My man emailed me the other day with something ‘new’ he had discovered – robots with flamethrowers. He was referring to Robot Wars, a US robot competition of the late 1990s that was taken up in the UK and broadcast on BBC2 in the early 2000s. Little did he know that it was one of my favourite programmes.
The first series was hosted by Jeremy Clarkson, but his sarcastic style didn’t really enhance the show, though it was popular from inception. Season two saw Red Dwarfer Craig Charles take over and he showed much more enthusiasm (and understanding of the competitors) than Clarkson.
The idea was simple – built a big, robust and nasty robot that will destroy all the other robots. They fight it out in an arena, like mechanical sumo wrestling. But the execution was somewhat more complex, as there were a few things that contributed to a winning robot.
The robots needed to be defensive, but also have offensive capability, because, like in boxing, if there was no knock-out, the judges decide on a winner. And they took account of the robots’ performance. It wasn’t enough just to survive – you had to look like a winner.
The arena was a hazardous place, and not just because of the combatants. There were pits into which unwary robots could fall, gratings through which great gouts of fire spurted up, and the menacing house robots – these were restricted to marked zones but pity any robot that strayed into their territory. The house robots were twice as big as the combatant bots, and could easily dismantle those that couldn’t get away. And often did.
In the early series the robots were fairly trashy affairs – cumbersome, fragile, ran around the arena without much of a clue. But by the third series a new bot came on the scene. It was like the Viv Richards of robot wars – the Master Blaster, so far ahead of its peers that none could touch it. It was called Chaos 2, and won the overall title two years in a row, the only robot to do so.
Its characteristics defined the key elements for a successful combatant robot:
1. It was well-built and tough. Blows slid off it due to its rounded profile, and its outer shell repelled all but the heaviest of implements.
2. It had a low centre of gravity, was difficult to get underneath, and therefore was difficult to flip.
3. It could right itself if flipped over. Using its powerful flipper (see no. 6), it could flip itself upright again and keep fighting.
4. It was highly agile. Many bots lost bouts when they couldn’t catch their opponents, or get away from them.
5. It had an excellent controller in George Francis, who was a whizz with the joystick. Very seldom was he fazed by the opposition, or even the house robots. He drove calmly and got the bot out of trouble on numerous occasions, and was aggressive and relentless in pursuing opponents, often harrying them into the pits or the house robots, if Chaos 2 didn’t immobilise them personally.
6. It had the most powerful flipper of its type in all of robot wars. Its winning weapon, a front-end flipper, was able to flip some opponents clear out of the arena. No mean feat when the combatant robots weighed in excess of 70-80kg.