Another Sunday and another night of light entertainment on TV as AWB current favourite free to air programming came and went. All good fun, unlike that rubbish Neil Gaiman wrote via twitter just before.
Curiously the ABC lists this ep as number 7 and last weeks (the Spencer Rifle) is listed as 8. No real idea what happened to number 6. Minor problems I am sure but if you are trying to follow at home good luck to you.
This week (or last weeks depending on numbering system) our three heroes from The Boffin The Builder and The Bombardier go all medieval on us and discuss the premier pre gunpowder siege weapon, the Trebuchet. The good news here is that like last week (or next week if you prefer) the trio don't try too hard by making bold statements they can't actually prove. The framework of the programme was that the Trebuchet evolved during the so called 'Dark Ages' and the so called much more clever Romans never used them. So, ignoring the slip that the 'Dark Ages' were actually before the 'Medieval' period where the Trebuchet was actually used, the question was raised as to was this actually an effective and well designed weapon or just a hack job a mere shadow of what the Romans could have built.
Having clearly blown their budget on all those 303 rifles, the team fail to build us a full scale behemoth and instead drag out what seems to be a commercial of the shelf working model about one metre high. Jokes aside that is fair enough, they clearly do have a budget to work within but one does have to wonder why they have 'The Builder' on the programme when he often doesn't actually seem to build anything. More on the 'characters' later.
They then fling some oranges and a toy cow at a small cardboard castle before blowing it up. As you do.
Conclusions, it was a very effective weapon that could do exactly what was said on the box.
Problems really are with the casual history. No weapon exists in a vacuum, and one of the reasons why there was an evolutionary break in the development of siege weapons from Roman to Medieval times was that for a great hunk of history people stopped building decent fortifications. It is often forgotten that it was the Normans that brought castles to the British Isles and those were the much smaller Motte and Bailey style and even then, most of the first ones were made of wood. Catapults in the Roman sense were largely forgotten because most defencive works could be more easily taken using a bunch of big hairy men with some homemade ladders. The other point of interest with the historical period was that there was no real 'Engineering Class' of skilled siege specialists passing down their skills from master to apprentice. Siege, while common, was more often a case of camping outside and hoping they surrendered before your own troops got bored and attempting to knock down the walls was actually relatively uncommon. The skills to make siege equipment it seems were no so much magically unlocked like a computer game tech tree, as rediscovered and forgotten time and time again over hundreds of years and it is most likely that the people knocking down the walls with siege engines were the same skilled master craftsman who had used their knowledge of levers, pulleys and woodwork to build the great walls in the first place.
Still, a lot of history to compress into 10 minutes so let us start to muse on the shows format instead.
This ep re-introduced the character of 'Big Mama', a woman 'in her prime' who has been used before to explain to these three overgrown boys the hard physics of their problems. One guesses that this character was introduced to play up on the 'men and sheds' social stereotype where no matter how many tools a man has, he is still just a big boy trying to impress his mates and only a woman really knows how to talk sense.
Which might actually be fine if this character actually got to talk some sense.
We are given a brief 'physics' lesson on how the Big T actually works by said Big Mama, and unfortunately most of what she says is crock. A Trebuchet is effectively a long arm rotating around a pivot. Now rotational velocity is the same at both ends and, if AWB remembers correctly from Uni days, is measured in radians per second. However, the further you move away from the centre of rotation, the faster the tangential velocity and in practical terms for us in this situation, the faster our big rock is flung. Of course the Trebuchet is also a balance lever. To get one end to go down, allowing for the mechanical advantage of the lever arm, it must be heavier then the other. So Trebuchet design is in reality a compromise between size of the counter balance, length of the arms, how far they are actually hoping to throw and how big they are prepared to build the thing in the first place. Having some mother figure sprout out some dross about ratios doesn't make it otherwise and is a small step away from technobabble.
This brings us back to actual dynamic of our trio within the show. Unlike say 'Mythbusters' where the hosts are effectively being themselves and just goofing it up, TBCubed are playing classic cliched roles. Why they have chosen to do this is open to ponder. A careful pausing of the credits has finally confirmed to AWB that the head writer is also the man playing 'The Boffin' and hence is must be assumed that he (John Concannon) does actually know a respectable amount of his history. However, instead of playing himself in a sort of Adam and Jamie Mythbusters dynamic, he instead takes the role of the bully. Tony, 'The Bombardier' is the thug enforcer character and Will 'The Builder' (who as we have pointed out earlier, often doesn't build anything) gets the role of the butt monkey the crueler pair keep around as their play thing. If 'Big Mama' is seen as the school teacher bringing the schoolboys back in line then the entire show develops a disturbing parallel to the worse of most people's schooling years.
Hmmm... Still an entertaining 10 minutes of TV that AWB has been enjoying the viewing of, and all attempts at making TV of military history must really be supported, but it does have the fault of being just a tad silly.
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