Hi, I'm Matt, I don't…
I'm Gary!
I don't trust them to do a sensible intro now.
No, just listen to him.
-Him! -He speaks in sentences.
This is Tabletop Time Machine 2, we're still in the kitchen.
The Revenge!
One speaks the truth, the other only lies.
Watch the thing.
This is the last thing we're filming today after a long time.
And this the mic stand we ordered.
The reason my camera shot's been slightly high up all through this,
is because we're down a mic stand and we hoped that Amazon Prime would get it here.
And, no, we're rolling.
-We'll use it the next series. -Welcome to the provinces, Londoners.
Here we go again.
This is the Technical Difficulties and this is the Tabletop Time Machine.
It's a kitchen.
Delving into the temporal depths today, as ever joining me are Chris Joel.
-Hello. -Gary Brannan.
We know what it is, we know who did it, but for God's sake, tell us where you did it.
And Matt Gray.
♫ Hi! ♫
Our kitchen time machine has crash-landed somewhere and somewhen in the past.
And we need to charge up the fact batteries to get out of here.
-Ah, yes! -Fact batteries.
-The factories. -Roll with it, okay?
-It's what we've got. -Just roll with it.
The first challenge is to work out where and when we are.
And I will start by telling you that our time machine seems to have been attracted
to an enormous mass of concrete.
Is it the 60s?
Yeah, it could be a Le Corbusian nightmare.
It could be, is it Coventry?
Are you just going to slate a load of towns now?
Is it any university built in the 60s?
No, no. It's a much bigger mass of concrete.
Are we in Roman...
Rome?
Roman Rome?
Not in that non-Roman Rome.
Welcome to French Rome.
Well, not technically because anything from Rome is technically Roman.
And then I was distinguishing the period which is the Roman period.
Welcome to British Britain.
Well, no, you'd have Norman Britain or Anglo-Scandinavian Britain.
-He's got a point, you know. -It's just the way I'm sat.
Oh, the old ones, the old ones. Are we somewhere nuclear related?
Ooh, no. And I will tell you that the scanners read nothing above normal in the air.
We've got scanners!
The time machine has everything.
Oh, so we're before the 50s?
-Yes, we are. -But are we within a drive of Las Vegas?
Yes.
Are we at that big f***-off dam?
-Oh, yeah. -Fact!
As the scanner that you can't see on your camera slides back to reveal...
The big f***-off dam.
The big Hoover Dam.
-That's the one. -Fact.
Fact. So the … is it a fact?
Well, it's called the Hoover Dam, so it's probably a fact.
Although it wasn't called that then.
Is that because the president hadn't hoovered anything yet?
I was going to say, was it called the Vacuum Dam?
Of which, which president?
-Hoover. -Fact.
This is brilliant.
Let's charge those batteries(!)
Some days the fact batteries almost charge themselves.
-Does anyone know what it's currently called? -Is it Three Rivers?
No, that's t'Chinese one, isn't it?
-No, that's Three Gorges. -Three Gorges.
Three Gorges is the one in China.
"Gorgeous!"
Finished in the 21st century.
Colorado something? No...
No, but the Colorado … why is Colorado connected to it? Because it's in Nevada.
-Isn't that the river? -Fact.
It's the big Colorado-stopper.
Yeah, I mean the batteries aren't charging off that, but yeah.
You need to look at something we can't see and go,
"Well, the batteries don't seem to want to charge on that fact."
If only we had some batteries on clear display in shots.
Is it in Arizona?
-Okay, you're… -Is it on the border?
Yes, between?
Nevada and Arizona.
Fact.
We got there in the end, like, all the words were there,
just not necessarily in the right order.
Boulder Dam.
Boulder. Oh, I've heard of that before.
I wouldn't mind, but, a) I've been driven over it,
and, b) while driving to the Grand Canyon.
Hang on, you've been driven over it, what, like cattle?
-Yeah. -"Get on, Gary, get on!"
That's what happens when you to go Vegas for a week.
-"Gon' sell your hide in Arizona!" -S*** happens.
I was … we were driving out on a bus tour to the Grand Canyon,
and while we were going they showed us a very long and detailed film
about the construction of the Hoover Dam, of which I can currently remember...
no facts.
It's near Boulder City, Nevada, which is why it was called Boulder Dam.
… is that Boulder City, is that one that sprung up while they were building the dam?
No, didn't they demolish it to put the dam there?
Two diverging reasons here, one's creation, the other's destruction.
Fact.
Hey.
The only reason it's there is to house workers contracted to build the Hoover Dam.
-Well, the Boulder. -The Boulder Dam.
Originally it was going to be at Boulder Canyon which is about 20 miles north of the dam.
The original plan was also not to use the massive concrete construction.
-What were they just going to do? -Explode it!
Fact.
They were going to explode the canyon to block it?
They were going to explode the walls of Boulder Canyon into the river and use that as the dam.
But wouldn't that make it wider so then it would go round it?
So they rejected it on the grounds of unproven technique.
"We came up with this idea, and it turns out it's a s*** idea."
Despite the fact that people have been really successfully building dams
for quite a long time,
someone sat there and thought "I can do this better with more explosions".
-Yes. -That's human history, let's face it.
By the way if we're talking when, I don't think…
Yeah, that's what I was thinking about.
I think we're talking 1930s...
because it's post-Great Depression and it was a Hoovernomics-based thing to create work.
Fact.
Oh, like all the highway reconstruction and stuff
where they stimulated the economy by creating jobs.
Are you listening?
Yeah. Satire. We have a lot of unemployed...
Not so much satire, just historical fact.
We have a lot of unemployed people, we need to stimulate the economy.
Let's give them something to do.
Yeah, effectively.
We don't need a dam, let's just build one so some people have something to work for.
Well, they did need the dam, that'd been on the cards for a while.
But the thing was, when they put it first on the cards they said,
"Well, there's not enough people to do this."
Suddenly, lots of unemployed people. Unrolls plans for dam and goes, "We could."
The money gets circulated back into the economy, they want consumer goods...
And we also need a Las Vegas.
Mmm...
So, okay, so yeah, we're talking, I know, okay, 1929, it's Hoover, isn't it...
One of these things that's kicked on by Hoover
who decides he's going to institute all these public works,
so I'm saying '35?
-Spot on. Fact. -Oh!
I can hear those batteries charging.
So what I'm doing here is I'm looking through other things in 1935
that are not immediately war related.
That we were a little bit preoccupied to have heard anything about.
Certainly, something was invented in February that year
that we could all be sitting around the table doing right now.
Hungry Hungry Hippos.
You're on the right lines.
-Monopoly. -Yes. Fact.
Parker Brothers began selling Monopoly in 1935.
Thus setting the stage for decades of bitter family resentment.
I was going to say.
Well, it was designed to show the evils of capitalism, wasn't it?
-Yeah. -Yeah.
-Fact. -Yes.
"I'm going to call this game Absolute Financial ****itude."
"Can we have 'Monopoly' instead?" "Well, on your head be it."
"I think mine was better."
"Might go misunderstood."
What was first used in Daventry?
Cheese.
What was first used in Daventry?
I was expecting a country though.
Hot water.
I'm going to emphasise, 'what' was first used?
-Soap. -The spoon.
'Watt' was first…
Electricity.
Something along those lines, it was by Robert Watson Watt,
who first demonstrated something in Daventry in February 1935.
-Daventry? -Daventry.
Is there somewhere in Daventry that specifically...
-TV? -Ooh, no...
It was, it involved that kind of … there was certainly a broadcast signal involved.
Was it the recording of something, like recording something electronically,
like radio signals or something like that?
Ooh, you're very close with radio signals.
Radar?
-Fact. -Oh.
Why Daventry?
I believe that's where his workshop was.
Is it some kind of government research laboratory?
BBC Broadcast Station.
-The BBC rented radar? -Whoa, radar.
They had a short wave broadcast station there,
so that's where he broadcast his radar tests from.
Okay.
What did Bill W start in June 1935?
-Bill W. -Bill W.
W, are you just masking his second name here?
Well, that's what he's known as, he was actually William G Wilson.
Oh, so it's not a water bill then?
Bill W(!)
I mention this because if you ever go on a cruise or something like that,
you will see that there is a meeting regularly in the cruise calendar,
marked as the Friends of Bill W.
Alcoholics Anonymous.
Yes.
Ah, really? Wait a minute, on a cruise?
Because cruises tend to be what?
Extremely alcoholic.
All you can sup aren't they, really?
Fact, absolutely. So if you are being taken on a cruise and you are in Alcoholics Anonymous,
it is very handy to know when the meetings of them are.
Must be awkward if you are someone called Bill W.
Called Bill W, yes.
"Hey, guys!"
"Hello, hello. I understand this is in my honour."
"Why the long faces?"
"I brought champagne!"
July 1935, another invention first in Oklahoma City.
And it's something that's just near by the side of the road quite a lot.
Tornado-proof road signs.
In Oklahoma!
-Shout, yeah. -That's not unreasonable.
But this is the first working version of this, it was…
Traffic light.
-There's been a few… -They're a lot earlier I think.
Roadside emergency telephone.
Same kind of height, same kind of build, but it's not really there to help you.
-To hinder you. -To hinder you.
Roadside machine gun nest...?
Is it one of those…
Again, we're going to skip over most of Europe at this point,
that's all I'm going to say.
Well, they were being installed.
A speed camera.
What would that be like?!
He's in the frame, he definitely wasn't speeding.
Yes, a bloke pops up with one of those big cameras with the big flash bulbs on top.
It's the same size, it's a similar shape and it is not there to help you.
If our time machine happened to park up next to one then we might be getting a bit of a bill.
-Oh, parking meters. -Yes.
I'll be damned if I'm being charged for my kitchen being on a side road.
-Doesn't even count as a moving vehicle, does it?
-No. -I mean, yeah, it's a planning issue.
Oh, but that could take months in the courts
and hopefully by then we've charged some f***ing batteries.
Well, let's just put a little bit of money in the meter just in case, just a tiny little.
No, they can bollocks!
Yeah, they can clamp us, but we're in a time machine kitchen now.
How do you clamp a kitchen?
How do you clamp a time machine? You can just go back to before it was clamped.
Not if it's clamped.
Whoa!
Why would they have time machine clamps?
For clamping time machines!
Because the amount of times people will go back to that time.
-Just for the parking meters. -You'd work out how to clamp them.
Bloody HG Wells, coming in here.
In the time machine can we not just have a little bit of something in the drawer,
we can just put in a parking meter and then my conscience is fine, alright. Jesus!
But we need currencies from all times, places and…
Fortunately we've got a time machine.
September 1935, there is an airspeed record set in the H-1 Racer.
(Oh, H-1...)
Yes, and that H is important, who might have been piloting that?
Oh, that's…
-Chuck Yeager. -No, it's Hughes, Howard Hughes.
-Fact. -It is, isn't it. I was thinking he didn't...
Yes. What did Chuck Yeager do?
-Broke the sound barrier. -Fact.
I was going to say, 1935, f***-all!
Well, yes. Probably went "gah?"
Oh, no, because '47 for the sound barrier, so he was probably in high school.
He'd have been going on about doing something dangerous in planes.
-Possibly. -Well, the thing is, with Chuck Yeager it
was basically a case of can we find the craziest, yet most competent person to
-throw at the sound barriers. -Yeah, but that was '46/'47,
so he probably wasn't enlisted in the military,
because he was quite young when he broke the sound barrier.
He'd have been the kid on the floor,
he'd have been a young man going when "one day I'm going to break the sound barrier".
Motorbikes, horses, something like that.
Can't do that, you can't break the sound barrier on a horse.
-Oh, yes. -If any man could, it's Chuck Yeager.
True, yeah.
I would pay to watch him try.
The H-1 Racer was the last airspeed record setting aircraft to be a certain thing.
Wasn't it manual control rather than assisted?
Open cockpit.
Blimey!
Have a think about who else would be building aircraft for speed soon after that.
Oh, was it the first one done for fun, not for war?
It was the last one done for non-military purposes.
Yeah, fact, it was the last private plane to beat the air speed record.
What holds it now?
So SR-71 for jet powered, atmospheric,
Yep.
Tupolev Tu-95 for prop driven, callsign Rare Bear, no...
It's the Gloud something or Grumbly Bastard or whatever.
Yeah. Yeah, Tu-95 Tupolev Grumbly Bastard.
To use its NATO codename.
Which is interesting because it uses contrarotating props on turbo props.
And the propeller tips exceed the speed of sound.
Which is why it's called Grumbly Bastard or something,
-because it's really f****** loud. -Bloody noisy.
And then I think the X-15's still got the rocket propelled, though NASA
might have gone faster with one of the lifting body designs.
I mean, the batteries are charged.
Which means we are taking off with the lever I don't have.
The fact batteries are full, we are jumping to another time and place,
as our time machine takes off we say thank you again
to Chris Joel, to Gary Brannan, to Matt Gray.
I love those fact batteries.
I've been Tom Scott, we'll see you another time.
Alright, time out.
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