James May's Man Lab (2010) s02e01 Episode Script
Series 2, Episode 1
1 Hello, viewers, and welcome to Man Lab, series 2, where we continue our quest to equip the modern male with all the skills he needs to overcome the obstacles life places in the path of his progress.
Our workshop is fully equipped.
Our kitchen is open.
Our bar is fully stocked.
And most importantly, our sitting area is very, very comfortable indeed.
Excellent! Right, let's get on with something useful.
Man Lab is the crucible of competence, where skills are forged and shoddiness scorned.
It is the shining path of enlightenment that leads us from confusion's murkiness to the stellar heights of a job well done.
I'm handcuffed to Oz Clarke, and an oddly dressed man from Zambia wants to kill me.
Yes, it's map reading.
At first it was a bit of a laugh.
Now they're feeling like they're hunted.
- There's nowhere to hide.
- We just have to go faster.
We practise the precision craft of woodworking and descend into the bowels of England in search of the perfect pool table.
That was well loud! Finally we solve a centuries-old problem: Remembering the names of girls you meet at parties.
- Funny, Funning - Fanning.
- Clare Fanny? - Fanning.
It's excruciating.
But first, a lengthy introduction to a simple question.
Here we have a typical in-car portable satellite navigation system, and it is a marvellous thing.
Really it is.
It's probably the most liberating piece of popular technology to appear during my lifetime, along with the desktop computer and the self-bleeding radiator valve.
In fact it's tempting to think sat nav has rendered the old-school printed Ordnance Survey map completely redundant.
But hang on a minute.
Sat nav is all very well if all you need to know is: "At the next roundabout take the third exit on the left," as if at a roundabout the exit could somehow be on the right.
But what if you had to do some proper navigation? What if, for example, you've just escaped from Dartmoor prison? Dartmoor prison is horrible.
Originally built to house French prisoners during the Napoleonic Wars, it was designed to be even more gruesome than a 19th-century Parisian khazi.
Few inmates have ever escaped, and those who did found themselves on Dartmoor itself, one of the largest wildernesses in England.
Most of them had no way of navigating, and would wander for days until succumbing to starvation, the cold or the treacherous bogland.
This, then, is the sheep-infested canvas against which I, together with TV's Oz Clarke, will stage our very own prison break.
Right, let's make one thing absolutely clear.
Oz and I haven't really escaped from Dartmoor.
Because they won't let us in and They won't let us show you how to get out.
But from now on, this is for real, we're on the run from the prison.
And all we've got is this map smuggled in inside a cake fruit cake by the smell of it, and all we've got on it is the prison here.
- North.
- North here.
Yeah.
- Coordinates.
- Yeah, we don't know what those mean yet.
And a bridge, west, southwest, which we presume is where we've got to go, where Knuckles has left something.
- Knuckles has left us our swag there.
- Yeah.
The first thing we need to do is work out which direction to go in, and we need to know where north is.
You can do this with your watch.
- If you - Stop it.
I'll take it off.
You point the hour hand of your watch, which is set at the right time, at the sun.
- It's nine o'clock.
- But actually you have to work on GMT, and it's British Summer Time, so actually it's eight o'clock.
So point the 8 at the sun.
If you divide the arc between the hour hand and the 12 o'clock position in half, it gives you south.
Not north, south.
So south is over there roughly in a line with those chimneys.
We want to go slightly southwest, pretty much parallel to this wall.
- Agreed? - Absolutely.
- People are on our tail, so we need to go.
- We need to get moving.
OK.
Go.
Let's go.
Oz and I set out for the bridge like two guests fleeing an S&M party.
On the other side of the moor our accomplice is waiting.
In accordance with the rules of prison break films, he's called Knuckles, and he's knocked off a Jag for the getaway.
Knuckles has also left us some vital supplies by the bridge marked on the crude cloth map.
Moving as one, we make the breathless 850-metre dash fuelled by desperation and a yearning for freedom.
So far so good.
Got it.
Good old Knuckles.
Oh, boots! Oh, Knuckles! We now had a decent survival kit for the moors: New boots, orienteering compass and, most pressingly, bolt cutters.
Right, straight off.
Let's do it.
Hang on.
How do you do this? - One of us will have to do one, one the other.
- OK.
You need to push, and then I'll pull again.
Let me see if I can Ah! Now we were free to get our heads around the two most important bits of the swag bag Oh, yes.
some pork, hidden inside a pie, and an OS map.
So we've escaped from Dartmoor Prison, allegedly, using Knuckles' map that he smuggled in with the cake, which has led us to this old railway bridge.
And on the fabric map, as Oz noted earlier, Knuckles has written some coordinates.
They're obviously coordinates - west and north.
West 5401, north 6703.
Yeah, and I've got an Ordnance Survey map here.
And Ordnance Survey maps are one of the great glories of creation.
These maps just tell you absolutely everything.
You only have to look at the map and they give you a complete picture of the place you are.
And presumably we'll find that place on the map, and that's where we go, and that's where Knuckles or Nosher or Cruncher or Fingers is waiting for us in the Jag.
Unfortunately, plotting a path to the getaway car is the least of our worries.
No imaginary break-out goes unpunished on Dartmoor.
A crack team of cross-terrain trackers is unleashed to bring us in, dead or alive.
Their leader, Ian Max Maxwell, is the world's foremost authority on animal tracking, having tracked his first leopard at the age of 8.
He even has his own specialist tracking organisation, codename Shadowhawk.
They could conceivably be a match for Clarke and May.
So we set about decoding the coordinates.
54.
Obviously these big coordinates, the squares, go 53, 54, 55.
- So it's 5401.
It's 54 and a tenth.
- Yeah.
Which is there.
So it's slightly to the right of that line.
5401 is down there.
6703 means it's one third above 67 towards 68, and this is the line of 67, that's the line of 54 That's where we're meeting them.
Look, Knuckles is there! - Unless I am wrong, that's the sign of a pub.
- It is.
It is the sign of a pub.
Knuckles is in the boozer.
What a great incentive for the recently released.
A pub! Between us and it, though, is a vast vista of lakes, woods, bogs, marshes and exposed moorland.
So it makes sense to plot a proper route.
What I've done for the first bit is just plotted a very basic course from where we are to the edge of the woods.
That gives us something to head for, but we can get a bearing for the first bit.
This is where we use our orienteering compass, which has this rotating housing on it.
If you ever need to escape from Dartmoor, here's a quick guide to using an orienteering compass.
Place the edge of your compass along your intended route with the direction of travel arrow pointing the way you want to go.
Turn the compass so the orienteering lines line up with the gridlines on the map, and the north indicator, the two green lines, are pointing north.
Take the compass off the map, and turn the compass until the north needle lines up with the north indicator.
As your compass is now orientated with the map, your direction of travel arrow will point in the direction you need to go.
This arrow on the base shows you where to go.
Somewhere over there is our point, just east of Black Tor.
And that's our first target.
- Yeah.
- Brilliant.
Meanwhile, back at the jail, Max has already picked up our scent.
I've just found some amazing tracks here.
This grass has been trampled down, and that grass is still wet.
That's gold dust to us, because I know now at least within the last couple of hours, someone's been here.
These guys are likely to be wearing trainers.
It doesn't look like a boot.
We're going to nickname this one, and we'll use the nickname on our radios throughout the whole track.
We'll call that Wavy.
It comes round like that.
And this break-off here means that they've just stepped off in that direction.
If they get stuck in the bogs then they're going to really struggle with this kind of footwear on.
- Right.
We need to change our boots, James.
- Yes.
These things we're wearing at the moment will absolutely come to bits in bogs and things, but also we want to change our footprints.
We can tell whether they're getting tired simply because the distance between tracks will close down.
They might then replenish with water, or drink or eat something.
Oh, good old Knuckles.
We know the direction of travel, so there's no point in hanging around.
I want to get on this guy's backside and track him down.
As Oz and I break cover and use our compass to head to our first waypoint, Max is also making use of his surroundings.
Mr Wavy.
Right, let's go.
With the trackers in pursuit, a spotter climbs the highest hill.
He might just be able to pick out two blokes in romper suits.
The chase is on.
Is that it then? You didn't get very far.
No, sir, that isn't it.
Of course it isn't.
We'll be picking the action up later as the miscreants make their way in a south-southwesterly direction.
Ah! Now, the other day we were all sitting around in the Man Lab Arms when suddenly Simmy said, "Does anybody fancy a game of pool?" Well, of course we did, because we'd had a few by then so of course we'd be brilliant at it.
But as we went to rack 'em up we discovered a problem.
We don't actually have a pool table.
Never mind, though.
This is Man Lab, so we'll make one.
If you've ever played pool, you will know that the vital attributes of a pool table are that it is perfectly flat and perfectly level.
Therefore pool tables tend to be substantial, weighty structures.
I mean they're not feeble occasional tables.
They are pool tables all of the time.
Wood is the favoured material, so that is what we're going to use.
And here is a piece of our wood pretty much as it was hewn from the merry greenwood of Olde England.
And we're going to use it like this, largely unchanged, for the legs, because let's face it, nature's spent maybe up to a century forming for us this perfect wooden component.
Why saw it up into dull old planks? Even though we've opted to leave the wood looking as natural as possible, we still have to strip off the bark.
That means we spend a very satisfying but slightly medieval afternoon working at the logs with chisels until the aromatic chestnut is exposed.
The real issue with our naturalistic table, though, is yet to come.
Here we are in the deliveries-in area of the Man Lab and we do have a problem, because no two pieces of our wood are the same.
More to the point, no piece of wood we have is straight and square, because of course nature abhors regularity, straightness and squareness.
They are mere conceits of civilisation.
They are vanities.
So the problem we have is that we have to work out where to put the bits of wood so they are in the best relationship to each other so that we do come out with something square and true.
And Simmy and I have come up with this, I think, rather excellent little system.
We name a nominal north on the floor, which I'm going to do here.
We're going to call that north We've selected a unique log for each leg of our table.
We mark each one with north and the number.
That establishes their position and orientation.
Next, we mark on the irregular logs the corners of the regular pub pool table that must lie in there somewhere.
Through geometric cunning, we hope to wrest engineering order from the chaos of nature.
If it was a chair, machine-made on a computer-controlled wood lathe, you could make a thousand legs and a thousand bases and they'd all go together, cos that's the nature of mass production.
But you can't do that with this.
This is woodland craft skill.
So, using this rustic 4000rpm carbide tip chop saw, we cut the longitudinal and cross members to the right length.
Then we set about chiselling the joints that will hold the table together.
Here are the joints.
These are very simple mortise and tenon joints.
That is the tenon.
That is the mortise cut in there.
They are the same at all four corners.
What's unique about each joint is this shape we're about to cut.
That is the, ahem, interpenetration between that piece of wood and that one.
And they of course are unique shapes.
Once we've got that in place we'll be ready to offer up the slate, which we don't actually have yet.
That is why Rory is standing here like a virgin teenager at a wedding reception, ready for me to say, "Rory, it's time to go and get the slate.
" Rory, it's time to go and get the slate.
- OK.
- Off you go.
So Rory slips in his favourite CD and off he goes, 323 miles up the road, all the wayto the Lake District.
This rugged mountainous landscape is home to England's last working underground slate mine at Honister Pass.
The artisans of Honister have been mining and shaping slate into everything from roof tiles to kitchen worktops, for the last 300 years.
It's Rory's job to journey into the mines and extract the perfect piece for our pool table.
Meanwhile, with the final, ahem, interpenetration joint cut and assembled the frame is done, so now we need to make the support for the forthcoming slate.
This will have to be absolutely flat and level.
Yay! This is the mysterious coming-together of the square and true and the not square and true.
This is where we'll find out if our great philosophical thinking bears any fruit, or if we're just going to have really a very long-lasting bonfire, cos this is pretty dense stuff.
So we set about cutting precise notches in the frame to take the support.
These have to be equidistant above the floor, which is level, so the slate will be too.
And talking of the slate it's still part of the Lake District, but not for long.
Not with Rory Barker, the most feared slate prospector of the southeast, ready to go to work.
Rory ventures underground, wearing an expression that suggests it's where he just came from.
How is it all rigged up here? I see these wires come out.
We're using a bit of dynamite here to take a bit of the roof out.
It's set off electronically.
You press a button and it sends a charge through to the detonators.
- How loud is it going to be? - Oh, it's just a little bang.
- Just like a little pop.
- Right.
That was well loud! - Why didn't you put your ear muffs on? - He said not to! Simon said not to put them on.
Said I didn't need to! Still, the unwitting victim of the oldest practical joke in mining has done us proud, and this chunk of Cumbria is destined to become the soul of our table just as soon as it's been milled to the dimensions in Rory's notebook.
Back at Man Lab, the side rails have been cut and notched to take the clamps for the cushions.
Well done.
It's only taken you three days.
Very nice.
The moment of truth.
If Rory's measurements are wrong, it's back to square one for us and the job centre for him.
- Lovely! - Wow! So, with the slate in position, Sim is able to complete the holes for the pockets, hewn out of solid chestnut.
Now we can cover our slate in glorious blue baize, taking care to avoid wrinkles.
It's gone wrong really, but not disastrously.
All that remains is to fit the rails and the cushions, and I'm ready to take a test shot.
Luckily, Simmy has a wire-based solution.
Oh, yes! Simmy, that is a thing of beauty.
What a table this is.
We've preserved the natural beauty of raw timber but dignified it with the discipline of geometry.
We've cut a perfect playing surface from the mountains of England, and then sheathed it in that blue baize the bloke from the haberdashery shop hadn't been able to shift for years.
But the most terrifying job is yet to come - marking it up with an indelible felt tip pen.
Director Tom loses the toss.
- Are you ready? - Yes.
Is there anything you need to say to your family before you do this? No.
They'd never speak to me again anyway if it went wrong.
Right.
Slowly.
Evenly.
Don't panic.
Yeah! With the symbolic D filled in, our table is finally finished.
This only took seven days.
Now we're going to inaugurate it with a game between me and Sim.
I won the toss, so I break, for the very first time ever on the Man Lab pool table.
Yee-hah! Pretty good.
Meanwhile there are still two men on the run on Dartmoor.
Oz and I are fleeing from Dartmoor prison, heading across the moor for a rendezvous with our getaway driver, Knuckles.
But between us and him is a wilderness of rough terrain made up of lakes, woods, bogs and marshes.
We've broken our chains and changed our boots.
But in hot pursuit are a team of expert manhunters.
As we race towards the cover of some distant woods, a spotter is sent to the top of a nearby hill to watch for any sign of us.
The problem we have here is that we're only just out of sight of the tor over there where we suspect they're looking out for us.
There's no way round the problem of having to cover quite a large area of open ground.
Well, why don't we try and apply Naismith's Rule? We've got to cover that ground as fast as humanly possible.
We need to get over round the corner of that hill, over towards the trees.
Now Naismith's Rule is one of these rules which says that you can cover three miles in an hour.
And also you have to allow an extra half an hour for going up 300 metres.
So technically we're going down, so we can take a little off that.
And we've got something like two miles and a bit to go.
I reckon we should say to ourselves we won't allow more than about 40 minutes to get there.
I'd like to do it in half an hour.
- So half an hour to the corner of that hill? - Maximum half an hour.
If they're looking in this direction they're sure to see us.
Let's follow the contour a bit.
We'll make quicker progress following the contour.
A fundamental rule of walking in the countryside is follow the contours.
Contours are lines of equal elevation above sea level.
These decreasing circles represent hills, with each line ten metres higher than the last.
So the closer the circles are, the steeper the hill.
Oz and I should be able to use them to zigzag through the bogs on the lowest path to stay out of sight of the spotter.
Onto here.
Onto that and then onto the stone again.
We are, after all, consummate outdoorsmen.
And then onto another stone and then up.
But Max and his team are just 40 minutes behind and gaining fast.
OK.
Going to lift this up, but basically I can tell this is really fresh cos it's got a human hair from an arm on top of it.
There we go.
They've changed their boots, the sneaky little devils.
That's what we've been following.
And that's what we've been following.
Mr Wavy.
Yeah, we saw that outside the prison.
They've been here a while.
Water.
These have been used, haven't they? There we go.
They've been used once.
And you see that silvering there? That links up.
I think these guys have just got out of their handcuffs.
OK.
Let's go, guys.
Yeah, as quick as we can.
OK.
A track.
Good stuff.
And because they've changed shoes we know this links into that boot that was there before.
Let's give it a nickname.
Pineapple Boy.
And the reason we call it Pineapple Boy is because the segments inside that track look like pineapple segments.
Back on the moors and trying to stay low, Oz and I suddenly hit a big problem.
A road.
We're not just exposed to the spotter here.
Passing motorists might see sunlight reflected from Oz's head.
We're about to cross the road, which is obviously very exposed, so the trick is to cross it at right angles as quickly as possible.
- Yeah.
- OK.
Watch it.
Sheep! Tango one, tango one, tango two.
Yeah, I've got two people wandering on the valley floor.
The tor's up there.
No, this side.
Here.
I said here! Yeah, I think we've got them.
Down left of the second peak, just against the back.
Pretty much where Jamie's standing.
That's them.
OK.
What we've got to do now Because we've got an eyeball on these people, we're just going to move very quickly.
So Max and his trackers are striking out from the bridge across the moor, and although Oz and I have a small lead, there's a long way to go and we're completely exposed.
We can't even hide against the side of a hill.
Just so obvious, a couple of blokes racing across open country like this, I mean if they're up on the tor looking for us, north, south, east, west, 25% of the time they'll be looking in our direction.
And so, if they're looking in our direction 25% of the time they've got to have seen us.
We were out in open country for about ten minutes.
They'd have had two-and-a-half minutes of looking directly at our backs flailing across that hassocky bog.
Thanks to Oz, I'd fully grasped the difficult concept of 25% of something.
Anyway, there's some good news up ahead.
This symbol on an OS map is a tree.
When you get lots of them, you get woods.
I think we're going to need to find somewhere and make ourselves look a little less obvious.
This aqueduct is really useful, because an aqueduct will show us precisely the way down.
And obviously the aqueduct has to go downhill, but it also means it's dead easy for them to track.
So I mean, we need to find some way of actually making ourselves less conspicuous.
It won't be too bad when we get to the trees and things.
Well, the worst thing is the boiler suit, but I can't take it off because I've only got my boxers and my T-shirt on, and if I run around like that I'll get arrested.
No, you won't, not out here, because the point is, at something like 800 yards you would look like a stick.
So they wouldn't even know what you were wearing.
It's actually 500 yards before you can see the colour of people's clothing.
Now if you want to keep the boiler suit on and we shove, kind of, I don't know, mud, that kind of stuff, cover ourselves in mud, that will massively improve our ability to blend into the background.
Somehow the wine expert managed to make this sound like a good idea.
You seriously say I've got to do the top of my head? Well, I would.
Ruin my moisturiser that I lovingly applied this morning? Thus disguised, we were off once more, seamlessly blending in with our environment.
You have to get up pretty early in the morning to outsmart Mr Wavy and Pineapple Boy.
Brilliant.
OK, guys.
Come in.
And that's what we needed.
We've got this plant which is bent over.
It should be like that.
So we've got one, two.
So that gives us the direction.
This is called flagging, rather like a flag flying in the wind.
The flag will point in the direction of travel.
Absolutely brilliant news.
Right.
We were just heading It was really hard about an hour ago.
Couldn't see anything because of the bog.
All we needed was one track just to tell us that they're in this direction.
Now we know we've got a feature bridge, all these things over the place.
So we're going to start running, and move as quickly as we can to get to them.
Let's go, guys.
Pick it up.
As Max and his team head for the aqueduct, Oz and I are entering the woods and finally getting out of sight.
Don't dally.
Tread over lots of bluebells.
The question is, is it all too late? Perfect.
Tracks all over the place.
Right.
OK.
This is just the oldest trick in the book.
You could see where they've just literally scooped out as much mud as they can.
Yeah.
Two hands, like that.
Grabbed it, rubbed it around and then put it on to their faces.
Yeah.
So I'm going to do exactly the same as them, to try and get into their mindset.
Yeah.
He's getting into the mind of Oz Clarke.
This is a man who truly knows no fear.
And some people put two stripes, like that, because it looks good.
But if you go into, for example, ferns, where you've got sharp angles, you would wear sharp camouflage as well.
But equally if you've got sharp features, a very sharp nose or high cheekbones, you'd use a stripe coming down to get rid of the high points on your face.
With both teams entering the woods, we're reaching the endgame in our escape to freedom.
They can smell us.
They can smell pork pie on our breath.
These guys are escaping from us now.
At first it was a bit of a laugh.
Now they're feeling like they're hunted, and they've got a pack of guys who are going to come down on them really soon.
And I should think that where they are at the moment, it's all becoming clear to them.
French cheeses, that Don't trust French cheese.
Shut up about bloody cheese.
Time is not on their side, and we're going to get 'em.
Yes, it's that part of the show where we respond to the letter that literally poured into the Man Lab only the other day.
It might contain the germ of a good idea which means we don't have to think one up.
And we don't even have to pay you.
Here we go.
"May," it says.
"Please could you show us that clip where you laugh at Charlie's attempt to draw that girl he fancied in the last series of Man Lab?" All right.
Well, here's the clip.
In a misguided attempt to impress her, Charlie decided to capture Cassie's loveliness in a beautiful hand-drawn portrait.
Fortunately I was on hand to offer a frank appraisal of Charlie's drawing skills.
Thus passed a happy afternoon in mocking Charlie's attempts to draw the human face.
It's really touching.
And I can't draw, but that's why I don't.
"Then could you show us if you could do it any better?" Bugger.
I've always believed ever since school that you can either draw or you can't.
And I can't.
I'll show you what I mean by sketching our sound man Dan.
It is, in the words of Claude Monet, trés difficile.
Your nose isn't straight.
Some sort of hair stuff going on there.
I can't do it.
Sorry, I just don't know how to do it.
I can't see it.
It's just a mass of colour.
I don't know how to make it come out in a pencil.
But here's a man who reckons drawing can be taught.
John Myatt is an art teacher by training, but his talent for mimicking the masters eventually led to a brush with the law.
But now he's a reformed man, and he's here to teach me the eternal mystery of the human face.
Well, we can, um we can build on this, James.
Is it as bad as Charlie's picture of Cassandra? It's worse! Accepting that I'm an artless buffoon is a low point in my life.
But it quickly passes, and John is able to progress to some handy hints.
Apparently there are certain basic rules that anyone can follow to dispel the impression that you've had a go at drawing with your feet.
If we look at the actual shape of Dan's head, you can see that in fact it's long and thin, isn't it? It's like an egg, but squashed in at the sides.
The second thing, what hardly anybody realises, is that the eyes are halfway down the skull.
If we draw a line from top to bottom somewhere along here you're going to find the eyes, and then the bottom half of the face is where it all happens.
Everything happens in the bottom half.
There's the forehead, but halfway down again between the line for the eyes and the line of the chin, we can roughly say somewhere there is the root of the nose.
And then we split that into one, two, three.
And somewhere along here is the line of the lips, and then along this bottom line we've got the chin.
Now already you can start to work on a likeness.
So when you boil it down basic portraiture is first and foremost about remembering your proportions.
A line up from the edge of the nostrils will show you where the inner edge of the eye is.
Ears run from the top of the eyebrows to the bottom of the nose and so on.
Then you can move on to revealing the soul of your subject.
OK, that's Dan as I drew him earlier on before anyone ever taught me anything about drawing.
And after - how long have we had? - about 35, 40 minutes' tuition, Dan is Dan is still no oil painting but he does look like that, which I think is better.
It's actually the best drawing I've ever done.
It does actually look a bit like him.
This clearly requires practice, and rather than alienate the film crew further, I decide to have a crack at some tourists instead.
The mark of my new-found artistry will be if anyone is prepared to pay me for my efforts.
The artist Paul Cézanne once said, "With an apple I will astonish Paris.
" And now, with my pencil, I will dismay London.
My alluring sign and pay-what-you-think-it's-worth policy soon draws a steady stream of tourists wanting something for the ancestral gallery.
Right.
You must look at me square on, and if you could smile a bit but try not to show your teeth, cos I can't do those.
I do my best to remember my lessons in proportion.
The face is shaped like squashed eggs, the halfway lines for the eyes.
Unfortunately the one thing I wasn't taught was an artist's patter.
Try not to smile too much or move.
So his eyes would be there in a normal human being.
The trouble is, whenever I draw a woman I end up making her look a bit manly.
You're my first subject with no real hair to talk of, which is interesting.
Now you see, I think I might have that roughly No, you're still too fat.
You have a haircut not dissimilar to mine actually.
- I'm sorry.
I don't hear very well.
- Probably for the best.
I was beginning to realise that like all great artists, I would never be appreciated in my own time.
I look like a smuggler from about the 1800s, I would have thought.
I look a bit cross.
Being on the South Bank doesn't help either.
For every couple of normal people, there's someone who looks like this bloke.
You see, the head is an egg, but I can't see much of his head.
At least it prevents me having to do too much of your nose because most of it is actually hidden, which is good Three portraits down, and thanks to Moodius Maximus my coffers are not exactly overflowing.
A used staple.
Do you know what I think? I think the Romans can bugger off.
B-V-G-G-E-R off.
But just as I was getting ready to call it a day and cut my own ear off, amazingly, I began to improve, as the practice of sketching portrait after portrait all day started to pay off.
I quite like it actually in an odd sort of way.
Even though I was getting the hang of it, the question remained, would anybody actually pay for my efforts? Two euros! Look at that.
I think it's really good actually.
I do.
Ho ho ho ho ho! Ah! Art, they say, is its own reward, but a grand total of ten pounds, two euros and a used staple means I can go to the pub, and that's better.
Leonardo da Vinci once said, "Art is never finished, it is merely abandoned.
" I think it's an excellent idea.
Can I have a cheeseburger? So just in case one of your viewers ever writes to you, here are those tips again.
The head is roughly a squashed-egg shape tapering at the bottom.
Draw a line halfway up, which is where the eyes will be.
The eyes are an eye's width apart but don't draw the middle eye.
Dividing the bottom of the face in half tells us where the end of the nose will be.
If you divide the space below that into three it will tell you where to put the mouth and the chin.
Add ears, hair, beards and hats to suit.
Now, we were talking in the Man Lab the other day, - and we all agree Bob the director - Tom! - Sorry, Tom, and Stan on the camera - Sean.
Sorry, Sean on the camera that remembering names is a very difficult skill for a man to master, especially at big events.
However, there are techniques for dealing with this.
So in the interests of preventing a man from looking like a feckless teenage halfwit, we decided to try them out, using one, our very own Rory.
And here is a baffled Rory who we've managed to covertly smuggle in to the army rugby league charity dinner, the jewel in the military social event calendar.
I'm outside monitoring his every move from the Man van.
From here I can see everything that's going on on this screen, which is a live feed from our main camera.
There's Rory's face now.
I can hear everything Rory says through this device.
By pressing this button, I can advise him through a secret earpiece hidden in his ear.
You can just see the camera discreetly hidden in his clothing.
During the pre-dinner drinks Rory must circulate as unobtrusively as possible, learning each guest's full name.
Later he will be playing the role of master of ceremonies, announcing each guest as they present themselves to be seated for dinner.
I also have here the names of all the guests plus the added complication, because this is the army of course, of their ranks.
And I have over here on this computer and on various bits of paper details of known techniques for helping to remember people's names.
In short, though, what we're asking Rory to do here is pretty much impossible.
Look at his face now.
Look at him.
He's getting nervous.
OK.
A couple of techniques.
Use the name frequently when you're introduced.
Find an excuse to say it a number of times.
OK.
So the next guys to come in, I'll just keeping saying their names.
Yeah, but don't overdo it otherwise they'll think you are a bit of a nutcase.
A new crowd of guests has just arrived.
Time for Rory to try out technique number one.
- Hiya.
I'm Rory.
- Hello.
Emma.
- How are you doing, Emma? - I'm very well, thank you.
- Rory.
- Hi.
I'm Clare.
- Clare.
How are you? - Fine, thank you.
- Get here all right, Clare? - Yes, thank you.
Nice one, Clare Michelle Nice to meet you, Michelle.
Lovely drink you've got.
Drink it up, Michelle.
- How you doing, Stu? - Yeah, not bad.
- Having a good night, Stu? - Not bad.
- Yeah.
- Lovely, lovely.
Enjoy yourself, mate.
Have a good night, Stu.
He thinks you're lunatic.
What was the first one called? The first one's name was Emma, I think.
- You're right.
- Yes! No one is quite clear why an idiot with a strange device bolted to his ribs is at their dinner, but they're too polite to mention it.
Another technique.
Clarify spelling.
Ask how do you spell your name? - Roger - Dussard.
Dussard.
How do you spell Dussard? D-U-S-S-A-R-D.
- Yeah, it's French.
- French.
- Oh, zut alors! - Yeah, oui.
Silly sod.
If it's a fairly obvious name, to help remember, write it with your finger.
But not obviously, in the air, because that will make you look really a lunatic.
- What's your name, sorry? - Norman.
Nice to meet you, Norman.
I'm Rory - Rory Barker.
- Rory Barker.
I'm just going to write You don't need to spell your own name, but use your full name to get their full name.
I'm just trying to spell out Norman's name.
I'm starting to wonder if Rory has problems beyond the help of memory techniques.
And as the guests start to flood in, he struggles to keep up.
- Andy Kershaw.
- Andy Kershaw.
- Rich Naivalurua.
- Naivalurua - Funny, Funning - Fanning.
- Clare Fanny? - No, Fanning.
Sorry.
It's excruciating.
Ben Sorry, Ben, I - Ben Hughes.
- Ben Hughes.
Right, so how do I remember his name? You can do little rhymes if you want, like, you know, it's Hughes so you could do the association huge Hughes because he's a big bloke.
Yes.
Yes.
Big, huge.
Ben Huge.
Ben Hughes.
Big Ben Hughes.
This is a nightmare.
This is all going wrong.
God, he looks nervous.
And you're Katie Eastwick Katie Garside.
- Eastwick? - Thanks.
All right.
But it's close.
- Really close.
- Yeah.
- I think she quite likes you, Rory.
- Yeah, she's only human.
Don't say that out loud, you fool.
Yeah, sorry.
No.
I wasn't talking to you then.
- What are you talking to? - I was talking to my drink.
What do you mean? I'm not - Get out of that one.
- Sorry.
Talking to his drink.
I forgot that she could hear me when I spoke to you.
She's looking at me.
I'm going to subtly.
Time's running out and so far Rory's managed to remember a few and terrify many.
Rory, just to let you know.
I don't want you to panic, but it's three minutes to dinner.
With the clock ticking, Rory is suddenly hit by a scrum of late arrivals.
- John - Hulatt.
So I've written it with my finger.
Also the rhyming association.
It's the army, John Hulatt, bullet.
Hulatt, bullet.
Caroline That's C-A-R-O Jeremy Bethell is a colonel.
He is a colonel.
Stuart.
Stu art.
- Is that Ben Johnson? - That is Nobby Nobby Nocock.
Nobby It's Nobby Pocock.
D-U-S-S-A-R-D.
Roger Dussard.
I can't work out if these blokes find Rory incredibly charming or the biggest chump they've ever had in their mess room in their entire lives.
- Can I just bring you to order, please? - Ooh, here we go.
Good luck.
Right.
Thank you very, very much.
The format for tonight In a moment I'm going to hand over to Rory.
Rory, would you like to come front and centre, mate? All right.
Rory's been going round trying to memorise your names.
OK.
Who am I? You are Ryan Swindell.
OK, well done.
- All right.
Yeah.
- We can do this, Rory.
What's going to happen is, I'll hand over to Rory, and Rory's going to call you through.
Time to see what Rain Man Rory can do.
Ben Hughes.
Ben Hughes, aka Ben Huge.
Word-association technique.
Correct.
Emma Emma Who the hell is Emma? - Poe Boke? - Bowes Bowes.
Emma Bowes-Crick.
Good rescue.
Emma Bowes-Crick.
Repeating-the-name-back technique.
Correct.
- Colonel.
- Colonel Jeremy Bethell.
Thank you.
Only bloke in a white jacket.
Easy one.
Ben Johnson? Writing-the-name-with-a-finger technique.
Failed.
Ben Hulatt and Julie Hulatt.
Word-association technique.
Hulatt, bullet.
Correct.
Norman Sergeant-Major Norman Mon - Montford.
- Muppet.
Writing-the-name-with-your-finger technique.
Failed.
Andy Gray.
Name-repetition.
Correct.
Ben Johnson.
He's not Ben Johnson either.
Katie Garside.
Speaking to a gin and tonic.
Not a recognised technique but it'll do.
Roger Dussard.
D-U-S-S-A-R-D.
Clarifying-spelling technique.
Flying colours.
Um Clive.
- No.
- Jeremy.
- No.
- Fred.
Andrew.
- No.
- Ben.
- No.
Johnson.
I'm not sure Ben Johnson's actually here.
Who's this bloke? Ben Johnson? It is Ben Johnson! So with the great Ben Johnson mystery of 2011 solved, Rory slam-dunks the final guests with ease.
My score sheet shows that Rory actually managed to remember over half the names of these identically-dressed people.
Strangely, though, he wasn't invited to join them.
On reflection, perhaps society would be better served if we could all just acknowledge that we can't remember each other's names, and then we won't all look like idiots just like Roger there.
Anyway, meanwhile, back on Dartmoor, the net is closing.
Oz and I have escaped from prison and are on the run from a crack team of expert trackers with only our orienteering skills and basic camouflage to help us.
Knuckles, our getaway driver, waiting for us on the other side of miles of tough terrain.
We've already made it across the moors from Dartmoor prison to these woods.
But the trackers are closing us down.
Right.
- Right.
Quick map update.
- Yeah.
We've made our point here at the edge of the woods.
We've actually walked into them, to this curve here, on the path, widely used by ramblers and so on.
Now, there's two schools of thought here.
One says you should stick to the path because you go much quicker, there's nothing unusual about people walking on paths, there's already lots of tracks on them, and you don't make as much noise.
The other school of thought says we should try and go straight through the woods, cos we're less likely to be seen, and the trackers aren't very far behind.
I say we go through the woods, and then hug the northern edge of the reservoir.
So that's what we do, disappearing furtively into the undergrowth like two wanted plumbers.
But after 20 minutes of struggling through branches and bogs and making precious little progress, Oz has had enough of my bright idea.
I think if we go ploughing through there we're going to take too long.
Eventually, we reluctantly head back to the path.
At this rate, Max and his tracker team will be nearly on us.
The path of least resistance for trackers is crucial, because there's no way, if you're in a hurry, you're going to go across this river on my right-hand side, or break through into all of this greenery here.
You're going to stay on here and move as quickly as possible.
Straight down here.
Then at the bottom we come to another bridge and take a right turn.
But hang on.
Why not cut across there and try and cut the corner off? - James, please.
Honestly.
Let's go.
- There's nowhere to hide on the path.
- It doesn't feel right.
- We just go faster.
I've found something really suspicious.
Come on.
Right.
Thought I'd got 'em.
Somewhere where they could have hidden up, gone to lay up for days.
This is the kind of thing the most dangerous criminals in the world will do.
If you build something like that there's no way people are going to find you.
But no luck this time.
Just keep looking.
So the shack turns out to have been made not by two television presenters but by a common or garden escaped criminal psychopath.
Phew.
Anyhow, this diversion buys us a few precious seconds as we head to our next landmark.
The cartographers among you will have realised that this large area of blue is a reservoir.
But in order to get there we face a fresh challenge: Some locals.
- I can see more people.
- People! People! Keep still.
They might look like harmless ramblers, but all it would take is a little light torture from Max and they could crack.
It's a risk we just can't take.
We've got to go.
We can't stay.
Avoiding the public was trickier than we thought, and as we came across the second road we had to cross, our camouflage skills were tested to the limit.
Oz, you can be seen a mile off.
James, there's one old lady by a van! She's on the other side of the van! She's not looking! We have to get Oops! Car.
My God! He's vanished! We've got to go.
James, we've got to go.
With the road clear, we were at last onto our final major hurdle, the Burrator Reservoir, with just over two miles to go before our rendezvous with Knuckles.
The path of least resistance drops straight down to a reservoir.
When we get down here, just a little bit further on, I want hand signals only.
Yeah? Cos that's going to be Unless they can swim, we got 'em.
Yeah? But for once there's something Max hasn't considered.
This is actually a very interesting point, James, cos none of this is marked along here.
- This is marked as lake.
- Yeah.
Because of global warming, because we've got such dry weather at the moment, all of this should be underwater and you can see it.
Look at this stuff here.
This is basically roots going under the water.
You can tell from the kind of vegetation.
All this should be underwater.
It shouldn't be here.
Do you know what that means? That means, if the water level stays like that, the next time this map's updated that line will change, but for the moment, as far as the map's concerned, we're walking in the lake.
- And the trackers may not realise that.
- Precisely.
So with Oz and I walking on what Max thinks is water, we make brisk progress along the north shore.
But when we attempt to cut up from the lake, and through the wood to the road we nearly get collared.
Hide, James! Down, down.
Stop.
- What? - It's them.
In the field.
You see them? - Coming up the road.
- Yes.
Right.
Down.
OK.
Down.
Down here.
Just wait.
Down here.
Don't look.
Oh, God.
Sorry.
We may have avoided capture by the skin of our teeth, but in the scramble to hide, I've knackered my knee quite badly.
You OK with the knee? And as we struggle on to a higher path in an attempt to slip past Max and his henchmen, I'm reduced to a crippled hobble.
Keep going.
- Can you get down here? - Yeah.
- Under here? - Yeah.
- Down there.
Down on See that track there? - Yeah.
- Right round there.
- Yeah.
- Across there, mostly through woodland.
- Yeah.
- A little bit of open ground and we're there.
- Then you've got to dash.
- Make a dash for it.
- 750 metres.
But 750 metres might be 750 too far.
This is like a bad World War II movie.
We don't know how close they are, but they are close.
It's so simple from here.
Just go down this track here.
It's wooded all the way.
The helicopter won't see us.
They won't see us.
We just go down that track, and honestly, James, I reckon 20 minutes and we're there.
It'll take 20 minutes.
Oh, I can't do that.
- It's 20 minutes! We're there! - Oz, I can't do that.
We have to do it.
Knuckles is waiting, James.
We have to.
This is the last bit.
Just, my knee's swollen like a kipper.
I'm sorry.
It was that bit in the bog.
I can't do it.
I can't run.
They're not going to be very far away.
They'll just get me as soon as I break cover, hobbling across like an old man.
- You go.
- No, I'm not going to go.
I'll go down there the wrong way.
They won't expect that.
I'll lie low for a bit.
I'll come out at night.
They won't find me down there.
- I can just hide in the bushes.
- Do you want a lift up? - I'm sorry.
- It's terrible, James.
I'm not doing this now, seriously, for television, hammy-acting thing.
I did put my foot in a hole and twisted my knee quite badly.
It actually goes to prove that Dartmoor is a very clever place to build a prison cos a lot of the people who escaped in the 19th century drowned in bogs or froze to death.
Quite a few went back to the prison and asked to be let back in.
But the fact remains that with a decent Ordnance Survey map, and this thing, you get this from a camping shop for £4 or £5, and your eyes and your common sense, that will take you right across terrain so inhospitable that in the 19th century, they built a prison on it.
We're close.
- Right, where's the other one? - All right.
All right.
- Where is he? - You won't get him.
He's got the map.
So there you have it.
Thanks to the good old Ordnance Survey and a few basic map-reading skills, a bald man in ill-fitting overalls has got away.
What better recommendation is there than that? It now remains only for me to say goodbye from here, north 52 degrees, 26 minutes and 23 seconds.
West zero degrees, 13 minutes and 11 seconds.
Goodbye.
Our workshop is fully equipped.
Our kitchen is open.
Our bar is fully stocked.
And most importantly, our sitting area is very, very comfortable indeed.
Excellent! Right, let's get on with something useful.
Man Lab is the crucible of competence, where skills are forged and shoddiness scorned.
It is the shining path of enlightenment that leads us from confusion's murkiness to the stellar heights of a job well done.
I'm handcuffed to Oz Clarke, and an oddly dressed man from Zambia wants to kill me.
Yes, it's map reading.
At first it was a bit of a laugh.
Now they're feeling like they're hunted.
- There's nowhere to hide.
- We just have to go faster.
We practise the precision craft of woodworking and descend into the bowels of England in search of the perfect pool table.
That was well loud! Finally we solve a centuries-old problem: Remembering the names of girls you meet at parties.
- Funny, Funning - Fanning.
- Clare Fanny? - Fanning.
It's excruciating.
But first, a lengthy introduction to a simple question.
Here we have a typical in-car portable satellite navigation system, and it is a marvellous thing.
Really it is.
It's probably the most liberating piece of popular technology to appear during my lifetime, along with the desktop computer and the self-bleeding radiator valve.
In fact it's tempting to think sat nav has rendered the old-school printed Ordnance Survey map completely redundant.
But hang on a minute.
Sat nav is all very well if all you need to know is: "At the next roundabout take the third exit on the left," as if at a roundabout the exit could somehow be on the right.
But what if you had to do some proper navigation? What if, for example, you've just escaped from Dartmoor prison? Dartmoor prison is horrible.
Originally built to house French prisoners during the Napoleonic Wars, it was designed to be even more gruesome than a 19th-century Parisian khazi.
Few inmates have ever escaped, and those who did found themselves on Dartmoor itself, one of the largest wildernesses in England.
Most of them had no way of navigating, and would wander for days until succumbing to starvation, the cold or the treacherous bogland.
This, then, is the sheep-infested canvas against which I, together with TV's Oz Clarke, will stage our very own prison break.
Right, let's make one thing absolutely clear.
Oz and I haven't really escaped from Dartmoor.
Because they won't let us in and They won't let us show you how to get out.
But from now on, this is for real, we're on the run from the prison.
And all we've got is this map smuggled in inside a cake fruit cake by the smell of it, and all we've got on it is the prison here.
- North.
- North here.
Yeah.
- Coordinates.
- Yeah, we don't know what those mean yet.
And a bridge, west, southwest, which we presume is where we've got to go, where Knuckles has left something.
- Knuckles has left us our swag there.
- Yeah.
The first thing we need to do is work out which direction to go in, and we need to know where north is.
You can do this with your watch.
- If you - Stop it.
I'll take it off.
You point the hour hand of your watch, which is set at the right time, at the sun.
- It's nine o'clock.
- But actually you have to work on GMT, and it's British Summer Time, so actually it's eight o'clock.
So point the 8 at the sun.
If you divide the arc between the hour hand and the 12 o'clock position in half, it gives you south.
Not north, south.
So south is over there roughly in a line with those chimneys.
We want to go slightly southwest, pretty much parallel to this wall.
- Agreed? - Absolutely.
- People are on our tail, so we need to go.
- We need to get moving.
OK.
Go.
Let's go.
Oz and I set out for the bridge like two guests fleeing an S&M party.
On the other side of the moor our accomplice is waiting.
In accordance with the rules of prison break films, he's called Knuckles, and he's knocked off a Jag for the getaway.
Knuckles has also left us some vital supplies by the bridge marked on the crude cloth map.
Moving as one, we make the breathless 850-metre dash fuelled by desperation and a yearning for freedom.
So far so good.
Got it.
Good old Knuckles.
Oh, boots! Oh, Knuckles! We now had a decent survival kit for the moors: New boots, orienteering compass and, most pressingly, bolt cutters.
Right, straight off.
Let's do it.
Hang on.
How do you do this? - One of us will have to do one, one the other.
- OK.
You need to push, and then I'll pull again.
Let me see if I can Ah! Now we were free to get our heads around the two most important bits of the swag bag Oh, yes.
some pork, hidden inside a pie, and an OS map.
So we've escaped from Dartmoor Prison, allegedly, using Knuckles' map that he smuggled in with the cake, which has led us to this old railway bridge.
And on the fabric map, as Oz noted earlier, Knuckles has written some coordinates.
They're obviously coordinates - west and north.
West 5401, north 6703.
Yeah, and I've got an Ordnance Survey map here.
And Ordnance Survey maps are one of the great glories of creation.
These maps just tell you absolutely everything.
You only have to look at the map and they give you a complete picture of the place you are.
And presumably we'll find that place on the map, and that's where we go, and that's where Knuckles or Nosher or Cruncher or Fingers is waiting for us in the Jag.
Unfortunately, plotting a path to the getaway car is the least of our worries.
No imaginary break-out goes unpunished on Dartmoor.
A crack team of cross-terrain trackers is unleashed to bring us in, dead or alive.
Their leader, Ian Max Maxwell, is the world's foremost authority on animal tracking, having tracked his first leopard at the age of 8.
He even has his own specialist tracking organisation, codename Shadowhawk.
They could conceivably be a match for Clarke and May.
So we set about decoding the coordinates.
54.
Obviously these big coordinates, the squares, go 53, 54, 55.
- So it's 5401.
It's 54 and a tenth.
- Yeah.
Which is there.
So it's slightly to the right of that line.
5401 is down there.
6703 means it's one third above 67 towards 68, and this is the line of 67, that's the line of 54 That's where we're meeting them.
Look, Knuckles is there! - Unless I am wrong, that's the sign of a pub.
- It is.
It is the sign of a pub.
Knuckles is in the boozer.
What a great incentive for the recently released.
A pub! Between us and it, though, is a vast vista of lakes, woods, bogs, marshes and exposed moorland.
So it makes sense to plot a proper route.
What I've done for the first bit is just plotted a very basic course from where we are to the edge of the woods.
That gives us something to head for, but we can get a bearing for the first bit.
This is where we use our orienteering compass, which has this rotating housing on it.
If you ever need to escape from Dartmoor, here's a quick guide to using an orienteering compass.
Place the edge of your compass along your intended route with the direction of travel arrow pointing the way you want to go.
Turn the compass so the orienteering lines line up with the gridlines on the map, and the north indicator, the two green lines, are pointing north.
Take the compass off the map, and turn the compass until the north needle lines up with the north indicator.
As your compass is now orientated with the map, your direction of travel arrow will point in the direction you need to go.
This arrow on the base shows you where to go.
Somewhere over there is our point, just east of Black Tor.
And that's our first target.
- Yeah.
- Brilliant.
Meanwhile, back at the jail, Max has already picked up our scent.
I've just found some amazing tracks here.
This grass has been trampled down, and that grass is still wet.
That's gold dust to us, because I know now at least within the last couple of hours, someone's been here.
These guys are likely to be wearing trainers.
It doesn't look like a boot.
We're going to nickname this one, and we'll use the nickname on our radios throughout the whole track.
We'll call that Wavy.
It comes round like that.
And this break-off here means that they've just stepped off in that direction.
If they get stuck in the bogs then they're going to really struggle with this kind of footwear on.
- Right.
We need to change our boots, James.
- Yes.
These things we're wearing at the moment will absolutely come to bits in bogs and things, but also we want to change our footprints.
We can tell whether they're getting tired simply because the distance between tracks will close down.
They might then replenish with water, or drink or eat something.
Oh, good old Knuckles.
We know the direction of travel, so there's no point in hanging around.
I want to get on this guy's backside and track him down.
As Oz and I break cover and use our compass to head to our first waypoint, Max is also making use of his surroundings.
Mr Wavy.
Right, let's go.
With the trackers in pursuit, a spotter climbs the highest hill.
He might just be able to pick out two blokes in romper suits.
The chase is on.
Is that it then? You didn't get very far.
No, sir, that isn't it.
Of course it isn't.
We'll be picking the action up later as the miscreants make their way in a south-southwesterly direction.
Ah! Now, the other day we were all sitting around in the Man Lab Arms when suddenly Simmy said, "Does anybody fancy a game of pool?" Well, of course we did, because we'd had a few by then so of course we'd be brilliant at it.
But as we went to rack 'em up we discovered a problem.
We don't actually have a pool table.
Never mind, though.
This is Man Lab, so we'll make one.
If you've ever played pool, you will know that the vital attributes of a pool table are that it is perfectly flat and perfectly level.
Therefore pool tables tend to be substantial, weighty structures.
I mean they're not feeble occasional tables.
They are pool tables all of the time.
Wood is the favoured material, so that is what we're going to use.
And here is a piece of our wood pretty much as it was hewn from the merry greenwood of Olde England.
And we're going to use it like this, largely unchanged, for the legs, because let's face it, nature's spent maybe up to a century forming for us this perfect wooden component.
Why saw it up into dull old planks? Even though we've opted to leave the wood looking as natural as possible, we still have to strip off the bark.
That means we spend a very satisfying but slightly medieval afternoon working at the logs with chisels until the aromatic chestnut is exposed.
The real issue with our naturalistic table, though, is yet to come.
Here we are in the deliveries-in area of the Man Lab and we do have a problem, because no two pieces of our wood are the same.
More to the point, no piece of wood we have is straight and square, because of course nature abhors regularity, straightness and squareness.
They are mere conceits of civilisation.
They are vanities.
So the problem we have is that we have to work out where to put the bits of wood so they are in the best relationship to each other so that we do come out with something square and true.
And Simmy and I have come up with this, I think, rather excellent little system.
We name a nominal north on the floor, which I'm going to do here.
We're going to call that north We've selected a unique log for each leg of our table.
We mark each one with north and the number.
That establishes their position and orientation.
Next, we mark on the irregular logs the corners of the regular pub pool table that must lie in there somewhere.
Through geometric cunning, we hope to wrest engineering order from the chaos of nature.
If it was a chair, machine-made on a computer-controlled wood lathe, you could make a thousand legs and a thousand bases and they'd all go together, cos that's the nature of mass production.
But you can't do that with this.
This is woodland craft skill.
So, using this rustic 4000rpm carbide tip chop saw, we cut the longitudinal and cross members to the right length.
Then we set about chiselling the joints that will hold the table together.
Here are the joints.
These are very simple mortise and tenon joints.
That is the tenon.
That is the mortise cut in there.
They are the same at all four corners.
What's unique about each joint is this shape we're about to cut.
That is the, ahem, interpenetration between that piece of wood and that one.
And they of course are unique shapes.
Once we've got that in place we'll be ready to offer up the slate, which we don't actually have yet.
That is why Rory is standing here like a virgin teenager at a wedding reception, ready for me to say, "Rory, it's time to go and get the slate.
" Rory, it's time to go and get the slate.
- OK.
- Off you go.
So Rory slips in his favourite CD and off he goes, 323 miles up the road, all the wayto the Lake District.
This rugged mountainous landscape is home to England's last working underground slate mine at Honister Pass.
The artisans of Honister have been mining and shaping slate into everything from roof tiles to kitchen worktops, for the last 300 years.
It's Rory's job to journey into the mines and extract the perfect piece for our pool table.
Meanwhile, with the final, ahem, interpenetration joint cut and assembled the frame is done, so now we need to make the support for the forthcoming slate.
This will have to be absolutely flat and level.
Yay! This is the mysterious coming-together of the square and true and the not square and true.
This is where we'll find out if our great philosophical thinking bears any fruit, or if we're just going to have really a very long-lasting bonfire, cos this is pretty dense stuff.
So we set about cutting precise notches in the frame to take the support.
These have to be equidistant above the floor, which is level, so the slate will be too.
And talking of the slate it's still part of the Lake District, but not for long.
Not with Rory Barker, the most feared slate prospector of the southeast, ready to go to work.
Rory ventures underground, wearing an expression that suggests it's where he just came from.
How is it all rigged up here? I see these wires come out.
We're using a bit of dynamite here to take a bit of the roof out.
It's set off electronically.
You press a button and it sends a charge through to the detonators.
- How loud is it going to be? - Oh, it's just a little bang.
- Just like a little pop.
- Right.
That was well loud! - Why didn't you put your ear muffs on? - He said not to! Simon said not to put them on.
Said I didn't need to! Still, the unwitting victim of the oldest practical joke in mining has done us proud, and this chunk of Cumbria is destined to become the soul of our table just as soon as it's been milled to the dimensions in Rory's notebook.
Back at Man Lab, the side rails have been cut and notched to take the clamps for the cushions.
Well done.
It's only taken you three days.
Very nice.
The moment of truth.
If Rory's measurements are wrong, it's back to square one for us and the job centre for him.
- Lovely! - Wow! So, with the slate in position, Sim is able to complete the holes for the pockets, hewn out of solid chestnut.
Now we can cover our slate in glorious blue baize, taking care to avoid wrinkles.
It's gone wrong really, but not disastrously.
All that remains is to fit the rails and the cushions, and I'm ready to take a test shot.
Luckily, Simmy has a wire-based solution.
Oh, yes! Simmy, that is a thing of beauty.
What a table this is.
We've preserved the natural beauty of raw timber but dignified it with the discipline of geometry.
We've cut a perfect playing surface from the mountains of England, and then sheathed it in that blue baize the bloke from the haberdashery shop hadn't been able to shift for years.
But the most terrifying job is yet to come - marking it up with an indelible felt tip pen.
Director Tom loses the toss.
- Are you ready? - Yes.
Is there anything you need to say to your family before you do this? No.
They'd never speak to me again anyway if it went wrong.
Right.
Slowly.
Evenly.
Don't panic.
Yeah! With the symbolic D filled in, our table is finally finished.
This only took seven days.
Now we're going to inaugurate it with a game between me and Sim.
I won the toss, so I break, for the very first time ever on the Man Lab pool table.
Yee-hah! Pretty good.
Meanwhile there are still two men on the run on Dartmoor.
Oz and I are fleeing from Dartmoor prison, heading across the moor for a rendezvous with our getaway driver, Knuckles.
But between us and him is a wilderness of rough terrain made up of lakes, woods, bogs and marshes.
We've broken our chains and changed our boots.
But in hot pursuit are a team of expert manhunters.
As we race towards the cover of some distant woods, a spotter is sent to the top of a nearby hill to watch for any sign of us.
The problem we have here is that we're only just out of sight of the tor over there where we suspect they're looking out for us.
There's no way round the problem of having to cover quite a large area of open ground.
Well, why don't we try and apply Naismith's Rule? We've got to cover that ground as fast as humanly possible.
We need to get over round the corner of that hill, over towards the trees.
Now Naismith's Rule is one of these rules which says that you can cover three miles in an hour.
And also you have to allow an extra half an hour for going up 300 metres.
So technically we're going down, so we can take a little off that.
And we've got something like two miles and a bit to go.
I reckon we should say to ourselves we won't allow more than about 40 minutes to get there.
I'd like to do it in half an hour.
- So half an hour to the corner of that hill? - Maximum half an hour.
If they're looking in this direction they're sure to see us.
Let's follow the contour a bit.
We'll make quicker progress following the contour.
A fundamental rule of walking in the countryside is follow the contours.
Contours are lines of equal elevation above sea level.
These decreasing circles represent hills, with each line ten metres higher than the last.
So the closer the circles are, the steeper the hill.
Oz and I should be able to use them to zigzag through the bogs on the lowest path to stay out of sight of the spotter.
Onto here.
Onto that and then onto the stone again.
We are, after all, consummate outdoorsmen.
And then onto another stone and then up.
But Max and his team are just 40 minutes behind and gaining fast.
OK.
Going to lift this up, but basically I can tell this is really fresh cos it's got a human hair from an arm on top of it.
There we go.
They've changed their boots, the sneaky little devils.
That's what we've been following.
And that's what we've been following.
Mr Wavy.
Yeah, we saw that outside the prison.
They've been here a while.
Water.
These have been used, haven't they? There we go.
They've been used once.
And you see that silvering there? That links up.
I think these guys have just got out of their handcuffs.
OK.
Let's go, guys.
Yeah, as quick as we can.
OK.
A track.
Good stuff.
And because they've changed shoes we know this links into that boot that was there before.
Let's give it a nickname.
Pineapple Boy.
And the reason we call it Pineapple Boy is because the segments inside that track look like pineapple segments.
Back on the moors and trying to stay low, Oz and I suddenly hit a big problem.
A road.
We're not just exposed to the spotter here.
Passing motorists might see sunlight reflected from Oz's head.
We're about to cross the road, which is obviously very exposed, so the trick is to cross it at right angles as quickly as possible.
- Yeah.
- OK.
Watch it.
Sheep! Tango one, tango one, tango two.
Yeah, I've got two people wandering on the valley floor.
The tor's up there.
No, this side.
Here.
I said here! Yeah, I think we've got them.
Down left of the second peak, just against the back.
Pretty much where Jamie's standing.
That's them.
OK.
What we've got to do now Because we've got an eyeball on these people, we're just going to move very quickly.
So Max and his trackers are striking out from the bridge across the moor, and although Oz and I have a small lead, there's a long way to go and we're completely exposed.
We can't even hide against the side of a hill.
Just so obvious, a couple of blokes racing across open country like this, I mean if they're up on the tor looking for us, north, south, east, west, 25% of the time they'll be looking in our direction.
And so, if they're looking in our direction 25% of the time they've got to have seen us.
We were out in open country for about ten minutes.
They'd have had two-and-a-half minutes of looking directly at our backs flailing across that hassocky bog.
Thanks to Oz, I'd fully grasped the difficult concept of 25% of something.
Anyway, there's some good news up ahead.
This symbol on an OS map is a tree.
When you get lots of them, you get woods.
I think we're going to need to find somewhere and make ourselves look a little less obvious.
This aqueduct is really useful, because an aqueduct will show us precisely the way down.
And obviously the aqueduct has to go downhill, but it also means it's dead easy for them to track.
So I mean, we need to find some way of actually making ourselves less conspicuous.
It won't be too bad when we get to the trees and things.
Well, the worst thing is the boiler suit, but I can't take it off because I've only got my boxers and my T-shirt on, and if I run around like that I'll get arrested.
No, you won't, not out here, because the point is, at something like 800 yards you would look like a stick.
So they wouldn't even know what you were wearing.
It's actually 500 yards before you can see the colour of people's clothing.
Now if you want to keep the boiler suit on and we shove, kind of, I don't know, mud, that kind of stuff, cover ourselves in mud, that will massively improve our ability to blend into the background.
Somehow the wine expert managed to make this sound like a good idea.
You seriously say I've got to do the top of my head? Well, I would.
Ruin my moisturiser that I lovingly applied this morning? Thus disguised, we were off once more, seamlessly blending in with our environment.
You have to get up pretty early in the morning to outsmart Mr Wavy and Pineapple Boy.
Brilliant.
OK, guys.
Come in.
And that's what we needed.
We've got this plant which is bent over.
It should be like that.
So we've got one, two.
So that gives us the direction.
This is called flagging, rather like a flag flying in the wind.
The flag will point in the direction of travel.
Absolutely brilliant news.
Right.
We were just heading It was really hard about an hour ago.
Couldn't see anything because of the bog.
All we needed was one track just to tell us that they're in this direction.
Now we know we've got a feature bridge, all these things over the place.
So we're going to start running, and move as quickly as we can to get to them.
Let's go, guys.
Pick it up.
As Max and his team head for the aqueduct, Oz and I are entering the woods and finally getting out of sight.
Don't dally.
Tread over lots of bluebells.
The question is, is it all too late? Perfect.
Tracks all over the place.
Right.
OK.
This is just the oldest trick in the book.
You could see where they've just literally scooped out as much mud as they can.
Yeah.
Two hands, like that.
Grabbed it, rubbed it around and then put it on to their faces.
Yeah.
So I'm going to do exactly the same as them, to try and get into their mindset.
Yeah.
He's getting into the mind of Oz Clarke.
This is a man who truly knows no fear.
And some people put two stripes, like that, because it looks good.
But if you go into, for example, ferns, where you've got sharp angles, you would wear sharp camouflage as well.
But equally if you've got sharp features, a very sharp nose or high cheekbones, you'd use a stripe coming down to get rid of the high points on your face.
With both teams entering the woods, we're reaching the endgame in our escape to freedom.
They can smell us.
They can smell pork pie on our breath.
These guys are escaping from us now.
At first it was a bit of a laugh.
Now they're feeling like they're hunted, and they've got a pack of guys who are going to come down on them really soon.
And I should think that where they are at the moment, it's all becoming clear to them.
French cheeses, that Don't trust French cheese.
Shut up about bloody cheese.
Time is not on their side, and we're going to get 'em.
Yes, it's that part of the show where we respond to the letter that literally poured into the Man Lab only the other day.
It might contain the germ of a good idea which means we don't have to think one up.
And we don't even have to pay you.
Here we go.
"May," it says.
"Please could you show us that clip where you laugh at Charlie's attempt to draw that girl he fancied in the last series of Man Lab?" All right.
Well, here's the clip.
In a misguided attempt to impress her, Charlie decided to capture Cassie's loveliness in a beautiful hand-drawn portrait.
Fortunately I was on hand to offer a frank appraisal of Charlie's drawing skills.
Thus passed a happy afternoon in mocking Charlie's attempts to draw the human face.
It's really touching.
And I can't draw, but that's why I don't.
"Then could you show us if you could do it any better?" Bugger.
I've always believed ever since school that you can either draw or you can't.
And I can't.
I'll show you what I mean by sketching our sound man Dan.
It is, in the words of Claude Monet, trés difficile.
Your nose isn't straight.
Some sort of hair stuff going on there.
I can't do it.
Sorry, I just don't know how to do it.
I can't see it.
It's just a mass of colour.
I don't know how to make it come out in a pencil.
But here's a man who reckons drawing can be taught.
John Myatt is an art teacher by training, but his talent for mimicking the masters eventually led to a brush with the law.
But now he's a reformed man, and he's here to teach me the eternal mystery of the human face.
Well, we can, um we can build on this, James.
Is it as bad as Charlie's picture of Cassandra? It's worse! Accepting that I'm an artless buffoon is a low point in my life.
But it quickly passes, and John is able to progress to some handy hints.
Apparently there are certain basic rules that anyone can follow to dispel the impression that you've had a go at drawing with your feet.
If we look at the actual shape of Dan's head, you can see that in fact it's long and thin, isn't it? It's like an egg, but squashed in at the sides.
The second thing, what hardly anybody realises, is that the eyes are halfway down the skull.
If we draw a line from top to bottom somewhere along here you're going to find the eyes, and then the bottom half of the face is where it all happens.
Everything happens in the bottom half.
There's the forehead, but halfway down again between the line for the eyes and the line of the chin, we can roughly say somewhere there is the root of the nose.
And then we split that into one, two, three.
And somewhere along here is the line of the lips, and then along this bottom line we've got the chin.
Now already you can start to work on a likeness.
So when you boil it down basic portraiture is first and foremost about remembering your proportions.
A line up from the edge of the nostrils will show you where the inner edge of the eye is.
Ears run from the top of the eyebrows to the bottom of the nose and so on.
Then you can move on to revealing the soul of your subject.
OK, that's Dan as I drew him earlier on before anyone ever taught me anything about drawing.
And after - how long have we had? - about 35, 40 minutes' tuition, Dan is Dan is still no oil painting but he does look like that, which I think is better.
It's actually the best drawing I've ever done.
It does actually look a bit like him.
This clearly requires practice, and rather than alienate the film crew further, I decide to have a crack at some tourists instead.
The mark of my new-found artistry will be if anyone is prepared to pay me for my efforts.
The artist Paul Cézanne once said, "With an apple I will astonish Paris.
" And now, with my pencil, I will dismay London.
My alluring sign and pay-what-you-think-it's-worth policy soon draws a steady stream of tourists wanting something for the ancestral gallery.
Right.
You must look at me square on, and if you could smile a bit but try not to show your teeth, cos I can't do those.
I do my best to remember my lessons in proportion.
The face is shaped like squashed eggs, the halfway lines for the eyes.
Unfortunately the one thing I wasn't taught was an artist's patter.
Try not to smile too much or move.
So his eyes would be there in a normal human being.
The trouble is, whenever I draw a woman I end up making her look a bit manly.
You're my first subject with no real hair to talk of, which is interesting.
Now you see, I think I might have that roughly No, you're still too fat.
You have a haircut not dissimilar to mine actually.
- I'm sorry.
I don't hear very well.
- Probably for the best.
I was beginning to realise that like all great artists, I would never be appreciated in my own time.
I look like a smuggler from about the 1800s, I would have thought.
I look a bit cross.
Being on the South Bank doesn't help either.
For every couple of normal people, there's someone who looks like this bloke.
You see, the head is an egg, but I can't see much of his head.
At least it prevents me having to do too much of your nose because most of it is actually hidden, which is good Three portraits down, and thanks to Moodius Maximus my coffers are not exactly overflowing.
A used staple.
Do you know what I think? I think the Romans can bugger off.
B-V-G-G-E-R off.
But just as I was getting ready to call it a day and cut my own ear off, amazingly, I began to improve, as the practice of sketching portrait after portrait all day started to pay off.
I quite like it actually in an odd sort of way.
Even though I was getting the hang of it, the question remained, would anybody actually pay for my efforts? Two euros! Look at that.
I think it's really good actually.
I do.
Ho ho ho ho ho! Ah! Art, they say, is its own reward, but a grand total of ten pounds, two euros and a used staple means I can go to the pub, and that's better.
Leonardo da Vinci once said, "Art is never finished, it is merely abandoned.
" I think it's an excellent idea.
Can I have a cheeseburger? So just in case one of your viewers ever writes to you, here are those tips again.
The head is roughly a squashed-egg shape tapering at the bottom.
Draw a line halfway up, which is where the eyes will be.
The eyes are an eye's width apart but don't draw the middle eye.
Dividing the bottom of the face in half tells us where the end of the nose will be.
If you divide the space below that into three it will tell you where to put the mouth and the chin.
Add ears, hair, beards and hats to suit.
Now, we were talking in the Man Lab the other day, - and we all agree Bob the director - Tom! - Sorry, Tom, and Stan on the camera - Sean.
Sorry, Sean on the camera that remembering names is a very difficult skill for a man to master, especially at big events.
However, there are techniques for dealing with this.
So in the interests of preventing a man from looking like a feckless teenage halfwit, we decided to try them out, using one, our very own Rory.
And here is a baffled Rory who we've managed to covertly smuggle in to the army rugby league charity dinner, the jewel in the military social event calendar.
I'm outside monitoring his every move from the Man van.
From here I can see everything that's going on on this screen, which is a live feed from our main camera.
There's Rory's face now.
I can hear everything Rory says through this device.
By pressing this button, I can advise him through a secret earpiece hidden in his ear.
You can just see the camera discreetly hidden in his clothing.
During the pre-dinner drinks Rory must circulate as unobtrusively as possible, learning each guest's full name.
Later he will be playing the role of master of ceremonies, announcing each guest as they present themselves to be seated for dinner.
I also have here the names of all the guests plus the added complication, because this is the army of course, of their ranks.
And I have over here on this computer and on various bits of paper details of known techniques for helping to remember people's names.
In short, though, what we're asking Rory to do here is pretty much impossible.
Look at his face now.
Look at him.
He's getting nervous.
OK.
A couple of techniques.
Use the name frequently when you're introduced.
Find an excuse to say it a number of times.
OK.
So the next guys to come in, I'll just keeping saying their names.
Yeah, but don't overdo it otherwise they'll think you are a bit of a nutcase.
A new crowd of guests has just arrived.
Time for Rory to try out technique number one.
- Hiya.
I'm Rory.
- Hello.
Emma.
- How are you doing, Emma? - I'm very well, thank you.
- Rory.
- Hi.
I'm Clare.
- Clare.
How are you? - Fine, thank you.
- Get here all right, Clare? - Yes, thank you.
Nice one, Clare Michelle Nice to meet you, Michelle.
Lovely drink you've got.
Drink it up, Michelle.
- How you doing, Stu? - Yeah, not bad.
- Having a good night, Stu? - Not bad.
- Yeah.
- Lovely, lovely.
Enjoy yourself, mate.
Have a good night, Stu.
He thinks you're lunatic.
What was the first one called? The first one's name was Emma, I think.
- You're right.
- Yes! No one is quite clear why an idiot with a strange device bolted to his ribs is at their dinner, but they're too polite to mention it.
Another technique.
Clarify spelling.
Ask how do you spell your name? - Roger - Dussard.
Dussard.
How do you spell Dussard? D-U-S-S-A-R-D.
- Yeah, it's French.
- French.
- Oh, zut alors! - Yeah, oui.
Silly sod.
If it's a fairly obvious name, to help remember, write it with your finger.
But not obviously, in the air, because that will make you look really a lunatic.
- What's your name, sorry? - Norman.
Nice to meet you, Norman.
I'm Rory - Rory Barker.
- Rory Barker.
I'm just going to write You don't need to spell your own name, but use your full name to get their full name.
I'm just trying to spell out Norman's name.
I'm starting to wonder if Rory has problems beyond the help of memory techniques.
And as the guests start to flood in, he struggles to keep up.
- Andy Kershaw.
- Andy Kershaw.
- Rich Naivalurua.
- Naivalurua - Funny, Funning - Fanning.
- Clare Fanny? - No, Fanning.
Sorry.
It's excruciating.
Ben Sorry, Ben, I - Ben Hughes.
- Ben Hughes.
Right, so how do I remember his name? You can do little rhymes if you want, like, you know, it's Hughes so you could do the association huge Hughes because he's a big bloke.
Yes.
Yes.
Big, huge.
Ben Huge.
Ben Hughes.
Big Ben Hughes.
This is a nightmare.
This is all going wrong.
God, he looks nervous.
And you're Katie Eastwick Katie Garside.
- Eastwick? - Thanks.
All right.
But it's close.
- Really close.
- Yeah.
- I think she quite likes you, Rory.
- Yeah, she's only human.
Don't say that out loud, you fool.
Yeah, sorry.
No.
I wasn't talking to you then.
- What are you talking to? - I was talking to my drink.
What do you mean? I'm not - Get out of that one.
- Sorry.
Talking to his drink.
I forgot that she could hear me when I spoke to you.
She's looking at me.
I'm going to subtly.
Time's running out and so far Rory's managed to remember a few and terrify many.
Rory, just to let you know.
I don't want you to panic, but it's three minutes to dinner.
With the clock ticking, Rory is suddenly hit by a scrum of late arrivals.
- John - Hulatt.
So I've written it with my finger.
Also the rhyming association.
It's the army, John Hulatt, bullet.
Hulatt, bullet.
Caroline That's C-A-R-O Jeremy Bethell is a colonel.
He is a colonel.
Stuart.
Stu art.
- Is that Ben Johnson? - That is Nobby Nobby Nocock.
Nobby It's Nobby Pocock.
D-U-S-S-A-R-D.
Roger Dussard.
I can't work out if these blokes find Rory incredibly charming or the biggest chump they've ever had in their mess room in their entire lives.
- Can I just bring you to order, please? - Ooh, here we go.
Good luck.
Right.
Thank you very, very much.
The format for tonight In a moment I'm going to hand over to Rory.
Rory, would you like to come front and centre, mate? All right.
Rory's been going round trying to memorise your names.
OK.
Who am I? You are Ryan Swindell.
OK, well done.
- All right.
Yeah.
- We can do this, Rory.
What's going to happen is, I'll hand over to Rory, and Rory's going to call you through.
Time to see what Rain Man Rory can do.
Ben Hughes.
Ben Hughes, aka Ben Huge.
Word-association technique.
Correct.
Emma Emma Who the hell is Emma? - Poe Boke? - Bowes Bowes.
Emma Bowes-Crick.
Good rescue.
Emma Bowes-Crick.
Repeating-the-name-back technique.
Correct.
- Colonel.
- Colonel Jeremy Bethell.
Thank you.
Only bloke in a white jacket.
Easy one.
Ben Johnson? Writing-the-name-with-a-finger technique.
Failed.
Ben Hulatt and Julie Hulatt.
Word-association technique.
Hulatt, bullet.
Correct.
Norman Sergeant-Major Norman Mon - Montford.
- Muppet.
Writing-the-name-with-your-finger technique.
Failed.
Andy Gray.
Name-repetition.
Correct.
Ben Johnson.
He's not Ben Johnson either.
Katie Garside.
Speaking to a gin and tonic.
Not a recognised technique but it'll do.
Roger Dussard.
D-U-S-S-A-R-D.
Clarifying-spelling technique.
Flying colours.
Um Clive.
- No.
- Jeremy.
- No.
- Fred.
Andrew.
- No.
- Ben.
- No.
Johnson.
I'm not sure Ben Johnson's actually here.
Who's this bloke? Ben Johnson? It is Ben Johnson! So with the great Ben Johnson mystery of 2011 solved, Rory slam-dunks the final guests with ease.
My score sheet shows that Rory actually managed to remember over half the names of these identically-dressed people.
Strangely, though, he wasn't invited to join them.
On reflection, perhaps society would be better served if we could all just acknowledge that we can't remember each other's names, and then we won't all look like idiots just like Roger there.
Anyway, meanwhile, back on Dartmoor, the net is closing.
Oz and I have escaped from prison and are on the run from a crack team of expert trackers with only our orienteering skills and basic camouflage to help us.
Knuckles, our getaway driver, waiting for us on the other side of miles of tough terrain.
We've already made it across the moors from Dartmoor prison to these woods.
But the trackers are closing us down.
Right.
- Right.
Quick map update.
- Yeah.
We've made our point here at the edge of the woods.
We've actually walked into them, to this curve here, on the path, widely used by ramblers and so on.
Now, there's two schools of thought here.
One says you should stick to the path because you go much quicker, there's nothing unusual about people walking on paths, there's already lots of tracks on them, and you don't make as much noise.
The other school of thought says we should try and go straight through the woods, cos we're less likely to be seen, and the trackers aren't very far behind.
I say we go through the woods, and then hug the northern edge of the reservoir.
So that's what we do, disappearing furtively into the undergrowth like two wanted plumbers.
But after 20 minutes of struggling through branches and bogs and making precious little progress, Oz has had enough of my bright idea.
I think if we go ploughing through there we're going to take too long.
Eventually, we reluctantly head back to the path.
At this rate, Max and his tracker team will be nearly on us.
The path of least resistance for trackers is crucial, because there's no way, if you're in a hurry, you're going to go across this river on my right-hand side, or break through into all of this greenery here.
You're going to stay on here and move as quickly as possible.
Straight down here.
Then at the bottom we come to another bridge and take a right turn.
But hang on.
Why not cut across there and try and cut the corner off? - James, please.
Honestly.
Let's go.
- There's nowhere to hide on the path.
- It doesn't feel right.
- We just go faster.
I've found something really suspicious.
Come on.
Right.
Thought I'd got 'em.
Somewhere where they could have hidden up, gone to lay up for days.
This is the kind of thing the most dangerous criminals in the world will do.
If you build something like that there's no way people are going to find you.
But no luck this time.
Just keep looking.
So the shack turns out to have been made not by two television presenters but by a common or garden escaped criminal psychopath.
Phew.
Anyhow, this diversion buys us a few precious seconds as we head to our next landmark.
The cartographers among you will have realised that this large area of blue is a reservoir.
But in order to get there we face a fresh challenge: Some locals.
- I can see more people.
- People! People! Keep still.
They might look like harmless ramblers, but all it would take is a little light torture from Max and they could crack.
It's a risk we just can't take.
We've got to go.
We can't stay.
Avoiding the public was trickier than we thought, and as we came across the second road we had to cross, our camouflage skills were tested to the limit.
Oz, you can be seen a mile off.
James, there's one old lady by a van! She's on the other side of the van! She's not looking! We have to get Oops! Car.
My God! He's vanished! We've got to go.
James, we've got to go.
With the road clear, we were at last onto our final major hurdle, the Burrator Reservoir, with just over two miles to go before our rendezvous with Knuckles.
The path of least resistance drops straight down to a reservoir.
When we get down here, just a little bit further on, I want hand signals only.
Yeah? Cos that's going to be Unless they can swim, we got 'em.
Yeah? But for once there's something Max hasn't considered.
This is actually a very interesting point, James, cos none of this is marked along here.
- This is marked as lake.
- Yeah.
Because of global warming, because we've got such dry weather at the moment, all of this should be underwater and you can see it.
Look at this stuff here.
This is basically roots going under the water.
You can tell from the kind of vegetation.
All this should be underwater.
It shouldn't be here.
Do you know what that means? That means, if the water level stays like that, the next time this map's updated that line will change, but for the moment, as far as the map's concerned, we're walking in the lake.
- And the trackers may not realise that.
- Precisely.
So with Oz and I walking on what Max thinks is water, we make brisk progress along the north shore.
But when we attempt to cut up from the lake, and through the wood to the road we nearly get collared.
Hide, James! Down, down.
Stop.
- What? - It's them.
In the field.
You see them? - Coming up the road.
- Yes.
Right.
Down.
OK.
Down.
Down here.
Just wait.
Down here.
Don't look.
Oh, God.
Sorry.
We may have avoided capture by the skin of our teeth, but in the scramble to hide, I've knackered my knee quite badly.
You OK with the knee? And as we struggle on to a higher path in an attempt to slip past Max and his henchmen, I'm reduced to a crippled hobble.
Keep going.
- Can you get down here? - Yeah.
- Under here? - Yeah.
- Down there.
Down on See that track there? - Yeah.
- Right round there.
- Yeah.
- Across there, mostly through woodland.
- Yeah.
- A little bit of open ground and we're there.
- Then you've got to dash.
- Make a dash for it.
- 750 metres.
But 750 metres might be 750 too far.
This is like a bad World War II movie.
We don't know how close they are, but they are close.
It's so simple from here.
Just go down this track here.
It's wooded all the way.
The helicopter won't see us.
They won't see us.
We just go down that track, and honestly, James, I reckon 20 minutes and we're there.
It'll take 20 minutes.
Oh, I can't do that.
- It's 20 minutes! We're there! - Oz, I can't do that.
We have to do it.
Knuckles is waiting, James.
We have to.
This is the last bit.
Just, my knee's swollen like a kipper.
I'm sorry.
It was that bit in the bog.
I can't do it.
I can't run.
They're not going to be very far away.
They'll just get me as soon as I break cover, hobbling across like an old man.
- You go.
- No, I'm not going to go.
I'll go down there the wrong way.
They won't expect that.
I'll lie low for a bit.
I'll come out at night.
They won't find me down there.
- I can just hide in the bushes.
- Do you want a lift up? - I'm sorry.
- It's terrible, James.
I'm not doing this now, seriously, for television, hammy-acting thing.
I did put my foot in a hole and twisted my knee quite badly.
It actually goes to prove that Dartmoor is a very clever place to build a prison cos a lot of the people who escaped in the 19th century drowned in bogs or froze to death.
Quite a few went back to the prison and asked to be let back in.
But the fact remains that with a decent Ordnance Survey map, and this thing, you get this from a camping shop for £4 or £5, and your eyes and your common sense, that will take you right across terrain so inhospitable that in the 19th century, they built a prison on it.
We're close.
- Right, where's the other one? - All right.
All right.
- Where is he? - You won't get him.
He's got the map.
So there you have it.
Thanks to the good old Ordnance Survey and a few basic map-reading skills, a bald man in ill-fitting overalls has got away.
What better recommendation is there than that? It now remains only for me to say goodbye from here, north 52 degrees, 26 minutes and 23 seconds.
West zero degrees, 13 minutes and 11 seconds.
Goodbye.