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Why I Love...Scrapheap Challenge

Lisa Rogers and Robert Llewellyn
  • Posted at 4:12pm
  • 21 April 2008
  • by RhodriMarsden-RT
  • 3 comments

Anyone remember The Great Egg Race? A quaint, scientific challenge-based show from the early 1980s, it required its contestants to solve such delicate problems as taking a photograph of an oil rig from a fluttering kite.

But that kind of thing looks distinctly unimpressive in 21st-century television schedules. The ante has to be upped to include steel girders, welding and combustible materials - and Scrapheap Challenge does exactly this, with panache, gusto and the occasional explosion. It's now in its umpteenth series, presented by actor Robert Llewellyn (best known for playing the mechanoid Kryten in space-age sitcom Red Dwarf) and the reliably effervescent Lisa Rogers.

And where The Great Egg Race might have attracted PhD-laden contestants making knowledgeable forays into the world of applied mathematics on a blackboard, Scrapheap Challenge attracts Blokes. Blokes with beards. Blokes who like oil, cogs, pistons and Lisa Rogers. Blokes with something to prove - if not to us, then certainly to each other.

The two teams of hirsute man-mountains spend ten hours wielding power tools in an attempt to build a working piece of machinery. Past challenges have included gizmos that can hurl burning projectiles, and others that can clamber over a terrain of rocks and boulders. All the bits and pieces are sourced from an enormous scrapheap that feels like dozens of square miles of futuristic Mad Max-style landscape (although apparently it's an army training centre outside Basingstoke).

The items they manage to locate are astounding; I mean, finding a winch or a bungee rope amid the colossal piles of outmoded junk is like finding a needle in, well, a colossal pile of outmoded junk. And, as the contraptions are assembled, I find myself in awe of these Blokes, because I can't pick up a chisel without plunging the blade into my thumb, and the inner workings of a gearbox are as much of a mystery to me as the appeal of hydra-energetic anti-fatigue tanning moisturiser.

As the hours tick away, Llewellyn and Rogers look upon the Blokes - by now red of face and short of fuse - with detached amusement, and find time to compose their own slapstick routines to lighten the oppressive stench of burning oil, and the mood of imminent failure. Because, generally speaking, these teams of Blokes construct magnificent-looking objects that, er, don't really work very well.

There used to be episodes of the A-Team where Mr T and co welded together bits and pieces to create improbable, life-saving items of machinery; put Scrapheap contestants in a similar scenario, and they'd be mown down in a hail of machine-gun fire in scant seconds.

But man alive, these boys have commitment. And belief. There's a whole lot of roaring and punching of the air going on at the climax of the show...but then their hovercraft sinks. Or their human cannonball dummy gently tumbles over the side of a cliff. Ah well. If at first you don't succeed, smile awkwardly at Lisa Rogers, that's my motto.

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Comments

  • Posted on 07 January 2009
  • at 6:34pm
  • by Fergry

Its known that some of the more unusual things are planted like propellors impelors, specialist stuff but the contestants still have to find them. I remember one item being in a container with a car with no engine blocking the door so they don't exactly make it easy.

All in all a great show never the less.

  • Posted on 21 July 2008
  • at 10:58pm
  • by Ed

Great stuff and I am hooked but a bit let down by the feeling that the experts come along with preconceived ideas and override anything the team had in mind. And that some bits that match the experts' pre-planned ideas have been planted in the scrapyard for them to find. For instance how do you find the specialist bits needed for a jet powered rail car or hovercraft unless they have been planted?

As an engineer I'd like to see more of how the item is built and less of the endless repetition and nonsense "entertainment" by Robert and Lisa.

  • Posted on 15 June 2008
  • at 5:05pm
  • by Treeman
I agree with a lot of what has been said above. However, I do not think enough credit has been given to the team's mechanical expertise. Not all the machines die horribly at the end, some do admittedly, but many work almost perfectly. This may be due to fluke, or lucky, (sorry) expert guess work but we sit in awe at the incredible techy-ability of the teams. Scrapheap is perfect Sunday evening entertainment. We thank the commssioning bods at channel 4.

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