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Scrapheap Challenge
1998 · TV series · 52 min episodes · 12 seasons
Scrapheap Challenge is an engineering game show produced by RDF Media and broadcast on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom. In the show, teams of contestants had 10 hours in which to build a working machine that could do a specific task, using materials available in a scrapheap. The format was exported to the United States, where it was known as Junkyard Wars as a completely different TV series. The US show was also produced by RDF Media, and was originally shown on The Learning Channel. Repeats have aired on another Discovery network, the Science Channel.
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3 comments on Hacker News
I didn't downvote, but I wanted to add this:
Many years ago, I was staying with my then-girlfriend and her parents. Her mother, deciding to prove to me that I was sexist and prejudiced because I'm a male, started by talking about a TV show (Scrapheap Challenge) where teams built machinery out of pre-selected scrap. The show starred a male comedian as one presenter, and a female as the other.
To underscore that I was sexist, she told me that one of the presenters was a qualified engineer - and took my surprise to mean that I assumed it was Robert Llewellyn, smugly announcing that it was the woman.
What she mistook was my surprise that either of the presenters was a qualified engineer. I expected the engineers to be off-camera, advising the teams. Ultimately, I would have been far more surprised to learn that Robert Llewellyn, an accomplished comedian as well as a television actor, is an engineer than any given woman.
It seems to me that those who present evidence of gender bias can be quite selective in the constructs used to demonstrate this bias.
I think a great comparison would be between the British tv show "Scrapheap Challenge", and "real world" engineering.
In the show, teams have to compete, over a period of 3 days, to build specific vehicles (e.g. amphibious cars, remote control tanks, light aircraft) out of what they can find in a (well stocked) scrapheap. The vehicles are invariably unsafe, hastily put together, and look you think they'd look after being made out of scrap. Generally however, each vehicle actually performs the task its made for.
If you took any one of the competitors on scrapheap challenge, and dropped them into (say) Lockheed-Martin, they'd undoubtably flounder (at least initially). The skills required to hack together an aeroplane in 3 days, are entirely different from the set of skills required to design an f22.
It's interesting comparing the text of this report from CNN with the text of the BBC report submitted here earlier:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2921195
According to the BBC the spacecraft was lost, according to CNN it crashed. It reminds me of the different titling of some TV shows. The UK program "Scrapheap Challenge" was renamed to "Junkyard Wars." No longer a challenge, the media decided that the US audience reacts better to a war.
The language also sometimes reflects the expected audience knowledge, just as the "Philosopher's Stone" becoming the "Sorcerer's Stone" in the US version of the first Harry Potter book.
In these times of increasingly international business, we are perhaps reminded that our web sites and advertising material might need to take these sorts of differences into account. I've frequently found some US web sites to be overly brash, or strident, but perhaps they're just catering for different demographics.
Any other observations?