AWOOGA!
There is a long tradition in Nottingham of letting off small amounts of explosives
Let's start things off with a bang - an actual bang - with a video from the University of Nottingham's Periodic Videos channel. The channel itself has become famous all over the world and has made a global superstar out of The Prof AKA Professor Martyn Poliakoff CBE, who has starred in many of the videos uploaded to the channel.
In this particular video, the Professor - with the help of a friend - continues a long-held tradition at the University which involves setting off a small explosion on top of a piece of aluminium which itself is on top off a coin. This time however, things are a little different as the coin in question is the new £1 coin, which came into circulation earlier this year and it not only has 12 sides, but it is made of 2 pieces: an inner circle and an outer ring. So the question is will such a coin survive the explosion? The answer lies below...
In this particular video, the Professor - with the help of a friend - continues a long-held tradition at the University which involves setting off a small explosion on top of a piece of aluminium which itself is on top off a coin. This time however, things are a little different as the coin in question is the new £1 coin, which came into circulation earlier this year and it not only has 12 sides, but it is made of 2 pieces: an inner circle and an outer ring. So the question is will such a coin survive the explosion? The answer lies below...
Whatever you do, DON'T try this at home. Try it at a friend's home, instead.
Even for those of us with our lives at stake
From starting off with a bang, we now carry on with a wobble, as we go back to February 13th 1978 and BBC1, as the Blake's 7 episode "Mission To Destiny" is being transmitted throughout the UK when the VT machine suffers a catastrophic head clog (when the magnetic head that reads the information on the tape get clogged up with various kinds of gunk) live on air.
I know these things aren't of great interest to everyone, but I always like seeing such examples of on-air breakdowns and how they were dealt with. It's nice to see how quickly they faded out the stricken tape and went into breakdown mode, especially as some channels these days don't even seem to bother to correct large technical faults, let alone apologise for them. You can only begin to imagine the operation that sprung into action the moment the picture was faded to the "TEMPORARY FAULT" caption. It has been suggested that the VT engineer actually had to remove the head and put in another one - hence the amount of time spent with a couple of captions and some library music.
Did you work in the BBC VT department at the time this happened? Do you know what had to be done in this case? If so, please do get in touch.
I could have farted that in
Next, we have a clip from long-running BBC show Room 101 from it's previous single-guest incarnation, presented by Paul Merton. In this video, Newsreader and presenter Kirsty Young has chosen people with no volume dial as a pet hate and to help demonstrate this, Paul brings on the legend that is Brian Blessed to undertake a spot of Snooker commentary...
Here come the lizards
And we end this week's journey with an old favourite of mine from Alexei Sayle as he sings about the dangers of drinking. This clip comes from his sketch show called "Stuff". It has sadly fallen a little by the wayside over time and even the DVD releases of all 3 series have long been deleted, so if you have never seen this show, I highly suggest you keep an eye out for it in the usual places...
That's your lot for now.
Bugger off..
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