James May's Man Lab (2010) s02e03 Episode Script
Series 2, Episode 3
1 Hello and welcome to Man Lab, the arena where the global, modern bloke scales the peak of prowess and shakes from his boots the cloying mud of inadequacy.
Coming up Go! We reach for the stars performing a funeral Man Lab style.
Prometheus is unbound in our home foundry.
Do not show that on camera.
If my wife sees that we are dead.
And I take on the simple task of revolutionising the entire male wardrobe.
I think the reaction out there will be either amazement or utter bewilderment.
Later on, we'll be attempting to put an end to the tyranny of male fashion.
But first, the history of high-altitude flight is littered with the names of the bold and the daring.
From Pilâtre de Rozier in the Montgolfier brothers' hot air balloon in 1783 to Neil Armstrong and Joe Walker in the Bell X-15 in the early 1960s.
The quest to go ever higher is one of humankind's oldest obsessions.
But it's one that we at Man Lab have yet to confront, mainly for budgetary reasons.
Our mission, then, is to add our own glorious chapter to the book of altitude, for a few hundred quid.
And for help, we turn to the true pioneers.
The first passengers in a hot air balloon were a duck, a sheep and a chicken.
The first Russian in space was Laika, a dog.
And the first American was Ham, a chimp.
Clearly, the British household pet was key to our cut-price suborbital mission.
Then we discovered that the RSPCA has some annoying rules about not catapulting live animals beyond the Final Frontier.
But don't worry, we found a loophole, and an unsuspecting crew of a cat and a bird.
And here they are.
This is Tommy.
God rest his whiskers.
And this is Budgie.
May his soul take wings.
Both of them tragically passed away earlier this year and their owners have expressed a wish for their ashes to be scattered to the four winds.
Welcome, then, o the pet cemetery of the future.
The Man Lab space funeral.
Our mission began with our two brave volunteers.
Or rather, permission from their owners.
Oh, I think it's really good that Tommy's going up there into the outer atmosphere because Tommy had very itchy feet and if he'd have been able to climb on a rocket or a balloon and go up there on his own, I'm pretty sure that that's what he would have done.
Because that's the type of cat he was.
Well, this budgie was known to me as Number 35.
I've got that many I don't give them names.
And nothing particularly wonderful has happened to me in my life but now it appears that I'm going to be part of the space race along with Number 35.
- Do you think that's enough? - I think so.
Our plan was a simple one.
Taking the urns containing our recently cremated companions, we would attach them to balloons which would take them up to the edge of the Earth's atmosphere and then release them, somehow, into the comforting black void.
So, in order to test our plan, we bashed together an urn prototype containing a miniature camera, and sombrely inflated our trans-atmospheric, trans-theological transport solution.
Let's just go through and see if it will take off.
Andit worked.
But it did leave us with some problems.
It had taken 35 balloons to lift one, quite light version of our urn.
Our prototype urn only had one camera on it which was a bit risky if it got damaged.
And three, all our hard work was now stuck on the ceiling.
- It works.
- That's good.
With a quick bit of woodwork, problem three had a solution.
The other problems, however, needed a bit more thought.
We quickly decided to make the switch from lots of little balloons to one large weather balloon per pet.
But what to put in that balloon divided the Man Lab.
We would like to use some hydrogen.
Hydrogen has the advantage, of course, of being lighter.
Everybody always uses helium.
Hydrogen is about half the weight of helium.
So it's going to give us more lift and go up fast.
But Simmy wants to stick with the party favourite, helium.
It doesn't matter about the lift.
They've got twice as much lift but it doesn't matter.
Cos the thing is, we're only lifting a small amount of weight.
- We'll get more height.
- So I'm hoping we'll get more.
What began as a respectful goodbye to our feathered and furry friends has now become competitive.
But that's the price of progress at the cutting edge of the pet ash creative disposal business.
Team Hydrogen, led by Dr Ben and Dan, will be in charge of the remains of Budgie Number 35, The Budgie.
Team Helium, led by me and Simmy, will oversee the final ethereal voyage of Tommy the cat.
He's not only travelled to the New Forest and come back from Manchester, but travelled down to Birmingham and come back.
But this, for Tommy, I think, will be the ultimate trip out into space.
Good on you, boy.
Back at the lab, and we've decided to get around the urn problem by having the balloons themselves hold the ashes.
As the balloons climb higher and the air pressure around them decreases, the gases inside will expand them to about the size of a sperm whale.
Eventually, they will pop and the ashes will float out like little clouds of pet soul.
This also leaves the gondola below each balloon free to stuff with cameras.
Cunningly designed so that when the strings pull, it actually pushes down on the camera.
All that remains is to perform a brief homage to Blue Peter, and the remains of Tommy and Budgie are ready to meet their maker.
This vaguely cat-shaped gondola will be suspended below the balloon and contains all the scientific equipment necessary to record Tommy's ascent to heaven.
There's a camera there where his face would normally be.
It will be looking at a portrait of Tommy so that we can see him up in the heavens.
There's another camera at the back which will give us a wonderful shot of the Earth and the curvature of the Earth and our position in space effectively.
There's a similar arrangement over here for Budgie.
Here it is.
It's shaped again, vaguely like a budgie's head.
Erm so that we know which one is which.
One camera looks upwards, the other forwards.
Nice portrait of Budgie there in his last days in his cage.
And this is particularly poignant because Budgie's life was cut so tragically short.
He was never even given a name by his breeder.
He simply lived and died briefly in his cage.
Now, of course, he could achieve a sort of immortality during his ascent.
Well, most budgies are normally cremated and just get scattered on the Earth.
But this is a first for the budgerigar world, I think.
And the fact that this bird has gone into space, and its ashes, will give it a place in history.
Back in the field, the two rival air hearses: One helium, one hydrogen, are inflating fast.
Now for the part where a cock-up wouldn't be funny.
This is the bit we have to do reverentially.
We're now going to feed this into the balloon.
The ash will be floating free in the balloon so that when it pops, it will be scattered and Tommy will become, as WB Yeats may have said, "a part of the constellations of heaven".
So, the dust of Tommy is deposited in the sacred vault of the helium balloon.
And Dr Ben's team, Hydrogen, is paying similar respects to Budgie Number 35, The Budgie.
And so, finally, our pioneers in the afterlife, are ready for launch.
This is, of course, a funeral.
It is a sky burial and should be afforded the dignity such an occasion demands.
But, at a more fatuous level, it's also, of course, a race.
It is Simmy's team versus Dr Ben's team.
It's helium versus hydrogen and it's cat versus budgie.
As in life, so it would appear, in death.
Are we ready? Three two one Go! Right.
There are, actually, two races involved here.
One is the race to altitude to see whether cat or budgie gets highest, and how long it takes to get there, but then when the balloons have popped, all the information and all our pictures fall back to Earth and we have a race to find them and recover them.
This equipment is going to do most of that work for us.
This noise you can hear is the data, the raw binary data, coming back from the transmitter inside our balloon, that's cat balloon, and that tells us where it is with GPS.
It's decoded on this screen and this gives us information on how high it is, what the time is, its co-ordinates, lat and long, temperature, and so on.
And this, later, can be further decoded into a map, like your car sat nav, which will tell us, in James Bond style, with a little bleep on the screen, where it is when it lands.
At just under 500m, Tommy the cat and our helium balloon, have a clear lead.
But Budgie and Dr Ben's Team Hydrogen are gaining fast.
So far, I believe that the cat is 300m above the budgie.
So far, it's bad news for us.
Er but we can hope it can change.
And change it does, as just moments later, Budgie Number 35, The Budgie, strikes a blow for birds harassed by felines everywhere, draws level with Tommy and then overtakes.
The budgie is ahead.
The cat had a short moment of glory but we are ahead.
There's no answer.
James May is not answering.
He clearly knows that we are ahead.
He doesn't want to look defeat in the eye.
In fact, Budgie continues its lead all the way up to 1,000m.
Back on the ground, I can't ignore my fellow funeral director any longer.
It's the rival team.
Hello, rival team.
Hello, Mr James May.
The loser of the moment, I believe.
Oh, shut up.
Really? I'm afraid I'm afraid your cat is dragging behind.
Well, I look forward to yours coming down in a fireball! I'll ring you back in a bit.
Roger.
Bye.
That's shocking news.
Budgie has leapt ahead now by nearly 1,000m.
That is strange.
Dr Ben is claiming that is to do with the unusual properties of hydrogen and how it behaves at lower altitude.
Having reached a certain height, it's then Well, it's gone off like a rocket, to be honest, even though it's only a balloon.
I'm staggered by that.
So Tommy the cat may be lagging behind in his journey to a better place, but, as the balloons rise ever closer to the clouds, the strange, ethereal beauty of our flying funeral is enough to stop anyone from being a sour puss.
The buffeting through the clouds has cost Budgie its advantage and the two animals are neck-and-neck again in the final race to heaven.
Tommy and Budgie leave the troposphere and head for the stratosphere pushing past 18,000m in height.
That's the equivalent of two Mount Everests.
Or 11,613 Oz Clarkes.
The whole project is probably £500 worth at the most, assuming we manage to recover our expensive cameras.
And we're already beating the highest flying aeroplanes available today.
Very soon, our balloon will be at the point where the only thing higher than it will be the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope.
After that, it's the infinity of space.
Back on the ground, we've caught up to the balloons' current position.
Time to see if we can get an eyeball on them.
I can't see bugger all.
What we don't quite realise is that trying to spot Tommy and Budgie through a pair of binoculars is an exercise in futility.
Because, unbeknownst to us, they have reached an incredible height of 25km.
Soaring into the stratosphere to become pets at the edge of space.
This is a sewing machine.
Something like it has been with us for many generations and it was a brilliant invention.
It clothed the masses affordably.
It stopped old people banging on about how they'd only ever had one shirt and they wore it every day for "forty year".
However, there was a dark side to all this.
In fact, the sewing machine has become unstoppable.
It is responsible for an annual global tsunami of over 50 billion fashion items.
All spewing forth from the mass ranks of Singers and Necchis and Brothers and Toyotas.
No-one is safe.
Not even me as it turns out.
Here is just a small part of the James May spring/summer collection.
And when I look at it, I have to ask, "What was I thinking of when I chose that?" Or for that matter, that.
Or that.
Or indeed, that.
Or any of the other things on this rack.
And more to the point, even in a whole lifetime, I couldn't expect to wear out that many shirts.
I mean, look at this thing.
I've never even worn it.
And here's a sobering thought.
I've calculated that, every day, the men of Britain waste two million man hours deciding what to put on.
Now imagine how much more constructively we could use all that time.
Imagine if you went to the wardrobe and there was a choice of just one thing.
All men would be free of this ridiculous tyranny of trends to stride forth and achieve greatness.
And that is why I have made it my quest to restore to glory the boiler suit.
The inspiration for this revolution came from one great man.
In Washington, in the gardens of the White House, Mr Churchill demonstrating his siren suit.
Churchill wore his one-piece siren suit through much of World War II.
Wherever the Premier went, it was the same story.
The message was clear.
Single-suitedness meant single-mindedness.
Wearing a boiler suit left Churchill's head clear for the important job of bashing Hitler's moustache off.
Loads of clothes, on the other hand, means poncing about.
An overload of labels spiralling us into fashion disaster.
And the men of the 21 st century seem to agree.
Do men have too many clothes? Yeah, I think they do.
I have too many clothes.
I've got loads of clothes.
It would be efficient.
It would be easy in the morning, I suppose.
Yes, I think it would be of great benefit to mankind if there was one bit of clothing.
But as with the telephone and the light bulb, not everyone is convinced.
I don't think a boiler suit is very fashionable at all.
Part of the problem is that people see the boiler suit as a sort of cheap, one-size-fits-no-one commodity available from a DIY shop for £5.
So let's begin its revival by giving it some posh provenance.
This notion is what takes me to a place I've never visited before: London's Savile Row, home to some of the best tailors in the country.
If I'm to convince blokes that one piece of clothing is enough, I need to at least be sure that my arse doesn't look big in it.
I want to make the boiler suit a sort of default choice.
You get up in the morning, "What do I wear? It's my boiler suit.
" I can see a case for making it a bit more tailored.
In its current state, it's very basic.
The sewing leaves quite a lot to be desired.
- And I'd imagine the fit does.
- Right.
Shall we measure me? Yeah.
Dubois! Dubois! Jacket waist, 39.
That's not your trouser waist, it's your jacket waist.
It's my belly.
Dubois measures everything about me.
But he doesn't ask me which way I dress.
He can probably tell that the answer is very badly.
Inside leg, 33.
And I know I said it had to fit around the back, but is this really necessary? - So, what, that's the diameter of my buttocks? - Yeah.
- The circumference rather.
- Yeah.
So, with the exact circumference of my buttocks recorded for posterior-ity, Dubois makes a start on the first step of my suit A bespoke paper template.
This is the front of the trousers.
That is as that.
That's that.
Dubois would like me to go away, so I do, to choose a suitable fabric.
I'm going for sturdy wool rather than the boiler suit's usual electric-shock-from-the-door-handle nylon.
Pocket linings are the one area where I could fall victim to my love of loud fabrics.
- Have you got anything a bit more patterned? - Yeah.
- Let's have a look.
- A bit more flamboyant.
Shall we have a look for something like, you know, a Jacquard lining? - These are, you know, your flower motif.
- Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Ooh, yes.
I must fight this urge.
Sir Winston Churchill wouldn't have done this! Stick to the basic boiler suit, you fool! Mind you, look at these.
That's got butterflies on it.
I think I'd quite like the butterfly one and the space disk thing.
I may have been sucked into the abyss of "what's hot this season" just then, but it's all OK.
I'm not saying that every man has to wear exactly the same boiler suit.
After all, my inspiration was Churchill not Chairman Mao.
The point I'm making is that every man should have only one suit.
How they style it, and for what purpose, is up to them.
And perhaps I'm being a bit square.
Maybe the boiler suit deserves a more liberal re-interpretation.
To activate Stage Two of Operation Onesie, I recruit some trendy fashion students.
Wow.
Look at all this.
Even though wearing one outfit for the rest of your life goes against everything they are taught and stand for, the students have excelled themselves.
- Oh, I see.
Those are the tails.
- Yes.
- Got you.
- They wrap round from the bottom.
Up and round.
So they come round the front.
It's formal wear but it's workwear at the same time.
OK.
So I could step into it in the morning without having to find the separate jacket and trousers.
- Is that? Is that me? - Yeah.
- It's a young version.
- Oh, thank you.
To them, the boiler suit has become the muse of the style conscious.
Lots of different functions.
Different-sized pockets for different-sized things.
Sandwich pocket.
This one was actually my dad's idea.
He said the last thing you'd want to do is unzip it all and take all your sleeves off - if you needed a Number Two.
- A poo flap on a boiler suit.
I mean, he does have a point, actually.
I hadn't really thought of that.
Like artists, some may have revealed things about themselves.
So this is going to have a slight sort of bondage look to it.
It's sort of a slight cross between The Terminator and the Village People.
And then, there's Adam.
- Hi.
Erm - Hang on a minute before you go further.
- This man's got antlers.
- Yeah, it's - Why? - Why this? Why has he got antlers growing out of his head? Because I really like the antlers and what you are wearing is This one is antler.
Actually.
Erm I just never thought of it, that's all.
I never thought, "I'm ready for this party.
Oh, no, bugger off.
I forgot my antlers.
" Despite his strange ideas about head furniture, one of Adam's designs looked brilliant.
Just make sure I've understood this.
- So all the red flaps - You can turn it over.
And so get everything covered.
- Could you really make that? - Yeah, I can.
Suddenly, the traditionally soot-stained, boiler-based all-in-one is the avant-garde of acceptability.
And so, like Victorian children yoked to lethal machinery for no pay, the students set to work.
Good.
I've decided to take the fight straight to the enemy.
We're going to take our collection to the catwalk at Earl's Court right in the middle of the prestigious Graduate Fashion Week.
If this works, man will be free and the wardrobe can be used for something useful.
But on the other hand, I could end up looking like a berk in a baby grow.
Adam's attempt to turn those otherwise useless antlers into a useful and practical fashion accessory got us thinking about the very topical issue of recycling.
Now this, as I'm sure you know, is a lemon squeezer.
And it's a very attractive thing.
Unfortunately, though, it does fall short in its intended role as a squeezer of lemons because when you use it, it's unstable, it falls over and you fracture your wrist.
So, in the vernacular of the metal working trades, this is what is known as scrap.
We also have this, the so-called Friendship Bowl.
This is the Queen of Hearts fruit platter.
And I'm sure you're getting the drift by now.
The good news is all of those things are made from aluminium so they can be sent for recycling.
And then, maybe, one day they will reappear as the kettle or part of the engine of my car.
But why actually bother your local authority with all that? With a bit of initiative, we can do the recycling job ourselves here in the Man Lab because the one thing we don't have is a decent, practical, useable lemon squeezer.
What we're intending to do here is to take the useless lemon squeezer and, as Omar Khayyam might have said, remould it closer to the heart's desire.
And we're going to do that in the Man Lab foundry.
A foundry being a place where metal is melted and then poured into moulds to create fascinating shapes.
Ever since our hairy-faced ancestors discovered that some rocks contain this stuff we call metal, metalworking has been central to the march of human progress.
In Britain, things came to a head in the Industrial Revolution when you couldn't move for blokes heating up or melting metal and then bashing into shape or pouring it into moulds.
Foundry work is the most mystical of metalworking.
If we can't master it, we are men of mere clay.
Our furnace will be made from bits and pieces lying around the Man Lab.
And we have help from our home foundry expert, Colin.
Now the first thing we do, tell me if I'm wrong, is make the furnace.
The furnace, believe it or not, is this bucket.
Of course, we'll have to customise the bucket first.
It needs an air hole or nozzle called a tuyere.
Metal dustbin.
Piece of pipe.
Hole made.
Jubilee clip attached.
Keep it stiff.
That is the tuyere.
That is where the air will be blown in to make our furnace rage like something from, I don't know, Dante or William Blake.
Next, we reinforce our bucket furnace with what's known as a refractory lining to withstand extremely high temperatures.
We're using a mixture of clay, sand and a bit of sawdust.
Wahey! That's looking good.
Look at that.
Put the lid on there.
All our furnace needs now is a lid with an exhaust hole.
- Yeah.
What a job.
What a job.
- Lovely.
Then we pack the furnace with old newspaper and wood and set fire to it.
Fire your blow torch up the tuyere.
Mm.
Here we go.
Try a little air in there.
The air will be provided by a familiar household appliance.
It's familiar if you're married to Colin.
That hairdryer is easily the most technically advanced piece of equipment.
Do not show that on camera.
If my wife sees that we are dead, I am dead.
She doesn't know it's here.
Whoa.
That's lovely.
Wahey! That works.
- Brilliant.
Look at that.
- Seriously hot.
That will become the white heat of technology.
The lemon squeezer and the silly bowls, will melt faster if they are in small pieces.
After much discussion, we decide to hit them with hammers.
I'd love a better lemon squeezer.
Ooh! Anyway, whilst that is happening, I can go and do something absolutely crucial to the foundry process, which is make the pattern.
This way.
The pattern is a wooden version of our forthcoming lemon squeezer and will be used to form the cavity inside the mould.
Now, it might seem a bit absurd that you have to make, effectively, a model of your casting before you make your casting.
You're making a lemon squeezer in wood then another one in aluminium.
But with a well-made pattern, you can use it over and over again to make a mould and make loads of lemon squeezers.
So, the pattern has to be spot-on.
Any mistakes will be reproduced in the finished squeezer.
So here I am at the wood-turning lathe in slight slow motion with misty-eyed music.
The knobby bit, sometimes known as the reamer, we're going to model it on the Phillips/Pozidriv screwdriver head so that our lemon squeezer is a little testimony to our love of hand tools.
Once the screwdriver-inspired reamer is ready, I attach it to the base and then finish the lot with some blue paint left over from Gran's bathroom, rubbing down for a perfect finish.
And there we are.
As Sir Henry Royce, motor car and aero engine-maker had inscribed over his fireplace, "Whatever is rightly done, however humble, is noble".
And you can't get much more humble than that.
Let's see if it's rightly done.
Right.
Here is our pattern from which we make the mould.
The mould is made out of sand.
It is a mixture of silver sand and clay.
To form the mould, this sand is carefully packed around the pattern in the two-part moulding flask as it is correctly called.
But you mustn't move the pattern around otherwise, obviously, it comes out the wrong shape and you'd have a comedy lemon squeezer.
In the top half of the mould, or the cope, we form a hole, or sprue, into which the molten metal will be poured or tipped.
It's nice to have a use in life.
Even if it is only holding your sprue! We are now at a crucial junction in the moulding process.
Now, do you want to do the technical part? - What? The separation? - That's got to be lifted dead straight.
- I know.
- Dead straight.
Otherwise we'll knock the sand.
I'll move out the way.
I'm not having any blame for it not coming out right.
If I cock this up, we'll have to start again.
How's it looking? How's it looking? Ooh, look at that! Be very quiet at home, please, for this moment.
Don't make any sudden movements or drop a glass or anything like that.
- Look at that.
Perfection.
- Beautiful.
Shall we just hang this on the wall rather than cast it? That is That's a work of art.
Now the pattern has been safely removed, the two halves of our flask are put back together with a lemon-squeezer-shaped cavity inside, thirsty for some hot metal.
- OK.
We are ready - Ready to go.
for pouring.
Here you can see our sacrificial offering to Vulcan, the God of Fire and Metalwork.
Apply hairdryer.
Scrub one poncy lemon squeezer.
Usher in the era of the un-poncy lemon squeezer.
Once the charcoal-fired furnace has reached something like 900 degrees, the aluminium becomes liquid.
Whoa! Look at that.
And so, like the horny-handed generations before us, we must turn molten potential into cold fruit-squeezing reality.
Time for the pour.
Now, the excess, pour This is fantastic.
Beautiful.
- Right.
Cup of tea and knock out.
- Sounds good to me.
One industrial cuppa later Right.
Are we ready? Because this is a moment of pure magic.
Are we going to see? This is looking good.
Poker.
Give it a poker.
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh! Where's the tongs? We need to show this to the world.
As I believe Goethe said, "Our passions are the true phoenixes.
When the old one is burnt out, the new one rises from its ashes.
" And if we could paraphrase that we could say, "Our lemon squeezer is the true phoenix.
When the old one proves utterly useless, a new one rises from its aluminium.
" And there it is.
And just to prove the efficacy of the Man Lab Self-Cast Phillips Screwdriver-Headed Squeezing Solution, we promptly knock up a few celebratory pancakes.
Here we go.
Let's squeeze a lemon.
It works.
Look at that.
Completely squeezed, a couple of pips in it for authenticity, lemon juice.
- Nice lemon.
- Well squeezed.
- Mm.
- Hm.
Ah, yes.
Anon has written in.
He says Sir, in your first, and excellent, series of Man Lab, you showed us how to cheat at playing the guitar for the purposes of minstrelsy.
However, you did not really explain how to tune it.
Please could you do that, err I die.
Well, look, it's really quite simple.
A guitar, normally, is tuned like this.
And it's a very pleasant sound but it makes it very difficult to actually play the regular chords you need for pop music.
You need to be able to do I think that's G major.
You have to do complicated contorted things with your finger.
So, for the purpose of just having a bit of a play along, it is easier if you tune your guitar like this, to what we call open fifths so that you can play any basic chord simply by moving one finger along.
OK? Now here is how you do it.
You take the bottom string of the guitar, the one furthest from the floor.
The thickest one; the lowest note.
Get that note in your head and that is the beginning of a scale of eight notes.
The only two notes now you need to tune the guitar are Do and So.
That's neither of those so I'm going to knock it down a bit.
And so, I set about tuning the strings to only the notes Do and So in the following order That's another Do.
That's another So.
And that's another Do.
And then, by using the one finger and moving it up and down the fret board, you can play what sounds like a convincing chord.
It isn't.
It's very simplified.
If you're being a minstrel or singing pop songs, it's good enough.
So you can play the Man Lab theme.
Using this method, only an idiot could fail to play the guitar.
Go! Earlier, we said goodbye to the remains of Tommy the cat and Budgie Number 35, The Budgie, whose owners had made the ill-advised decision of asking us to take care of the funeral arrangements.
So we sent their ashes to heaven inside balloons.
And it worked better than we imagined.
The balloons shot up like rockets carrying the cat and the budgie far above the Earth beyond the clouds and into the stratosphere until finally The Final Frontier, at least for a cremated cat and budgie.
Their mission? To boldly go higher than any British household pet had been before.
And then be scattered to the four winds.
Meanwhile, back on Earth It's still going up which is a good sign and means it hasn't burst yet.
our two races are still on.
The first to see whose balloon will go higher- my own Team Helium with Tommy the cat or Dr Ben's Team Hydrogen.
The second race is to see who can recover their cameras first when they fall back to Earth.
We're speeding towards the recovery point and hoping very much that by the time the balloons go pop, we will both have won the height race and won the recovery.
But back at the edge of heaven, away from our earthly concerns, racing seems irrelevant.
Budgie Number 35, our representative of budgies everywhere, is now 30, 111 m above the Earth.
That's 123 times higher than Canary Wharf, the previous highest recorded bird.
Tommy the cat isn't far below at 28,917 m.
But then The air pressure outside Tommy's balloon is finally too low for the helium inside it and it bursts beginning its long fall back to Earth.
In slow motion, you can actually see the ash being released and the final remains of Tommy the cat floating away.
- Got a burst definitely.
- Who? 28,900 We've got a burst.
So we are on the way down.
We've got a burst.
28,249.
92,500 feet.
Let's just dwell on that for a moment and think about the remains of poor Tommy.
They've just been, quite literally, spread to the four winds.
Tommy's camera gondola is plummeting back towards Earth but Budgie Number 35, The Budgie, is still flying high.
Team Hydrogen and Budgie have won the altitude race and at a final height of 30,352m, it erupts into a shower of glory.
Budgie has won the altitude competition.
So hydrogen has won altitude; Budgie has won altitude.
Dr Ben's going to be unbearable.
We won! Both balloons have now burst.
We burst higher.
Losers.
Oh, I'm over the moon.
This is one for the birds.
The cats have always been their mortal enemy and here they've won without doubt.
Oh, it's coming down like a - It's coming down like a - A lead balloon.
Yeah.
At the start of their plummet, the atmosphere is about a hundredth the density of that at ground level and this lack of air resistance allows the payloads to reach speeds in excess of 200 miles an hour.
Meanwhile, far below, we're now into Race 2.
Camera recovery.
All we need back from the entire operation at this point now is the data cards with the pictures on.
The little cameras don't have film in them.
They have flash cards, effectively.
And if we can find those, we're in business.
We're sort of prepared to lose the cameras.
If they land in water, they will float because the budgie's head and the cat are buoyant.
The cameras will probably be ruined, but we could retrieve the cards and rescue the information.
As the payloads start to near the cloud layer, the air resistance picks up and the parachutes we remembered to attach start to take effect.
Unfortunately, it is, as ever, not quite that simple.
Unbeknownst to us, Tommy's trajectory has him landing square in a line of electricity pylons.
While Budgie is on course to make an emergency ditching in a sewage treatment works.
Ooh, pylons.
It hits and falls.
A few miles away, Budgie Number 35 isn't far behind and worryingly close to ending up in the sewage.
But, at the last minute, a lucky gust of wind sends it sailing out of danger and into the welcoming arms of a nearby field.
The budgie has landed.
40 yards.
We're there.
20.
- Should be right here.
- It's there.
Dr Ben is the first to reach his landing site.
But the combination of the cornfields and the close range of the GPS is making a polystyrene budgie's head rather tricky to spot.
OK.
It's that way.
Here it comes.
We are getting close.
And over in our cornfield, we're having similar problems.
It could be either side of the road.
We are now 75km from our launch site but a tantalising 50m from our gondola.
It's just there.
You can just about see it.
Sticking up through the corn.
- Looks like we've found it.
- Parachute.
What's on the end of the string? James, do you want to reel it in? - I can't see it.
- I think it's here.
Oh, that was very close.
When you see the pylon that we must have missed by feet.
So, can you smell? That is a sewage works there.
- Lucky you didn't land there.
- A few hundred yards and we'd be swimming.
Our aerospace string is stuck.
We fall over.
Argh! Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's it there.
Can you see it? Wahey! Here's our budgie.
Complete.
Ha-ha! Look at that.
Let's get that right.
Happy camera.
Still on.
Happy camera still on.
- Say hello to the camera.
- Fantastic.
- Look at that.
- It's perfect.
- Wow! - Amazing.
Nice job.
Success.
Fantastic.
Thank you.
Oh, there it is.
- Hey-hey.
- Superb.
Cameras look intact.
Picture is intact.
Where's that been? 85,000ft? - 85,000ft.
Yeah.
- That's pretty spectacular, isn't it? Twice as high as Concorde used to fly.
Well done, Tommy.
So, Team Helium lost both races but what of it? The Man Lab pet cemetery on the edge of space seems to me to have been a resounding success.
Most pet ashes are scattered in a corner of the garden.
But, in death, Tommy and Budgie have reached heights unknown to any British animal before them.
We salute them.
Pioneers both.
If your beloved pet has recently shuffled off this mortal coil, and you'd like it to perform one last duty, clogging up the engines of a budget flight to Malaga, do please get in touch: No goldfish, please.
Earlier, I declared war on male fashion.
I want to make the boiler suit a sort of default choice.
My mantra? One man, one customised boiler suit.
Sandwich pockets? This man's got antlers.
A poo flap on a boiler suit.
I've convinced a renegade group of fashion students to help me out.
But now we face our biggest challenge.
Presenting our revolutionary vision on the enemy's home turf: The catwalk.
Welcome to Graduate Fashion Week.
It's the highlight of the fashion student's year.
The place is absolutely teeming with bright, creative, optimistic young people hoping to make an impact in this gay, mad world we call the fashion business.
And really, I'm here hoping to put an end to fashion, really.
To stop the tyranny of trends and reduce the male wardrobe to a single one-piece overall.
It may not be a very popular idea.
Graduate Fashion Week is the beating heart of the country's fashionistas.
The place is jam-packed with designers, photographers and, most importantly, the money men - buyers.
A well-placed boiler suit uprising here could start a chain reaction and bring the fashion empire to its knees.
I decide to go on a reconnaissance mission.
What will their attitude be to a bloke who is sort of taking an anti-fashion stance? There's always been a strong history of anti-fashion throughout fashion anyway.
It depends on how it looks and what it looks like.
If you get halfway and people are literally jeering and throwing things, is it acceptable to retreat or is that just? Is it a bit like the frontline in 1916 - and you have to keep going? - You have to.
It's clear, then.
This is do or die.
Once the first boiler suit battalion breaks cover and hits that catwalk, there's no coming back.
Precision-trained to show off our designs.
What we have are me, Will, the producer, and a bunch of blokes we grabbed from the pub next door.
Face the audience, darling.
And The audience is out there, yeah.
And turn right.
No, I'll tell you when to go.
Do not pre-empt.
Not since the first prehistoric Homo Erectus tottered up on to its hind legs, has a group of men had such difficulty in simply walking.
And you pose on the way up, did you say? You sort of come straight out and just go one, two, and then carry on walking straightaway down the middle.
- Shall I try that? - Yes, go on.
- The flaps are the back bit here.
- You're going round and I'll say, "Go.
" - You say go and I turn and go - One, two.
Off you go.
And go.
Will and I glide up the catwalk like consummate professionals.
OK.
So stop here.
So then we sort of go Massive applause.
At this point, I'm imaging the audience's faces as they gaze speechlessly at my detachable smart casual accessories.
And then we do a pose about here.
Now, I, I'm sure, like you until now, thought the catwalk was a matter of mincing in one direction and then mincing back in the other, but it's more complicated.
This is like It's like the invasion of Normandy but in silly outfits.
It's quite difficult.
This is it, then.
On the battlefield our colours are unfurled.
Backstage, our plucky troop of amateur models are dressed into their personalised boiler suits by the young designers.
This is an uprising.
Even Adam has the finest antlers on for the occasion.
Ah.
I'm so excited.
While the students tie up any loose ends, I get into my own boiler suit.
No, don't worry.
It's not this one.
I can't reveal my outfit to you yet, obviously, because that will spoil the surprise, but I think the reaction out there will be either amazement or utter bewilderment.
It could go either way.
Let's see.
Pioneering stuff.
Yeah.
OK, chaps.
Over the top we go.
Maybe that poo flap wasn't such a bad idea.
Presenting the May boiler.
Me.
Perfect for everyday activities like fixing motorcycles, going to the pub or trying not to laugh at the camera.
The May boiler also comes with multiple accessories for formal wear but before I get into those, and, as the audience hasn't left yet, the student designs are going to take the frontline.
First up, the biker boiler.
Designed for the gentleman who likes racing around the track and hammering in invisible nails.
Or why not try the barbecue boiler? With useful tongs pocket and party atmosphere trim.
The hammer-to-glamour boiler.
For a day fixing the roof and a night at the opera.
So far, our fashion revolution is going quite well.
Our troops seem to be winning over the crowd with the versatility of their humble boiler suit offering a look for all lifestyles.
Even one or two of the buyers have sat up to take notice.
It's only when the audience are hit with designer lona's boiler suit that things start to come a little unstuck.
I think this is for people who spend a lot of time in the rain but don't mind wet knees.
It's up to Adam to save the day with his multi-flap design that I was such a fan of earlier.
Unfortunately, this being Adam, he's gone and stuck a ruddy great pair of antlers on the back.
Go.
Go.
Go.
To close the show, we return to show off producer Will's suit with formal black tie attachments - ideal for all those endless BAFTA Awards evenings.
The beauty of these attachments is they can be removed in the flick of a wrist once you've been beaten by MasterChef.
Thus leaving you ready to continue plumbing, painting or whatever.
The crowd is on our side.
We may yet stand victorious, boiler-suited and proud, telling Gautier to go to hell.
The ordeal is over.
Our student designers take the stage to gratifyingly enthusiastic applause.
Thank you very much.
Thank you and Have we succeeded in releasing men from the yoke of fashion? Well, who knows? That could have been a pivotal moment in fashion.
It could be like the first time a woman was seen out without a hat.
Or the very first time a man discarded his hose and put on a pair of trousers.
It could be that significant.
But it all comes down to what the buyers think.
So, let's find out.
Well, it was entertaining.
There was obviously a lot of work had gone into it.
Was it commercial for our sort of mass market retailer? I'm not sure it was.
I think some were quite out there.
Particularly the ones with the antlers down the back.
I'm not sure how appropriate it would be to be commercial.
I thought it was really good.
I was pleasantly surprised, to be honest.
You could really see all the work that had gone into all the garments.
It looked pretty sharp.
Three months later in the accounts department of Emporia Man Lab, sales were recorded as nil.
And so, with a heavy heart and an expertly cut multi-tasking flag of surrender, I accepted defeat.
I am, I admit, bitterly disappointed.
It does seem that whatever you do with the boiler suit, it is destined just to be worn where quite dirty manual work is being done.
And I thought this was a good idea.
I really did.
I mean, what is the problem with it? It's not as if I'm asking blokes to wear a skirt or anything.
Goodbye.
Coming up Go! We reach for the stars performing a funeral Man Lab style.
Prometheus is unbound in our home foundry.
Do not show that on camera.
If my wife sees that we are dead.
And I take on the simple task of revolutionising the entire male wardrobe.
I think the reaction out there will be either amazement or utter bewilderment.
Later on, we'll be attempting to put an end to the tyranny of male fashion.
But first, the history of high-altitude flight is littered with the names of the bold and the daring.
From Pilâtre de Rozier in the Montgolfier brothers' hot air balloon in 1783 to Neil Armstrong and Joe Walker in the Bell X-15 in the early 1960s.
The quest to go ever higher is one of humankind's oldest obsessions.
But it's one that we at Man Lab have yet to confront, mainly for budgetary reasons.
Our mission, then, is to add our own glorious chapter to the book of altitude, for a few hundred quid.
And for help, we turn to the true pioneers.
The first passengers in a hot air balloon were a duck, a sheep and a chicken.
The first Russian in space was Laika, a dog.
And the first American was Ham, a chimp.
Clearly, the British household pet was key to our cut-price suborbital mission.
Then we discovered that the RSPCA has some annoying rules about not catapulting live animals beyond the Final Frontier.
But don't worry, we found a loophole, and an unsuspecting crew of a cat and a bird.
And here they are.
This is Tommy.
God rest his whiskers.
And this is Budgie.
May his soul take wings.
Both of them tragically passed away earlier this year and their owners have expressed a wish for their ashes to be scattered to the four winds.
Welcome, then, o the pet cemetery of the future.
The Man Lab space funeral.
Our mission began with our two brave volunteers.
Or rather, permission from their owners.
Oh, I think it's really good that Tommy's going up there into the outer atmosphere because Tommy had very itchy feet and if he'd have been able to climb on a rocket or a balloon and go up there on his own, I'm pretty sure that that's what he would have done.
Because that's the type of cat he was.
Well, this budgie was known to me as Number 35.
I've got that many I don't give them names.
And nothing particularly wonderful has happened to me in my life but now it appears that I'm going to be part of the space race along with Number 35.
- Do you think that's enough? - I think so.
Our plan was a simple one.
Taking the urns containing our recently cremated companions, we would attach them to balloons which would take them up to the edge of the Earth's atmosphere and then release them, somehow, into the comforting black void.
So, in order to test our plan, we bashed together an urn prototype containing a miniature camera, and sombrely inflated our trans-atmospheric, trans-theological transport solution.
Let's just go through and see if it will take off.
Andit worked.
But it did leave us with some problems.
It had taken 35 balloons to lift one, quite light version of our urn.
Our prototype urn only had one camera on it which was a bit risky if it got damaged.
And three, all our hard work was now stuck on the ceiling.
- It works.
- That's good.
With a quick bit of woodwork, problem three had a solution.
The other problems, however, needed a bit more thought.
We quickly decided to make the switch from lots of little balloons to one large weather balloon per pet.
But what to put in that balloon divided the Man Lab.
We would like to use some hydrogen.
Hydrogen has the advantage, of course, of being lighter.
Everybody always uses helium.
Hydrogen is about half the weight of helium.
So it's going to give us more lift and go up fast.
But Simmy wants to stick with the party favourite, helium.
It doesn't matter about the lift.
They've got twice as much lift but it doesn't matter.
Cos the thing is, we're only lifting a small amount of weight.
- We'll get more height.
- So I'm hoping we'll get more.
What began as a respectful goodbye to our feathered and furry friends has now become competitive.
But that's the price of progress at the cutting edge of the pet ash creative disposal business.
Team Hydrogen, led by Dr Ben and Dan, will be in charge of the remains of Budgie Number 35, The Budgie.
Team Helium, led by me and Simmy, will oversee the final ethereal voyage of Tommy the cat.
He's not only travelled to the New Forest and come back from Manchester, but travelled down to Birmingham and come back.
But this, for Tommy, I think, will be the ultimate trip out into space.
Good on you, boy.
Back at the lab, and we've decided to get around the urn problem by having the balloons themselves hold the ashes.
As the balloons climb higher and the air pressure around them decreases, the gases inside will expand them to about the size of a sperm whale.
Eventually, they will pop and the ashes will float out like little clouds of pet soul.
This also leaves the gondola below each balloon free to stuff with cameras.
Cunningly designed so that when the strings pull, it actually pushes down on the camera.
All that remains is to perform a brief homage to Blue Peter, and the remains of Tommy and Budgie are ready to meet their maker.
This vaguely cat-shaped gondola will be suspended below the balloon and contains all the scientific equipment necessary to record Tommy's ascent to heaven.
There's a camera there where his face would normally be.
It will be looking at a portrait of Tommy so that we can see him up in the heavens.
There's another camera at the back which will give us a wonderful shot of the Earth and the curvature of the Earth and our position in space effectively.
There's a similar arrangement over here for Budgie.
Here it is.
It's shaped again, vaguely like a budgie's head.
Erm so that we know which one is which.
One camera looks upwards, the other forwards.
Nice portrait of Budgie there in his last days in his cage.
And this is particularly poignant because Budgie's life was cut so tragically short.
He was never even given a name by his breeder.
He simply lived and died briefly in his cage.
Now, of course, he could achieve a sort of immortality during his ascent.
Well, most budgies are normally cremated and just get scattered on the Earth.
But this is a first for the budgerigar world, I think.
And the fact that this bird has gone into space, and its ashes, will give it a place in history.
Back in the field, the two rival air hearses: One helium, one hydrogen, are inflating fast.
Now for the part where a cock-up wouldn't be funny.
This is the bit we have to do reverentially.
We're now going to feed this into the balloon.
The ash will be floating free in the balloon so that when it pops, it will be scattered and Tommy will become, as WB Yeats may have said, "a part of the constellations of heaven".
So, the dust of Tommy is deposited in the sacred vault of the helium balloon.
And Dr Ben's team, Hydrogen, is paying similar respects to Budgie Number 35, The Budgie.
And so, finally, our pioneers in the afterlife, are ready for launch.
This is, of course, a funeral.
It is a sky burial and should be afforded the dignity such an occasion demands.
But, at a more fatuous level, it's also, of course, a race.
It is Simmy's team versus Dr Ben's team.
It's helium versus hydrogen and it's cat versus budgie.
As in life, so it would appear, in death.
Are we ready? Three two one Go! Right.
There are, actually, two races involved here.
One is the race to altitude to see whether cat or budgie gets highest, and how long it takes to get there, but then when the balloons have popped, all the information and all our pictures fall back to Earth and we have a race to find them and recover them.
This equipment is going to do most of that work for us.
This noise you can hear is the data, the raw binary data, coming back from the transmitter inside our balloon, that's cat balloon, and that tells us where it is with GPS.
It's decoded on this screen and this gives us information on how high it is, what the time is, its co-ordinates, lat and long, temperature, and so on.
And this, later, can be further decoded into a map, like your car sat nav, which will tell us, in James Bond style, with a little bleep on the screen, where it is when it lands.
At just under 500m, Tommy the cat and our helium balloon, have a clear lead.
But Budgie and Dr Ben's Team Hydrogen are gaining fast.
So far, I believe that the cat is 300m above the budgie.
So far, it's bad news for us.
Er but we can hope it can change.
And change it does, as just moments later, Budgie Number 35, The Budgie, strikes a blow for birds harassed by felines everywhere, draws level with Tommy and then overtakes.
The budgie is ahead.
The cat had a short moment of glory but we are ahead.
There's no answer.
James May is not answering.
He clearly knows that we are ahead.
He doesn't want to look defeat in the eye.
In fact, Budgie continues its lead all the way up to 1,000m.
Back on the ground, I can't ignore my fellow funeral director any longer.
It's the rival team.
Hello, rival team.
Hello, Mr James May.
The loser of the moment, I believe.
Oh, shut up.
Really? I'm afraid I'm afraid your cat is dragging behind.
Well, I look forward to yours coming down in a fireball! I'll ring you back in a bit.
Roger.
Bye.
That's shocking news.
Budgie has leapt ahead now by nearly 1,000m.
That is strange.
Dr Ben is claiming that is to do with the unusual properties of hydrogen and how it behaves at lower altitude.
Having reached a certain height, it's then Well, it's gone off like a rocket, to be honest, even though it's only a balloon.
I'm staggered by that.
So Tommy the cat may be lagging behind in his journey to a better place, but, as the balloons rise ever closer to the clouds, the strange, ethereal beauty of our flying funeral is enough to stop anyone from being a sour puss.
The buffeting through the clouds has cost Budgie its advantage and the two animals are neck-and-neck again in the final race to heaven.
Tommy and Budgie leave the troposphere and head for the stratosphere pushing past 18,000m in height.
That's the equivalent of two Mount Everests.
Or 11,613 Oz Clarkes.
The whole project is probably £500 worth at the most, assuming we manage to recover our expensive cameras.
And we're already beating the highest flying aeroplanes available today.
Very soon, our balloon will be at the point where the only thing higher than it will be the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope.
After that, it's the infinity of space.
Back on the ground, we've caught up to the balloons' current position.
Time to see if we can get an eyeball on them.
I can't see bugger all.
What we don't quite realise is that trying to spot Tommy and Budgie through a pair of binoculars is an exercise in futility.
Because, unbeknownst to us, they have reached an incredible height of 25km.
Soaring into the stratosphere to become pets at the edge of space.
This is a sewing machine.
Something like it has been with us for many generations and it was a brilliant invention.
It clothed the masses affordably.
It stopped old people banging on about how they'd only ever had one shirt and they wore it every day for "forty year".
However, there was a dark side to all this.
In fact, the sewing machine has become unstoppable.
It is responsible for an annual global tsunami of over 50 billion fashion items.
All spewing forth from the mass ranks of Singers and Necchis and Brothers and Toyotas.
No-one is safe.
Not even me as it turns out.
Here is just a small part of the James May spring/summer collection.
And when I look at it, I have to ask, "What was I thinking of when I chose that?" Or for that matter, that.
Or that.
Or indeed, that.
Or any of the other things on this rack.
And more to the point, even in a whole lifetime, I couldn't expect to wear out that many shirts.
I mean, look at this thing.
I've never even worn it.
And here's a sobering thought.
I've calculated that, every day, the men of Britain waste two million man hours deciding what to put on.
Now imagine how much more constructively we could use all that time.
Imagine if you went to the wardrobe and there was a choice of just one thing.
All men would be free of this ridiculous tyranny of trends to stride forth and achieve greatness.
And that is why I have made it my quest to restore to glory the boiler suit.
The inspiration for this revolution came from one great man.
In Washington, in the gardens of the White House, Mr Churchill demonstrating his siren suit.
Churchill wore his one-piece siren suit through much of World War II.
Wherever the Premier went, it was the same story.
The message was clear.
Single-suitedness meant single-mindedness.
Wearing a boiler suit left Churchill's head clear for the important job of bashing Hitler's moustache off.
Loads of clothes, on the other hand, means poncing about.
An overload of labels spiralling us into fashion disaster.
And the men of the 21 st century seem to agree.
Do men have too many clothes? Yeah, I think they do.
I have too many clothes.
I've got loads of clothes.
It would be efficient.
It would be easy in the morning, I suppose.
Yes, I think it would be of great benefit to mankind if there was one bit of clothing.
But as with the telephone and the light bulb, not everyone is convinced.
I don't think a boiler suit is very fashionable at all.
Part of the problem is that people see the boiler suit as a sort of cheap, one-size-fits-no-one commodity available from a DIY shop for £5.
So let's begin its revival by giving it some posh provenance.
This notion is what takes me to a place I've never visited before: London's Savile Row, home to some of the best tailors in the country.
If I'm to convince blokes that one piece of clothing is enough, I need to at least be sure that my arse doesn't look big in it.
I want to make the boiler suit a sort of default choice.
You get up in the morning, "What do I wear? It's my boiler suit.
" I can see a case for making it a bit more tailored.
In its current state, it's very basic.
The sewing leaves quite a lot to be desired.
- And I'd imagine the fit does.
- Right.
Shall we measure me? Yeah.
Dubois! Dubois! Jacket waist, 39.
That's not your trouser waist, it's your jacket waist.
It's my belly.
Dubois measures everything about me.
But he doesn't ask me which way I dress.
He can probably tell that the answer is very badly.
Inside leg, 33.
And I know I said it had to fit around the back, but is this really necessary? - So, what, that's the diameter of my buttocks? - Yeah.
- The circumference rather.
- Yeah.
So, with the exact circumference of my buttocks recorded for posterior-ity, Dubois makes a start on the first step of my suit A bespoke paper template.
This is the front of the trousers.
That is as that.
That's that.
Dubois would like me to go away, so I do, to choose a suitable fabric.
I'm going for sturdy wool rather than the boiler suit's usual electric-shock-from-the-door-handle nylon.
Pocket linings are the one area where I could fall victim to my love of loud fabrics.
- Have you got anything a bit more patterned? - Yeah.
- Let's have a look.
- A bit more flamboyant.
Shall we have a look for something like, you know, a Jacquard lining? - These are, you know, your flower motif.
- Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Ooh, yes.
I must fight this urge.
Sir Winston Churchill wouldn't have done this! Stick to the basic boiler suit, you fool! Mind you, look at these.
That's got butterflies on it.
I think I'd quite like the butterfly one and the space disk thing.
I may have been sucked into the abyss of "what's hot this season" just then, but it's all OK.
I'm not saying that every man has to wear exactly the same boiler suit.
After all, my inspiration was Churchill not Chairman Mao.
The point I'm making is that every man should have only one suit.
How they style it, and for what purpose, is up to them.
And perhaps I'm being a bit square.
Maybe the boiler suit deserves a more liberal re-interpretation.
To activate Stage Two of Operation Onesie, I recruit some trendy fashion students.
Wow.
Look at all this.
Even though wearing one outfit for the rest of your life goes against everything they are taught and stand for, the students have excelled themselves.
- Oh, I see.
Those are the tails.
- Yes.
- Got you.
- They wrap round from the bottom.
Up and round.
So they come round the front.
It's formal wear but it's workwear at the same time.
OK.
So I could step into it in the morning without having to find the separate jacket and trousers.
- Is that? Is that me? - Yeah.
- It's a young version.
- Oh, thank you.
To them, the boiler suit has become the muse of the style conscious.
Lots of different functions.
Different-sized pockets for different-sized things.
Sandwich pocket.
This one was actually my dad's idea.
He said the last thing you'd want to do is unzip it all and take all your sleeves off - if you needed a Number Two.
- A poo flap on a boiler suit.
I mean, he does have a point, actually.
I hadn't really thought of that.
Like artists, some may have revealed things about themselves.
So this is going to have a slight sort of bondage look to it.
It's sort of a slight cross between The Terminator and the Village People.
And then, there's Adam.
- Hi.
Erm - Hang on a minute before you go further.
- This man's got antlers.
- Yeah, it's - Why? - Why this? Why has he got antlers growing out of his head? Because I really like the antlers and what you are wearing is This one is antler.
Actually.
Erm I just never thought of it, that's all.
I never thought, "I'm ready for this party.
Oh, no, bugger off.
I forgot my antlers.
" Despite his strange ideas about head furniture, one of Adam's designs looked brilliant.
Just make sure I've understood this.
- So all the red flaps - You can turn it over.
And so get everything covered.
- Could you really make that? - Yeah, I can.
Suddenly, the traditionally soot-stained, boiler-based all-in-one is the avant-garde of acceptability.
And so, like Victorian children yoked to lethal machinery for no pay, the students set to work.
Good.
I've decided to take the fight straight to the enemy.
We're going to take our collection to the catwalk at Earl's Court right in the middle of the prestigious Graduate Fashion Week.
If this works, man will be free and the wardrobe can be used for something useful.
But on the other hand, I could end up looking like a berk in a baby grow.
Adam's attempt to turn those otherwise useless antlers into a useful and practical fashion accessory got us thinking about the very topical issue of recycling.
Now this, as I'm sure you know, is a lemon squeezer.
And it's a very attractive thing.
Unfortunately, though, it does fall short in its intended role as a squeezer of lemons because when you use it, it's unstable, it falls over and you fracture your wrist.
So, in the vernacular of the metal working trades, this is what is known as scrap.
We also have this, the so-called Friendship Bowl.
This is the Queen of Hearts fruit platter.
And I'm sure you're getting the drift by now.
The good news is all of those things are made from aluminium so they can be sent for recycling.
And then, maybe, one day they will reappear as the kettle or part of the engine of my car.
But why actually bother your local authority with all that? With a bit of initiative, we can do the recycling job ourselves here in the Man Lab because the one thing we don't have is a decent, practical, useable lemon squeezer.
What we're intending to do here is to take the useless lemon squeezer and, as Omar Khayyam might have said, remould it closer to the heart's desire.
And we're going to do that in the Man Lab foundry.
A foundry being a place where metal is melted and then poured into moulds to create fascinating shapes.
Ever since our hairy-faced ancestors discovered that some rocks contain this stuff we call metal, metalworking has been central to the march of human progress.
In Britain, things came to a head in the Industrial Revolution when you couldn't move for blokes heating up or melting metal and then bashing into shape or pouring it into moulds.
Foundry work is the most mystical of metalworking.
If we can't master it, we are men of mere clay.
Our furnace will be made from bits and pieces lying around the Man Lab.
And we have help from our home foundry expert, Colin.
Now the first thing we do, tell me if I'm wrong, is make the furnace.
The furnace, believe it or not, is this bucket.
Of course, we'll have to customise the bucket first.
It needs an air hole or nozzle called a tuyere.
Metal dustbin.
Piece of pipe.
Hole made.
Jubilee clip attached.
Keep it stiff.
That is the tuyere.
That is where the air will be blown in to make our furnace rage like something from, I don't know, Dante or William Blake.
Next, we reinforce our bucket furnace with what's known as a refractory lining to withstand extremely high temperatures.
We're using a mixture of clay, sand and a bit of sawdust.
Wahey! That's looking good.
Look at that.
Put the lid on there.
All our furnace needs now is a lid with an exhaust hole.
- Yeah.
What a job.
What a job.
- Lovely.
Then we pack the furnace with old newspaper and wood and set fire to it.
Fire your blow torch up the tuyere.
Mm.
Here we go.
Try a little air in there.
The air will be provided by a familiar household appliance.
It's familiar if you're married to Colin.
That hairdryer is easily the most technically advanced piece of equipment.
Do not show that on camera.
If my wife sees that we are dead, I am dead.
She doesn't know it's here.
Whoa.
That's lovely.
Wahey! That works.
- Brilliant.
Look at that.
- Seriously hot.
That will become the white heat of technology.
The lemon squeezer and the silly bowls, will melt faster if they are in small pieces.
After much discussion, we decide to hit them with hammers.
I'd love a better lemon squeezer.
Ooh! Anyway, whilst that is happening, I can go and do something absolutely crucial to the foundry process, which is make the pattern.
This way.
The pattern is a wooden version of our forthcoming lemon squeezer and will be used to form the cavity inside the mould.
Now, it might seem a bit absurd that you have to make, effectively, a model of your casting before you make your casting.
You're making a lemon squeezer in wood then another one in aluminium.
But with a well-made pattern, you can use it over and over again to make a mould and make loads of lemon squeezers.
So, the pattern has to be spot-on.
Any mistakes will be reproduced in the finished squeezer.
So here I am at the wood-turning lathe in slight slow motion with misty-eyed music.
The knobby bit, sometimes known as the reamer, we're going to model it on the Phillips/Pozidriv screwdriver head so that our lemon squeezer is a little testimony to our love of hand tools.
Once the screwdriver-inspired reamer is ready, I attach it to the base and then finish the lot with some blue paint left over from Gran's bathroom, rubbing down for a perfect finish.
And there we are.
As Sir Henry Royce, motor car and aero engine-maker had inscribed over his fireplace, "Whatever is rightly done, however humble, is noble".
And you can't get much more humble than that.
Let's see if it's rightly done.
Right.
Here is our pattern from which we make the mould.
The mould is made out of sand.
It is a mixture of silver sand and clay.
To form the mould, this sand is carefully packed around the pattern in the two-part moulding flask as it is correctly called.
But you mustn't move the pattern around otherwise, obviously, it comes out the wrong shape and you'd have a comedy lemon squeezer.
In the top half of the mould, or the cope, we form a hole, or sprue, into which the molten metal will be poured or tipped.
It's nice to have a use in life.
Even if it is only holding your sprue! We are now at a crucial junction in the moulding process.
Now, do you want to do the technical part? - What? The separation? - That's got to be lifted dead straight.
- I know.
- Dead straight.
Otherwise we'll knock the sand.
I'll move out the way.
I'm not having any blame for it not coming out right.
If I cock this up, we'll have to start again.
How's it looking? How's it looking? Ooh, look at that! Be very quiet at home, please, for this moment.
Don't make any sudden movements or drop a glass or anything like that.
- Look at that.
Perfection.
- Beautiful.
Shall we just hang this on the wall rather than cast it? That is That's a work of art.
Now the pattern has been safely removed, the two halves of our flask are put back together with a lemon-squeezer-shaped cavity inside, thirsty for some hot metal.
- OK.
We are ready - Ready to go.
for pouring.
Here you can see our sacrificial offering to Vulcan, the God of Fire and Metalwork.
Apply hairdryer.
Scrub one poncy lemon squeezer.
Usher in the era of the un-poncy lemon squeezer.
Once the charcoal-fired furnace has reached something like 900 degrees, the aluminium becomes liquid.
Whoa! Look at that.
And so, like the horny-handed generations before us, we must turn molten potential into cold fruit-squeezing reality.
Time for the pour.
Now, the excess, pour This is fantastic.
Beautiful.
- Right.
Cup of tea and knock out.
- Sounds good to me.
One industrial cuppa later Right.
Are we ready? Because this is a moment of pure magic.
Are we going to see? This is looking good.
Poker.
Give it a poker.
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh! Where's the tongs? We need to show this to the world.
As I believe Goethe said, "Our passions are the true phoenixes.
When the old one is burnt out, the new one rises from its ashes.
" And if we could paraphrase that we could say, "Our lemon squeezer is the true phoenix.
When the old one proves utterly useless, a new one rises from its aluminium.
" And there it is.
And just to prove the efficacy of the Man Lab Self-Cast Phillips Screwdriver-Headed Squeezing Solution, we promptly knock up a few celebratory pancakes.
Here we go.
Let's squeeze a lemon.
It works.
Look at that.
Completely squeezed, a couple of pips in it for authenticity, lemon juice.
- Nice lemon.
- Well squeezed.
- Mm.
- Hm.
Ah, yes.
Anon has written in.
He says Sir, in your first, and excellent, series of Man Lab, you showed us how to cheat at playing the guitar for the purposes of minstrelsy.
However, you did not really explain how to tune it.
Please could you do that, err I die.
Well, look, it's really quite simple.
A guitar, normally, is tuned like this.
And it's a very pleasant sound but it makes it very difficult to actually play the regular chords you need for pop music.
You need to be able to do I think that's G major.
You have to do complicated contorted things with your finger.
So, for the purpose of just having a bit of a play along, it is easier if you tune your guitar like this, to what we call open fifths so that you can play any basic chord simply by moving one finger along.
OK? Now here is how you do it.
You take the bottom string of the guitar, the one furthest from the floor.
The thickest one; the lowest note.
Get that note in your head and that is the beginning of a scale of eight notes.
The only two notes now you need to tune the guitar are Do and So.
That's neither of those so I'm going to knock it down a bit.
And so, I set about tuning the strings to only the notes Do and So in the following order That's another Do.
That's another So.
And that's another Do.
And then, by using the one finger and moving it up and down the fret board, you can play what sounds like a convincing chord.
It isn't.
It's very simplified.
If you're being a minstrel or singing pop songs, it's good enough.
So you can play the Man Lab theme.
Using this method, only an idiot could fail to play the guitar.
Go! Earlier, we said goodbye to the remains of Tommy the cat and Budgie Number 35, The Budgie, whose owners had made the ill-advised decision of asking us to take care of the funeral arrangements.
So we sent their ashes to heaven inside balloons.
And it worked better than we imagined.
The balloons shot up like rockets carrying the cat and the budgie far above the Earth beyond the clouds and into the stratosphere until finally The Final Frontier, at least for a cremated cat and budgie.
Their mission? To boldly go higher than any British household pet had been before.
And then be scattered to the four winds.
Meanwhile, back on Earth It's still going up which is a good sign and means it hasn't burst yet.
our two races are still on.
The first to see whose balloon will go higher- my own Team Helium with Tommy the cat or Dr Ben's Team Hydrogen.
The second race is to see who can recover their cameras first when they fall back to Earth.
We're speeding towards the recovery point and hoping very much that by the time the balloons go pop, we will both have won the height race and won the recovery.
But back at the edge of heaven, away from our earthly concerns, racing seems irrelevant.
Budgie Number 35, our representative of budgies everywhere, is now 30, 111 m above the Earth.
That's 123 times higher than Canary Wharf, the previous highest recorded bird.
Tommy the cat isn't far below at 28,917 m.
But then The air pressure outside Tommy's balloon is finally too low for the helium inside it and it bursts beginning its long fall back to Earth.
In slow motion, you can actually see the ash being released and the final remains of Tommy the cat floating away.
- Got a burst definitely.
- Who? 28,900 We've got a burst.
So we are on the way down.
We've got a burst.
28,249.
92,500 feet.
Let's just dwell on that for a moment and think about the remains of poor Tommy.
They've just been, quite literally, spread to the four winds.
Tommy's camera gondola is plummeting back towards Earth but Budgie Number 35, The Budgie, is still flying high.
Team Hydrogen and Budgie have won the altitude race and at a final height of 30,352m, it erupts into a shower of glory.
Budgie has won the altitude competition.
So hydrogen has won altitude; Budgie has won altitude.
Dr Ben's going to be unbearable.
We won! Both balloons have now burst.
We burst higher.
Losers.
Oh, I'm over the moon.
This is one for the birds.
The cats have always been their mortal enemy and here they've won without doubt.
Oh, it's coming down like a - It's coming down like a - A lead balloon.
Yeah.
At the start of their plummet, the atmosphere is about a hundredth the density of that at ground level and this lack of air resistance allows the payloads to reach speeds in excess of 200 miles an hour.
Meanwhile, far below, we're now into Race 2.
Camera recovery.
All we need back from the entire operation at this point now is the data cards with the pictures on.
The little cameras don't have film in them.
They have flash cards, effectively.
And if we can find those, we're in business.
We're sort of prepared to lose the cameras.
If they land in water, they will float because the budgie's head and the cat are buoyant.
The cameras will probably be ruined, but we could retrieve the cards and rescue the information.
As the payloads start to near the cloud layer, the air resistance picks up and the parachutes we remembered to attach start to take effect.
Unfortunately, it is, as ever, not quite that simple.
Unbeknownst to us, Tommy's trajectory has him landing square in a line of electricity pylons.
While Budgie is on course to make an emergency ditching in a sewage treatment works.
Ooh, pylons.
It hits and falls.
A few miles away, Budgie Number 35 isn't far behind and worryingly close to ending up in the sewage.
But, at the last minute, a lucky gust of wind sends it sailing out of danger and into the welcoming arms of a nearby field.
The budgie has landed.
40 yards.
We're there.
20.
- Should be right here.
- It's there.
Dr Ben is the first to reach his landing site.
But the combination of the cornfields and the close range of the GPS is making a polystyrene budgie's head rather tricky to spot.
OK.
It's that way.
Here it comes.
We are getting close.
And over in our cornfield, we're having similar problems.
It could be either side of the road.
We are now 75km from our launch site but a tantalising 50m from our gondola.
It's just there.
You can just about see it.
Sticking up through the corn.
- Looks like we've found it.
- Parachute.
What's on the end of the string? James, do you want to reel it in? - I can't see it.
- I think it's here.
Oh, that was very close.
When you see the pylon that we must have missed by feet.
So, can you smell? That is a sewage works there.
- Lucky you didn't land there.
- A few hundred yards and we'd be swimming.
Our aerospace string is stuck.
We fall over.
Argh! Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's it there.
Can you see it? Wahey! Here's our budgie.
Complete.
Ha-ha! Look at that.
Let's get that right.
Happy camera.
Still on.
Happy camera still on.
- Say hello to the camera.
- Fantastic.
- Look at that.
- It's perfect.
- Wow! - Amazing.
Nice job.
Success.
Fantastic.
Thank you.
Oh, there it is.
- Hey-hey.
- Superb.
Cameras look intact.
Picture is intact.
Where's that been? 85,000ft? - 85,000ft.
Yeah.
- That's pretty spectacular, isn't it? Twice as high as Concorde used to fly.
Well done, Tommy.
So, Team Helium lost both races but what of it? The Man Lab pet cemetery on the edge of space seems to me to have been a resounding success.
Most pet ashes are scattered in a corner of the garden.
But, in death, Tommy and Budgie have reached heights unknown to any British animal before them.
We salute them.
Pioneers both.
If your beloved pet has recently shuffled off this mortal coil, and you'd like it to perform one last duty, clogging up the engines of a budget flight to Malaga, do please get in touch: No goldfish, please.
Earlier, I declared war on male fashion.
I want to make the boiler suit a sort of default choice.
My mantra? One man, one customised boiler suit.
Sandwich pockets? This man's got antlers.
A poo flap on a boiler suit.
I've convinced a renegade group of fashion students to help me out.
But now we face our biggest challenge.
Presenting our revolutionary vision on the enemy's home turf: The catwalk.
Welcome to Graduate Fashion Week.
It's the highlight of the fashion student's year.
The place is absolutely teeming with bright, creative, optimistic young people hoping to make an impact in this gay, mad world we call the fashion business.
And really, I'm here hoping to put an end to fashion, really.
To stop the tyranny of trends and reduce the male wardrobe to a single one-piece overall.
It may not be a very popular idea.
Graduate Fashion Week is the beating heart of the country's fashionistas.
The place is jam-packed with designers, photographers and, most importantly, the money men - buyers.
A well-placed boiler suit uprising here could start a chain reaction and bring the fashion empire to its knees.
I decide to go on a reconnaissance mission.
What will their attitude be to a bloke who is sort of taking an anti-fashion stance? There's always been a strong history of anti-fashion throughout fashion anyway.
It depends on how it looks and what it looks like.
If you get halfway and people are literally jeering and throwing things, is it acceptable to retreat or is that just? Is it a bit like the frontline in 1916 - and you have to keep going? - You have to.
It's clear, then.
This is do or die.
Once the first boiler suit battalion breaks cover and hits that catwalk, there's no coming back.
Precision-trained to show off our designs.
What we have are me, Will, the producer, and a bunch of blokes we grabbed from the pub next door.
Face the audience, darling.
And The audience is out there, yeah.
And turn right.
No, I'll tell you when to go.
Do not pre-empt.
Not since the first prehistoric Homo Erectus tottered up on to its hind legs, has a group of men had such difficulty in simply walking.
And you pose on the way up, did you say? You sort of come straight out and just go one, two, and then carry on walking straightaway down the middle.
- Shall I try that? - Yes, go on.
- The flaps are the back bit here.
- You're going round and I'll say, "Go.
" - You say go and I turn and go - One, two.
Off you go.
And go.
Will and I glide up the catwalk like consummate professionals.
OK.
So stop here.
So then we sort of go Massive applause.
At this point, I'm imaging the audience's faces as they gaze speechlessly at my detachable smart casual accessories.
And then we do a pose about here.
Now, I, I'm sure, like you until now, thought the catwalk was a matter of mincing in one direction and then mincing back in the other, but it's more complicated.
This is like It's like the invasion of Normandy but in silly outfits.
It's quite difficult.
This is it, then.
On the battlefield our colours are unfurled.
Backstage, our plucky troop of amateur models are dressed into their personalised boiler suits by the young designers.
This is an uprising.
Even Adam has the finest antlers on for the occasion.
Ah.
I'm so excited.
While the students tie up any loose ends, I get into my own boiler suit.
No, don't worry.
It's not this one.
I can't reveal my outfit to you yet, obviously, because that will spoil the surprise, but I think the reaction out there will be either amazement or utter bewilderment.
It could go either way.
Let's see.
Pioneering stuff.
Yeah.
OK, chaps.
Over the top we go.
Maybe that poo flap wasn't such a bad idea.
Presenting the May boiler.
Me.
Perfect for everyday activities like fixing motorcycles, going to the pub or trying not to laugh at the camera.
The May boiler also comes with multiple accessories for formal wear but before I get into those, and, as the audience hasn't left yet, the student designs are going to take the frontline.
First up, the biker boiler.
Designed for the gentleman who likes racing around the track and hammering in invisible nails.
Or why not try the barbecue boiler? With useful tongs pocket and party atmosphere trim.
The hammer-to-glamour boiler.
For a day fixing the roof and a night at the opera.
So far, our fashion revolution is going quite well.
Our troops seem to be winning over the crowd with the versatility of their humble boiler suit offering a look for all lifestyles.
Even one or two of the buyers have sat up to take notice.
It's only when the audience are hit with designer lona's boiler suit that things start to come a little unstuck.
I think this is for people who spend a lot of time in the rain but don't mind wet knees.
It's up to Adam to save the day with his multi-flap design that I was such a fan of earlier.
Unfortunately, this being Adam, he's gone and stuck a ruddy great pair of antlers on the back.
Go.
Go.
Go.
To close the show, we return to show off producer Will's suit with formal black tie attachments - ideal for all those endless BAFTA Awards evenings.
The beauty of these attachments is they can be removed in the flick of a wrist once you've been beaten by MasterChef.
Thus leaving you ready to continue plumbing, painting or whatever.
The crowd is on our side.
We may yet stand victorious, boiler-suited and proud, telling Gautier to go to hell.
The ordeal is over.
Our student designers take the stage to gratifyingly enthusiastic applause.
Thank you very much.
Thank you and Have we succeeded in releasing men from the yoke of fashion? Well, who knows? That could have been a pivotal moment in fashion.
It could be like the first time a woman was seen out without a hat.
Or the very first time a man discarded his hose and put on a pair of trousers.
It could be that significant.
But it all comes down to what the buyers think.
So, let's find out.
Well, it was entertaining.
There was obviously a lot of work had gone into it.
Was it commercial for our sort of mass market retailer? I'm not sure it was.
I think some were quite out there.
Particularly the ones with the antlers down the back.
I'm not sure how appropriate it would be to be commercial.
I thought it was really good.
I was pleasantly surprised, to be honest.
You could really see all the work that had gone into all the garments.
It looked pretty sharp.
Three months later in the accounts department of Emporia Man Lab, sales were recorded as nil.
And so, with a heavy heart and an expertly cut multi-tasking flag of surrender, I accepted defeat.
I am, I admit, bitterly disappointed.
It does seem that whatever you do with the boiler suit, it is destined just to be worn where quite dirty manual work is being done.
And I thought this was a good idea.
I really did.
I mean, what is the problem with it? It's not as if I'm asking blokes to wear a skirt or anything.
Goodbye.