Crazy Contraptions

Synopsis

A sort of inversion of The Great Egg Race. Teams compete to create "chain reaction machines" to carry out a simple task in the most complicated way, for example stopping Hammond from having to get out of his bath to feed his dog at the other end of his mansion. In one section they have to demonstrate a particular scientific principle and in another they need to incorporate a particular object. Knockout series structure.

Unfortunately, with so many moving parts (and on this occasion that's not a metaphor), there's very little time to focus on the various engineering challenges in any depth. Hammond has a good track record in formats that balance science and entertainment, but this one constantly misses the mark on both of those elements: Dr Shini Somara provides cursory VTs on the required elements, but would have been better deployed in the studio where she could have picked up on all the technical matters arising, and then the finale is critically undermined by choppy editing. To show off a chain reaction machine properly, the camerawork needs to be as well choreographed as the machine itself, capturing the whole thing in a single flowing shot if at all possible. 48 edits in 70 seconds (as we saw in the first episode) really won't cut it - or rather it will cut it, to ribbons, robbing us and the teams of the big "wow" moment at the end. All a bit of a shame, because this could have been a fun twist on the build-a-machine genre, if only the contestants' ingenuity had been matched on the production side.

Champions

Fieldhouse Brothers (Adam, Damian and Robin Fieldhouse).

Key moments

Lack of confidence in your central conceit ahoy: Hammond asked the contestants to carry out a task without making him move, yet gave the teams up to three interventions. Eh? To be clear, apart from the initial trigger, teams aren't allowed to design human interaction into their machines - the permitted interventions are just a measure to avoid a machine being a damp squib because it fails early, and they (apparently) count against the team. Presumably, if a machine fails a fourth time then they'd be allowed to intervene just so that we get to see it play out, but anything beyond that point won't count. We say "presumably" because none of this is ever properly explained on screen.

Trivia

Officially billed as Richard Hammond's Crazy Contraptions.

The heats aired at 8pm on Fridays, with subsequent episodes shunted off at 10:55pm the Sunday before (i.e. with just over 50 hours separating episodes 4 and 5). Possibly the skits supposedly showing Hammond supposedly flaunting his wealth fell a bit flat in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis. But even if that hadn't been going on, the show was more than capable of failing on its own demerits: in the entire run we saw only one professional review of the show (by Benji Wilson in The Telegraph) and the headline was "Richard Hammond’s Crazy Contraptions tries to take on YouTube (and fails)". Considering that every week Hammond's opening spiel told us that chain reaction machines were "made famous by viral videos", you'd have to say they brought that on themselves.

Even if you did stick with the show on catchup, All4 managed to spoil the result anyway by having the final represented by an image of... the winners holding their trophy. D'oh.

See also

Simply Complicated

Pictures

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