The Robot Wars Technical Manual

The Robot Wars Technical Manual was published in 1999, during the programme’s second series, and was one of the first pieces of merchandise relating to the show. Of the four tie-in books published during the show’s original run, the Technical Manual is unquestionably the best and the only one really worth writing anything about, so here goes.

First and foremost: the book has lots and lots of lovely high-quality behind-the-scenes photos. If you can find a reasonably cheap second-hand copy of this, then the pictures alone are well worth the price… and fortunately, for the most part the text is just as great. It starts off with an extensive behind-the-scenes look at the production of the show, covering how the first series got off the ground and the second series built on that, with everything you’d want to read about covered – the show’s American origins, how entrants for the first series were sourced, the replacement of Jeremy Clarkson (described as a “grinning apparition”) with Craig Charles, how the arena was built, the perils of having small children in the audience and plenty of other interesting tidbits (such as how the first series’ ‘post-apocalyptic’ tone was changed because the producers were worried it came across as patronising and they wanted the show to be seen as a legitimate sport, or how the first series was so short-staffed they hired roboteers who had been knocked out to fill in backstage).

Key members of the production crew are interviewed, and all give good value, particularly Noel Sharkey when recounting the story of a chair race held during a particularly long break in recording. All the little ‘fun facts’ and boxouts accompanying the main text are just a joy to read (including the tale of the roboteer who put his foot on his robot, asked for full power and promptly managed to destroy its speed controller). Any fan of the show, or anyone with even a passing interest in television production, would get quite a lot out of this book.

This is broken up by a quick look at the show’s format, covering all the various trials of the time, which is less interesting but still has lots of nice high-quality pictures, and is also quite short (and the bit on the Gauntlet gives a look at how things changed between the first two series). I don’t want to say any more about this section, because I don’t want to spoil all the lovely anecdotes and insights you get from it. Over thirty big pages (this is quite a big book, if the picture at the top with no sense of scale wasn’t useful) of unbridled joy for the television production enthusiast. There's even a piece on how they made the title sequence! (A proper set of opening titles is, incidentally, something the revived series is seriously crying out for... but that's an argument for another day.)

The book then makes its only real misstep with a section on the house robots. When the show first started, somebody thought it would be an amusing idea to come up with ‘origin stories’ for the House Robots; i.e. Shunt was the result of two robots designed to work in a Russian nuclear plant fusing together and mutating, Sergeant Bash was a prototype military law enforcement robot, Dead Metal was a robot assassin that had travelled back in time (no, seriously) etc. The book reproduces these stories, along with some spectacularly unhelpful diagrams:

To be fair, each such ‘biography’ is then followed by a far more factual ‘official rebuttal’ from the BBC’s Visual Effects Department, all of which are uniformly excellent, but their inclusion feels at odds with the rest of the book. It's especially baffling considering the biographies were part of the original pitch that the show was taking place in some post-apocalyptic scenario... which the book has already stated the powers that be were trying to back away from.

We then move on to a section on how to build your own robot. I haven’t checked how outdated some of this information has become in the 18 years since this book was published, but it’s still an informative and entertaining chapter, which is really made by the fact that it’s liberally sprinkled with suggestions, advice and anecdotes from the roboteers themselves (my favourite is the guy who managed to destroy his conservatory in fifteen seconds during a test drive because of a steering problem, but there’s also ones that are genuinely interesting from a technical point of view). Throughout this section there are biography/statistic pages of various competitor robots, which are reasonably interesting and feature some more nice official photos. This is just as fascinating as the behind-the-scenes bit even if you’ve no interest in building your own robot, and I’m going to have to stop now lest I spoil too many of the anecdotes and other bits hidden throughout. This really is a well-written book – it even manages to make how to choose transmitter frequencies interesting.

The book then ends with a few pages on the official Robot Wars website (which helpfully informs us all that you can “venture onto a number of screens” from the homepage) and how to join the Robot Wars Club, which at the time was necessary to take part in the show. The £10 entry fee also got you a VHS of the 1996 US series Grand Final, an enamel badge, a membership card, a magazine and more information on how to enter the show.

Overall, this book is just lovely, and the photos and high quality and quantity of anecdotes about the perils of filming a TV show about robots fighting each other make it well worth picking up. Totally recommended. The only real disappointment is that it barely touches on any of the actual fighting itself – the roboteers’ contributions are uniformly brilliant, so I’d have loved to read some accounts of how the actual fighting unfolded. And it is a real shame nothing like this showed up for any of the later series – a similar account of the Third Wars, which greatly changed the format and saw the advent of robots like Chaos 2 and Hypno-Disc, would surely have been equally fascinating. As it was, the other three Robot Wars books were rather dull collections of robot profiles with nothing in the way of technical information whatsoever. And don’t get me started on the official magazine. The Technical Manual is, sadly, an anomaly as far as Robot Wars merchandise goes, which is a real shame given just how interesting its source material obviously is.

Still, the show’s now back on air and more technically minded than before, and it’s just been given a shiny new merchandising contract – so maybe another book like this will show up in the near future? I can dream…