Robot Wars, TV preview: 'Even more vicious and exciting than the political arena'

Sean O'Grady on Robot Wars, BBC2 Sunday 24 July 8pm, and The Somme 1916: From Both Sides of the Wire, BBC2 Monday 25 July 9pm

Robot Wars

I wasn’t far into the new series of Robot Wars – it’s back after an absence of 12 years – when I realised what this orgy of mutually assured destruction reminded me of the Tory leadership contest. Some of the robots do seem inspired by senior Conservative politicians of our time. For example, there’s a flailing, unpredictable robot with two “babies” that goes by the name Nuts, which is obviously a miniature cyber-version of Andrea Leadsom. Then there’s the deadly Razer (Theresa “Razer” May), Bonk (Boris, no explanation needed), and the wilfully eccentric and ultimately ineffective Kill-E-Krank-E (Michael Gove, of course).

Yet Robot Wars, you will I hope discover, is even more vicious and exciting than the political arena. Returning with more powerful motors, tougher materials, new ideas and lithium ion batteries, these modern robots are much more impressive than their predecessors. When the series began back in 1998 – and I was a fan then too – the archetypal home-made “killer” robot was a Fox’s biscuit tin with a bread knife sticking out of it, its artificial intelligence supplied by the alternator off an Astra. No longer. We have students of cybernetics here creating wonderful pieces of machinery out of steel as strong as titanium, but lighter, capable of lifting up a car, with carbide blades, and with electronic brains. Plus the rather charming teams of chaps – and it remains a male domain this – spending up to £25,000 on their little dreams. You’ll notice only two women on any of the teams, and one of them was there just to dish out her home-made sausage rolls.

The show is well-structured in its league and knockout stages – rather better than the Euro 2016 football championship – which helps get you more involved in who/what is going to win. Really, you do. Dangerous, disturbing thoughts start to insinuate their way into one’s mind about how to construct the ultimate robot – the one you’d build, if you could be arsed. Axe or spinning blade for main weapon? Wheels exposed or enclosed? The right balance between strength and weight? The ideal self-righting mechanism? Stupidest name? As I say, it is a strangely enthralling world, as politics can be. My money is on ‘Razer, for the long haul.

Dara O Briain and Angela Scanlon do their best to make small talk with the obsessives, but I do wonder what is really going through their minds – sometimes the hint of a smirk flashes across O Briain’s lips, and I got the impression that Scanlon would much rather be in LA than a shed. Maybe they agree with me: Obviously the whole thing is quite ridiculous, but it is simultaneously strangely enthralling. Given the state of the public finances, by the way, maybe we should nominate the Robot Wars winner as our replacement for Trident.

As the years grind on, and the pile of documentaries grows, it gets harder and harder to make a decent programme about the Great War. The centenary of the Somme has been the occasion of many sombre acts of remembrance and the re-telling of the familiar, appalling saga, but new stuff…? Well, Peter Barton’s The Somme 1916: From Both Sides of the Wire does indeed contain some stories and insights that this viewer, at any rate, had not encountered before. I was not aware, for example, that “thermite” – a kind of primitive napalm that could turn a landscape into a lake of fire – did more damage to the troops than the artillery. Neither had I heard of the strange confluence of the medieval and ultra-modern when the infant Royal Flying Corps prepared the way for the Indian Army cavalry to make a charge on the Germans using lances. Lances! Even a century ago that was archaic, and the story of this old-school imperial bravery was widely covered in the media. The Daily Sketch: “The Huns Were Terrified”. In modern parlance it went viral, but we now know there was less to the story than met the eye. Highly recommended.