The Bucket O' Nothing

Something I've noticed while browsing IRC channels for various things to watch is that there are many, many channels on many servers dedicated to anime episodes, and far fewer dedicated to other sorts of television programs. There are, of course, several that have various American television series like ER available, some that are dedicated to cheesy non-Japanese cartoons (where I recently was happy to find the entire four seasons of ReBoot available), and even a few that serve the even cheesier Japanese television genre known as sentai.

Not to be confused with hentai, sentai shows are best summed up by comparison with Power Rangers - a team of people, usually in preposterous fighting gear, who fight monsters that wear even more outlandish outfits. However, there are very few places that I've found that have British television programs on them. Of course, the more successful ones might make it across the Atlantic and thus gain a fanbase, but not all of them do.

So I was very happy to discover, some time ago, a channel called #junkyard-wars on irc.irchighway.net. Some of you may know of Junkyard Wars - two teams are challenged to make something, like a steam-powered car, a diving suit or something to knock down buildings, using only what they can find on a scrapheap (a junkyard for the Americans reading this, hence the name).

The series has been going for a fair few seasons in America, and what more astute viewers may have noticed is that the hosts of the program changed after the first few seasons. This is because the first few seasons were actually made in the UK, where it's called Scrapheap Challenge, and was initially presented by Cathy Rogers (the very cool woman who came up with the program concept and runs the company that produced it) and the ever mad Robert Llewelyn (Kryten in Red Dwarf). It's very fun to watch people start out with an outlandish premise - "you must build a boat, that can also drive on land, and has a pump and hose in it so you can extinguish a burning building in the middle of a lake!" - a scrapheap full of all sorts of rubbish, and ten hours, and still come up with something at the end that manages to fulfill the challenge, all with the help with lots of welding and liberal application of duct tape.

Even the moments that go horribly wrong can be utterly hilarious. My favourite example of this was in one of the finals, where the teams had to build drag racing cars, and after one run all the forward gears on the gearbox on one of the cars blew out. So, of course, the team decided to do the next run in reverse... all the way down the drag strip. Managing about 30 miles an hour, backwards. You don't get moments like these in movies, because they're so ridiculous nobody would ever believe them.

In conclusion - welding and duct tape, and a lot of bodging, are what holds the world together.

Oh, and Finding Nemo is a cool film (the seagulls were highly amusing), and definitely a nice thing to watch before going to bed. :)