I have dabbled in various forms of content creation and had a few TV experiences over the years. Most of my YouTube adventures are now forgotten, but I took a serious step towards growing my own audience in late 2024. I built a “Giant Lego Christmas Tree” and documented the entire process on a new channel. If you’re on TikTok or Instagram, there’s a chance you saw something about it, as the algorithm had a field day and sent several clips into the millions of views!
I also made a casual little video as I built some toys, dubbed “Battle Tractors” for youngsters in our family.
– Masters of Reinvention –
Last summer I filmed a new TV show, called Masters of Reinvention, for U&Yesterday. Airing from March in 2025, I was one of several “experts” (shucks!) brought in by the show’s host to build a plethora of totally mad contraptions in a dedicated workshop-shed. Filmed in the summer of 2024 over several months, the show puts me on the spot as I try to crank out everything from boats to pedal-powered white goods! After what feels like a lost decade for engineering TV, it was fantastic to be part of what will hopefully become a regular series 🙂
– Robots, etc –
I was a competitor on all three reboot series of BBC’s Robot Wars. The show was hosted by Dara Ó Briain and Angela Scanlon in 2016 and 2017. I was also the roboteering knowhow for Paralympian Kadeena Cox for the show’s celebrity special.
Robot Wars was my first experience in front of TV cameras, and boy, those early interviews were hard! Being on the show represents a lot for me, because its original run was such a huge part of my childhood, and because the exposure I had from the opportunity to show off my engineering work has given me a career.
I took my robot shenanigans to the US for BattleBots in Las Vegas. For the show’s 2022 season I joined “Big Dill”, an existing team made up of friends in the community, which presented a different perspective on the production experience.
I have also travelled to Shanghai a total of 5 times to film Chinese shows “King of Bots” and “This is Fighting Robots”. The latter was, put simply, totally mad. Produced for Youku, China’s Netflix/YouTube mega-platform, the show had tens of millions of viewers and took place in what may as well have been the Star Wars universe. I built a machined called Sandstorm (沙尘暴) which became a favourite, meaning for a surreal few months, I had a major following on Weibo, the nation’s Twitter equivalent.
Behind the camera, among other things, I have crewed for a Channel 4 show hosted by Richard Hammond, smashed up a hatchback in a north-London carpark with Matilda for a Robot Wars advert, and have had a number of local radio moments, such as for BBC Shropshire in 2020.
I have had a few appearances on the front pages of sites like Reddit and Imgur, which is always a wild ride. In 2016, a flurry of articles were written about my journey into engineering without traditional education, such as this slightly sensational Business Insider piece.