As mentioned previously in one of these articles, in 2001, not one but two series of Robot Wars were filmed: the regular series, and Extreme, a series featuring a variety of different mini-tournaments, as well as all the roboteers being told to act like jerks and a blatantly faked case of a roboteer pretending to sabotage his opponent's machine, in an apparent homage to the artifical nature of pro wrestling. But it's the filming dates we're interested in here.
The following filming dates, and what was filmed on them, are definite:
27 June to 1 July, 2001: Filming for Extreme takes place at Earl's Court in London (as part of Tomorrow's World Live), including the All-Stars tournament and the Second World Championship. The Challenge Belt event is also due to be filmed, but production falls so far behind schedule it's cancelled.
26 to 28 August and 30 August, 2001: Filming for Series 5 takes place at Elstree Studios. Round 1 battles are filmed on days 1 & 2, and some round 2 battles on day 3. I would presume the Heat Finals and Semi-Finals were filmed across days 4 & 5.
31 August 2001: This is both the final filming day for Series 5 (the Grand Final is filmed on this day), and more filming for Extreme also takes place, both at Elstree. At least one of the Mayhem battles for Extreme is filmed on this date.
1 to 3 September, 2001: More filming for Extreme takes place at Elstree. The Challenge Belt event, cancelled during the summer filming, finally takes place over the last day or two.
Some of the Mayhem battles must have been filmed in June and July, as two robots won said battles, putting them through to the later Annihilator fights, but then took terminal damage during Series 5 filming and had to pull out. Other stuff is harder to figure out. Whilst the production fell extremely badly behind schedule during the June-July filming, I am not certain if it was always the intention to split the Extreme filming into two blocks with Series 5 in the middle, or if they had to come back in September to pick up the stuff they couldn't get done in the summer. (It's unclear exactly why filming fell so far behind; there's an incident in episode 5 where Plunderbird 5 was activated, immediately went out of control and damaged the entry door to the arena which apparently resulted in some lost filming time, but that wouldn't account for all of the delays.)
Several roboteers used the break between July and August to repair and upgrade their machines, or in some cases replace them completely; due to the Extreme filming being made up of two separate shoots, this means that some robots have two different versions appear in the Extreme series. Take, for example, Napalm:
The version on the left is the original Napalm, brought out of retirement after the team's new robot for Series 4 was damaged beyond repair; the version on the right is Napalm 2, which was also used for Series 5. The nature of the Extreme filming means that the version used in the Extreme episodes alternates from show to show (in fact, episodes 14 & 15 feature the two different versions of Napalm).
There are some other interesting oddities thrown up by the recording order. Tornado were humiliatingly knocked out in the second round of Series 5, but then went on to win the Challenge Belt, in the process fighting and winning five battles in the same day; the latter was recorded after their early exit from the main competition, but broadcast first. You'd also think that the fact that the two different blocks were filmed at different studios would be a problem, but that doesn't come across on screen. (Note that inserting stock footage was a common tactic of Robot Wars' editor; several audience members were often surprised to see themselves in the audience for episodes they didn't attend the recording for, and a clip often used before battles started was of audience members holding up '3, 2, 1, ACTIVATE' signs, synced to match the announcer's countdown... which was unfortunately conspicuous as the person holding up the '1' had it the wrong way round.)
We still remain uncertain as to whether some Extreme fights were filmed in the pre-S5 June-July block, or the post-S5 September block. We can piece bits together: the Annihilators were done post-S5, but the Mayhems (which were themselves qualifiers for the Annihilators) were done at least partially in the earlier block (there is some circumstantial, but not concrete, evidence (from a tie-in book that was printed before the series had finished filming) that points to some of the other Mayhems being done as part of the September shoot). The Tag Team Terror tournament seems to have been done pre-S5, as it features the first version of Napalm plus Suicidal Tendencies, which had to withdraw from Series 5 after irreparably breaking down. Troubled productions are always interesting to read about, and this one would be no different...
There is one other way of identifying which Extreme battles were filmed when: the Refbot's electronic counter, which was first used in this series to count immobile robots out. It was decided that the countdown was too fast after its first uses, and was slowed down in the battles filmed later (I don't know if the changeover happened during or after the June-July block, though).
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For the record, the information on filming dates came from the Team Tornado website, which also tells us that Series 4 was filmed in August 2000; even more specifically, Heats E, F, G and H were filmed on the 8th, and the Semi-Finals and Grand Final on the 13th. We can extrapolate that Heats A-D were likely filmed on the 7th, and Heats I-P were probably done over two days between the 9th and 12th. The various special programmes (the Annihilators, Celebrity Special, Tag Team Terror, and side events like Pinball and Sumo) were filmed over two days on the 14th and 15th (if you look closely during the Sumo event, you can see the rest of the arena is set up for the Tag Team fights). Series 6 began filming on the 8th July 2002, but once again they did not film an entire heat in one day; Tornado filmed their first fight on the 9th, their other two heat battles on the 10th, the semi-finals on the 11th and 13th and the Grand Final on the 14th.
Extreme 2 was filmed between the 19th and 23rd of October 2002, but the Tornado team's build diary becomes much less detailed at this point, and we get less of an idea of what was filmed when. Tornado definitely seem to have been filming on the first two days, so the All-Stars and Challenge Belt shows might have been filmed then; Iron Maidens was definitely done on the third day; and it looks like the European Championship was done on the fourth day. Finally, we only know that Series 7 was filmed between the 23rd and 31st of August 2003.
As Tornado did not participate in the first three series, we lack concrete information on the filming dates for those series; Series 1 was filmed in November 1997, Series 2 between July and August of 1998, and the third series in October 1999 (the 24th and the 27th are definite, and according to Tectonic Robot Wars it was delayed from August) - given the large amount of filming that had to be cancelled or rethought for that particular series, it would definitely be interesting to know more about what was filmed when...
You can deduce all sorts of interesting things from these filming dates (no, really), especially Series 4's. In Series 4 Heat B, apparently filmed on the 7th August, Razer was destroyed by Pussycat in its heat final, upsetting team captain Ian Lewis so much that he went on an extended rant to camera about the damage caused, yet the robot was back up and running a week later to take part in the special events. Heat P was filmed no later than the 12th, and Onslaught broke down shortly before getting into the arena and had to be replaced by a reserve robot - yet the team managed to get it working again to take part in the special events two days later. Hypno-Disc took severe damage in the Grand Final when Shunt slammed its axe down into the disc whilst it was going at full tilt and the power of kinetic energy instantly killed the robot, which the team state onscreen is going to take about two days' worth of repairs, so the fact that it managed to participate in the Pinball filming is interesting. Can we deduce from that that the Pinball was all filmed on the 15th? Would that in turn suggest the Tag Team Terror, which needed the arena set up differently, was on the 14th, and the Sumo was done on that day as well?
As long as we're here, we might as well cover where each series was filmed. Series 1 and 2 were at a site in London's Docklands, which is also where the live events circa 1995-96 that preceded the TV series took place; that site later got demolished to make way for the Millennium Dome, so Series 3 was filmed at Elstree Studios, but that set would only be used for one series after the producers decided it was too small - although as already mentioned above, a different set filmed at Elstree for Series 5 and the second block of Extreme filming. In the interim, Series 4 was filmed at Park Street in St Albans (although at least one piece of tie-in media claimed it was filmed in London), and from Series 6 until the end of the original run filming took place at RAF Newton. In early 2005 the new owners of the base discovered the set in storage and decided to scrap it, resulting in several roboteers unsuccessfully suing them for £350,000; I would presume a similar fate has met the Glasgow-based set used for the revival series.
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This is surely the last article about Robot Wars edits that I can possibly write, so to end on, why not ruin one of the few genuinely heartwarming moments the show ever produced? Series 3 Heat D ends with the Ultor team being declared the winners on a judges' decision, but they then decide to concede victory to the Big Brother team, allowing 6-year-old Joe Watts to progress to the semi-finals. Ian Watts admitted last year that the real reason for this was that Ultor weren't going to be able to make the filming dates for the semi-finals due to work commitments; I can imagine the producers not being keen to admit this, although it would be interesting to know exactly how 'staged' Ultor's concession was - was it the producers' idea for them to concede, or did they come up with it themselves as a cover story? The whole thing is comparable to Terrorhurtz getting "disqualified", as covered in Edit Wars #4.
And for another random piece of trivia I can't crowbar in anywhere else: the Channel 5 series repeatedly claimed that "for the first time, a cash pot of over £20,000 [was] on offer". Every previous series had offered cash payments to participants, but as they were broadcast on the license fee-funded BBC this could not be referred to. Furthermore, the "cash pot" was repeatedly implied/misleadingly phrased to be what the winner would receive, without qualifying that the "over £20,000" total was reached by adding up how much each team was paid; the overall winner actually received £5,000.
So, that's definitely it, unless I can later get a whole article out of the fact that one of the presenters of the American series also worked as an actor in the, erm, adult film industry...
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