Extreme Deadlines

On 25 October 2001, Robot Wars Extreme: The Official Guide was published, tying in with the broadcast of, not unreasonably, Robot Wars Extreme (the first episode was broadcast on BBC Choice on the 8th, and received a terrestrial outing on BBC Two on the 26th).

Of the three Robot Wars publications aside from the Robot Wars Technical Manual, none are particularly great examples of TV tie-in books, but the one for Extreme is probably the strongest. Most notably, it learns from the similar book published for Series 4 by giving each robot two pages for its statistics, so it doesn't, for example, have to reduce a robot's previous battle history to 'Series 3: Overall winner'.

There is one particularly interesting thing about this book, and the series it accompanied. The bulk of filming for Robot Wars Extreme took place between 27 June and 1 July, 2001 at Earl's Court in London, as part of Tomorrow's World Live. However, filming fell very badly behind schedule, and a significant chunk of bouts had to be filmed alongside Series 5 from 26 August to 3 September at Elstree Studios. The book quite clearly had to be at the printers between these two filming blocks, as it is missing some key information about fights, or even whole events, which hadn't yet been filmed when it went to print. The introduction acknowledges this rather well:

All this incredible action guarantees the most extreme robot battles ever seen. Not all the competitors will live to fight another day. A robot that's scheduled to do battle might be annihilated by its archenemy in an earlier event. This makes for mega-exciting, adrenaline-fuelled viewing - but it also means that some of the listings in this book may differ from what you see on the screen.

Edit Wars #14

Just a quick one this time, but this is an interesting development: It appears that circa Series 4 of the original run of Robot Wars, participating teams could receive the live, uncut studio footage of battles they participated in on request. This means that two battles featuring Iron-Awe survive in their raw, unedited form:

Iron-Awe vs Mazakari vs Mortis: Uncut Version vs Broadcast Version

Iron-Awe vs Steg 2: Uncut Version vs Broadcast Version

Also, I mentioned these on Twitter when they first started appearing, but this channel has recently uploaded an absolutely enormous number of videos from the live events in '96 and '97 that were effectively a pilot for the TV series. It may well be that some of these clips are the same ones that convinced the BBC to commission the show, so it seems worth mentioning them here...

Edit Wars #13

7 - 13 August 2000: The main competition part of the fourth series of Robot Wars is filmed.

14 - 15 August 2000: Various specials and side tournaments for the same series are filmed. This includes the Sumo Basho tournament, which will be broadcast across the first eight heats.

The fact that the non-competition stuff is filmed after all the fighting, but most of it broadcast first, would not be a problem... were it not for this.

Get Into Jail Free

The Robot Wars Wiki is an amazing resource, thanks to its tireless editors who never stop looking for new information about the show. Here's a piece that recently came to light on the Internet Archive thanks to their diligence - the sad story of Series 3 entrants The Jailer, who successfully qualified only to withdraw on the day of filming due to a broken speed controller.

So, The Jailer had to pull out at the last minute. And diligent readers may recall there are two robots that were pulled off the substitutes bench at the last moment. Does it follow that either Steg-O-Saw-Us or Triterobot were the replacements for The Jailer? Possibly not, because we can't be sure the robots listed in that article were the only substitutes - there may be other robots who were also pulled in at the last minute but not identified as such onscreen. But wouldn't it make sense, given how late in the day The Jailer had to pull out and how late in the day those two were brought in? We're halfway to another piece of the puzzle, surely? And there must be another robot who had to pull out at the very last minute, quite possibly also on the day of filming - is their story still out there somewhere?

Edit Wars #12

Oh good lord, they're still going. Ahem. Actually, this one's a bit interesting - examples of possible censorship in the show for reasons of copyright or similar.

Edit Wars #11

"Good grief," I hear you exclaim (I have a very powerful sense of hearing). "Edit Wars Eleven? He hasn't seriously found something else worth going on about, has he?"

Well, no, because what I'm actually going to do is go on about the show's inconsistent attitude towards reserve robots - ones which were not initially selected to compete, but were pulled from the substitutes' bench when another entry was forced to retire.

Edit Wars #10

Nearly every Robot Wars fight ever filmed was edited down in some way. (I have covered some of the more glaring examples in the past.) No fight that lasted the whole 5 minutes made it to air in its entirety, with some lasting less than 2 minutes once the editor had got their hands on it; I believe the record for least cut full-length battle is the Series 6 Grand Final, which only had about 20 seconds trimmed from it. Usually, however, the edit was done well enough that it wasn't too obvious. Apart from this one.

Edit Wars #9

Whilst getting the links for the old Robot Wars Club membership pack videos off of YouTube, I have made several remarkable discoveries readers of the blog might like.

Robot Wars Revealed, the Series 2 spin-off show that has languished in obscurity since its original broadcast due to airing on a newly launched channel, previously only had one known surviving episode. But now a second one's only gone and bloody turned up!

The next discovery is even better, though. Seven whole minutes of footage from the pits, shot via hand-held camcorder by one of the 13 Black team (for the curious, this footage can be dated to exactly 26 August 2001 by the team's own website). The same account also gives us five minutes of test footage from when the robot was first built, and footage of their Series 2 entry Limpet dating from August 1998.

And, for good measure, an appearance from Mike Lambert of the Dantomkia team on Harry Hill's TV Burp.

Edit Wars #8

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 Robot Wars Trial Guide

For the first two series of Robot Wars, the robots didn't just to go to war. In fact they didn't get to that point until halfway through the show. The first two rounds were always a trial of some kind. Round 1 was always the Gauntlet, an assault course with a selection of different routes, and then the second round would change every week. In Series 3, the main competition was changed to be all combat, but the more popular/interesting trials were retained as sideshows. There was a bit of a kerfuffle that led to filming on some of these being shortened or cancelled, but they stayed on for Series 4 more successfully... but then, Series 5 was filmed alongside the 'Extreme' series, and there wasn't time for any of the trials.

Here, then, is a listing of all the trials you might expect to encounter had you entered Robot Wars in the twentieth century, in order of appearance.

Edit Wars #7

In the summer of 2001, two new series of Robot Wars were filmed: the fifth series of the 'regular' show, and Robot Wars Extreme, a special run of shows featuring a variety of different mini-tournaments. The Pussycat team, with driver David Gribble, participated in both of them.

On the 13th of October 2001, David - a familiar face to Robot Wars viewers for nearly three years - was involved in a motorcycle accident and passed away at the tragically young age of 17; his final television appearances were aired posthumously. Various sources say that this dedication was featured at the end of Extreme episode 1, taken from the Robot Wars Wiki:

At the time, Robot Wars was first run on BBC Choice, then got a terrestrial outing on BBC Two a few weeks later. I would presume that this was seen on the 26 October 2001 BBC Two broadcast of episode 1; the episode was originally broadcast on BBC Choice on 8 October 2001, five days before David died. Eight new episodes of Robot Wars were broadcast on BBC Choice between David's death and the first BBC Two screening of the series; it is possible that one of those also carried the dedication, and they also used it on the first episode's terrestrial outing to make sure it was seen. (For the record, David's final appearance on the show was the Series 5 semi-final, which was originally broadcast on BBC Choice on 23 May 2002 - but that episode would not be seen by terrestrial viewers until 25 October of that year, over a year after his death.)

Edit Wars #6: International Insurrection

The year is 2000, Robot Wars is really hitting its stride, and a new video-only release, The First World Championship, offers the chance to see the best of British roboteering fight against robots from around the world. Except, erm, not really.

Edit Wars #5

Update! (Inserted at the top of the article for reasons of importance.) Since writing this piece some 15 months ago, I have since discovered that some of the sources I used for it were based on garbled information about the filming of Series 3; although More Panda Monium was dropped during filming, that was an entirely separate incident to the one that resulted in injury (which happened when the robot activated without warning), and the name of the robot involved is not known. See this page on the Robot Wars Wiki for more information.

A kind-of, sort-of appendix to the Edit Wars series of articles, here, and specifically the fourth one. (The series has long ago stopped being about actual edits and more about stuff that happened backstage that wasn't mentioned on the show for obvious reasons, but there's not really a snappy title for that.)

As already covered there: there was a serious health and safety incident during the filming of the third series of Robot Wars, where a robot (by the name of More Panda Monium and pictured above, incidentally) malfunctioned in the pits and put its weapon through someone's foot, leading to some of the filming being shortened or cancelled outright because of the resulting health and safety investigation.

Now, in the same series, and also covered in that article, Pussycat was disqualified for using an illegal hardened steel blade that shattered on the arena wall. Were those two facts connected? If the first incident hadn't occurred, might Pussycat have been allowed to go through? Did the impaling lead to an immediate, much stronger enforcement of the health and safety rules?

Edit Wars #4

Terrible visual pun

Over the last three instalments of Edit Wars, we’ve covered a Robot Wars fight that has two different versions, and two others where the producers were trying to cover up something a bit dodgy in the edit. This concluding article contains a veritable gallimaufry of examples that are similar to the latter, but are more minor and I can’t spin a whole article out of, plus the occasional piece of related trivia thrown in for fun.

Note that virtually every battle in the show’s history was edited down to highlights – it wasn’t uncommon for a battle that lasted the whole 5 minutes in reality to be cut to less than 2 minutes – and obviously I won’t list every such example here. There’s plenty more information about a lot of these on the Robot Wars Wiki if you want to go looking.

Edit Wars #3

Important update made in July 2021: Since this article was originally written, a large number of the sources used for the claims made in it have been, at the very least, strongly brought into question. Except one of the primary people doing so is a roboteer who appears to have some personal grudge against a member of the Storm team.

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.

Edit Wars #2

THIS SCOREBOARD IS A COMPLETE AND UTTER LIE

Let joy be unconfined: it’s one of those other articles about Robot Wars I promised you some time ago. (This story may already be familiar to you if you’re a big fan of the show, but I still reckon it’s worth telling again.) Last time around, we were interested in two different versions of the same episode. What we have here is a rather different kettle of fish – there’s only one version of this episode, but it’s been edited to avoid giving us the whole story, and what really happened is alluded to later on in the series.

Edit Wars

You may wish to turn your attention to this video, which is taken from an episode of Robot Wars that was broadcast on BBC2 on 23 November 2001. (The episode is split up into parts, and the footage we're interested in continues into the next part for about 20 seconds.)

As you’ll see, starting from around 6:35 it depicts a battle between King B Powerworks and a robot called Draven. Except, when that battle was filmed, it wasn’t called Draven. And when the episode was first broadcast on BBC Choice on 12 October 2001, it wasn’t called Draven either. At that point, it was called Anthrax.

At some point between those two broadcasts, there was an anthrax scare in the US which necessitated the change of name and a re-edit of the episode for its terrestrial screening. (It’s a good thing the team hadn’t had any T-shirts made.) All I know for sure is that the version on YouTube above has a re-recorded commentary by Jonathan Pearce, but I’d like to see the originally broadcast version if possible to know exactly what edits or changes were made.

So, if you have a copy of the original version of the episode, do get in touch. (Rather sadly, there are at least two other articles about Robot Wars and strange editing I can think of writing, but this is the only case of there being two versions of the same episode that made it to air – definitely of this show, and possibly of any gameshow I can think of – so it’s probably the most interesting.)