Basically: Nobody knows what the truth is any more, and unless unedited rushes of the episodes covered here are released, it is unlikely we ever will. Read on, but be aware this is only one side of the story.
Well, I’ve
not got anything else to write about, so it’s time once again to look at an old
episode of Robot Wars. This time it’s
the final episodes of the seventh and last series of the original run, which was
first broadcast on Channel Five in late 2003 and early 2004, and as with last
time, it’s been edited to avoid giving us the whole story… and not just one
fight, but several. What follows is an account of probably the most
controversial moment in the show’s history… except literally nobody was
watching the show at this point (it wasn’t making Channel Five’s top 30 for the
week) and so nobody really cared.
Some
grounding detail would be useful here. Tornado had controversially won the
sixth series the previous year, and a quick look at it in the championship-deciding battle should show you why it was so controversial. The
rules over interchangeable weapons were revised before the seventh series as a
result, and a new rule was brought in: all robots must now have an active
weapon.
Inbetween the
sixth and seventh series, a mini-tournament for new and inexperienced teams,
New Blood, was held as part of Robot Wars
Extreme; the winning team would gain automatic qualification to the Seventh
Wars by being seeded. The competition was won by Storm II, which at the time
was a ‘full body hammer’; i.e. it didn’t have an active weapon, but relied on
brute force. The team were informed of the new rule and duly fitted the robot
with an electric lifter before filming of the next series. However, the full
body hammer capability was so effective it often didn’t need it, as shown here
in its heat final where it manages to launch the other robot out of the arena
by pure force and without even firing its weapon!
 |
| The original, weaponless Storm |
(NB: For all
links to Series 7 episodes, I’ve gone for copies taken from Challenge’s repeats
as they’re higher-quality, but copies of Five’s original broadcasts can also be
easily found on YouTube; apart from image clarity, they’re both identical in
all cases.)
From that
heat final, it moved on to…
Semi-Final B – first broadcast 29 February
2004
By this
point, the Storm team had apparently heard that the show’s producers thought
that after their performance so far, the competition could well be won by a
‘boring box’ for the second year running, and they weren’t happy about the
prospect. Storm II got through the round of 16 just fine, and then in the
qualifier for the grand final they fought Firestorm V. Which they pretty decisively won…
Except,
after the battle, there was a long pause (not seen on TV, naturally) before
Storm was confirmed as the winner. Apparently the producers were attempting to
convince the judges that Storm had at no point used its weapon, and as the
rules require an active weapon they shouldn’t win the match. The judges refused
to be swayed by Mentorn’s interpretation of the rules and the match was awarded
to Storm.
Grand Final – first broadcast 7 March 2004
Mentorn had
failed to stop Storm progressing by trying to disqualify them after the fight,
so now they would start using what control they had over the fight itself. In
the round of 4, Storm 2 fought the incumbent champions, Tornado. Go and watch the battle, then come back here.
See the bit
where Storm 2 pushes Tornado onto the pit, but (as the show would have you
believe) Tornado manages to drive away before the pit goes down? What supposedly
actually happened was that the producers were bringing the pit up to bring Tornado back into the
battle. In fact, you don’t even need me to tell you that, there’s nothing
‘supposed’ about it – you can clearly see the pit going back up whilst Tornado
is on it. (Presumably the clip of Refbot hitting the pit release button has
been dropped in from elsewhere in the battle to try and cover this.) Despite
the producer interference prolonging the battle, the judges awarded it to Storm
2… who went on to fight in the most controversial battle of all for the series
decider. Once again, it would help to watch the thing first.
As you’ll
see, the battle was split in half, being called to a stop after Typhoon managed
to break the arena wall. By that point they were having real trouble spinning
up – and, unbeknownst to the viewers, whilst the wall was being replaced the
Typhoon team were (allegedly) unprecedentedly allowed to repair the robot
mid-battle. It would be worth noting that that
detail is disputed by the Typhoon team, who claimed they had no access to the
robot during the pause, and I don’t see any way to reconcile the two different
accounts apart from “one of them is lying”. The Storm team lodged a
complaint, but were fobbed off by the production, saying they were only trying
to ensure things looked seamless (and also claiming that it would be
‘inappropriate’ to show the wall getting broken and the fight having to stop on
TV… despite the fact it was, obviously, left in). They pointed out Typhoon had
been having trouble spinning up long before the wall broke, but to no avail.
Oh, and during the battle Storm was repeatedly pushing Typhoon into the CPZs
but the house robots curiously refused to get involved at all.
Anyway, the
fight restarted, and Typhoon 2 were allowed to spin up to the speed they were
at before ‘cease’ was called, as they’d also been allowed to do when they did
the same thing in their previous bout. Except, even in the TV edit, at the
start of the second battle they’re
clearly spinning much faster than they were when the first battle was stopped.
Mentorn weren’t doing a terribly good job at hiding their subterfuge, it must
be said.
There are
two crucial moments in the battle left to discuss. The first is when Storm
manages to knock two of Typhoon’s drive chains off – after the battle was
stopped, a technical assistant shouted to both teams (still on the balcony with
Craig Charles) that they’d put them with the robot. However, the judges weren’t
made aware of this, were informed that Typhoon had suffered ‘no damage’ and the
Typhoon team described it as ‘like new’; there’s no evidence of it in the
broadcast edit. The second is right at the end, when Typhoon manages to knock
one of Storm’s panels off (how much they contributed to this is questionable as
it wasn’t spinning by the end), which by contrast is made a huge song and dance
of on the show, with the missing panel being brought up to the balcony so it could be presented to the team in the interview.
The marks
for damage swung it with the judges, and Typhoon won the series. When they were
announced as the winners, the audience booed the house down, and cheers had to
be dubbed on in post-production (although Craig saying that “the audience
aren’t happy” was still broadcast despite not making sense in Mentorn’s version
of events). When the judges discovered the truth about the damage Typhoon had
taken, the Storm team received letters of apology from all three of them – two
of which were in writing. But their tribulations weren’t to end there…
The Third World Championship – first
broadcast 28 March 2004
Fairly
straightforward here. In the grand final, Supernova was wedged against the
arena wall by Storm 2 and left there, immobile. However, the Refbot’s
electronic counter (used to declare robots officially immobilised) wasn’t
working, and meanwhile the house roboteers decided to have a bit of fun by
stacking Storm against an angle grinder. The producers then had Supernova freed
by the house robots and apparently tried to argue that as Supernova hadn’t been
counted out, it was still mobile and should win… but the judges didn’t have any
of it (I don’t know if they knew the truth about the final of the main
championship yet, but I suspect not).
It’s worth
noting that Typhoon was scheduled to take part in the World Championship, but
had to pull out. The reason given on the show is very abruptly described as
“technical problems”, but other reports suggest that the robot had taken so
much damage in the fight against Storm it was unable to continue.
An odd thing
about the Channel Five series is that there are a lot of reliable reports about
the producers inexplicably trying to meddle with the show to screw people over.
The Featherweight championships (for robots weighing no more than 11.4kg) were
also being held this series, and the Storm team were also due to participate…
but withdrew after some disgruntled house roboteers warned them that they had
been told to deliberately destroy the robots (see here for the outcome of
that). And during the sideshow ‘All-Stars’ tournament the driver of Dantomkia was
asked by the producers to make sure they flipped out Behemoth and King B
Powerworks. That was just for fun and not the main tournament (which the
producers were already trying to rig anyway), but it’s still a concerning thing
to hear. Were they trying to get away with more now that they were no longer on
the BBC and on a smaller channel, or something?
Anyway,
there’s still one more scintillating article about Robot Wars edits to come, and it’s a bit of a departure from the
previous three. Stay tuned…
No comments:
Post a Comment