a been a musical event Professor Smith would have been the conductor of the Birmingham Philharmonic Orchestra and Simon the lead guitarist in a punk band called The Piles. Professor Smith builds autonomous mobile robotic systems and is a consultant on the design of multifrequency triplex assemblies. Simon and his friends have twice been Robot Wars world champions with their machine Razer, a frankly maniacal device capable of exerting nine tonnes of crushing power with its titanium beak.
The Professor showed the robot he'd brought along, a charming homunculus named Scarlet. Scarlet looked around the bench on which it stood with the bemused but sincere goodwill of a Japanese tourist. Occasionally it waved its arms about or seemed to be following the Prof's conversation with Simon.
'This took three years to build and can process fifteen million instructions per second,' said Martin Smith with his habitual air of reserved yet faintly embarrassed intellectual prowess.
'Wow! Great! It's wonderful!' said Simon with his own habitual slightly frenzied enthusiasm for anything with too many servos built into it. You could see him wondering which bit of Scarlet to ram the titanium beak into first should push come to shove.
