Guy Martin - The World’s Fastest Van, Channel 4, Monday at 9pm
You may remember Guy Martin racing across the Nevada desert at 165mph in his Ford Transit van, well he’s back again to see if he can get it going even faster.
This time it was the Nurburgring in Germany which Formula 1 stopped racing in the 1970s because it was too dangerous.
Just the place, then, for a high-sided panel van trying to break the lap record on a track with “decreasing radius” corners. This, we learned from Martin’s Nurburgring expert, is when the turn narrows as you go around, therefore the apex point of the corner is further on from where you would expect it to be and a misjudgement could send you into the wall.
Martin, fortunately, is comfortable at speed. And that’s not just because he made a whole television series named after it. The Grimsby lad has podium places at the Isle of Man TT and raced for a number of Northern Ireland-based road racing motorbike teams.
He retired from racing last year, partially as the result of a serious crash at Dundrod in 2015, but continues to work as a truck mechanic and part-time television presenter.
His combination of machine gun speed talking (he has been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome), intense curiosity about all things mechanical and his avoidance of fame (he turned down Top Gear), has given him a huge following.
And with his long time producer, James Woodroffe, they dream up madcap schemes like this which will interest Guy and produce good content.
For the Nurburgring, a complete rebuild of the van was needed, which suited Guy down to the rear suspension.
He moved the engine from the front to the middle and put in a new cooling system and all manner of go faster bits and bobs.
A bit of concern about the dangerous spots on the track meant a late decision to add a co-driver for cornering advice (the man who holds the motorbike record for the Nurburgring) but it was still Guy with his hands on the steering wheel. And he decided if he was driving a van, the appropriate footwear was work boots.
As to be expected, he took 30 seconds off the van record, but never got the chance to set the all out van speed record on the 2km straight because the engine went on fire.
Nonetheless, the 90-minutes of television sped by in a blur.
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I’ll Get This, BBC 2, Tuesday at 10pm
It wasn’t the worst celebrity show ever, but it was a celebrity show on BBC 2 in the lead up to Newsnight.
Now, there is no reason why BBC 2 has to be a serious channel but is there really a shortage of celebrity stuff on television?
The format for this one is five famous (some more than others) people go to dinner and put their credit cards in the middle of the table. As the courses arrive they play a series of games and the winner of each round removes their card. The last person left pays the bill.
In episode one of six, we had Rylan Clark-Neal, Carol Vorderman, Anton Du Beke, Ellie Taylor and Ed Gamble.
Ed was left with the bill of £589 but despite the gasps of the other contestants when the cheque arrived, do we really think that Ed paid out of his own money? Or that he wasn’t more than compensated by his appearance fee?
Surely the commercial channels are making plenty of this kind of stuff without the BBC wasting our time and money.
