Techno Games
Contents |
Host
Series 1: Ulrika Jonsson
Series 2: Jayne Middlemiss
Series 3 & 4: Philippa Forrester
Co-hosts
Series 1 interviewer: Ed Hall and Sophie Blake
Series 2 interviewer: Ed Hall (with Japan reports by Julia Reed) Liz Bonnin, Simon Scott
Commentator: Barry Davies
Broadcast
BBC 2, 20 March 2000 to 28 March 2003 (35 episodes in 4 series)
Synopsis
The Orb, 2Unlimited and The Shamen play The Crystal Maze style games to determine who is best.
No, not really, this is a spin-off from the hugely successful Robot Wars but instead of fighting (read: pushing your opponent into the big House Robots/Pit) they do other Olympic-y things like run! Swim! Climb! Fill out tax returns! (A demonstration event at Sydney 2000).
So school kids and university students build robots to win certain events. Some of these events had rules though, robots for the 15m sprint had to be walking robots, not wheely robots. There was a similar rule with the swimming event.
Although she sometimes seemed out of place, Ulrika hosted the show well - ably assisted by two judge blokes from Robot Wars for event analysis. Thankfully, the excellent Ed Hall was on hand to introduce the events and subtly mock everything whilst some model-type tried to look interested and nodded on cue while interviewing by numbers the various engineers and teams. Commentary for the events was provided by the last bastion of professionalism, yes, he who is Barry Davies.
By far the best part of the show was the robots themselves, and it was a great idea to give a good prize (flying the team out to NASA no less) for the most original robot to compete. Correctly in the first series this was given to Skeletron, a rather cool looking humanoid climbing robot who was slow but looked the business and did make it to the top of the rope climb.
Despite its good intentions the show lacked any pace whatsoever - 20 minutes of build-up, interviews, chat, more analysis and repeats of the actual event in a 27 minute show doesn't work.
The set up for the second series was beginning to get somewhere. Jayne Middlemiss loosened up the presenting style and there was some jolly banter between her in the studio bubble and Ed Hall in the events hall. The range of events was increased, although the quality of entry still left a lot to be desired. Is this really the best that British Engineering can do? Well, given that the idea is that schools get a good share of the airtime rather than the usual Scrapheap-style professional bodgers, yes it is.
