TV - The Boffin The Builder The Bombardier

Here in cheery Australia, ABC television have been recently showing a quick little 15min show called 'The Boffin, The Builder, The Bombardier' that was no doubt made up to fill up the remainder of the hour left by the 45minutes of Doctor Who.
This is a curious little show of which AWB has managed to watch three episodes. The format seems obviously inspired by that of Mythbusters but while Adam and Jamie play themselves on that programme, the title three in this Australian grown production seem to be characters. Are they actually who they claim? Stuff if AWB knows and the ABC website is annoyingly vague.
What we get is a friendly little 15 minutes where they put forward some item from military history, dress up a bit in some mock period clothing, and then see if it will work, all with added explosives.
So far in the three episodes observed we have seen the ANZAC periscope rifle, a Chinese multi tube firelance launcher and the water drip rifle used during the evacuation of the Gallipoli campaign. Slight Australian theme as one would expect from an Australian production but AWB is unsure from the rapid reading of the credits just how much support, if any, the programme is getting from places like the Australian War Memorial.
So what are they like?
Well, average to silly. The periscope rifle was probably the best of what AWB has seen so far. They put forward the premise that reports into the weapons effective range seem to vary greatly and so, having built one, set out to range test the weapon to see what results were obtained.
(Spoilers - effective out to 100m, incredibly difficult to aim beyond that and Bruce Willis' character was really dead all along.)
So useful historical information and light TV entertainment. Win.
The other two eps? Not so much.
The drip rifle never really seemed to prove anything or indeed even offer a point to prove in the first place. For those not up on ANZAC folk law, the drip rifle was used during the evacuation to give off random rifle shots in the vague direction of the Turkish lines while the final rearguard did a bunk. Water from one tin slowly dripped until the weight change toppled the carefully balanced box of rocks and pulled the string connected trigger. Bang.
Since this arrangement is known to have worked and can clearly be shown to have worked, the team were left with very little to actually prove. They spent most of the first half of that ep musing on drip rates to gain the magic 32 minutes, without really giving any solid evidence as to why 32 minutes was a magic number. Yes the final rearguard was given 32 minutes (or there abouts, AWB is writing from memory here) to reach the final boats but that does not necessarily automatically translate into a solid need to have the timer work exactly at that time. Indeed if all drip rifles were 'set' to the same time, a sudden ragged volley from up and down the ANZAC line would probably prove more suspicious to the watching Turks then no fire at all.
Then, having proved the timer works, the team gave the final conclusion, without really offering up more then personal opinion, that the drip rifle probably didn't do all that much anyway and it was the other careful deception ploys that had the most effect.
Sure, so, ummm, what have we actually been proving again?
Last ep viewed by AWB was about Chinese multiple fire lance launchers. Think a big box with multiple gunpowder rocker powered spears that no doubt has a much more impressive name that AWB is too lazy to research.
So, our trio of harmless eccentrics, having read (Western) reports that dismissed the weapon, decided to prove it could work. A Noble enough challenge, but very casually executed.
First they build their launcher out of PVC pipe and other modern tools, which is a bit like proving that da Vinci could have flown by visiting Boeing, and then fire said rockets and launcher at a small horde of what one assumes were MDF man sized targets cunningly disguised as Mongals. At no time is any indication or attempt at historical methods and seems at best to have been a logical guess. The weapon was then fired off where the spear tipped rockets flew off in the general direction of the targets (about 50m away, the range was never stated) and largely bounced off the MDF.
Okay, it was not a hugely historically accurate replica, the spear points seemed to be flame cut bits of mild sheet and well, who are we fooling, it was just three guys playing with fireworks.
The conclusion however? Oh this would be a deadly effective weapon.
Well, maybe if you had set out some hard ground rules like maximum range, reload vs closing speed of the enemy and didn't have the sidekick character actually carrying one of the spear points that had literally curled back on itself after bouncing off one of the targets we might, just maybe, take your conclusions a bit more seriously.
Conclusions? Historical bollocks but harmless and good natured fun.
ABC tv - Sundays, after Doctor Who.