One of the most important things to remember when you are in the world of mass communication is numbers don’t mean that much. I remember a conversation I had in 1998, when we heard the record breaking viewing figures that the most recent series Red Dwarf had achieved. Over 10 million on first broadcast, amazing.
A bunch of space bums reaching that kind of popularity was a genuinely impressive result. However when this was being discussed among the cast and crew, old misery guts here said something along the lines of ‘well, that means around 48 million people didn’t watch it.’
(For a full explanation of that statement, it refers to the total population of the UK in 1998, around 58 million).
But what an annoying thing to say. I mean, come on, party pooper, be happy about it. I still feel bad about saying it to this day. On the other hand it was true, there were 48 million people who had either never heard of Red Dwarf or who’d never watched it, or who watched 5 minutes and turned over because it ‘wasn’t for them.’
But seriously, the fact that 10 million people all sat down at the same time and watched one TV show is pretty amazing. Long before YouTube/TikTok/Instagram. You may understand why I remember this so crisply when you realise we beat Top Gear to being the most watched TV show ever on BBC 2.
Not that I did mention that to Mr J Clarkson a few years later, in fact I repeated it several times as he asked me what car I drove.
Anyway, something along the lines of this conversation happened during the lifespan of another show that took over my life for ten years. Scrapheap Challenge was also a very popular show in its heyday. I think we topped out at around 4.5 million views on Channel 4.
The long running challenge show was certainly very popular and I’m very proud to be associated with it, although as I have said on many occassions, it would not have existed without the creator ands my co-presenter for 4 years, Cathy Rogers coming up with the idea in the first place.
The series ran from 1998 to 2007, and for the last 6 years I was really lucky to be joined by Lisa Rogers (no relation) who bought fresh energy and enthusiasm to the show making it a must watch for an ever wider audience.
So I think I can genuinely claim that I never thought I would be making anything like Scrapheap again. It’s a complex and expensive show to make, all I have managed to do outside the traditional broadcasting industry is create super cheap shows like Carpool and The Fully Charged Show (Now Everything Electric cars).
To be fair, the early episodes of Fully Charged were cheap to make, we now run a very talented and sophisticated production team and everything is a bit less cheap, but the jump from what we are doing now to making episodes of anything like Scrapheap is very big.
So it wasn’t in the picture, until we had a very special guest at our London Everything Electric event last year. Colin Furze was one of our highlight ‘digital fireside chat’ guests and he was a joy to talk to. For the very few of you not familiar with Colin’s incredible achievements, have a look here.
During that conversation and over the following months, we discussed the possibility of bringing back something along the lines of Scrapheap, only with a slightly more sustainable slant.
But it was really a question of budget. It just seemed impossible without going to a big broadcaster.
Since we last made Scrapheap Challenge 17 years ago, the broadcasting industry has dramatically changed. The big media companies that utterly dominated what we watched on our TVs on the 1990’s and 2000’s have gone from muscular masters of the universe to broken down old Uncles who once hobnobbed with the rich and famous.
The big muscles are now flexed by ‘the streamers,’ the likes of Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV and the gazillions of weird conglomerates with apps on our smart TVs. But that ignores the really huge elephant in the room, YouTube, with the largest audience share of any of the major players.
So we didn’t approach any of the aforementioned companies, we decided to try and raise the money independently and put the show up on YouTube to see what happens. We tried and failed to raise enough using Kickstarter, I decided it was too late and people had forgotten about Scrapheap and what it represented, but we managed to raise the budget elsewhere, I’m not at liberty to divulge where from but it’s not an oil company, the Kremlin or the Chinese Communist Party.
Over the next couple of weeks we will shoot no fewer than 2 episodes of Zapheap!
Two teams have 10 hours to make a machine out of the piles of waste on our special mini scrapheap, but, with the additional challenge of no combustion engine use. Both teams will be supplied with safe battery packs and battery and motor controllers, the rest they have to9 bodge together.
The show will be hosted by Colin and myself (I’m staying in the background making tea) and Imogen Bhogal and Jack Scarlett following the teams as they slog away to create their electric dreams.
Once the machines are built, we will record the test in front of a live audience at our Everything Electric South show in October, at Farnborough International, just to the west of London. The shows will then be released on both the Everything Electric and Colin Furze YouTube channel shortly after that.
I truly didn’t think this would be possible and I’m sure we’ll have some hiccups and struggles in the coming few weeks, but we have everything in place, 4 truly brilliant teams, 2 very different challenges and hopefully, the same inspirational show that we now know for sure had a huge impact on na generation of engineers.
I will be posting reports from the show in the next few weeks, so stay tuned folks!
"Not that I did mention that to Mr J Clarkson a few years later, in fact I repeated it several times as he asked me what car I drove."
Glorious
I love that you're getting this off the ground (hopefully literally). Well done. To have yourself and Colin as part of the team is great. All that's missing is Adam Savage and we'd have the trinity of presenters that have had an enormous influence on my and my son's engineering interest (and Jake's 1st class Beng degree in Yacht Design). I know that you are always very modest about that influence, but without your unending enthusiasm and excitement the shows you've led would not have been what they became.