Welcome to Man Lab, the arena where the global modern bloke
scales the peak of prowess
and shakes from his boots the cloying mud of inadequacy.
Coming up:
Go! 'We reach for the stars, performing a funeral Man Lab style.'
Prometheus is unbound in our home foundry.
Do not show that on camera. If my wife sees that, we are dead.
And I take on the simple task
of revolutionising the entire male wardrobe.
I think the reaction out there will be either amazement,
or utter bewilderment.
Later on, we'll be attempting to put an end
to the tyranny of male fashion.
But first, the history of high-altitude flight
is littered with the names of the bold and the daring.
From Pilatre de Rozier in the Montgolfier Brothers' hot air balloon in 1783,
to Neil Armstrong and Joe Walker in the Bell X-15 in the early 1960s.
The quest to go ever higher is one of humankind's oldest obsessions.
But it's one that we at Man Lab have yet to confront,
mainly for budgetary reasons.
Our mission, then, to add our own glorious chapter
to the book of altitude, for a few hundred quid.
And for help, we turn to the true pioneers.
The first passengers in a hot air balloon
were a duck, a sheep and a chicken.
The first Russian in space was Laika, a dog.
And the first American was Ham, a chimp.
The British household pet
was key to our cut-price sub-orbital mission.
Then we discovered that the RSPCA has some annoying rules
about not catapulting live animals beyond the final frontier.
But don't worry. We've found a loophole,
and an unsuspecting crew of a cat and a bird.
And...here they are.
This is Tommy, God rest his whiskers,
and this is Budgie, may his soul take wings.
Both of them tragically passed away earlier this year,
and their owners have expressed a wish for their ashes
to be scattered to the four winds.
Welcome, then, to the pet cemetery of the future.
The Man Lab Space Funeral.
I think it's really good that Tommy's going up there,
into the outer atmosphere.
Because Tommy had very itchy feet.
And if he'd been able to climb on a rocket or a balloon
and go up there on his own,
I'm pretty sure that's what he would have done,
cos that's the type of cat he was.
This budgie was known to me as number 35.
I've got that many, I don't give them names.
And nothing particularly wonderful has happened to me in my life,
but now it appears I'm going to be part of the space race,
along with number 35.
You think that's enough, yeah?
Our plan was a simple one.
Taking the urns containing our recently-cremated companions,
we would attach them to balloons,
which would take them up to the edge of the Earth's atmosphere
and then release them, somehow, into the comforting black void.
So, in order to test our plan, we bashed together an urn prototype,
containing a miniature camera, and sombrely inflated
our trans-atmospheric, trans-theological transport solution.
Let's go through, and see if it'll take off.
And...it worked.
But it did leave us with some problems.
One - it had taken 35 balloons
to lift one quite light version of our urn.
Two - our prototype urn only had one camera on it,
which was a bit risky if it got damaged.
And three - all our hard work was now stuck on the ceiling.
It works!
With a quick bit of woodwork, problem three had a solution.
BALLOON POPS, CHEERING
The other problems, however, needed a bit more thought.
We decided to make the switch from lots of little balloons
to one large weather balloon per pet.
But what to put in that balloon divided the Man Lab.
We would like to use some hydrogen.
So hydrogen has the advantage of being lighter.
Everybody always uses helium. Hydrogen's about half the weight,
so it's going to give us more lift. It'll go up fast.
But Simmy wants to stick with the party favourite - helium.
Doesn't matter about lift.
They've got twice as much lift, but it doesn't matter.
Cos the thing is we're only lifting a small amount of weight,
so I'm hoping we'll get more height.
What began as a respectful goodbye to our feathered and furry friends
has now become competitive.
But that's the price of progress at the cutting edge of pet ash creative disposal.
Team Hydrogen, led by Dr Ben and Dan,
will be in charge of the remains of budgie number 35, the budgie.
Team Helium, led by me and Simmy, will oversee
the final, ethereal voyage of Tommy the cat.
He's not only travelled to the New Forest
and come back from Manchester, and he's travelled down to Birmingham
and come back but this, for Tommy, I think will be the ultimate trip.
Out into space, good on you, boy.
Back at the Lab, we've decided to get around
the urn problem by having the balloons themselves hold the ashes.
As the balloons climb and the air pressure around them decreases,
the gases inside will expand them
to the size of a sperm whale.
Eventually they'll pop,
and the ashes will float out like little clouds of pet soul.
This also leaves the gondola below each balloon free
to stuff with cameras.
Cunningly designed so that when the strings pull,
it pushes down on the camera.
Superb.
All that remains is to perform a brief homage to Blue Peter
and the remains of Tommy and Budgie are ready to meet their maker.
This vaguely cat-shaped gondola will be suspended below the balloon
and contains all the scientific equipment necessary
to record Tommy's ascent to heaven.
There's a camera where his face would normally be.
It will be looking at a portrait of Tommy,
so we can see him, up in the heavens.
There's another camera at the back, which will give us a wonderful shot
of the Earth, the curvature of the Earth
and our position in space, effectively.
There's a similar arrangement over here for Budgie.
Here it is - it's shaped again vaguely like a budgie's head,
so that we know which one is which.
Camera looking upwards, camera looking forwards,
nice portrait of Budgie there in his last days in his cage.
And this is particularly poignant,
because Budgie's life was cut so tragically short,
he was never even given a name by his breeder,
he simply lived and died briefly in his cage.
Now, of course, he could achieve a sort of immortality during his ascent.
Well, most budgies are normally cremated,
and just sit scattered on the earth.
But this is a first for the budgerigar world, I think.
And the fact that this bird's gone into space, its ashes,
will give it a place in history.
Back in the field, the two rival air hearses -
one helium, one hydrogen - are inflating fast.
Now for the part where a cock-up wouldn't be funny.
This is the bit we must do reverentially.
We're going to feed this into the balloon.
The ash will be floating free in the balloon so when it pops,
they will be scattered and Tommy will become,
as WB Yeats may have said, a part of the constellations of heaven.
'So the dust of Tommy is deposited
'in the sacred vault of the helium balloon.
'Dr Ben's Team Hydrogen is paying similar respects to Budgie no.35,
'The Budgie.'
And so, finally, our pioneers in the afterlife are ready for launch.
This is, or course, a funeral.
It's a sky burial and should be afforded the dignity
that such an occasion demands.
But, on a more fatuous level, it's also a race.
It is Simmy's team versus Dr Ben's team.
It's helium versus hydrogen, and it's cat versus budgie.
As in life, so it would appear in death.
Are we ready?
Three, two, one...go!
MAJESTIC ORCHESTRAL VERSION OF "AMAZING GRACE" PLAYS
'Right!'
HEAVY ROCK VERSION OF "AMAZING GRACE" PLAYS
There are actually two races involved here.
One is the race to altitude
to see whether cat or budgie gets highest,
and how long it takes to get there,
but when the balloons pop,
all our information and pictures fall back to Earth,
and we have a race to find them and recover them.
This equipment is going to do most of that work for us.
This noise you can hear... BLEEPING
..is the data, the raw binary data
coming back from the transmitter inside our balloon,
that's cat balloon, that tells us where it is with GPS.
It's decoded on this screen, this gives us information
on how high it is, what the time is,
its coordinates, lat and long, temperature and so on,
and this, later, can be further decoded
into a map like your car sat nav,
which will tell us in James Bond style
with a little bleep on the screen where it is when it lands.
At just under 500 metres, Tommy the cat
and our helium balloon have a clear lead.
But Budgie and Dr Ben's Team Hydrogen are gaining fast.
So far, I believe, that the cat is 300 metres above the budgie.
So far, bad news for us.
But we can hope it can change.
And change it does, as just moments later,
budgie no.35, The Budgie, strikes a blow for birds harassed by felines everywhere,
draws level with Tommy and then overtakes.
The budgie is ahead?
The cat had a short moment of glory, but we are ahead!
There's no answer. James May is not answering!
He clearly knows that we're ahead,
and doesn't want to look defeat in the eye.
In fact, Budgie continues its lead, all the way up to 1,000 metres.
Back on the ground,
I can't ignore my fellow funeral director any longer.
MOBILE RINGS
Hang on - it's the rival team.
Hello, rival team.
Hello, Mr James May. The loser of the moment, I believe?
'Oh, shut up.' Really?
I'm afraid your cat is dragging behind.
Well, I look forward to yours coming down in a fireball.
- Erm, I'll ring you back in a bit. - HE CHUCKLES
Roger. Bye.
That's shocking news!
Budgie has leapt ahead now by...
nearly 1,000 metres. That is strange.
Dr Ben is claiming that is to do with
the unusual properties of hydrogen and how it behaves at low altitude,
but having reached a certain height, it's then...
well, it's gone off like a rocket, to be honest,
even though it's only a balloon.
I'm staggered by that.
So Tommy the cat may be lagging behind in his journey to a better place,
but as the balloons rise ever closer to the clouds,
the strange ethereal beauty of our flying funeral
is enough to stop anyone from being a sourpuss.
MUSIC: "Welcome Home" by Radical Face
The buffeting through the clouds has cost Budgie its advantage,
and the two animals are neck and neck again in the final race to heaven.
Tommy and Budgie leave the troposphere,
and head for the stratosphere,
pushing past 18,000 metres in height.
That's the equivalent of two Mount Everests,
or 11,613 Oz Clarkes.
The whole project is probably £500 worth at the most,
assuming we manage to recover our expensive cameras,
and we're already beating the highest-flying aeroplanes available today.
Very soon, our balloon will be at the point
where the only things higher than it
will be the International Space Station
and the Hubble Space Telescope.
After that, it's the infinity of space.
'Back on the ground, we've caught up to the balloons' current position.
'Time to see if we can get an eyeball on them.'
I can't see bugger all.
'What we don't quite realise is that trying to spot Tommy and Budgie
'through a pair of binoculars is an exercise in futility.
'Because, unbeknownst to us,
'they have reached an incredible height of 25 kilometres,
'soaring into the stratosphere to become
'pets at the edge of space.'
This is a sewing machine.
Something like it has been with us for many generations,
and it was a brilliant invention.
It clothed the masses affordably,
it stopped old people banging on about how they'd only ever had one shirt
and they wore it every day for "fotty yerr".
However, there was a dark side to all this.
In fact, the sewing machine has become unstoppable.
It is responsible for an annual global tsunami
of over 50 billion fashion items,
all spewing forth from the massed ranks of Singers
and Necchis and Brothers and Toyotas.
No-one is safe. Not even me, as it turns out.
Here is just a small part of the James May spring/summer collection.
When I look at it I have to ask,
what was I thinking of when I chose that?
Or, for that matter, that? Or that?
Or indeed that, or any of the other things on this rack?
And, more to the point, even in a whole lifetime,
I couldn't expect to wear out that many shirts.
I mean, look at this thing. I've never even worn it.
And here's a sobering thought.
I've calculated that, every day,
the men of Britain waste 2 million man-hours deciding what to put on.
Now, imagine how much more constructively
we could use all that time.
Imagine if you went to the wardrobe
and there was a choice of just one thing.
All men would be free of this ridiculous tyranny of trends
to stride forth and achieve greatness,
and that is why I have made it my quest to restore to glory...
..the boiler suit.
The inspiration for this revolution came from one great man.
'In Washington, in the gardens of the White House,
'Mr Churchill demonstrating his siren suit.'
Churchill wore his one-piece siren suit through much of World War II.
'Wherever the premier went, it was the same story.'
The message was clear. Single suitedness meant single-mindedness.
Wearing a boiler suit left Churchill's head clear
for the job of bashing Hitler's moustache off.
Loads of clothes, on the other hand, means poncing about.
An overload of labels spiralling us into fashion disaster.
And the men of the 21st century seem to agree.
Do men have too many clothes? Yeah, I think they do.
I have too many clothes. I've got loads of clothes.
It would be efficient. It'd be easy in the morning, I suppose.
Yes, it would be of great benefit to mankind
if there was only one bit of clothing.
But as with the telephone and the light bulb, not everyone is convinced.
I don't think a boiler suit's very fashionable at all.
Part of the problem is that people see the boiler suit
as a sort of cheap, one-size-fits-no-one commodity
available from a DIY shop for £5,
so let's begins its revival by giving it some posh provenance.
This notion is what takes me to a place I've never visited before,
London's Savile Row, home to some of the best tailors in the country.
'If I'm to convince blokes that one piece of clothing is enough,
'I need to at least be sure that my arse doesn't look big in it.'
I want to make the boiler suit a sort of default choice.
You get up in the morning, "What do I wear? It's my boiler suit."
I can see a case for making it more tailored.
In its current state, it's very basic.
The sewing leaves quite a lot to be desired, I'd imagine the fit does.
- Right, shall we measure me? - Yep.
- Dubois! - Dubois!
Jacket waist, 39.
- That's not your trouser waist, it's your jacket. - It's my belly.
'Dubois measures everything about me,
'but he doesn't ask me which way I dress.
He can probably tell that the answer is "very badly".
Inside leg... 33.
'And I know I said it had to fit around the back, but is this really necessary?'
- So that's the diameter of my buttocks? - Yeah.
- The circumference, rather. - Yeah.
'So, with the exact circumference of my buttocks recorded for posteriority,
'Dubois makes a start on the first step of my suit to end all suits.
'A bespoke paper template.'
This is the front of the trousers.
- That is...that. - That's that. Yeah.
'Dubois would like me to go away, so I do, to choose a suitable fabric.
'I'm going for sturdy wool rather than the boiler suit's
'usual "electric shock from the door handle" nylon.
'Pocket linings are the one area
'where I COULD fall victim to my love of loud fabrics.'
- Have you got anything a bit more patterned? - Yup... - A bit more flamboyant?
If we look for something like a Jacquard lining...
- These are, you know, your flower sort of motif. - Yes...
Yes... Yes...
Yes... Ooh, yes.
'I must fight this urge. Sir Winston Churchill wouldn't have done this.
'Stick to the basic boiler suit, you fool!'
'Mind you...look at these.'
That's got butterflies on it.
I think I'd quite like the butterfly one, and the...space disc thing.
'I may have been sucked into the abyss of what's hot this season just then, but it's all OK.
'I'm not saying every man has to wear exactly the same boiler suit -
'after all, my inspiration was Churchill, not Chairman Mao.
'The point I'm making is that every man should have only one suit.
'How they style it, and for what purpose, is up to them.'
'And perhaps I'm being a bit square.
'Maybe the boiler suit deserves a more liberal reinterpretation.
'To activate stage two of Operation Onesie, I recruit some trendy fashion students.'
Wow, look at all this.
'Even though wearing just one outfit the rest of your life goes against
'everything they're taught and stand for, the students have excelled themselves.'
- Oh, I see, those are the tails. - Yes. - Oh, got you.
They wrap round from the bottom up and round,
so they come round the front.
It's formal wear and work wear at the same time.
- I could just step into it in the morning without having to find the separate jacket. - Yeah.
- Is that me? - Yeah, it's a young version. - Oh, thank you.
'To them, the boiler suit has become the muse of the style conscious.'
Lots of different functions, pockets for different size things...
"Sandwich pocket"?!
This one was my dad's idea.
He said the last thing he'd want to do is unzip it all,
take all his sleeves off if he needed a number two.
A poo-flap on a boiler suit(?) LAUGHTER
I mean, he does have a point, I hadn't thought of that.
'Like artists, some of them may have revealed things about themselves.'
This is going to have a slight sort of bondage look to it?
It's sort of a slight cross between The Terminator
and the Village People. LAUGHTER
- 'And then, there's Adam.' Hi. - Hi.
Hang on a minute, this man's got antlers.
- Yeah, it's... - Why... Why has he got antlers growing out of his head?
Because I really like the antlers... What I'm wearing is,
this one, is antler, actually.
LAUGHTER
I'd just... I'd just never thought of it, that's all -
"I'm ready for this party - oh, no, bugger, I've forgotten my antlers!"
'Despite his strange ideas about head furniture,
'one of Adam's designs looked rather brilliant.'
Just make sure I've understood this. So all the red flaps...
You can tailor over, so get everything covered.
- Could you really make that? - Yeah, I can.
'Suddenly, the traditionally soot-stained boiler-based
'all-in-one is the avant-garde of acceptability.
'And so, like Victorian children yoked to lethal machinery
'for no pay, the students set to work.
'Good. I've decided to take the fight straight to the enemy.
'We're going to take our collection to the catwalk at Earls Court,
'right in the middle of the prestigious Graduate Fashion Week.
'If this works, man will be free,
'and the wardrobe can be used for something useful. On the other hand,
'I could end up looking like a berk in a babygro.'
Adam's attempt to turn those antlers
into a very useful and practical fashion accessory
got us thinking about the very topical issue of recycling.
Now, this, as I'm sure you know, is a lemon squeezer
and it's a very attractive thing.
Unfortunately, though, it does fall rather short in its intended role
as a squeezer of lemons, because when you use it it's unstable,
it falls over and you fracture your wrist.
So, in the vernacular of the metal working trades,
this is what is known as scrap.
We also have this, the so-called Friendship Bowl.
This is the Queen of Hearts fruit platter
and I'm sure you're getting the drift by now.
The good news is all of those things are made from aluminium,
so they can be sent for recycling - and then maybe one day
they will reappear as the kettle or part of the engine of my car.
But why actually bother your local authority with all that?
With a bit of initiative, we can do the recycling job ourselves
here in the Man Lab. Because the one thing we don't have is a decent,
practical, useable lemon squeezer.
What we're actually intending to do
is to take the useless lemon squeezer and, as Omar Khayyam
might have said, remould it closer to the heart's desire.
And we're going to do that in the Man Lab foundry.
A foundry being a place where metal is melted
and then poured into moulds to create fascinating shapes.
'Ever since our hairy-faced ancestors discovered
'that some rocks contain metal,
'metalworking has been central to the march of human progress.
'In Britain, things came to a head in the Industrial Revolution,
'when you couldn't move for blokes heating up or melting metal
'and then bashing it into shape or pouring it into moulds.
'Foundry work is the most mystical of metalworking.
'If we can't master it, we are men of mere clay.
'Our furnace will be made from bits and pieces lying around the Man Lab.
'And we have help from our home foundry expert, Colin.'
The first thing we do - tell me if I'm wrong - is make the furnace.
The furnace, believe it or not, is this bucket.
'We'll have to customise the bucket first.
'It needs an air hole, or nozzle, called a tuyere.'
Metal dustbin, piece of pipe, hole made,
Jubilee Clip attached, keep it stiff.
That is the tuyere -
that is where the air will be blown in to make our furnace
rage, like something from... I don't know, Dante or William Blake.
'Next, we reinforce our bucket furnace with
'what's known as a refractory lining,
'to withstand extremely high temperatures.
'We're using a mixture of clay, sand and a bit of sawdust.'
Wahey! That's looking good. Look at that.
Put the lid on there...
'All our furnace needs now is a lid with an exhaust hole.'
Yeah! Lovely. What a job...
'Then we pack the furnace with old newspaper and wood, and set fire to it.'
Fire your blowtorch up the tuyere. Hmmm....
Here we go...
Try a little air in there.
'The air will be provided by a familiar household appliance.'
'Well, it's familiar if you're married to Colin.'
That hairdryer is easily the most
technically advanced piece of equipment...
Do not show that on camera! if my wife sees that we are dead, I am dead.
She doesn't know it's here.
MUSIC: "Jupiter" from The Planets by Holst
Oh, that's lovely. Wahey!
That works!
- That's brilliant, look at that. - That is seriously hot.
That will become the white heat of technology.
'Our scrap - the lemon squeezer and the silly bowls -
'will melt faster if they're in small pieces.'
'After some discussion, we decide to hit them with hammers.'
MUSIC: Symphony No.9 by Beethoven
I'd love a better lemon squeezer...
Ohhh!
I can now go and do something
absolutely crucial to the foundry process, which is make the pattern.
This way.
'The pattern is a wooden version of our forthcoming lemon squeezer,
'and will be used to form the cavity inside the mould.'
It might seem a bit absurd that you have to make
a model of your casting before you make your casting,
because you're making a lemon squeezer in wood
and then another one in aluminium.
But with a well-made pattern, you can use it over and over again
to make loads of lemon squeezers.
'So, the pattern has to be spot on.
'Any mistakes will be reproduced in the finished squeezer.
'So here I am at the wood-turning lathe, in slight slow motion,
'with misty-eyed music.'
MUSIC: Piano Concerto No.2 by Rachmaninoff
The knobby bit, sometimes known as the reamer, we're going to
model it on the Phillips/Pozidriv screwdriver head, so that
our lemon squeezer is a little testimony to our love of hand tools.
'Once the screwdriver-inspired reamer is ready,
'I attach it to the base, and then finish the lot with some blue paint
'left over from my gran's bathroom, rubbing down for a perfect finish.'
And there we are.
As Sir Henry Royce, motor car and aero engine maker had inscribed over
his fireplace: "Whatever is rightly done, however humble, is noble."
And you can't get much more humble than that.
Let's see if it's rightly done.
Right. Here is our pattern from which we make the mould.
The mould is made out of sand. It is a mixture of silver sand and clay.
'To form the mould, this sand is carefully packed around the pattern
'in the two-part moulding flask, as it is correctly called.'
You mustn't move the pattern around,
otherwise obviously it comes out the wrong shape.
Then you'd have a sort of comedy lemon squeezer.
'In the top half of the mould, or the cope, we form a hole,
'or sprue, into which the molten metal will be poured, or tipped.'
It's nice to have a use in life -
even if it is only holding your sprue.
'We are now at a crucial junction in the moulding process.'
Do you want to do the technical part?
- What, the separation? - That's got to be lifted dead straight.
- I know. - Dead straight, otherwise we'll knock the sand.
I'll move out the way - I'm not having any blame
for it not coming out right.
'If I cock this up, we'll have to start again.'
How's it looking...? Oh, look at that!
Be very quiet at home, please, for this moment,
don't make any sudden movements or drop a glass or anything like that.
Look at that! Perfection!
Shall we just hang this on the wall rather than cast it?
That's a work of art.
'Now that the pattern has been safely removed,
'the two halves of our flask are put back together,
'with a lemon squeezer-shaped cavity inside, thirsty for some hot metal.'
OK. We are ready for pouring.
Here you can see our sacrificial offering to Vulcan,
the god of fire and metalwork.
Apply hairdryer...
Scrub one poncey lemon squeezer,
usher in the era of the unponcey lemon squeezer.
'Once the charcoal-fired furnace has reached
'something like 900 degrees, the aluminium becomes liquid.'
Phwoar, look at that!
'And so, like the horny-handed generations before us,
'we must turn molten potential into cold, fruit-squeezing reality.
'Time...for the pour.'
Now, the excess, we pour...
This is fantastic.
Beautiful.
- Right, cup of tea and knock out. - That sounds good to me.
'One industrial cuppa later...'
Are we ready? Because this is a moment of pure magic
that we're going to see...
This is looking good. Poker, give it a poker...
HE LAUGHS
Where's the tongs? We need to show this to the world.
As I believe Goethe said - "Our passions are the true phoenixes.
"When the old one is burnt out, a new one rises from its ashes."
And if we could paraphrase that, we could say our lemon squeezer
is the true phoenix -
when the old one proves utterly useless,
a new one rises from its aluminium. And there it is.
'And just to prove the efficacy of the self-cast
'Phillips screwdriver-headed squeezing solution,
'we promptly knock up a few celebratory pancakes.'
Here we go. Let's squeeze a lemon!
It works!
Look at that. Completely squeezed,
couple of pips in it for authenticity.
Lemon juice.
- Nice lemon. - Yeah, well squeezed. - Mmm. - Mmm.
"Anon" has written in.
He says, "Sir, in your first and excellent series of Man Lab
"you showed us how to cheat at playing the guitar
"for the purposes of minstrelsy."
♪ Fair, if you expect admiring
♪ Dear, if you provoke desiring
♪ Grace, dear love, with kind requiting... ♪
"However, you did not really explain how to tune it.
"Please could you do that, ere I die?"
Well, look, it's really quite simple.
- A guitar normally is tuned like this... - HE STRUMS ASCENDING NOTES
..but that makes it very difficult to actually play the normal,
regular chords you need for pop music.
You need to be able to do... I think that's G major.
You have to do very complicated, contorted things with your finger.
So, for the purposes of just having a bit of a play along, it is easier
if you tune a guitar like this, to what we call open fifths, so that
you can play any basic chord simply by moving one finger along.
OK? Now, here is how you do it.
You take the bottom string of the guitar, that is
the one furthest from the floor, the thickest one, the lowest note.
Get that note in your head,
and that is the beginning of a scale of eight notes.
♪ Do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do... ♪
The only two notes you need now to tune the guitar are "do" and "so".
HE PLAYS TWO NOTES
That's neither of those, so I'm going to knock it down a bit.
'And so, I set about tuning the strings
'to only the notes "do" and "so", in the following order...'
Do, so, do...
That's another "do", that's another "so",
and that's another "do".
And then, by moving the one finger up and down the fretboard,
you can play what sounds like a convincing chord.
It isn't, it's very simplified -
but if you're being a minstrel or just singing pop, it's good enough.
So you can play the Man Lab theme...
HE SINGS THE THEME TUNE
..and you can play Nirvana.
HE PLAYS "Smells Like Teen Spirit"
There you go, there's Nirvana with open fifth string tuning.
'That works well when I'm throwing a Renaissance banquet,
'but what if you've never played the guitar?
'We hit the streets
'and asked some volunteers to play Smells Like Teen Spirit.'
♪ With the lights out
♪ It's less dangerous
♪ Here we are now
♪ Entertain us... ♪
'We've pre-tuned the guitar to open fifths,
'so all they have to do is slide a finger on the fretboard and strum.
'This is what made Britain Pop Central.'
HE STRUMS THE TUNE
Just have a nice, easy intro into it... Actually really pleasing.
Yeah, it's quite surprising. Felt quite good, actually.
'I'd call this a success.
'Using this method, only an idiot could fail to play the guitar.'
HE PLUCKS HALTINGLY
'Earlier, we said goodbye to the remains of Tommy the cat
'and Budgie Number 35 the budgie,
'whose owners had made the ill-advised decision
of asking us to take care of the funeral.
'So, we sent their ashes to heaven, inside balloons.'
MUSIC: "Space Oddity" by David Bowie
'And it worked, better than we imagined.
'The balloons shot up like rockets, carrying the cat
'and the budgie far above the Earth.
'Beyond the clouds and into the stratosphere, until, finally...
The final frontier. At least for a cremated cat and budgie.
Their mission was to go higher than any British household pet
had been before and then be scattered to the four winds.
STAR TREK THEME MUSIC PLAYS
Meanwhile, back on Earth...
It's still going up, which means it hasn't burst yet.
Our two races are still on -
the first to see whose balloon will go higher.
My own Team Helium, with Tommy the cat, or Dr Ben's Team Hydrogen.
The second race is to see who can recover their cameras first
when they fall back to Earth.
We're speeding towards the recovery point
and hoping very much that by the time the balloons go pop
we will both have won the height race and won the recovery.
But back at the edge of heaven, away from our earthly concerns,
racing seems irrelevant.
Budgie Number 35, our representative of budgies everywhere,
is now 30,111 metres above the Earth.
That's 123 times higher than Canary Wharf,
the previous highest-recorded bird.
Tommy the cat isn't far below, at 28,917 metres.
But then...
BALLOON BURSTS
The air pressure outside Tommy's balloon is finally
too low for the helium inside it and it bursts,
beginning its long fall back to Earth.
In slow motion, you can actually see the ash being released
and the final remains of Tommy the cat floating away.
ETHEREAL CHORAL MUSIC PLAYS
Oh! We've got a burst, definitely.
28,900. So we're definitely on the way down.
We've got a burst 28,249.
92,500 feet.
Let's just dwell on that and think about the remains of poor Tommy.
ETHEREAL CHORAL MUSIC PLAYS
They've just been quite literally spread to the four winds.
Tommy's camera gondola is plummeting back towards Earth,
but Budgie Number 35, the budgie, is still flying high.
Team Hydrogen and Budgie have won the altitude race and at
a final height of 30,352 metres, it erupts into a shower of glory.
CHARIOTS OF FIRE THEME MUSIC PLAYS
Budgie has won the altitude competition,
so Hydrogen has won altitude, Budgie has won altitude.
Dr Ben is going to be unbearable.
We won! So both balloons have now burst, but we burst higher.
Losers!
CHARIOTS OF FIRE THEME MUSIC PLAYS
I'm over the moon! This is one for the birds.
The cats have always been their mortal enemy
and here they've won without doubt.
It's coming down like a... Well...
- Like a lead balloon. - I was going to say that.
At the start of their plummet,
the atmosphere is about 100th that of ground level and this lack of
air resistance allows the payloads to reach speeds in excess of 200mph.
Meanwhile, far below, we're now into race two - camera recovery.
All we need back from the operation now
is the data cards with the pictures on.
The little cameras don't have film in them,
they have flash cards, effectively.
And if we can find those, we're in business.
We're sort of prepared to lose the cameras.
If they land in water, they will float
because the budgie's head and the cat are buoyant.
The cameras would be ruined
but we could retrieve the cards and probably rescue the information.
As the payloads start to near the cloud layer,
the air resistance picks up and the parachutes
we remembered to attach start to take effect.
Unfortunately, it is, as ever, not quite that simple.
Unbeknownst to us, Tommy's trajectory has him
landing square in a line of electricity pylons...
..while Budgie is on course to make an emergency
ditching in a sewage treatment works.
Oooh, pylons.
It hits.
And falls.
A few miles away, Budgie Number 35 isn't far behind
and worryingly close to ending up in the sewage
But at the last minute, a gust of wind sends it
sailing out of danger and into the welcoming arms of a nearby field.
The budgie has landed.
40 yards. We're there.
- 20... It should be right here. - There!
Dr Ben is the first to reach his landing site,
but the combination of the cornfields and the close range
of the GPS is making a polystyrene budgie's head rather tricky to spot.
It's that way.
Here it comes. We are getting close.
And over in our cornfield, we're having similar problems.
Could be either side of the road.
We are now 75 kilometres from our launch site,
but a tantalising 50 metres from our gondola.
Just there, yeah? You can just about see it. Just sticking up.
- Looks like we've found it. - Parachute.
What's on the end of the string? Do you want to reel it in?
I can't see it. I think it's here, I think it's here.
That was very close. Look at that!
You can see the pylon that we must've missed by feet.
- Can you smell? It's a sewage works. - We're lucky it didn't land in that.
A few hundred yards further and we would've been swimming.
Our aerospace string is stuck.
We fall over.
- Waaah! - Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's it there. Can you see it?
Hey! Here's our budgie! Complete!
- Ha! Ha! Look at that! - Let's get that right.
Happy camera? Still on?
Happy camera still on?
- Say hello to the camera! - Fantastic! Look at that! It's perfect.
- Wow! - Amazing!
- Nice job! Success! - Fantastic.
Thank you. Oh, there it is!
Hey-hey!
Superb.
Cameras look intact. Picture is intact.
- Where's that been 85,000 feet? - 85,000 feet, yep.
That is pretty spectacular, isn't it?
Twice as high as Concorde used to fly.
Well done, Tommy.
♪ ..law man beating up the wrong guy... ♪
So team helium lost both races, but what of it?
The Manlab pet cemetery on the edge of space seems to me
to have been a resounding success.
Most pet ashes are scattered in a corner of the garden.
But in death, Tommy and Budgie have reached heights unknown to
any British animal before them. We salute them. Pioneers both.
If your beloved pet has recently shuffled off this mortal coil
and you'd like it to perform one last duty clogging up
the engines of a budget flight to Malaga, do please get in touch:
No goldfish, please.
Earlier, I declared war on male fashion.
I want to make the boiler suit a sort of default choice.
My mantra, "One man, one customised boiler suit."
Sandwich pocket? This man's got antlers.
A poo-flap on a boiler suit?
I've convinced a renegade group of fashion students to help me
but now we face out biggest challenge -
presenting our vision on the enemy's home turf, the catwalk.
Welcome to Graduate Fashion Week.
It's the highlight of the fashion student's year.
The place is absolutely teeming with bright, creative,
optimistic young people hoping to make an impact in
this gay mad world we call the fashion business.
And really I'm here hoping to put an end to fashion, really,
to stop the tyranny of trends
and reduce the male wardrobe to a single, one-piece overall.
It may not be a very popular idea.
Graduate Fashion Week is the beating heart of the country's fashionistas.
The place is jam-packed with designers, photographers
and, most importantly, the money men - buyers.
A well-placed boiler-suit uprising here could start
a chain-reaction and bring the fashion empire to its knees.
I decide to go on a reconnaissance mission.
What will their attitude be to a bloke who is
sort of taking an anti-fashion stance?
There's always been a history of anti-fashion throughout fashion.
It depends on how it looks and what it looks like.
If you get halfway and people are literally jeering
and throwing things, is it acceptable to retreat?
Is it like the front line in 1916, you have to keep going?
You have to keep going.
It's clear then. This is do or die.
Once the first boiler suit battalion breaks cover
and hits that catwalk, there's no coming back.
What we need are top models,
precision-trained to show off our designs.
What we have are me, Will the producer
and a bunch of blokes we grabbed from the pub next door.
Face the audience, darling.
The audience is out there, yeah. And turn right.
No, I'll tell you when to go. Do not pre-empt.
Not since the first pre-historic homo-erectus tottered up onto
its hind legs has a group of men had such difficulty in simply walking.
So can you pose on the way up, did you say?
You sort of come straight out, just go "one-two"
and then walk down the middle.
- Shall I try that? - Yes. Go on.
So that's er... The flats are the back bits?
Yeah. You're going round here and when I've said go,
you come to the front. "One-two", off you go.
And go.
Will and I glide up the catwalk like consummate professionals.
OK. So stop here. And then we sort of go...
Massive applause.
At this point I'm imagining the audience faces as they gaze
speechlessly at my detachable smart casual accessories.
And then we do a pose about here.
I'm sure like you until now, thought that the catwalk was
just a matter of mincing in one direction and then mincing back
but it's more complicated than that.
This is like the invasion of Normandy. But in silly outfits.
It's quite difficult.
This is it, then, on the battlefield our colours are unfurled.
Backstage, our plucky troupe of amateur models are dressed
into their personalised boiler suits by the young designers.
This is an uprising.
Even Adam has his finest antlers on for the occasion.
Ahh! I'm so excited!
While the students tie up any loose ends, I get into my own boiler suit.
No, don't worry, it's not this one.
I can't reveal my whole outfit to you yet
because that would spoil the surprise
but I think the reaction out there will be either amazement
or utter bewilderment.
Could go either way. Let's see.
Pioneering stuff.
OK, chaps. Over the top we go.
Maybe that poo-flap wasn't such a bad idea.
TECHNO MUSIC PLAYS
Presenting the May Boiler. Designer, me.
Perfect for everyday activities like fixing motorcycles,
going to the pub or trying not to laugh at the camera.
The May Boiler also comes with multiple accessories
for formal wear.
But before I get into those
the student designs are going to take the front line.
First up, the Biker Boiler.
Designed for the gentleman who likes racing round the track,
and hammering in invisible nails.
Or, why not try the Barbecue Boiler?
With useful tongs-pocket, and party atmosphere trim.
The Hammer-To-Glamour Boiler, for a day fixing the roof,
and a night at the opera.
So far, our fashion revolution is going quite well.
Our troops seem to be winning over the crowd with the versatility
of the humble boiler suit, offering a look for all lifestyles.
Even one or two of the buyers have sat up to take notice.
It's only when the audience are hit with designer Iona's
boiler suit that things start to come a little unstuck.
I think this is for people who spend a lot of time in the rain
but don't mind wet knees.
APPLAUSE
It's up to Adam to save the day with his multi-flap design that
I was such a fan of earlier.
Unfortunately, this being Adam,
he's stuck a pair of antlers on the back of it.
HE LAUGHS
APPLAUSE
Go, go, go!
To close the show, we return to show off producer Will's suit
with formal black tie attachments.
Ideal for all those endless BAFTA awards evenings.
The beauty of these attachments is that they can be removed
in the flick of the wrist once you've been beaten by MasterChef.
Thus leaving you ready to continue plumbing, painting or whatever.
CHEERING
The crowd is on our side.
We may yet stand victorious, boiler-suited and proud,
telling Gaultier to go to hell.
APPLAUSE
The ordeal is over.
Our student designers take the stage to enthusiastic applause.
APPLAUSE
Thank you very much.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
The question is, have we succeeded in releasing men
from the yoke of fashion?
Who knows? That could've been a pivotal moment in fashion.
It could've been like the first time a woman was seen out without
a hat or the very first time a man discarded his hose
and put on a pair of trousers.
It could be that significant.
But it all comes down to what the buyers think. Let's find out.
I thought it was really good. I was surprised.
I think you could really see all the work that
had gone into all the garments. I thought it looked pretty sharp.
Just as things were looking positive...
It was entertaining. A lot of work had gone into it.
Was it commercial for our mass market retailer? I'm not sure it was.
Some of them were quite out there,
particularly the ones with the antlers down the back.
I'm not sure how appropriate that would be to be commercial.
Three months later, in the accounts department of Emporia Manlab,
sales were recorded as nil.
And so, with a heavy heart, and an expertly-cut
multi-tasking flag of surrender, I accepted defeat.
I am, I admit, bitterly disappointed.
It does seem that, whatever you do with the boiler suit, it is
destined just to be worn where quite dirty manual work is being done.
And I thought this was a good idea. I really did.
What is the problem with it?
It's not as if I'm asking blokes to wear a skirt or anything.
Goodbye.
BAGPIPES PLAY
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk