8pm, Sky 1
This one’s flown under the radar a bit, I heard about it a few weeks ago and now it’s on. Basically, two teams travel to South Wales and have two days to build vehicles on a limited budget. On the third day they will race to the safe with £5,000 in it, picking up the combination along the route. Not so much breaking into a safe then as just opening it.
Ben Shephard is our unlikely host. It sounds like Scrapheap Challenge With A Safe. Looking at the pictures it might turn out to be better than anticipated.
Here’s the Guardian’s preview: “In which two teams of professional mechanics attempt to build vehicles (such as fire engines or tanks) that will help them reach a locked safe full of money in a seemingly inaccessible location. What a great idea for a series, you may say. Well now. As presenter Ben Shephard puts it, it may be the case that “these guys could take the inside of a dishwasher and turn it into a helicopter” – but the execution itself is mystifyingly, unbelievably dull, from inception to finish. Of interest only to very patient engineering students, probably.”
Right, watching this now. It’s got ‘cool’ American camerawork, but Scrapheap’s approach in breaking the problems down for its audience is more entertaining than Ben Shephard standing around in a sort of everyman role looking concerned.
Mmm, I don’t get why the canisters weren’t in the burning house/cars, picking them up from an attendant felt a bit weak.
I don’t know, as a show it’s functional but not altogether that likable or fun. Something that should have felt quite exciting was the endgame with the actual safe breaking, but it just felt a bit rushed and anticlimactic – I don’t understand how that was meant to be the ultimate test when it came across as being quite a bit easier than the time trial before it. More thought needs to go into progression. Whatsmore, I don’t like the use of combination locks on Fort Boyard, not visceral enough, having to actually guess the combination here to remove chains from a safe is far removed from what an engineering show named after the act of breaking into a safe ought to be about.