James May's Man Lab (2010) s03e05 Episode Script
Series 3, Episode 5
1 Hello and welcome to Man Lab, where we celebrate the ascent of our species in wood, stone, cold steel, and the works of Thomas Campion - 1567 to 1620.
In today's kitchen drawer of forgotten skills You're catching them, cooking them, picking them - Oh, Roger! - .
.
and selling them.
Rory Barker is Alan Sugar.
Whelks, whelks.
But can he winkle a profit out of whelks? We make our own table football with a striking twist That was a corker.
.
.
and embark on a top-secret mission to terrorise Skegness.
Let's make a monster.
The English language is rich with expressions for describing men's incompetence - couldn't run a bath, couldn't work his way out of a paper bag, wouldn't say boo to a goose, and the famous one about organisational ineptitude despite being already inside a brewery.
But here's the one that baffles us - he couldn't run a whelk stall, the insult favoured in the ruthless bear pit of British politics, where it's used to deliver whole governments into the gutter of derision.
This man, Sir Winston Churchill, said it of the entire cabinet under Clement Attlee.
They, apparently, could not run a whelk stall.
This man, John Prescott, was condemned by his own prime minister as being incapable of running a whelk stall.
And the Daily Telegraph said of this man, the Prime Minister Gordon Brown, that he couldn't run a whelk stall, in whelkland, at the height of the whelking season.
The implication, then, is that running a whelk stall is easy, or, to put a more positive spin on it, anybody who can run a whelk stall is clearly fit to lead the country.
MUSIC: "Land Of Hope And Glory" This insult - he couldn't run a whelk stall - is it valid in this day and age? Does anybody know what's involved, running a whelk stall? It seems like the basis for a useful Man Lab experiment, because to be honest, I don't know what a whelk is, I don't know where whelks come from, and I have no idea in what is involved running a stall that sells them.
Fortunately, though, neither does Rory.
Whitstable on the south-east coast, traditional port and host to whelk fishing for over 2,000 years.
It's also now host to Rory Barker, entrepreneur.
Rory is globally accepted as the litmus test for the simplicity of tasks, so we've sent him here with a £100 start-up loan.
His mission - to prove himself perfectly capable where so many of our great leaders would supposedly fail, by running the finest whelk stall in the land and turning a profit.
First stop, some tips from a professional.
So that's what we're fishing for? - That's what we're fishing for.
- Oh, they're horrific, Roger.
- You're catching them.
- Right.
Cooking them, picking them - Oh, Roger.
- .
.
and selling them.
I'm starting to worry about this now.
It might actually be quite hard to run a whelk stall.
This is a whelk.
Have you ever seen Alien? So it's time to suit up.
Roger, taking pity on Rory, has agreed to rent him whelking waders, pots and bait That looks like banana.
.
.
for the budget-busting sum of £5.
- Cheers, Roger.
- All tied up - you ready? - I'm off to get some whelks.
- Yeah.
So with dwindling capital in his pockets and pots of dead dogfish and concrete over his shoulder, Rory Barker, a symbol of our nation's optimism, heads down to the water's edge.
Well, it's sunsets like this that inspired Joseph Mallord William Turner, the father of English impressionism, to paint some of his best boat pictures.
Today, though, we have Rory Barker bent double like an old beggar under a sack of whelks.
And I'm reminded, actually, of that very famous scene from Henry V by William Shakespeare, when Fluellen is saying of Bardolph, "His face is all bubukles and whelks and knobs and flames of fire".
He might well have been looking at Rory when he wrote that.
Rory has a few precious hours of low tide to place the whelk pots.
Once they're down, he has to wait overnight for the sea to wash over them, and then come back to see if he's caught anything.
And so, with the realities of running a whelk stall sinking into his boots like the incoming tide, we leave Rory adjusting his tackle and return to our luxury hotel, from where his distant wails come to us as a lullaby.
I don't know who eats whelks.
I've never seen whelks on a menu, I don't think.
Early next morning, it's time to collect the pots.
I've never seen a whelk stall anywhere that I go.
- Do you think I'm going to earn a lot of money? - No.
It's speculate to accumulate, James.
Yeah, have you been reading the Pursuit Of Excellence, Rory? I can't remember.
Let's review your business plan and strategy so far on the whelk apprentice.
What have you spent? - So I was given £100.
- Yep.
I think I've spent about half of it, I've got Had to spend £26 on the youth hostel last night - Right.
- .
.
which was horrific.
I had to spend £13 on a bus journey down here.
- Right.
- Um Had to spend a fiver on these waders.
And then Oh, and then I spent about £5.
50 on a Beano and some sweets on the bus journey cos I was really bored.
£5.
50 on sweets? Well, the Beano was £1.
50.
Was it? And the sweets were the £4.
50.
No, £4.
- £1.
50 for the Beano? - Yeah.
I thought it was about 80 pence.
It's a good magazine, that.
- Is it? - Yeah.
Do you think Italian tourists in Camden, they're going to buy the whelks off me? Yeah, I think you'll be able to whack the price up, and you can't call them whelks, you have to call them something like, shade-grown, free-range, line-caught, day-boat whelks.
- All right.
- And then that puts the price up immediately, people go, "God, yeah, we had some whelks from Camden.
They were marvellous.
" - Even though they're probably terrible.
- I can tell people they're - organic.
But they are.
Are they? Well, yeah.
They're free range, aren't they? - What does organic mean? - Dunno.
- Just costs more in Tesco.
They cost more, yeah.
It's known as pay-the-difference.
This is massively exciting.
So under us now .
.
is the key to my fortune.
- Whoa! - I wouldn't think of it as your fortune, but I don't see why you shouldn't be able to turn a profit.
You've kept your cost down, you haven't, sort of, got a flashy van or a boat.
You've come on the bus Well, you wasted money on the Beano - and the sweets, which was stupid.
- I was hungry and bored.
- I know, all right.
But you stayed in a youth hostel, you've come on the bus, you've done it the austerity way.
You've maximised profit.
All theseAlan Sugar and that other bloke with the pillow stuffed up his shirt, what was his name? John Harvey-Jones, they always go on about, "business", and it's interesting, and intellectual, and complicated.
You buy something, spend as little as possible producing it, sell it for as much as you can.
The difference is the profit.
What was that second name you said? Was it Sir John Harvey-Jones? I thought he did the voice of Darth Vader! And so, himself like something risen from the deep, Rory hauls in his first catch.
"'Courage', he said, and pointed toward the land.
" That's Tennyson.
- Who? - Tennyson! Six crabs.
Oh, there's all crabs in there! You've got whelks, no, look at this! You've got hundreds of whelks! Oh, ha-ha-ha! Look at that! You have got millions of whelks! Look at the size of that.
I think that might be in my "Luxury" range.
- Oh, I think so, yeah.
- £5 for that puppy! Just to be clear, I'm not supposed to help Rory in this.
There's live crabs in there.
They're not dangerous, it's not like tarantulas.
- They're not nice though, are, they? - Well What would you do if you had 10,000 crabs coming in your front door? But there are about six in there, and they're small.
- Yeah, but they're moving.
- Grr! - Agh! Did you see it then? It got ready, I'm not joking.
- Don't be daft! - It got its clippers open.
- Yeah, but they're tiny, it's like somebody coming at you with a pair of tweezers.
They'll have your eyebrows out! Argh! Oh, it's got a crab on it, argh! RORY LAUGHS HEARTILY Look at that, Look at that, it came out! I can't believe how many you've got.
I was ready to mock, I'll be honest.
I was ready to say, now what are you going to do with three whelks? Look at it moving.
The big one's moving.
Do you think I'm being cruel, dropping them into the bucket? No, I don't think they know.
Why, cos they have big shells? Well, I don't think they have a conscience, whelks.
Conscience? No.
Though I could be wrong, I mean, we don't know, do we? I think the whelk is in there looking out and saying, "Has that got a conscience?" There he goes, you've got thou I've never seen any whelks.
Look at the crabs! I'm looking at profit.
You're looking at cash there.
Correct.
That's the fruit of the sea, that's the great cash machine of the ocean.
I'll tell you what, Prescott couldn't run a whelk stall, Boris Johnson couldn't run a whelk stall.
Tony Blair couldn't run a whelk stall.
Tessa Jowell, whoever the bloomin' hell that is, can't run a whelk stall.
But Rory Barker, from Essex You're obviously leadership material(!) But as we drag Rory's haul back to the harbour, we find that the main catch of Barker's Premium Pay The Difference Whelk Stall is rank optimism.
So do you think that's enough for me to run my high-end whelk stall in London? If you only want to be there for about 30 seconds, yeah.
- Really? - So you might as well buy some, cook 'em all together.
Hold on a minute, when you say "buy some", what do you mean? Well, I can sell you some whelks.
Roger is proposing to sell you some more whelks for 20 quid, making your total expenditure £69.
50.
So Leaving you £30.
50 to rent your stall and pay the protection money.
So in other words, I've only caught 10% of my stock? - Yeah.
- Oh, for the love of Right, fine, go on Roger.
You get more, I'll give you 20 quid.
- All right.
- You happy? - Yep.
Cheers, Rog.
I only caught 10%! Yeah.
That's a shame, cos it looked impressive.
I mean, if you were just having a whelk party for a couple of mates.
- Would you come? - No.
- OK! Not because of the whelks, Rory, though, cos JAMES CHORTLES Even after buying extra stock, the whelk stall business is far from simple.
EU regulation article 3, number 850/98 states that any whelks smaller than 45mm must be thrown back to avoid over-fishing.
Lovely! Now, look, you hear a lot of tripe from the so-called business community, about diversification, and portfolios, and UK PLC, and moving forward and the rest of it, but that's not what it's about.
It's about Rory Barker in rubber trousers, sizing whelks.
This is how the European economy will be rescued.
You don't see the Minister for Trade and Industry doing this, so you have to ask, what do these people actually know? He's your man, that's where economic salvation lies.
Rory Barker.
You watch that boy.
Get you dressed properly, my man.
Right, let's cook these puppies.
So, all that remains for Rory are the relatively simple steps of cooking the whelks for 15 minutes exactly at the correct temperature, cooling them, and hauling them up to the kitchen above .
.
de-shelling them individually by hand at an industrial speed .
.
and lastly, packing them with ice for the 62.
9-mile journey to Camden Lock market.
Piece of cake, really.
So there goes Rory Barker, our great hope for the nation, with his two chilled buckets of whelks.
He's £69.
50 down, no profit yet.
But let's see.
Right, I'm going to drive back to London in my Porsche.
Coming up, Barker's whelks go on the market.
Want a whelk? I don't think so.
It's seafood.
Come on try it, they're gorgeous.
Can Rory realise a profit through the strategic deployment of sales patter? Whelks! whelks! 50p, one whelk.
Whelk, whelk, whelks! In the last series of Man Lab, Simmy suddenly decided he wanted a game of pool.
Now, we didn't have a pool table, but that wasn't a problem because we could make one, and here it is.
And I have to say, we are extremely proud of it.
- It's two shots, isn't it? - Yep.
In fact, quite a few of you have written in saying, "I like that pool table, could you make me one of those, as well?" And we'd love to, but sadly, we can't.
We haven't got time.
Because Simmy's now suddenly decided he wants a game of table football.
Interestingly, or at least we think it's reasonably interesting, if you're going to design your own table football, you really have to start with the ball.
Because the ball dictates the size of the players, the size of the players dictates the dimensions of the table, the height of the walls, the size of the goal and so on.
So here is our ball, it's a 30-millimetre table football ball.
Now, from that, we worked out the height of the players, and rather than buy off-the-shelf ones, which you can do, but there's no skill in that, we're going to make our own.
We're going to carve them, in fact, out of wood, out of this piece of wood.
It's a piece of cedarwood.
160 millimetres is the height of my player.
Now, somewhere within this block, of this block that I've marked out there, there lurks a rather elegant, hand-carved table football player.
In the mind of the wood carver, the sculptor, probably not me, to be honest, it's simply a matter of revealing it by taking away the stuff that's surrounding it.
It's a bit like Schrodinger's table football player, you don't actually know if it's there until you look inside and see if it is there.
Before carving out our philosophical centre-forward, we drill the hole for the bar that will attach him, shoulder height, to the fussball table.
- It's quite oily, isn't it? - Oh, it is.
It's lovely and warm, you put your finger in there it's a nice, warm place to put your finger.
You walk around with this on a winter's day, your finger would never be cold.
The classic looking-through-the-hole shot! Next up, a turn on my favourite tool in the workshop.
If we had a football club, we would surely be called the Man Lab Lathes.
This is the wood-turning lathe, and I have made the vague profile of a striker for a table football game.
There you can see the hole that we drilled in the square block earlier.
Now, obviously, this is circular in section because it's been made on a lathe.
But Simon here is our best wood carver, and he is going to give it a soul.
He's going to reveal this player's personality through the artistry of wood carving.
- Or at least give him a face.
- Yes, yeah.
- Do you think you can do that OK? - Yep, yep.
Make him sort of look international.
He got little hands, little eyes This will be the most bespoke, hand-crafted football table in the history of table football football tables.
So now we have more of a body shape, we have the arms that have been cut in.
I've trimmed off the round base to make it more foot-shaped, and then on to the old boat race.
Simon chips, carves and sands and before long, the unmistakable face of head striker Schrodinger, captain of the Man Lab Lathes, is revealed.
Meanwhile, Simmy and I have set about making the table element of our table football table.
One unique feature is the use of real AstroTurf, making the Man Lab table football truly all-weather.
It's quite good exercise.
It's the most exercise I'll get playing football.
And there it is finished, and I'm very sorry I forgot to mention earlier on that this is the Man Lab limited edition penalty shootout table football, so there are only two players, the striker and the goalie.
There are also refinements that you won't find on the table football table down at your pub.
If you'd like to come and have a look at the striker, he pivots on a rod, as you'd expect, he's operated with two hands for extra power, and the bar is mounted in these little spring-loaded cups so you can move him up and down.
You can either hit a daisy cutter, like that, or if you press down, you get his feet right under the ball for a nice chip shot.
And he will move from side to side, as well, so you can banana it a bit, rather like I didn't when I played football, and aim up for the corner of the goal.
Simmy will explain the goalkeeper - this is very clever.
So the goalkeeper here has got a spherical bearing at the back, so he's got a bit of rotation.
He can also go from side to side, he can dive right up into the corners, right down there.
He's pretty much got the whole goal covered.
The action is relayed live onto the big screen for the crowd to be able to see it clearly, and it's being recorded so we can watch particularly good goals or saves in slow motion.
The beauty of this fully portable special edition table football, is that you can relive the misery of an England penalty shoot-out in the comfort of your own home.
And I know through bitter experience what it's like to miss life's one great penalty opportunity.
With this system, you can delete all of those, and simply show your friends something a bit like this.
That was a corker! That was a good goal.
Let's see that one again.
Oh, sent him the wrong way.
- Do you want to swap ends? - Come on, then.
'Like the great icons of an earlier age, it was time for Simmy and me 'to settle our differences like real men, 'on the miniature field of honour.
' That hit me in the nuts! Seriously, you could play this all day.
I expect we will.
In the defensive position in the box.
Oh, hit the post! After a quick change of ends, it's clear from the score that I need to convert four out of five of my penalty kicks.
Oh, flippin' heck.
Saved.
Like all the best penalty contests in footballing history, sporting destiny would be decided by one final punt of the ball.
We won the cup We won the cup Ee-ay-addio We won the cup.
Redemption! I felt like Stuart Pearce in Euro '96.
Also available in Man Lab Limited Edition penalty shoot-out table football, personalise your players with numbered shirts and a range of fashion accessories, so the players even look like you.
That's me, by the way.
And that's Simmy.
And go international, with kits from Germany, England, France and Spain.
Goal! Make your own! Earlier in the show, I decided, democratically, that Rory Barker should answer to an accusation that's been levelled at our politicians down the ages.
He couldn't run a whelk stall.
So far, from £100 loan, Rory's spent £69.
50 trapping, sorting, cooking and shelling his whelks, before bringing them here, to Camden Lock market.
It's a fry-up of international flavours.
What chance for Rory's titbit? The reputation of the whelk is really founded in a time when the British had only a handful of things to eat, such as, eels, spam, tripe, coal and the humble whelk.
But, of course, today, multiculturalism has infused all of food.
Food is where we are at our most cosmopolitan and international.
Look at all these fantastic things, look at these colours, and this is normal, this is not dare food, it's not bravado, this is simply what people eat in the modern world.
And there's our man Rory, with a whelk.
It's tough.
10am.
With a further £15 spent on stall hire, Rory now needs to use all his talent to make his shop front look as attractive as possible.
What? You think I'm going to run out of space? What's wrong with that? That'll entice people.
- It's good.
- It's terrible.
This chap, for example, says, "Very low in fat and cholesterol, the leanest, meanest burger in town, "best served medium rare.
" And you've said, "whelks".
Yeah, but if I use too much paint, then I won't be able to put the can back on, take it back to the shop, claim the difference.
You know, I'm trying to make money here.
Now all I need to do is find a place to put this up, right? And then people will know that I'm selling whelks, so they're going to come to buy whelks.
Yeah, I admire your thinking.
'Rory was clearly onto an infallible marketing strategy, 'and his dragon-esque insight didn't stop there.
' Look at that, see the word "only" in there? Put the word "only" in, makes people think it could be more.
Only £4, look at this, I'm learning as I go.
Three ounces, £4, only £4.
Only.
I think you need a couple of display punnets to show what you're actually getting.
Well, I thought I can offer people one.
"Here, try a whelk, darlin'.
" She tries one, then she's hooked for life.
Yeah.
'Mmmm.
' Look at that, eh? Look at that.
Tremendous.
'The whelks were stirring the public's curiosity.
' 'With customers already lining up, Rory might have this in the bag.
' It's a whelk, it's like a sea snail.
My dad used to eat those.
My what? - Do I need one of those? - Yes.
Oh right, OK.
No.
Ah, come on.
- No, no.
- People love the whelks.
No, no, not without a food hygiene certificate.
- Oh, really? - Sorry about that.
Oh, right, OK, mate, nice one.
No whelks for now people, it's closed.
So Rory has to miss the morning crowd entirely, run back to the Man Lab offices, and spend a further £15 passing an online food hygiene course.
He's now managed to spend £99.
50 out of his £100 loan, and not yet have a single customer.
Get your whelks.
The poet William Wordsworth, 1770-1850, told us, "In business, it is not the crook who is to be feared, "but the honest man who doesn't know what he's doing.
" Try whelks.
Want a whelk? They're delicious.
I don't think so.
For some reason, after seeing Rory publicly reprimanded for health and safety failings, the punters don't seem quite so keen on the whelks any more.
You want to try a whelk? - No, thanks.
- You sure? - I don't like it.
£3, £4 for three ounces how about that? - I'll weigh 'em out for ya.
- No, thank you.
No? Ah.
What is that? It's a whelk, it's like a mussel or It's seafood.
Come on, try it, they're gorgeous.
You can have a look, but don't breathe on it.
Looks like a snail, though.
Yeah, delicious snail, that's right.
What d'you think? Three ounces, £4.
I'll measure 'em up for you.
What do you think? Outrageous.
Get your whelks.
How you doing? I haven't sold any.
People like trying them for free.
Really? They try one for free, and then they mutter something in a different language and walk off.
Well, maybe you need to sort of tempt them in and don't offer them one immediately.
- Yeah.
- Get them interested.
What I have done, though, cos I've been and found a load of amazing historical stuff about whelks, where the word comes from, what they actually are, left-handed and right-handed whelks.
Famous people who ate whelks, cos I want to give you some other things to shout, rather than just whelks.
Right, yeah.
Elvis Presley's favourite seafood.
What? Yeah, It's full of stuff like that.
You just pick anything and, you know, be like Speakers' Corner, give them a little soliloquy about the whelk and its greatness.
Just get it out, refer to it, shout something.
Elvis Presley's favourite seafood.
Get your whelks.
That's the king of rock, Elvis Presley.
Get your whelks, be like Elvis.
Get your whelks.
It's Elvis Presley's favourite seafood.
What do you think? How much I have to give you? - Sorry? - OK, just for try? One cup, £4, one try for free.
"Let me try it first", that's how they all get me.
What do you think? You're going to put down that melon you're drinking out of and get a few whelks down you instead? That's a coconut, Rory.
It's quite nice, but Yeah, it's quite nice, yeah? A cup for £4? Yeah! Amazingly, and even though it isn't actually true, the king of rock and roll has snagged Rory's first customer.
Look at that, you happy with that? You have a nice day.
£4 down, a mere £95.
50 to break even.
Hey-hey, first sale.
Ha-ha-ha.
Nice, nice, nice.
Right, now I'm cooking with gas.
Four whelks, £3! With the whole of Camden now an expert on Elvis and whelks, it's time for some new patter.
Baby whelks are cannibalistic.
That's right, ladies and gentlemen.
Baby whelks used to be cannibalistic.
Come on, guys.
These whelks, ladies and gentlemen, they've got a large single foot which helps them track their prey.
A large single foot, and they get I'll tell you what, you can eat that foot today.
Whelk.
Whelks can be ambidextrous, they're ambidextrous, they can use their left or right hands.
Have a try of that, what do you think? - Oh, my God.
- It's too nice? £3, £4 for three ounces.
It's tricky because pounds are a weight of measurement, as well.
It's hard to remember.
So, three hours of selling down, and Rory is not only still on £4 selling return, he also manages to give away half his stock in free samples.
As the lunchtime crowds hit, it's time to try a drastic change of tack.
You could sell whelks singularly.
I don't know, say one whelk for 50p.
Three ounces for four quid.
- How many whelks do you get in three ounces? - Yes! One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
Eight, yeah, so one for 50p, yeah, that works.
Yeah, 50p will do it, right.
50p for one whelk, an ambidextrous whelk, left or right-handed.
I don't do free samples any more, I'm no mug.
You fancy a whelk? 50p for one whelk I'm afraid, I'm no longer doing free samples.
A bit of vinegar and pepper? A bit of vinegar, please.
- Bit of vinegar, no pepper? - No.
All right, lovely, there you go.
Thank you very much.
How about that, eh? You can get That is superb.
You want another one? Another one for 50p? Yes, please.
Lovely jubbly, get that down you.
Oh, that is so good.
Got to say, that is excellent.
Cheers very much, cheers, guys.
Bloody mugs.
Another hard-earned pound in the coffers, an immediate return for single whelk trading.
This might be the way to go.
Fresh from the shores of Whitstable.
What do you think? Amazing.
You try that, you'll never eat a kebab again, I'm telling you.
Thank you so much.
You ever been to Whitstable in Kent? Now you have, you have in your mouth.
You've been there in your mouth.
50p for one whelk.
I'll give it to you for free, and you give me 50p.
It's nice, isn't it? you want another one? You don't want another one but it is quite nice.
That's reasonable.
People may not be willing to shell out for shellfish, but the curiosity factor is tempting them to try one.
50p at a time is slow going, though.
Even after two more hours, Rory has only made another 30 quid.
And the competition is stiff.
'Small chicken doner, wrapped, please.
'One size will do it.
' James, what are you doing? I'm just checking out the competition.
What are you doing? Fantastic.
In business terms, the people of this market are acting locally but thinking globally, because visitors come here from all over the world, it's very trendy, very cosmopolitan, and there's every language imaginable spoken here.
There is Polish over there, Urdu, Jamaican Patois, Cantonese, Spanish.
The men on the Turkish kebab stall can speak English, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Turkish.
And that's where Rory's going wrong.
Whelks, whelks.
50p, one whelk.
Whelk.
I think part of the problem is you're not being multicultural.
This is a very multi-culti place, there's all these languages and people can talk to their customers in any language.
These guys here can speak five languages, the Pakistani blokes can speak four languages.
I've translated some whelk things.
Right.
This is it, one last push to turn molluscs into moola.
With a hasty price slash and pots in a cunningly concealed prompter, Barker's multicultural around-the-world whelks opens its doors.
We're going to start with Norwegian.
Any Norwegians out there? THEY SPEAK NORWEGIAN Albanian is puprri.
Any Albanians out there want some puprri? THEY SPEAK GERMAN Wellhornschnecken.
Wellhornschnecken! 'Rory is starting to draw a crowd.
'They wonder why Harry Potter has aged so terribly 'and is now running a whelk stall.
' Optimo loco! In oppidom whelks! In oppidom whelks! 50p! And where there's a crowd, there's money.
50p for one, yeah, you want two? You want two, the different languages helped.
Multi-lingual Rory is a hit.
The money is piling in.
You want pepper and vinegar? One whelk, 50p, or a cup for £4.
Cup of whelks for £4.
Cup of whelks for £4.
- Cup of whelks £4.
Ignore him.
- Did it work? Ignore him and buy your whelks.
In a show of defiance to obscure political insults everywhere, Rory's whelk stall money box was finally looking as healthy as his food hygiene certificate.
but as the last punter headed into the Camden sunset, the question remains, can any idiot run a whelk stall? Now, Rory Barker, I have here on this clip board the accounts for your first day of trading.
Now, obviously if Rory was going to set up for life as a whelker, he'd have capital costs, like he'd have to buy a fridge and probably a van, so we're not including those.
These are the expenses you incurred on the day.
You started with £100, and you spent, bus ride, buying extra whelks, hire of the waders, copy of the Beano, £99.
50.
At the end of the day, in your cash tin, as you well know .
.
you had takings of £91.
50, meaning you have made a loss of £8, and therefore you cannot run a whelk stall, you stupid boy.
However .
.
what I didn't tell you was that I nicked £10 from your tin to buy that rather excellent Turkish kebab, which I can recommend wholeheartedly.
Which means overall actually, Rory, you've made a profit of £2, and therefore you can run a whelk stall, and by extension, you are fit to run the country.
Anyway, if you have any thoughts on that, viewers, do please write to us.
And remember to mark your subject line, the right honourable Rory Barker MP.
Here's a problem we've identified in the Man Lab, and I bet millions of you have done it at home, in the office, in the garden, in your own workshop.
I made a cup of tea, and I knew I hadn't finished it because you always know when you've still got half a cup of tea left, but I've put it somewhere and forgotten where it is.
And after a while I remembered that actually, it was over here, look, cos I came over to help these guys do something on the Swiss army bicycle.
And now, as a result of that, that has gone completely stone cold and is undrinkable.
And this is an interesting point, because the British government's waste watchdog reckons that about £110 million is wasted every year by people throwing away half-drunk cold cups of tea, and another £100 million or so is wasted making another cup of tea, when you already had a perfectly good one.
So, me and Simmy have come up with what we think is a rather brilliant idea.
It's a tea cup that incorporates a temperature sensitive alarm that will sound a piercing squeal when the tea falls below a given temperature, which we're going to work out.
Not only warning you to drink it, but also telling you where it is, cos if it's over there and you've put it on a shelf like that while you're doing something, it'll go beep, and you think, tea going cold over there.
Oh, how I love my tea Tea, in the afternoon.
What we will have to establish, by careful and scientific experimentation, is the temperature at which tea has become too cold to drink.
For the benefit of overseas viewers, you should know that any mention of tea in a British male laboratory instantly brews up a massive argument.
The best way is to make a cup of tea is to make it in the mug.
Says who? She said.
Scientists.
Tea scientists.
Bollocks.
Even though there is a lot of social stigma attached to it, I still think the milk should go in first.
Milk goes in last in the cup.
No, but I think that spoils the taste, because if you've got a large volume of tea, and you add the cold milk, the milk is scalded by the tea.
I make it in the mug, put the milk in last.
Yeah, that's my boy.
But if the milk is in the cup first, the tea is added to it gradually, and it heats it up gently so it doesn't change the molecular structure of the milk, and it tastes better.
If you put the tea into the cup, the temperature of the cup will take away some of the heat from the tea, so it won't be boiling when you add the milk, so the milk won't get scalded and ruin the taste.
Yes, but you've still got, even in a small cup, a massive volume of hot tea, and as we know from the first and second law of thermodynamics, it won't pass from the cooler to the hotter.
That volume of heat has that small volume of milk to heat up.
Whereas if you pour the tea into the milk The cameraman's given up.
Eventually, we managed to coax our cameraman back, with the promise of a nice, hot cup of tea, milk first.
Right, back to our alarm.
We're using an old thermometer, which we will attach to the bottom of the mug.
The thermometer's needle is attached to a biometallic strip, two pieces of metal that coil or uncoil in reaction to heat.
You can demonstrate this using this hot air machine that we've found.
- Can you see it moving? - Yeah.
Hey, look at that.
Inside our re-appropriated thermometer, we're putting a battery and a buzzer.
We will connect the loop of wire one end battery The needle will be attached to the battery and the buzzer in an electrical circuit.
So when the temperature in the tea drops to almost undrinkable levels, the needle will complete the circuit, setting off the buzzer.
- ALARM BEEPS - Whoa! Your tea is getting cold.
That's perfect, isn't it? Champion.
The difficulty with a tea cup alarm is that, like Ronnie Corbett with a violin, it's incredibly small and fiddly.
But, as Charles Dickens, 1812-1870, said, "My dear, if you would give me a cup of tea, "I should better understand your affairs.
" Do you want some tea? With final calibrations calibrated and wires wired, there's only one thing left to do.
Right, now for the test.
This is prototype number one, it's been calibrated.
56, 57 degrees.
I'm going to make a cup of tea in it by the builders' method, i.
e.
teabag in the cup.
Just boiled that.
Mmm, lovely.
And then, I'm going to go back to my woodworking job that I was doing earlier, Simmy is going to hide my cup of tea somewhere in the Man Lab, and I'll wait for it to warn me that it's not been drunk.
You'll have to do the milk bit.
And take the tea bag out.
And take the tea bag out, yeah.
It's now just coming up for ten minutes since Sim hid the cup of tea.
It is amazing what you can achieve in the time it takes a cup of tea to become too cold to drink.
I've reduced most of this superb piece of wood to sawdust.
ALARM BEEPS Ah.
Is it? Yes, it is.
See, I'd never have found that.
Obviously, in the final version we'll have to incorporate a switch, cos now it's going to buzz constantly and it'll buzz when we put the cup in the cupboard, as well.
So we do need a switch in it, Simmy, but other than that, what a brilliant idea! Mm, perfectly drinkable.
Life improved by Man Lab.
It's actually a terrible cup of tea, Simmy.
You weren't supposed to drink it.
Tastes of solder.
There's probably a few little metal filings.
Don't drink it all.
It's work in progress, James.
Now, the other day, we were standing around in the Man Lab, when suddenly somebody said, "Why would anyone go to Skegness?" And to be honest, we couldn't think of a reason.
So we decided to create one.
Shot.
You see, back in the good old days, Skegness was a bustling, prosperous seaside resort, attracting millions of eager holidaymakers every year.
But in today's recessionary times, the resort has had sand kicked in its face.
Not only have we been competing with one of the wettest summers on record, but also with the economic downturn, people haven't got a lot of money to spend.
I don't whether it's the weather or just people aren't coming out and spending, but there's not really that many people wandering about.
While the ill wind of the economic downturn blows cold on Skeggy, there is one place that has no trouble attracting tourists and their money.
Scotland is wetter and colder and foggier than Skegness, but in 2010, it attracted 10 million visitors, generating over £11 billion.
And why? It's all because Scotland has its own world-famous monster.
NEWSREADER: A glorious summer's day and tourists sunning themselves on the bank of Loch Ness.
Could this be Scotland's most famous tourist attraction? It's hard to say what it might be, but hoteliers along Loch Ness know only too well, it's a promise of better times ahead.
These Nessie sightings always occur in the run-up to the tourist season, oddly enough.
And it isn't just the Scots who are at it.
Ireland has its leprechauns, it has its Giant's construction project, and all that helped it to about three billion euros back in 2010.
And Wales, Wales' national flag is really just a sort of monster marketing campaign.
Even the Isle of Man's full of fairies.
How can Skeggy compete? All it has is a small clock tower, and a 100-year-old statue of a camp fisherman.
We can do better.
We've come up with a simple plan for instant economic recovery, something to bring the tourists' money flooding back in.
We're going to give Skegness its own monster.
This is the most secretive project we've ever attempted on Man Lab.
If any word of our plan gets out to the public, everything could be ruined.
The entire lab is on lockdown, with information strictly on a need-to-know basis.
Dan thinks we're making this season's camouflage boiler suit.
We've told Rory we're making him a robot friend.
It's up to Simmy to create an instant legend out of the murky depths of his imagination.
We've got an ear.
Simmy's only remit is that the monster must look scary and must be able to move in the water.
I'm going to put this on like so.
And then I'll probably put another one going the other way, and that'll give it a bit of rigidity.
And finally it takes shape.
Here are the bare bones of a mythical sea creature.
Except, of course, this isn't mythical, it's very much real.
It looks prehistoric, it may indeed sound prehistoric, but it's made of mild steel.
We've taken our inspiration from all the great hideous creatures of legend.
We have the giraffe at the front end, and the mange tout at the back.
They are separate pieces, each steered by an underwater diver who's using one of these, a DPV, a dive propulsion vehicle.
They're in separate parts, so that the two divers controlling them can be close together to give the appearance of a small monster, or many, many yards apart to give the appearance of a very long, sinuous one.
They will make it move at almost four kilometres an hour.
And of course it isn't finished yet, it is just a framework.
But when it is, it will be covered in hideous dripping scales and eyes that burn like hot coals, so that as it rises from the thunders of the upper deep, the people of Skegness will scurry in terror to their beach huts and small houses.
And of course, they will also, therefore, end up at the top of the tourist league table.
The frame is wrapped in a fine steel mesh, enclosing some state-of-the-art buoyancy devices to keep the monster upright in the water.
The finishing touch is supplied by camouflaged netting to give the impression of seaweedy mystery.
That's lovely, that's a thing of beauty, innit? Under cover of darkness, the completed monster, or Susan, to give it its code name, is smuggled into the top secret Man Lab aquatic testing centre, where our dive team will put it through its paces.
Just trying to imagine what it looks like from the surface.
What I was aiming for was straight, down, up again.
But while the divers get acquainted with Susan, our undercover team in Skegness have identified a major problem.
To make our monster utterly convincing, she must appear out of the sea just once and just long enough to get tongues wagging.
But the beach at Skegness is so barren that any attempt to sneak Susan into the water here will be quickly spotted.
The only way to pull this off is to approach Skegness from the sea.
This operation, obviously, must be conducted in utmost secrecy.
We're ready to launch here, but we're nowhere near Skegness.
We're about 20 nautical miles down the coast, actually in the north of Norfolk.
Skegness, of course, is in Lincolnshire.
Such meticulous planning should guarantee the absolute secrecy of our mission.
But then our boat turns up.
The small sailing vessel we'd asked Rory to organise is, in fact, a gigantic, 80-foot, bright yellow landing craft.
While the crew try their best to hide it, I attempt to draw attention away from our sea-born ambition, by pretending we're making a very different film.
Dad's Army, scene four, take two.
Action.
It's been over 40 years, but even so, the adventures of Walmington, the people who populated this mythical town, are still very much alive in the hearts and minds of the people who live here.
And the locals say that if you come here late at night, the sound of the water gently lapping in this harbour, seems to be saying, "They don't like it up 'em, Captain Mainwaring".
With the locals suitably confused, and with Susan securely in the hold, I disguise myself and sneak aboard, our monstrous secret intact.
But as soon as we leave our quiet mooring, our giant yellow landing craft looms into public view.
We look like a contingent of militant Liberal Democrats, bent on the invasion of Cromer.
It's an unexpected, yet effective, smokescreen.
I'm still wearing my Cornish fisherman's disguise whilst we make our way out of the harbour, just in case anybody spots me and makes the connection between Man Lab and what's going to happen later .
.
and what's going to happen later on.
We can only drop our guard when we clear the headland and reach the open sea.
20 miles distant, a sleepy seaside town has no idea that it'll soon be elevated to the pantheon of myth and legend.
We're now in the middle of The Wash.
This is the shadowy pools where crowns were hurled as armies fled, as WB Yeats put it.
King John's jewels are down there somewhere.
I think I can afford to take off the Cornish smuggler disguise.
Our divers are almost ready, Susan is still under wraps there.
Let's make a monster.
What we have here is the eye of the monster.
It's actually made out of half a tennis ball with a bit of white paint put on it.
But from a distance, obviously, this will look extremely convincing.
Anybody will see that and say, "Yes, yes, that's a monster.
" 'But while we scurry about getting Susan ship-shape, 'we receive some worrying news from north of the border.
' 'The Scots, it seems, have launched a pre-emptive strike.
' There's been a very interesting development in the field of aquatic monsters.
There's been a sighting of the Loch Ness Monster.
I'm sure you've seen it, here it is.
Now, the man who took this has been hunting for Nessie for over a quarter of a century, and when he finally sees it, he takes one low resolution picture, which he says was from the back of his small boat and the monster was something like a quarter of a mile away.
But you can see from this picture, this is very close indeed, and he's clearly in something like the crow's nest of HMS Victory.
It's obviously rubbish, we know it's rubbish, the American tourists that flood in know it's rubbish.
But it's a lovely myth, and who can blame them? This sort of thing actually makes millions of pounds for that area of Scotland.
And when Scotland devolves, none of this will come to us, they will float off northwards with their monster, and what will we be left with? Nothing, except that.
What we're doing is not dishonest, it's no more dishonest than this, we're just helping Skegness along a bit.
After three hours, our target, like Brighton, hoves into view.
I'm back in disguise.
We've got to get going quite soon, otherwise we're going to draw attention to ourselves.
I might start some fishing in a minute.
We're 400 yards from the shore, the divers are ready, the wind is favourable.
Our self-propelled, mild steel, two-part, camouflaged creature with tennis ball eyes is about to re-write economic history.
She shall smash the long-held monster monopoly of our Celtic cousins, and wrestle jobs and cash from Nessie's weakened jaws.
As Susan is towed into position, we wish her godspeed.
Go forth, oh, monster of Skegness, go forth and take the myth out of Scotland.
It's looking pretty inconspicuous at the moment.
It's hard to see what's happening, but there's little evidence of panic on the beach.
The only hard information comes from a support team that's nearly as far from the monster as we are.
We know that the monster surfaced.
One of the diver's heads appeared at one point, but apparently it looked like part of the monster.
So now, we've got to get the monster back on board this boat without anybody seeing that we're putting a monster back on board a boat.
And that's all we need.
I mean, it only takes one person to have photographed it or made a short piece of film of it, and we're good.
Less actually is more with aquatic sea monsters.
20 minutes later, the divers return, and I can tell from their faces that something has gone horribly wrong.
The dive boat appears to be missing a very important passenger.
Have we lost a bit? Have you lost half the monster? Where has it gone? It's gone down somewhere.
Getting into the rib, clipped it on the side, andit must have come off or something.
Have you lost the PSV, as well? Yes, yes.
- It's all gone? - Yes.
- How deep was it where it? - Not that deep.
- What, two metres? There was a big current.
We didn't know where anybody was.
So the whole head of the monster is off? How far off the beach do you think it is? 'It's a devastating turn of events.
' With Susan lost to Davy Jones, our hopes for a monster-led Skegness-related economic miracle seem sunk without trace.
And that seemed to be the end of that, but actually, it wasn't.
You see, in a heartfelt tribute to our tragically lost monster, one of our beach crew decided to upload the only existing footage we had of Susan in action, shortly before her head fell off.
The crew were unprepared and, as a result, the footage was shaky, blurry and indistinct.
In short, it was perfect.
Slowly, views started to increase, and before we knew it, we were into the hundreds.
Comments started appearing, theories flying around as to what this strange and shoddily-piloted shape could be.
And then we hit the headlines.
The local Skegness paper picked up on the story, and suddenly Susan was front page news.
The views went into the thousands, other websites started linking to our video, and conspiracy theories got even more outlandish.
"It's Nessie on her holidays, you dumbasses.
" "Driftwood.
" "This is quite clearly a basking shark.
" Susan was snowballing.
The national papers, led by the Daily Mail, caught wind of our monster.
Skegness monster sights started appearing up and down the country.
Got an email that came in after yesterday's show from a listener who lives up in Skegness.
If you go on YouTube, just type in "Skegness monster".
I was sceptical at first.
Now I'm not so sure.
I'm just looking at it, and I'm at that 29, 30 second bit.
- That is some kind of monster.
- No, Christian! This is the North Sea.
There's all sorts of things out there happening all the time.
That looks like a head.
It's flotsam and jetsam, that's all it is.
It's bits of wood.
It's a sightseeing thing, ain't it, just seeing is believing.
There's a bit that looks like a head and a tail.
That is a sea monster of some kind.
And then, Susan went global.
'What we had just about written off as a colossal failure 'had somehow become one of the biggest successes 'we've had on Man Lab.
' "I do not know, I am difficult to determine," says a man from Japan.
"Driftwood.
" "I know buffalo timber.
Daft bouncers.
Chips.
" On our last count, the first and final voyage of Susan was on course to break a million views.
And even the economy of Skegness was on a slow but significant upturn.
Earlier, a person did come up and they did ask me about a sea monster.
They bought a 99, anyway, so if people keep coming and looking for a sea monster and buy 99s, I'm happy.
That's a 99 that would still be in the freezer without Susan.
The mayor is absolutely delighted.
I welcome the Skegness monster, and thank you very much, Mr Monster, for actually giving us the added value of people's interest in our resort.
Have you seen our monster's head? Perhaps you'd like to help us find it.
If so, do write to us.
And remember to mark your subject line, "Desperately Seeking Susan".
That was Man Lab.
We hope you enjoyed watching it.
And here to play us out for the final time this series, with Theme from Man Lab, The King's Big Band.
Thank you for watching and goodbye.
BAND PLAYS "Theme From Man Lab"
In today's kitchen drawer of forgotten skills You're catching them, cooking them, picking them - Oh, Roger! - .
.
and selling them.
Rory Barker is Alan Sugar.
Whelks, whelks.
But can he winkle a profit out of whelks? We make our own table football with a striking twist That was a corker.
.
.
and embark on a top-secret mission to terrorise Skegness.
Let's make a monster.
The English language is rich with expressions for describing men's incompetence - couldn't run a bath, couldn't work his way out of a paper bag, wouldn't say boo to a goose, and the famous one about organisational ineptitude despite being already inside a brewery.
But here's the one that baffles us - he couldn't run a whelk stall, the insult favoured in the ruthless bear pit of British politics, where it's used to deliver whole governments into the gutter of derision.
This man, Sir Winston Churchill, said it of the entire cabinet under Clement Attlee.
They, apparently, could not run a whelk stall.
This man, John Prescott, was condemned by his own prime minister as being incapable of running a whelk stall.
And the Daily Telegraph said of this man, the Prime Minister Gordon Brown, that he couldn't run a whelk stall, in whelkland, at the height of the whelking season.
The implication, then, is that running a whelk stall is easy, or, to put a more positive spin on it, anybody who can run a whelk stall is clearly fit to lead the country.
MUSIC: "Land Of Hope And Glory" This insult - he couldn't run a whelk stall - is it valid in this day and age? Does anybody know what's involved, running a whelk stall? It seems like the basis for a useful Man Lab experiment, because to be honest, I don't know what a whelk is, I don't know where whelks come from, and I have no idea in what is involved running a stall that sells them.
Fortunately, though, neither does Rory.
Whitstable on the south-east coast, traditional port and host to whelk fishing for over 2,000 years.
It's also now host to Rory Barker, entrepreneur.
Rory is globally accepted as the litmus test for the simplicity of tasks, so we've sent him here with a £100 start-up loan.
His mission - to prove himself perfectly capable where so many of our great leaders would supposedly fail, by running the finest whelk stall in the land and turning a profit.
First stop, some tips from a professional.
So that's what we're fishing for? - That's what we're fishing for.
- Oh, they're horrific, Roger.
- You're catching them.
- Right.
Cooking them, picking them - Oh, Roger.
- .
.
and selling them.
I'm starting to worry about this now.
It might actually be quite hard to run a whelk stall.
This is a whelk.
Have you ever seen Alien? So it's time to suit up.
Roger, taking pity on Rory, has agreed to rent him whelking waders, pots and bait That looks like banana.
.
.
for the budget-busting sum of £5.
- Cheers, Roger.
- All tied up - you ready? - I'm off to get some whelks.
- Yeah.
So with dwindling capital in his pockets and pots of dead dogfish and concrete over his shoulder, Rory Barker, a symbol of our nation's optimism, heads down to the water's edge.
Well, it's sunsets like this that inspired Joseph Mallord William Turner, the father of English impressionism, to paint some of his best boat pictures.
Today, though, we have Rory Barker bent double like an old beggar under a sack of whelks.
And I'm reminded, actually, of that very famous scene from Henry V by William Shakespeare, when Fluellen is saying of Bardolph, "His face is all bubukles and whelks and knobs and flames of fire".
He might well have been looking at Rory when he wrote that.
Rory has a few precious hours of low tide to place the whelk pots.
Once they're down, he has to wait overnight for the sea to wash over them, and then come back to see if he's caught anything.
And so, with the realities of running a whelk stall sinking into his boots like the incoming tide, we leave Rory adjusting his tackle and return to our luxury hotel, from where his distant wails come to us as a lullaby.
I don't know who eats whelks.
I've never seen whelks on a menu, I don't think.
Early next morning, it's time to collect the pots.
I've never seen a whelk stall anywhere that I go.
- Do you think I'm going to earn a lot of money? - No.
It's speculate to accumulate, James.
Yeah, have you been reading the Pursuit Of Excellence, Rory? I can't remember.
Let's review your business plan and strategy so far on the whelk apprentice.
What have you spent? - So I was given £100.
- Yep.
I think I've spent about half of it, I've got Had to spend £26 on the youth hostel last night - Right.
- .
.
which was horrific.
I had to spend £13 on a bus journey down here.
- Right.
- Um Had to spend a fiver on these waders.
And then Oh, and then I spent about £5.
50 on a Beano and some sweets on the bus journey cos I was really bored.
£5.
50 on sweets? Well, the Beano was £1.
50.
Was it? And the sweets were the £4.
50.
No, £4.
- £1.
50 for the Beano? - Yeah.
I thought it was about 80 pence.
It's a good magazine, that.
- Is it? - Yeah.
Do you think Italian tourists in Camden, they're going to buy the whelks off me? Yeah, I think you'll be able to whack the price up, and you can't call them whelks, you have to call them something like, shade-grown, free-range, line-caught, day-boat whelks.
- All right.
- And then that puts the price up immediately, people go, "God, yeah, we had some whelks from Camden.
They were marvellous.
" - Even though they're probably terrible.
- I can tell people they're - organic.
But they are.
Are they? Well, yeah.
They're free range, aren't they? - What does organic mean? - Dunno.
- Just costs more in Tesco.
They cost more, yeah.
It's known as pay-the-difference.
This is massively exciting.
So under us now .
.
is the key to my fortune.
- Whoa! - I wouldn't think of it as your fortune, but I don't see why you shouldn't be able to turn a profit.
You've kept your cost down, you haven't, sort of, got a flashy van or a boat.
You've come on the bus Well, you wasted money on the Beano - and the sweets, which was stupid.
- I was hungry and bored.
- I know, all right.
But you stayed in a youth hostel, you've come on the bus, you've done it the austerity way.
You've maximised profit.
All theseAlan Sugar and that other bloke with the pillow stuffed up his shirt, what was his name? John Harvey-Jones, they always go on about, "business", and it's interesting, and intellectual, and complicated.
You buy something, spend as little as possible producing it, sell it for as much as you can.
The difference is the profit.
What was that second name you said? Was it Sir John Harvey-Jones? I thought he did the voice of Darth Vader! And so, himself like something risen from the deep, Rory hauls in his first catch.
"'Courage', he said, and pointed toward the land.
" That's Tennyson.
- Who? - Tennyson! Six crabs.
Oh, there's all crabs in there! You've got whelks, no, look at this! You've got hundreds of whelks! Oh, ha-ha-ha! Look at that! You have got millions of whelks! Look at the size of that.
I think that might be in my "Luxury" range.
- Oh, I think so, yeah.
- £5 for that puppy! Just to be clear, I'm not supposed to help Rory in this.
There's live crabs in there.
They're not dangerous, it's not like tarantulas.
- They're not nice though, are, they? - Well What would you do if you had 10,000 crabs coming in your front door? But there are about six in there, and they're small.
- Yeah, but they're moving.
- Grr! - Agh! Did you see it then? It got ready, I'm not joking.
- Don't be daft! - It got its clippers open.
- Yeah, but they're tiny, it's like somebody coming at you with a pair of tweezers.
They'll have your eyebrows out! Argh! Oh, it's got a crab on it, argh! RORY LAUGHS HEARTILY Look at that, Look at that, it came out! I can't believe how many you've got.
I was ready to mock, I'll be honest.
I was ready to say, now what are you going to do with three whelks? Look at it moving.
The big one's moving.
Do you think I'm being cruel, dropping them into the bucket? No, I don't think they know.
Why, cos they have big shells? Well, I don't think they have a conscience, whelks.
Conscience? No.
Though I could be wrong, I mean, we don't know, do we? I think the whelk is in there looking out and saying, "Has that got a conscience?" There he goes, you've got thou I've never seen any whelks.
Look at the crabs! I'm looking at profit.
You're looking at cash there.
Correct.
That's the fruit of the sea, that's the great cash machine of the ocean.
I'll tell you what, Prescott couldn't run a whelk stall, Boris Johnson couldn't run a whelk stall.
Tony Blair couldn't run a whelk stall.
Tessa Jowell, whoever the bloomin' hell that is, can't run a whelk stall.
But Rory Barker, from Essex You're obviously leadership material(!) But as we drag Rory's haul back to the harbour, we find that the main catch of Barker's Premium Pay The Difference Whelk Stall is rank optimism.
So do you think that's enough for me to run my high-end whelk stall in London? If you only want to be there for about 30 seconds, yeah.
- Really? - So you might as well buy some, cook 'em all together.
Hold on a minute, when you say "buy some", what do you mean? Well, I can sell you some whelks.
Roger is proposing to sell you some more whelks for 20 quid, making your total expenditure £69.
50.
So Leaving you £30.
50 to rent your stall and pay the protection money.
So in other words, I've only caught 10% of my stock? - Yeah.
- Oh, for the love of Right, fine, go on Roger.
You get more, I'll give you 20 quid.
- All right.
- You happy? - Yep.
Cheers, Rog.
I only caught 10%! Yeah.
That's a shame, cos it looked impressive.
I mean, if you were just having a whelk party for a couple of mates.
- Would you come? - No.
- OK! Not because of the whelks, Rory, though, cos JAMES CHORTLES Even after buying extra stock, the whelk stall business is far from simple.
EU regulation article 3, number 850/98 states that any whelks smaller than 45mm must be thrown back to avoid over-fishing.
Lovely! Now, look, you hear a lot of tripe from the so-called business community, about diversification, and portfolios, and UK PLC, and moving forward and the rest of it, but that's not what it's about.
It's about Rory Barker in rubber trousers, sizing whelks.
This is how the European economy will be rescued.
You don't see the Minister for Trade and Industry doing this, so you have to ask, what do these people actually know? He's your man, that's where economic salvation lies.
Rory Barker.
You watch that boy.
Get you dressed properly, my man.
Right, let's cook these puppies.
So, all that remains for Rory are the relatively simple steps of cooking the whelks for 15 minutes exactly at the correct temperature, cooling them, and hauling them up to the kitchen above .
.
de-shelling them individually by hand at an industrial speed .
.
and lastly, packing them with ice for the 62.
9-mile journey to Camden Lock market.
Piece of cake, really.
So there goes Rory Barker, our great hope for the nation, with his two chilled buckets of whelks.
He's £69.
50 down, no profit yet.
But let's see.
Right, I'm going to drive back to London in my Porsche.
Coming up, Barker's whelks go on the market.
Want a whelk? I don't think so.
It's seafood.
Come on try it, they're gorgeous.
Can Rory realise a profit through the strategic deployment of sales patter? Whelks! whelks! 50p, one whelk.
Whelk, whelk, whelks! In the last series of Man Lab, Simmy suddenly decided he wanted a game of pool.
Now, we didn't have a pool table, but that wasn't a problem because we could make one, and here it is.
And I have to say, we are extremely proud of it.
- It's two shots, isn't it? - Yep.
In fact, quite a few of you have written in saying, "I like that pool table, could you make me one of those, as well?" And we'd love to, but sadly, we can't.
We haven't got time.
Because Simmy's now suddenly decided he wants a game of table football.
Interestingly, or at least we think it's reasonably interesting, if you're going to design your own table football, you really have to start with the ball.
Because the ball dictates the size of the players, the size of the players dictates the dimensions of the table, the height of the walls, the size of the goal and so on.
So here is our ball, it's a 30-millimetre table football ball.
Now, from that, we worked out the height of the players, and rather than buy off-the-shelf ones, which you can do, but there's no skill in that, we're going to make our own.
We're going to carve them, in fact, out of wood, out of this piece of wood.
It's a piece of cedarwood.
160 millimetres is the height of my player.
Now, somewhere within this block, of this block that I've marked out there, there lurks a rather elegant, hand-carved table football player.
In the mind of the wood carver, the sculptor, probably not me, to be honest, it's simply a matter of revealing it by taking away the stuff that's surrounding it.
It's a bit like Schrodinger's table football player, you don't actually know if it's there until you look inside and see if it is there.
Before carving out our philosophical centre-forward, we drill the hole for the bar that will attach him, shoulder height, to the fussball table.
- It's quite oily, isn't it? - Oh, it is.
It's lovely and warm, you put your finger in there it's a nice, warm place to put your finger.
You walk around with this on a winter's day, your finger would never be cold.
The classic looking-through-the-hole shot! Next up, a turn on my favourite tool in the workshop.
If we had a football club, we would surely be called the Man Lab Lathes.
This is the wood-turning lathe, and I have made the vague profile of a striker for a table football game.
There you can see the hole that we drilled in the square block earlier.
Now, obviously, this is circular in section because it's been made on a lathe.
But Simon here is our best wood carver, and he is going to give it a soul.
He's going to reveal this player's personality through the artistry of wood carving.
- Or at least give him a face.
- Yes, yeah.
- Do you think you can do that OK? - Yep, yep.
Make him sort of look international.
He got little hands, little eyes This will be the most bespoke, hand-crafted football table in the history of table football football tables.
So now we have more of a body shape, we have the arms that have been cut in.
I've trimmed off the round base to make it more foot-shaped, and then on to the old boat race.
Simon chips, carves and sands and before long, the unmistakable face of head striker Schrodinger, captain of the Man Lab Lathes, is revealed.
Meanwhile, Simmy and I have set about making the table element of our table football table.
One unique feature is the use of real AstroTurf, making the Man Lab table football truly all-weather.
It's quite good exercise.
It's the most exercise I'll get playing football.
And there it is finished, and I'm very sorry I forgot to mention earlier on that this is the Man Lab limited edition penalty shootout table football, so there are only two players, the striker and the goalie.
There are also refinements that you won't find on the table football table down at your pub.
If you'd like to come and have a look at the striker, he pivots on a rod, as you'd expect, he's operated with two hands for extra power, and the bar is mounted in these little spring-loaded cups so you can move him up and down.
You can either hit a daisy cutter, like that, or if you press down, you get his feet right under the ball for a nice chip shot.
And he will move from side to side, as well, so you can banana it a bit, rather like I didn't when I played football, and aim up for the corner of the goal.
Simmy will explain the goalkeeper - this is very clever.
So the goalkeeper here has got a spherical bearing at the back, so he's got a bit of rotation.
He can also go from side to side, he can dive right up into the corners, right down there.
He's pretty much got the whole goal covered.
The action is relayed live onto the big screen for the crowd to be able to see it clearly, and it's being recorded so we can watch particularly good goals or saves in slow motion.
The beauty of this fully portable special edition table football, is that you can relive the misery of an England penalty shoot-out in the comfort of your own home.
And I know through bitter experience what it's like to miss life's one great penalty opportunity.
With this system, you can delete all of those, and simply show your friends something a bit like this.
That was a corker! That was a good goal.
Let's see that one again.
Oh, sent him the wrong way.
- Do you want to swap ends? - Come on, then.
'Like the great icons of an earlier age, it was time for Simmy and me 'to settle our differences like real men, 'on the miniature field of honour.
' That hit me in the nuts! Seriously, you could play this all day.
I expect we will.
In the defensive position in the box.
Oh, hit the post! After a quick change of ends, it's clear from the score that I need to convert four out of five of my penalty kicks.
Oh, flippin' heck.
Saved.
Like all the best penalty contests in footballing history, sporting destiny would be decided by one final punt of the ball.
We won the cup We won the cup Ee-ay-addio We won the cup.
Redemption! I felt like Stuart Pearce in Euro '96.
Also available in Man Lab Limited Edition penalty shoot-out table football, personalise your players with numbered shirts and a range of fashion accessories, so the players even look like you.
That's me, by the way.
And that's Simmy.
And go international, with kits from Germany, England, France and Spain.
Goal! Make your own! Earlier in the show, I decided, democratically, that Rory Barker should answer to an accusation that's been levelled at our politicians down the ages.
He couldn't run a whelk stall.
So far, from £100 loan, Rory's spent £69.
50 trapping, sorting, cooking and shelling his whelks, before bringing them here, to Camden Lock market.
It's a fry-up of international flavours.
What chance for Rory's titbit? The reputation of the whelk is really founded in a time when the British had only a handful of things to eat, such as, eels, spam, tripe, coal and the humble whelk.
But, of course, today, multiculturalism has infused all of food.
Food is where we are at our most cosmopolitan and international.
Look at all these fantastic things, look at these colours, and this is normal, this is not dare food, it's not bravado, this is simply what people eat in the modern world.
And there's our man Rory, with a whelk.
It's tough.
10am.
With a further £15 spent on stall hire, Rory now needs to use all his talent to make his shop front look as attractive as possible.
What? You think I'm going to run out of space? What's wrong with that? That'll entice people.
- It's good.
- It's terrible.
This chap, for example, says, "Very low in fat and cholesterol, the leanest, meanest burger in town, "best served medium rare.
" And you've said, "whelks".
Yeah, but if I use too much paint, then I won't be able to put the can back on, take it back to the shop, claim the difference.
You know, I'm trying to make money here.
Now all I need to do is find a place to put this up, right? And then people will know that I'm selling whelks, so they're going to come to buy whelks.
Yeah, I admire your thinking.
'Rory was clearly onto an infallible marketing strategy, 'and his dragon-esque insight didn't stop there.
' Look at that, see the word "only" in there? Put the word "only" in, makes people think it could be more.
Only £4, look at this, I'm learning as I go.
Three ounces, £4, only £4.
Only.
I think you need a couple of display punnets to show what you're actually getting.
Well, I thought I can offer people one.
"Here, try a whelk, darlin'.
" She tries one, then she's hooked for life.
Yeah.
'Mmmm.
' Look at that, eh? Look at that.
Tremendous.
'The whelks were stirring the public's curiosity.
' 'With customers already lining up, Rory might have this in the bag.
' It's a whelk, it's like a sea snail.
My dad used to eat those.
My what? - Do I need one of those? - Yes.
Oh right, OK.
No.
Ah, come on.
- No, no.
- People love the whelks.
No, no, not without a food hygiene certificate.
- Oh, really? - Sorry about that.
Oh, right, OK, mate, nice one.
No whelks for now people, it's closed.
So Rory has to miss the morning crowd entirely, run back to the Man Lab offices, and spend a further £15 passing an online food hygiene course.
He's now managed to spend £99.
50 out of his £100 loan, and not yet have a single customer.
Get your whelks.
The poet William Wordsworth, 1770-1850, told us, "In business, it is not the crook who is to be feared, "but the honest man who doesn't know what he's doing.
" Try whelks.
Want a whelk? They're delicious.
I don't think so.
For some reason, after seeing Rory publicly reprimanded for health and safety failings, the punters don't seem quite so keen on the whelks any more.
You want to try a whelk? - No, thanks.
- You sure? - I don't like it.
£3, £4 for three ounces how about that? - I'll weigh 'em out for ya.
- No, thank you.
No? Ah.
What is that? It's a whelk, it's like a mussel or It's seafood.
Come on, try it, they're gorgeous.
You can have a look, but don't breathe on it.
Looks like a snail, though.
Yeah, delicious snail, that's right.
What d'you think? Three ounces, £4.
I'll measure 'em up for you.
What do you think? Outrageous.
Get your whelks.
How you doing? I haven't sold any.
People like trying them for free.
Really? They try one for free, and then they mutter something in a different language and walk off.
Well, maybe you need to sort of tempt them in and don't offer them one immediately.
- Yeah.
- Get them interested.
What I have done, though, cos I've been and found a load of amazing historical stuff about whelks, where the word comes from, what they actually are, left-handed and right-handed whelks.
Famous people who ate whelks, cos I want to give you some other things to shout, rather than just whelks.
Right, yeah.
Elvis Presley's favourite seafood.
What? Yeah, It's full of stuff like that.
You just pick anything and, you know, be like Speakers' Corner, give them a little soliloquy about the whelk and its greatness.
Just get it out, refer to it, shout something.
Elvis Presley's favourite seafood.
Get your whelks.
That's the king of rock, Elvis Presley.
Get your whelks, be like Elvis.
Get your whelks.
It's Elvis Presley's favourite seafood.
What do you think? How much I have to give you? - Sorry? - OK, just for try? One cup, £4, one try for free.
"Let me try it first", that's how they all get me.
What do you think? You're going to put down that melon you're drinking out of and get a few whelks down you instead? That's a coconut, Rory.
It's quite nice, but Yeah, it's quite nice, yeah? A cup for £4? Yeah! Amazingly, and even though it isn't actually true, the king of rock and roll has snagged Rory's first customer.
Look at that, you happy with that? You have a nice day.
£4 down, a mere £95.
50 to break even.
Hey-hey, first sale.
Ha-ha-ha.
Nice, nice, nice.
Right, now I'm cooking with gas.
Four whelks, £3! With the whole of Camden now an expert on Elvis and whelks, it's time for some new patter.
Baby whelks are cannibalistic.
That's right, ladies and gentlemen.
Baby whelks used to be cannibalistic.
Come on, guys.
These whelks, ladies and gentlemen, they've got a large single foot which helps them track their prey.
A large single foot, and they get I'll tell you what, you can eat that foot today.
Whelk.
Whelks can be ambidextrous, they're ambidextrous, they can use their left or right hands.
Have a try of that, what do you think? - Oh, my God.
- It's too nice? £3, £4 for three ounces.
It's tricky because pounds are a weight of measurement, as well.
It's hard to remember.
So, three hours of selling down, and Rory is not only still on £4 selling return, he also manages to give away half his stock in free samples.
As the lunchtime crowds hit, it's time to try a drastic change of tack.
You could sell whelks singularly.
I don't know, say one whelk for 50p.
Three ounces for four quid.
- How many whelks do you get in three ounces? - Yes! One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
Eight, yeah, so one for 50p, yeah, that works.
Yeah, 50p will do it, right.
50p for one whelk, an ambidextrous whelk, left or right-handed.
I don't do free samples any more, I'm no mug.
You fancy a whelk? 50p for one whelk I'm afraid, I'm no longer doing free samples.
A bit of vinegar and pepper? A bit of vinegar, please.
- Bit of vinegar, no pepper? - No.
All right, lovely, there you go.
Thank you very much.
How about that, eh? You can get That is superb.
You want another one? Another one for 50p? Yes, please.
Lovely jubbly, get that down you.
Oh, that is so good.
Got to say, that is excellent.
Cheers very much, cheers, guys.
Bloody mugs.
Another hard-earned pound in the coffers, an immediate return for single whelk trading.
This might be the way to go.
Fresh from the shores of Whitstable.
What do you think? Amazing.
You try that, you'll never eat a kebab again, I'm telling you.
Thank you so much.
You ever been to Whitstable in Kent? Now you have, you have in your mouth.
You've been there in your mouth.
50p for one whelk.
I'll give it to you for free, and you give me 50p.
It's nice, isn't it? you want another one? You don't want another one but it is quite nice.
That's reasonable.
People may not be willing to shell out for shellfish, but the curiosity factor is tempting them to try one.
50p at a time is slow going, though.
Even after two more hours, Rory has only made another 30 quid.
And the competition is stiff.
'Small chicken doner, wrapped, please.
'One size will do it.
' James, what are you doing? I'm just checking out the competition.
What are you doing? Fantastic.
In business terms, the people of this market are acting locally but thinking globally, because visitors come here from all over the world, it's very trendy, very cosmopolitan, and there's every language imaginable spoken here.
There is Polish over there, Urdu, Jamaican Patois, Cantonese, Spanish.
The men on the Turkish kebab stall can speak English, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Turkish.
And that's where Rory's going wrong.
Whelks, whelks.
50p, one whelk.
Whelk.
I think part of the problem is you're not being multicultural.
This is a very multi-culti place, there's all these languages and people can talk to their customers in any language.
These guys here can speak five languages, the Pakistani blokes can speak four languages.
I've translated some whelk things.
Right.
This is it, one last push to turn molluscs into moola.
With a hasty price slash and pots in a cunningly concealed prompter, Barker's multicultural around-the-world whelks opens its doors.
We're going to start with Norwegian.
Any Norwegians out there? THEY SPEAK NORWEGIAN Albanian is puprri.
Any Albanians out there want some puprri? THEY SPEAK GERMAN Wellhornschnecken.
Wellhornschnecken! 'Rory is starting to draw a crowd.
'They wonder why Harry Potter has aged so terribly 'and is now running a whelk stall.
' Optimo loco! In oppidom whelks! In oppidom whelks! 50p! And where there's a crowd, there's money.
50p for one, yeah, you want two? You want two, the different languages helped.
Multi-lingual Rory is a hit.
The money is piling in.
You want pepper and vinegar? One whelk, 50p, or a cup for £4.
Cup of whelks for £4.
Cup of whelks for £4.
- Cup of whelks £4.
Ignore him.
- Did it work? Ignore him and buy your whelks.
In a show of defiance to obscure political insults everywhere, Rory's whelk stall money box was finally looking as healthy as his food hygiene certificate.
but as the last punter headed into the Camden sunset, the question remains, can any idiot run a whelk stall? Now, Rory Barker, I have here on this clip board the accounts for your first day of trading.
Now, obviously if Rory was going to set up for life as a whelker, he'd have capital costs, like he'd have to buy a fridge and probably a van, so we're not including those.
These are the expenses you incurred on the day.
You started with £100, and you spent, bus ride, buying extra whelks, hire of the waders, copy of the Beano, £99.
50.
At the end of the day, in your cash tin, as you well know .
.
you had takings of £91.
50, meaning you have made a loss of £8, and therefore you cannot run a whelk stall, you stupid boy.
However .
.
what I didn't tell you was that I nicked £10 from your tin to buy that rather excellent Turkish kebab, which I can recommend wholeheartedly.
Which means overall actually, Rory, you've made a profit of £2, and therefore you can run a whelk stall, and by extension, you are fit to run the country.
Anyway, if you have any thoughts on that, viewers, do please write to us.
And remember to mark your subject line, the right honourable Rory Barker MP.
Here's a problem we've identified in the Man Lab, and I bet millions of you have done it at home, in the office, in the garden, in your own workshop.
I made a cup of tea, and I knew I hadn't finished it because you always know when you've still got half a cup of tea left, but I've put it somewhere and forgotten where it is.
And after a while I remembered that actually, it was over here, look, cos I came over to help these guys do something on the Swiss army bicycle.
And now, as a result of that, that has gone completely stone cold and is undrinkable.
And this is an interesting point, because the British government's waste watchdog reckons that about £110 million is wasted every year by people throwing away half-drunk cold cups of tea, and another £100 million or so is wasted making another cup of tea, when you already had a perfectly good one.
So, me and Simmy have come up with what we think is a rather brilliant idea.
It's a tea cup that incorporates a temperature sensitive alarm that will sound a piercing squeal when the tea falls below a given temperature, which we're going to work out.
Not only warning you to drink it, but also telling you where it is, cos if it's over there and you've put it on a shelf like that while you're doing something, it'll go beep, and you think, tea going cold over there.
Oh, how I love my tea Tea, in the afternoon.
What we will have to establish, by careful and scientific experimentation, is the temperature at which tea has become too cold to drink.
For the benefit of overseas viewers, you should know that any mention of tea in a British male laboratory instantly brews up a massive argument.
The best way is to make a cup of tea is to make it in the mug.
Says who? She said.
Scientists.
Tea scientists.
Bollocks.
Even though there is a lot of social stigma attached to it, I still think the milk should go in first.
Milk goes in last in the cup.
No, but I think that spoils the taste, because if you've got a large volume of tea, and you add the cold milk, the milk is scalded by the tea.
I make it in the mug, put the milk in last.
Yeah, that's my boy.
But if the milk is in the cup first, the tea is added to it gradually, and it heats it up gently so it doesn't change the molecular structure of the milk, and it tastes better.
If you put the tea into the cup, the temperature of the cup will take away some of the heat from the tea, so it won't be boiling when you add the milk, so the milk won't get scalded and ruin the taste.
Yes, but you've still got, even in a small cup, a massive volume of hot tea, and as we know from the first and second law of thermodynamics, it won't pass from the cooler to the hotter.
That volume of heat has that small volume of milk to heat up.
Whereas if you pour the tea into the milk The cameraman's given up.
Eventually, we managed to coax our cameraman back, with the promise of a nice, hot cup of tea, milk first.
Right, back to our alarm.
We're using an old thermometer, which we will attach to the bottom of the mug.
The thermometer's needle is attached to a biometallic strip, two pieces of metal that coil or uncoil in reaction to heat.
You can demonstrate this using this hot air machine that we've found.
- Can you see it moving? - Yeah.
Hey, look at that.
Inside our re-appropriated thermometer, we're putting a battery and a buzzer.
We will connect the loop of wire one end battery The needle will be attached to the battery and the buzzer in an electrical circuit.
So when the temperature in the tea drops to almost undrinkable levels, the needle will complete the circuit, setting off the buzzer.
- ALARM BEEPS - Whoa! Your tea is getting cold.
That's perfect, isn't it? Champion.
The difficulty with a tea cup alarm is that, like Ronnie Corbett with a violin, it's incredibly small and fiddly.
But, as Charles Dickens, 1812-1870, said, "My dear, if you would give me a cup of tea, "I should better understand your affairs.
" Do you want some tea? With final calibrations calibrated and wires wired, there's only one thing left to do.
Right, now for the test.
This is prototype number one, it's been calibrated.
56, 57 degrees.
I'm going to make a cup of tea in it by the builders' method, i.
e.
teabag in the cup.
Just boiled that.
Mmm, lovely.
And then, I'm going to go back to my woodworking job that I was doing earlier, Simmy is going to hide my cup of tea somewhere in the Man Lab, and I'll wait for it to warn me that it's not been drunk.
You'll have to do the milk bit.
And take the tea bag out.
And take the tea bag out, yeah.
It's now just coming up for ten minutes since Sim hid the cup of tea.
It is amazing what you can achieve in the time it takes a cup of tea to become too cold to drink.
I've reduced most of this superb piece of wood to sawdust.
ALARM BEEPS Ah.
Is it? Yes, it is.
See, I'd never have found that.
Obviously, in the final version we'll have to incorporate a switch, cos now it's going to buzz constantly and it'll buzz when we put the cup in the cupboard, as well.
So we do need a switch in it, Simmy, but other than that, what a brilliant idea! Mm, perfectly drinkable.
Life improved by Man Lab.
It's actually a terrible cup of tea, Simmy.
You weren't supposed to drink it.
Tastes of solder.
There's probably a few little metal filings.
Don't drink it all.
It's work in progress, James.
Now, the other day, we were standing around in the Man Lab, when suddenly somebody said, "Why would anyone go to Skegness?" And to be honest, we couldn't think of a reason.
So we decided to create one.
Shot.
You see, back in the good old days, Skegness was a bustling, prosperous seaside resort, attracting millions of eager holidaymakers every year.
But in today's recessionary times, the resort has had sand kicked in its face.
Not only have we been competing with one of the wettest summers on record, but also with the economic downturn, people haven't got a lot of money to spend.
I don't whether it's the weather or just people aren't coming out and spending, but there's not really that many people wandering about.
While the ill wind of the economic downturn blows cold on Skeggy, there is one place that has no trouble attracting tourists and their money.
Scotland is wetter and colder and foggier than Skegness, but in 2010, it attracted 10 million visitors, generating over £11 billion.
And why? It's all because Scotland has its own world-famous monster.
NEWSREADER: A glorious summer's day and tourists sunning themselves on the bank of Loch Ness.
Could this be Scotland's most famous tourist attraction? It's hard to say what it might be, but hoteliers along Loch Ness know only too well, it's a promise of better times ahead.
These Nessie sightings always occur in the run-up to the tourist season, oddly enough.
And it isn't just the Scots who are at it.
Ireland has its leprechauns, it has its Giant's construction project, and all that helped it to about three billion euros back in 2010.
And Wales, Wales' national flag is really just a sort of monster marketing campaign.
Even the Isle of Man's full of fairies.
How can Skeggy compete? All it has is a small clock tower, and a 100-year-old statue of a camp fisherman.
We can do better.
We've come up with a simple plan for instant economic recovery, something to bring the tourists' money flooding back in.
We're going to give Skegness its own monster.
This is the most secretive project we've ever attempted on Man Lab.
If any word of our plan gets out to the public, everything could be ruined.
The entire lab is on lockdown, with information strictly on a need-to-know basis.
Dan thinks we're making this season's camouflage boiler suit.
We've told Rory we're making him a robot friend.
It's up to Simmy to create an instant legend out of the murky depths of his imagination.
We've got an ear.
Simmy's only remit is that the monster must look scary and must be able to move in the water.
I'm going to put this on like so.
And then I'll probably put another one going the other way, and that'll give it a bit of rigidity.
And finally it takes shape.
Here are the bare bones of a mythical sea creature.
Except, of course, this isn't mythical, it's very much real.
It looks prehistoric, it may indeed sound prehistoric, but it's made of mild steel.
We've taken our inspiration from all the great hideous creatures of legend.
We have the giraffe at the front end, and the mange tout at the back.
They are separate pieces, each steered by an underwater diver who's using one of these, a DPV, a dive propulsion vehicle.
They're in separate parts, so that the two divers controlling them can be close together to give the appearance of a small monster, or many, many yards apart to give the appearance of a very long, sinuous one.
They will make it move at almost four kilometres an hour.
And of course it isn't finished yet, it is just a framework.
But when it is, it will be covered in hideous dripping scales and eyes that burn like hot coals, so that as it rises from the thunders of the upper deep, the people of Skegness will scurry in terror to their beach huts and small houses.
And of course, they will also, therefore, end up at the top of the tourist league table.
The frame is wrapped in a fine steel mesh, enclosing some state-of-the-art buoyancy devices to keep the monster upright in the water.
The finishing touch is supplied by camouflaged netting to give the impression of seaweedy mystery.
That's lovely, that's a thing of beauty, innit? Under cover of darkness, the completed monster, or Susan, to give it its code name, is smuggled into the top secret Man Lab aquatic testing centre, where our dive team will put it through its paces.
Just trying to imagine what it looks like from the surface.
What I was aiming for was straight, down, up again.
But while the divers get acquainted with Susan, our undercover team in Skegness have identified a major problem.
To make our monster utterly convincing, she must appear out of the sea just once and just long enough to get tongues wagging.
But the beach at Skegness is so barren that any attempt to sneak Susan into the water here will be quickly spotted.
The only way to pull this off is to approach Skegness from the sea.
This operation, obviously, must be conducted in utmost secrecy.
We're ready to launch here, but we're nowhere near Skegness.
We're about 20 nautical miles down the coast, actually in the north of Norfolk.
Skegness, of course, is in Lincolnshire.
Such meticulous planning should guarantee the absolute secrecy of our mission.
But then our boat turns up.
The small sailing vessel we'd asked Rory to organise is, in fact, a gigantic, 80-foot, bright yellow landing craft.
While the crew try their best to hide it, I attempt to draw attention away from our sea-born ambition, by pretending we're making a very different film.
Dad's Army, scene four, take two.
Action.
It's been over 40 years, but even so, the adventures of Walmington, the people who populated this mythical town, are still very much alive in the hearts and minds of the people who live here.
And the locals say that if you come here late at night, the sound of the water gently lapping in this harbour, seems to be saying, "They don't like it up 'em, Captain Mainwaring".
With the locals suitably confused, and with Susan securely in the hold, I disguise myself and sneak aboard, our monstrous secret intact.
But as soon as we leave our quiet mooring, our giant yellow landing craft looms into public view.
We look like a contingent of militant Liberal Democrats, bent on the invasion of Cromer.
It's an unexpected, yet effective, smokescreen.
I'm still wearing my Cornish fisherman's disguise whilst we make our way out of the harbour, just in case anybody spots me and makes the connection between Man Lab and what's going to happen later .
.
and what's going to happen later on.
We can only drop our guard when we clear the headland and reach the open sea.
20 miles distant, a sleepy seaside town has no idea that it'll soon be elevated to the pantheon of myth and legend.
We're now in the middle of The Wash.
This is the shadowy pools where crowns were hurled as armies fled, as WB Yeats put it.
King John's jewels are down there somewhere.
I think I can afford to take off the Cornish smuggler disguise.
Our divers are almost ready, Susan is still under wraps there.
Let's make a monster.
What we have here is the eye of the monster.
It's actually made out of half a tennis ball with a bit of white paint put on it.
But from a distance, obviously, this will look extremely convincing.
Anybody will see that and say, "Yes, yes, that's a monster.
" 'But while we scurry about getting Susan ship-shape, 'we receive some worrying news from north of the border.
' 'The Scots, it seems, have launched a pre-emptive strike.
' There's been a very interesting development in the field of aquatic monsters.
There's been a sighting of the Loch Ness Monster.
I'm sure you've seen it, here it is.
Now, the man who took this has been hunting for Nessie for over a quarter of a century, and when he finally sees it, he takes one low resolution picture, which he says was from the back of his small boat and the monster was something like a quarter of a mile away.
But you can see from this picture, this is very close indeed, and he's clearly in something like the crow's nest of HMS Victory.
It's obviously rubbish, we know it's rubbish, the American tourists that flood in know it's rubbish.
But it's a lovely myth, and who can blame them? This sort of thing actually makes millions of pounds for that area of Scotland.
And when Scotland devolves, none of this will come to us, they will float off northwards with their monster, and what will we be left with? Nothing, except that.
What we're doing is not dishonest, it's no more dishonest than this, we're just helping Skegness along a bit.
After three hours, our target, like Brighton, hoves into view.
I'm back in disguise.
We've got to get going quite soon, otherwise we're going to draw attention to ourselves.
I might start some fishing in a minute.
We're 400 yards from the shore, the divers are ready, the wind is favourable.
Our self-propelled, mild steel, two-part, camouflaged creature with tennis ball eyes is about to re-write economic history.
She shall smash the long-held monster monopoly of our Celtic cousins, and wrestle jobs and cash from Nessie's weakened jaws.
As Susan is towed into position, we wish her godspeed.
Go forth, oh, monster of Skegness, go forth and take the myth out of Scotland.
It's looking pretty inconspicuous at the moment.
It's hard to see what's happening, but there's little evidence of panic on the beach.
The only hard information comes from a support team that's nearly as far from the monster as we are.
We know that the monster surfaced.
One of the diver's heads appeared at one point, but apparently it looked like part of the monster.
So now, we've got to get the monster back on board this boat without anybody seeing that we're putting a monster back on board a boat.
And that's all we need.
I mean, it only takes one person to have photographed it or made a short piece of film of it, and we're good.
Less actually is more with aquatic sea monsters.
20 minutes later, the divers return, and I can tell from their faces that something has gone horribly wrong.
The dive boat appears to be missing a very important passenger.
Have we lost a bit? Have you lost half the monster? Where has it gone? It's gone down somewhere.
Getting into the rib, clipped it on the side, andit must have come off or something.
Have you lost the PSV, as well? Yes, yes.
- It's all gone? - Yes.
- How deep was it where it? - Not that deep.
- What, two metres? There was a big current.
We didn't know where anybody was.
So the whole head of the monster is off? How far off the beach do you think it is? 'It's a devastating turn of events.
' With Susan lost to Davy Jones, our hopes for a monster-led Skegness-related economic miracle seem sunk without trace.
And that seemed to be the end of that, but actually, it wasn't.
You see, in a heartfelt tribute to our tragically lost monster, one of our beach crew decided to upload the only existing footage we had of Susan in action, shortly before her head fell off.
The crew were unprepared and, as a result, the footage was shaky, blurry and indistinct.
In short, it was perfect.
Slowly, views started to increase, and before we knew it, we were into the hundreds.
Comments started appearing, theories flying around as to what this strange and shoddily-piloted shape could be.
And then we hit the headlines.
The local Skegness paper picked up on the story, and suddenly Susan was front page news.
The views went into the thousands, other websites started linking to our video, and conspiracy theories got even more outlandish.
"It's Nessie on her holidays, you dumbasses.
" "Driftwood.
" "This is quite clearly a basking shark.
" Susan was snowballing.
The national papers, led by the Daily Mail, caught wind of our monster.
Skegness monster sights started appearing up and down the country.
Got an email that came in after yesterday's show from a listener who lives up in Skegness.
If you go on YouTube, just type in "Skegness monster".
I was sceptical at first.
Now I'm not so sure.
I'm just looking at it, and I'm at that 29, 30 second bit.
- That is some kind of monster.
- No, Christian! This is the North Sea.
There's all sorts of things out there happening all the time.
That looks like a head.
It's flotsam and jetsam, that's all it is.
It's bits of wood.
It's a sightseeing thing, ain't it, just seeing is believing.
There's a bit that looks like a head and a tail.
That is a sea monster of some kind.
And then, Susan went global.
'What we had just about written off as a colossal failure 'had somehow become one of the biggest successes 'we've had on Man Lab.
' "I do not know, I am difficult to determine," says a man from Japan.
"Driftwood.
" "I know buffalo timber.
Daft bouncers.
Chips.
" On our last count, the first and final voyage of Susan was on course to break a million views.
And even the economy of Skegness was on a slow but significant upturn.
Earlier, a person did come up and they did ask me about a sea monster.
They bought a 99, anyway, so if people keep coming and looking for a sea monster and buy 99s, I'm happy.
That's a 99 that would still be in the freezer without Susan.
The mayor is absolutely delighted.
I welcome the Skegness monster, and thank you very much, Mr Monster, for actually giving us the added value of people's interest in our resort.
Have you seen our monster's head? Perhaps you'd like to help us find it.
If so, do write to us.
And remember to mark your subject line, "Desperately Seeking Susan".
That was Man Lab.
We hope you enjoyed watching it.
And here to play us out for the final time this series, with Theme from Man Lab, The King's Big Band.
Thank you for watching and goodbye.
BAND PLAYS "Theme From Man Lab"