James May's Man Lab (2010) s02e91 Episode Script
Christmas Special
1 Hello and welcome to this special edition of Man Lab, where it really is Christmas Day in the workhouse and everything is carpeted in a magical layer of sawdust.
Here, in our grotty grotto, we are going to banish festive fecklessness and the ghosts of Christmas Past and do everything properly.
In tonight's bulging sack: We have a blast, felling our Man Lab Christmas tree.
In three, two, one, fire! - We make some crackers crackers.
ALL: Whoa! We make Christmas dinner, with military precision.
It's turkey time! And good King Wences-Oz leans out of a window in an attempt to create our own snowstorm.
Fantastic.
(Sleigh bells jingle) Ding dong merrily on high In heaven, the bells are ringing Ding dong verily the skies Are riv'n with angels singing, GI So here it is: Christmas.
Everybody's having fun.
It's a time of gifts and goodwill and silly jumpers, of dull dads saying, "God bless us, one and all" in an overdramatic voice.
Many wonderful things.
But what is the one thing that makes Christmas actually feel like Christmas and not August, which is when we're filming this? We decided to conduct one of our Man Lab surveys.
20% of our respondents voted for spending two weeks in a country that doesn't celebrate Christmas.
Only 8% voted for turkey.
And 1% for a game of charades - although no-one was quite sure what they meant.
However, an overwhelming 60% of our sample said that Christmas is only really Christmas with a proper Christmas tree.
The Christmas Tree Here is our tree.
It's a 35' sustainable monster.
Now, earlier in the year, in normal Man Lab, we cut down a tree by the old-fashioned method of axe and saw and it took absolutely ages.
For Christmas, we've come up with something much more modern and, crucially, quicker.
Follow me.
This is Charlie.
He's an explosives expert and we're going to be using this: This is linear cutting charge, a sort of explosive draught excluder.
It's very widely used in the demolition business to slice through things like the concrete or steel verticals of big buildings so that they fall in a nice, neat pile and can be quickly swept away.
All we're asking it to do is separate this feeble fir tree from its stump and this burns at a rate of four miles per second.
The circumference of the tree is almost exactly three feet, so I've calculated that this job will take one-ten thousandth of a second.
The thinking behind this fir felling fatuousness is as follows: The draught stopper consists of a foam tube inside which is a plastic explosive and a strip of copper.
When the explosive goes off, the copper is blasted through the tree like a knife through an overcooked sprout.
The copper bit there is sort of a big, circular penknife blade.
- It will be, when it's been squeezed - When it goes bang.
We cut the tube to size, stick it round the tree and we're sorted, save for a small addition quite difficult to source in August.
To impart a suitable yuletide flavour to these proceedings, we're going to disguise our bit of explosives as tinsel, but please, seriously, don't do this at home.
Job done.
Right, now, just to borrow a bit of advice from 5th November, it's time to stand well back and never return to your tree once it's been exploded.
Axes? They're for Vikings.
- Right, here we go.
Charging.
- (Electronic whine) Line one in three, two, one.
Fire! Wow! Oh, it hasn't worked.
Hang on, it has.
Holy mother of Santa! Look at that! Wow! Look at that! That is superb.
Clean, efficient quite expensive, yes, I know, but, nevertheless, a superb way to cut down a tree.
However you measure it, and including the Richter Scale, that was a success.
All that remains is for our own East End elf Rory to drag it back to the Man Lab.
Here, then, is our loveliest of trees, erected by the magic of yuletide television in the corner of our Man Lab.
It's even better than it looks, because we've mounted it on this powered, rotating plinth, that I can operate from this piece of very modern electrical equipment down here.
Off it goes, allowing us to display all sides of the tree, and not just the bit facing the room and, better still, by rotating this knob, I can change the speed, so I can make the display more dynamic.
This also has the added advantage of getting rid of Rory for us.
How about that? Now, later on, we'll be showing you how to decorate a tree of this size in the modern, Man Lab way.
But, before that, we're going to move into the kitchen and interfere with time itself.
Follow me.
We're gonna cook a right corker of a Christmas feast for our special Man Lab guests.
Expecting proper food with no lumps or raw bits are Doctor Ben, who helped me explode a dead budgie a few weeks ago, Mat McIvor, the lead singer from Love Fungus, Razor Ruddock, who shouted at me when I missed a penalty, Simmy and various people from our office who are fed up with the usual gruel.
Cooking well for a large number of people is difficult, so we've drawn a table and created our own time zone.
It's called turkey time and here it is.
And here is zero hour, when everything is ready to serve.
From this very, very handy, very clear, colour-coded chart, we can work out that, for example, at zero hour turkey time minus three hours and 30 minutes, somebody must peel the parsnips.
At zero hour minus three hours 45 minutes, somebody has to read the instructions on the bread sauce packet.
It's all perfectly clear.
There's no excuse for making a baubles of this.
We'll try that baubles joke again later on, cos I'm sure it'll work.
Meantime, quickly grab a pen and write all this down, before we move onto something else.
I'm now going to declare it turkey time minus five hours and 30 minutes.
In charge with logistics, and not imbued with the spirit of goodwill, is Sergeant Major Weston and, on extra duties in the cook house, is Lance Corporal Oz Clarke.
Carry on, Sergeant.
Clarke, put that down! Go over there and tell me about turkey weights and timings! - Go! Come on! Move yourself! - Keep your hair on.
Now, the two most important things about turkey are how many people have you got, and a turkey of basically 1 kg will do about two people, so a 6kg turkey like this will do 12, 13 people.
Secondly, timings.
If you put the oven at about 190 degrees Centigrade, that's Gas Mark five, about 20 minutes per kilogram - six of those, therefore six kilograms, two hours, plus you need to add about 90 minutes - that's 9-0, minutes at the end.
So two hours plus 90 minutes, three-and-a-half hours.
Three-and-a-half hours.
Dead simple.
Good.
Now for the stuffing and some advice from the sergeant.
- Hurry up.
- All right, then.
Time waits for no turkey.
Every second counts.
This is an electric stove.
Right.
Most importantly, our sergeant major is under strict orders not to let Oz touch a drop until dinner is served.
- What are you supposed to be doing? - Turkey, right, er So, leaving Oz to struggle with his cold turkey, we turn to the problem of dressing our tree.
It is estimated that, every year, British men spend 60 million man hours decorating Christmas trees by hand.
At any one point in the 48-hour run-up to Christmas Day, at least 30 of them are in casualty with bauble-related injuries sustained falling off a small step ladder.
Now, we like to pretend that it is a joyous, tinselly communion in the bosom of the family, but it isn't, let's be honest, it's Dullsville.
So I asked Sim, our Socrates of the socket set to bring some military thinking to bear on this problem.
- This is the barrel of a mortar.
- Hm-mm.
Compressed air mortar, fires anything that'll fit inside that tube.
The mortar is a weapon that's been around since as early as 1453 and, like Jeremy Kyle's gob, nothing good has ever come out of it.
Extremely popular in both World Wars, its bombs could be aimed to fall directly into trenches.
Our 60psi controlled-action bauble mortar though, has the rather more jolly task of firing meaningless, festive guff at our tree.
It's like being the Wright Brothers, except we're decorating a tree, not improving humankind with the invention of powered, controlled and sustained flight.
Simmy welds up a few joints and we fit a valve for the compressed air.
Our mortar is ready to deck the halls at 50 paces, but it still lacks a certain something.
Right, the only thing that's missing from this, Sim, is some sense of it being a proper, military weapon.
It needs to be camouflaged, so that it blends in with its surroundings.
- That's what you do with a mortar, isn't it? - It is indeed.
Let's paint it.
No-one would suspect anything.
OK.
Inaugural fiery tail bauble loaded.
- Pressurise.
- Charge.
Full bar.
Fire at will.
(Cheering and laughter) Right, more.
For those of you who haven't served in the Christmas military, the mortar works very simply.
A remote compressor feeds air to a reservoir in the mortar, which is controlled by a valve.
Lovely.
When the valve is released, whatever symbol of goodwill is in the tube is fired out.
It is the pipe of peace.
(Laughter) Look at that.
Sorry, can we just? I just wanna point this out before the tree gets away.
No step ladder, no effort, admittedly one of the baubles has shattered, but you don't see that from this side, so that's OK.
But then, a snag.
Ooh.
(Chuckles) - That's a bit rubbish.
- Yeah.
How are we gonna do tinsel? Cos it does need proper tinsel for that tree to look suitably cheesy and Christmassy.
Sim had an idea and will now shout it at you.
This is a four-stroke petrol normally-aspirated leaf blower, air cooled and it's given me an idea.
(Leaf blower whirs) Now that we have a fair smattering of traditional baubles on the tree, Millie and I are going to add these symbolic tool decorations, partly because they embody the spirit of Man Lab.
More importantly, let us not forget that the Christ child himself would have been familiar with tools such as these, - in the workshop of Joseph, the poor - (Whirring) Never mind.
Nice.
Blowing leaves around is pointless, so Simmy's converted the irritating contraption into a breach-loaded tinsel machine gun.
Say hello to my little festive friend.
Fire! Fire! - That was excellent.
- That went really well, didn't it? It looks brilliant.
Put lights on.
- Ready? - Yeah.
(Cheers) Aaaah! - How good is that? - Lovely.
That's the first Christmas tree in history, as far as we know, to be decorated ballistically, but it isn't quite finished yet because we have the crowning glory of the Christmas tree to attach: The fairy.
Now, this is indeed a ballistic fairy.
It's shaped rather like a World War I German Zeppelin bomb.
If our thinking is correct, it will fly through the air and her arms will just drop over a branch at the top of the tree, from where she can look down on us all benignly.
Fairy in the hole! Breach closed.
Wait for it.
Maximum pressure.
Is that fully closed? - (Laughter) - (High-pitched voice) Hello! (High-pitched voice) Who's that? - That's really spooky.
I don't like that.
- (Laughter) (High-pitched voice) What are you doing here? Fire! Oh, dear.
Wahey! I think I saw her head come off.
I think the head came off.
And so I bask in the festive glow of our tree, contemplating the casualty of war.
- She's got no head, that's terrible.
- (Laughter) - Soon, our guests will be here.
- (Kettle whistles) They will expect food, a tree and gifts.
It's better to receive than give, so let's confront the misery of wrapping up presents.
Now it is commonly held that men cannot wrap things up but, of course, that's cobblers, because wrapping things up is easy.
I'll show you, using the example of this house brick.
Lay out your paper.
Put your brick to one edge.
Two, three, four, plus an extra one to allow for the overlap, then you can cut your paper.
Then you simply fold the paper over the gift item, stick it down and then you form the ends into triangles.
It really is fantastically easy.
However, it's never actually like that, is it? Because you end up, on Christmas Eve, with 20 oddly-shaped gifts that you've bought as distressed purchases from your local petrol station, rolling around in a drunken stupor, with bits of sticky tape stuck all over your face and missing The Guns Of Navarone.
There is, however, an easier way to do all this.
This is a vacuum-packing bag.
It's used by people to store pillows, spare duvets and other things that ought to go to the dump.
We have taken some and we have coloured them red and indeed green.
It is now a simple matter of opening up the bag, putting in the gift item, like so, sealing the bag along this special press-together edge like so.
Now you take any domestic vacuum cleaner.
This is what one looks like.
You unscrew this cap like that.
You apply the nozzle to that, turn on (Air hisses) (Turns vacuum off) Put the cap back on and there you go.
You've freed up enough time to watch The Guns Of Navarone and probably The Bridge Over The River Kwai as well.
What could be simpler? Ooh, I wonder what it could be? Meanwhile, as Oz is still prepping the potatoes and feeling like he's in M ASH Faster! Get a move on! let me tell you about a grand undertaking which we'd begun a little earlier.
We'd already checked off the top answer on our Man Lab Christmas survey by getting a tree.
While that was making its way to the lab, we set about dealing with the second-highest answer.
It was much more tricky.
Here is the Christmas card that Richard Hammond sent me last year.
In fact, I've been getting cards something like this for most of my 48 years and it shows - in direct contravention of my lifetime's experience - some snow.
Now, I have never actually seen it snow on Christmas Day.
I've never even heard it forecast for Christmas Day, which gives the Met Office, in fact, a 100% reliability record.
The thing is, we are British.
We love talking about the weather.
We can print as many cards like this as we want, but the fact remains we can't do anything about the weather.
We cannot actually make it snow.
Or can we? You see, it's been done before.
On 13th November, 1946, science's Vincent Schaefer and Bernard Vonnegut performed the first attempt at cloud seeding, during a flight over New York.
By dumping 6lbs of dry ice into a target cloud, the two boffins discovered that tiny, liquid droplets in the cloud could be instantly transformed by this super-chilled shock into ice crystals.
The minute ice crystals then collide and grow into snowflakes until, finally, it snows.
Bernard Vonnegut, incidentally, was the brother of novelist Kurt Vonnegut.
My brother was unavailable, so I've teamed up with Oz Clarke.
Don't worry.
The flasks contain dry ice.
- My name's Oz.
How are you? - Hello, Oz.
I'm Max.
- I'm your pilot.
- I'm glad to hear it.
Right.
Oz, scramble.
A bit harder.
This doesn't bode well.
He has to open the window a bit later on.
(Door repeatedly slams) I'm now beginning to worry about what scientists call the Oz Uncertainty Principle, in which the inclusion of an Oz in an experiment or undertaking has a detrimental effect on the results, rendering them meaningless or even hazardous.
(Bleeping) - Well? - Lovely.
That sounds like Oz coming now and the conditions are almost perfect.
The thing to remember is you can't do cloud seeding if you have no clouds at all.
It's why it isn't an answer to the world's drought problems.
You can't make a cloud in perfectly blue sky by this method.
What you need is a cloud with some water already in it and then you encourage it to become rain or, in our case, snow.
We have very good clouds.
High up, the paler clouds are not particularly good for rain but, underneath those, nimbostratus, these ones, uniformly dark grey, falling rain or snow.
That is what we want.
They're ready to produce water and, if it's frozen, of course, it's snow.
We just need to make it do it here, rather than wherever it was intending to do it, probably somewhere over there.
- Right, they're just below us.
- I can see them.
- See James' red sweater? - Yeah, looking like the Queen of Norway.
We are remaining very, very true and faithful to the original Schaefer and Vonnegut experiment.
We've got the same amount of dry ice, at the same temperature - minus 78 or thereabouts.
We're also throwing out some table salt, because the very tiny particles will form the nuclei of the cloud.
They are the little droplets, normally dust or even bacteria in the atmosphere, around which the cloud droplets form, and then they eventually turn into rain or, if it's cold enough, snow.
Oz and his pilot climbing quite hard now.
Oz, you should recognise them.
You have just climbed through nimbostratus, which is a rain-bearing cloud, exactly the sort of thing we're after.
- That one? Is that any good? - That's perfect.
Wonderful.
This is the pilot.
Oz has just prepared himself: He's got his goggles on.
He's got his goggles on? Right.
You should be above them, ready to chuck your stuff out.
OK.
Window.
Voilà .
PILOT: We're ready! - Oh! - He's done it.
- This is it.
This is gonna work.
- It worked in New York in 1946.
It'll work here.
- Roger.
I'm ready.
OK.
I'm gonna go.
(Grunts) (Laughs) OZ: Come out! Come out! Done! Done! Fantastic.
Now we've gotta see if it's snowing down there.
Er, nothing down here.
Figgy pudding.
No sign of snow or even a light drizzle, but we are not to be deterred, so Oz readies up another flask of dry ice and salt and tries again.
Wind direction is favourable.
The clouds above us are also favourable.
Now! Go! Yes, come on.
Please snow.
No, we're not getting anything down here, not a sausage, or a raindrop, or a snowflake, just a terrible view of Rory's pants.
- So let's look for another cloud.
- OK.
- Again and again, we tried.
- The cloud in front of you looks perfect.
It's big and black and lovely.
Dump it in there.
Go on! The clouds refused to play snowball and our winter wonderland remained, in case you'd forgotten, Augusty.
We have entrusted a fairly technical operation - ie removing the lid from a Thermos flask - to a wine connoisseur.
That may not have been such a good idea.
- Max, I've got one secret weapon with us - OK.
What's that? which is a bottle of Kentish-brewed beer.
- Local beer.
- Oh, God.
It seems to me, all this nonsense about dry ice and salt and all that rubbish, what you need is some good hops and good Kent barley going straight through the cloud.
I don't think the alcohol idea will work, Oz, to be honest.
The idea is to give the cloud a cold shock, not to get it clattered.
OK, here we go.
Kentish beer.
As predicted, the Oz Uncertainly Principle had rendered the experiment meaningless.
Our supplies were exhausted and the way the wind was affecting Oz's face was terrifying the pilot.
I'm very sorry to report that it hasn't snowed here on the Christmas tree, but thank you very much, anyway.
JAMES: Return to base.
- Roger.
Returning to base.
Thanks for your help, Sierra Alpha.
See you later.
Let's not forget that, in the original experiment, it didn't snow immediately, it snowed a bit later.
So let's just hang on.
There's rain.
I've got rain on my face.
There's no denying that since Oz turned up, it has started raining a little bit.
There's a bit more.
And more.
It's raining.
It's raining, isn't it? It is raining.
Look at this.
This is not TV trickery.
There isn't somebody standing over there with one of those things you use when you're ironing.
That is rain.
And that was just the start.
I know Bing Crosby never dreamed of a wet Christmas, but it's halfway there.
Look at it! It may have been about to rain anyway, but I don't think it was.
Look at that.
It's chucking it down.
It's not snow, but it's not cold.
If it was cold, that would be snow.
Oz, you've done it.
Fantastic.
It's a miracle.
That is incredible.
From the stuff you use for a Genesis concert, we've changed the weather and we're not giving up the snow either, we'll try with snow again in the Man Lab but, for now, look at it! Oz Clarke did this.
(Chuckles) OK, it wasn't the blizzard of Oz that we'd been hoping for.
It might have been too warm for snow and it might have shrunk my favourite Christmas jumper.
But, for one glorious moment, co-pilot Oz "I can't get in or out of an aeroplane" Clarke delivered the goods.
The question remained though.
Could we ever really make it snow? Back at the kitchen, and our Man Lab pacemaker experts have informed us that Oz can't be subjected to the sergeant major any further, so I've stepped in.
- Oz? I think the thing is - Is this the neck end? Yeah, but, because it's been de-gutted, it's like a tube, you can shove it in either end.
The next thing is to work out how we actually cook it and keep it moist.
Now, I'm a bit of an old-fashioned, "put bacon over the top" chap.
What about you? Yes, I am, but I think, for people who've not done it before, there are two methods of doing it.
One is turn the bird upside-down and roast it in the tray, then turn it over later and put the bacon on.
But, for safety, you do it in the wrapped in foil method.
Unfortunately, I sent one of our I know.
When you go to buy the foil, for roasting your turkey, especially if you're doing a big one, you get the extra-wide turkey roasting foil, not this sprout roasting foil that one of our feeble-minded callow youths have bought.
- It doesn't matter.
- I've never seen such small foil in my life.
Wrapping the turkey in foil means that the juices will stay in the meat and cooking it upside-down means that they will concentrate in the breast.
- OK.
Turkey in, on its back.
- Upside-down? - Upside-down.
Breast end.
- You realise it's a poncey chef way of doing it.
I would have thought you of all people would not wanna do it this way.
This is why there was a sergeant major in the original plot.
Our turkey is now going in 27 minutes 8 seconds too late.
Our guests are on their way and I still need to organise the festive entertainment.
There are many sad side effects to Christmas: Unwanted gifts, thick head, broken telly, remembering your family is absolutely awful, and, of course, getting fat.
But, not in Man Lab, because here is the Man Lab exercise centre, which some of you will recognise as the Swiss army bicycle from earlier in the series.
Now, what is the point of an exercise bicycle? Where is the incentive to pedal? Well, we have one because, tragically, the transformer in our record player has broken and now the bicycle powers the music so, if you stop pedalling, everybody will hate you.
Since we already resent him for his youth and wit, I put Rory on the bike.
Wait for it.
(Distorted music) - (Jumble of notes) - Too fast.
- (Music slows) - Bit faster.
That's it.
That's it.
Rory the red-faced pedaller was doing a great job, but I needed something grander for my guests' amusement.
Something deeper, crisper, and certainly more even.
Right, let's return to our attempts to make it snow.
Earlier on, Oz threw some CO2 out of the window of a small aeroplane, onto a cloud.
We were very surprised when this didn't work, but the fact is that it didn't.
A sensible man might accept defeat at this point, but sod it, it's Christmas.
So, filled with a festive, kamikaze recklessness, we're going to make the job even harder, by trying to make it snow indoors, right over our unsuspecting guests.
What may help us in our quest is a fluke discovery made by our favourite cloud-seeding pioneer- Vincent Schaefer.
He discovered that if he breathed into a freezer containing super-cold dry ice, the vapour would be instantly shocked into becoming millions of microscopic ice crystals.
It seemed like a good starting point.
This is a humidifier.
It is a device that produces - you'll see this as Sim plugs it in - a little stream of water vapour - that is vapour, it's not steam from a kettle.
We're going to put this in the freezer, which is running at a temperature of, what, minus 12? - More like minus 18.
- Minus 18.
There's the humidifier running.
You can just see the beginnings of our cloud forming.
A lot of people - old people especially - will look at the sky and go, "It's too cold to snow", but that is not true.
If anybody says that to you, you can punch them in the face.
The Met Office says it's not true and I've been to the North Pole where it's chuffing cold and there was snow all over the place.
Although we know that water freezes at nought, in clouds, because there is energy in the vapour, it sometimes needs a temperature as low as minus 40 to remove all that energy and form the ice crystals.
So it's not too cold to snow in our freezer.
If anything, it may not be cold enough.
Inside the Polystyrene box is a block of solid CO2 - carbon dioxide - or dry ice as it's commonly known, with which you would be very familiar if you've ever been to see Genesis or Pink Floyd.
It's called dry ice because it can perform the remarkable trick of jumping straight to a solid to a gas, without going through the liquid stage.
It's at minus 78 degrees naturally.
This will shock our cloud and hopefully make instant crystals form, which would then turn into snowflakes.
Go! Look at that.
- (Laughter) - It's a load of cloud.
When it comes to making snowflakes, naturally-occurring clouds have two big advantages over our freezer-made version.
As even a drunken buffoon in a Gillingham scarf would have noted, real clouds are A: Huge, and B: They're blown around the sky.
To help our snowflakes form, we need to make our captive cloud more windswept.
We're going to try and increase the distance that they move inside here with this small fan, which will create very turbulent conditions inside the freezer compartment.
- That's brilliant.
- Look at our cloud.
As the temperature plunges minus 40, our cloud makes it difficult to see what's going on.
But, then, like a small boy looking out of the window on Christmas morning, - Sim makes an exciting discovery.
- I can see snow.
Look! - He's right.
Look at this.
Look at this.
- It's forming.
JAMES: There's snow on the fan.
- (Laughter) Can you see that snow? The fan has now frozen up and stopped, although we do have in front of it a small patch of what might be considered snow, but that we suspect is actually frost.
We'll just show you the fan.
Is it snow? Yeah, I think that's sort of snow.
It's white, fluffy and cold, but does it pass the internationally-recognised standard test? I'll throw it at Sim and see.
Does this feel like a snowball? No.
(Laughs) Baubles.
So we do have to think about this a bit harder, but that is that's a beginning.
It's cold and it's white and it's on the floor.
The results are inconclusive.
Considering we've only made enough for a scale model of Richard Hammond, we're going to have to improve our methods of production if we're to astound our dinner guests with a real indoor snowfall.
Well, there you go.
Doesn't turkey time fly when you're having fun with popular science? I'm off back to the kitchen.
Ding Dong Merrily On High Now, the carrot and, I suspect, an argument.
In fact, I'm so confident of this being an argument that I've added the argument to our scheme here, in turkey time.
We've got 15 minutes for it.
Anyway, peeling a carrot, rather like a parsnip, I find it works better if you just wet it slightly and then the blade - You don't have to peel it.
- Yes, you do.
You honestly don't.
Modern carrots, you do not have to peel.
You just rub them.
- Modern carrots? - That is a modern carrot.
It's a carrot.
There is a school of thought that says - I'll divide this in half and show you what I mean - that you should cut them into what people like to call batons, ie lengthways, like that.
That is considered the posh way to cut a carrot.
But, after many years of experimentation, I have decided that the school dinner lady way, which is to cut them into circles, like so, actually makes for a better tasting carrot.
The only reason I Wait for it! The only reason I can think of for that is that if you cut them into a circle, you get a better ratio of surface area to volume, so they cook quickly, which is nice if you like rather undercooked vegetables as I do.
Which you Wait! which you don't necessarily get, if you cut them up into batons like that.
Yes, I know it's considered posh and it makes you a member of the middle classes, but what are we interested in? Outmoded Victorian conventions or carrots that taste nice? - Go.
- You're absolutely full of it, James.
- It's nothing to do with middle-class things.
- It is.
It's nothing to do with calling it a baton.
The carrot's flavour changes, like that, not across.
There, you've got a different flavour from there.
That's more intense there.
That's a sweeter flavour there.
If you do it lengthways like that, through one enjoyable moment of chopping your carrot, you get two or three different flavours.
- Not your way.
Also I think that - No, I'm going to have to disagree with you.
Meanwhile, our guests have arrived and they're bored.
(Inconsistent music tempo) (Music slows then speeds up) I don't believe that the sugars will caramelise at the temperature of steam.
- All right, then - Hey, you two fellas, stop arguing! Just chop the bleeding things up.
Hack 'em up.
- You haven't got a preference? - No.
Look, I'll show you what a preference is.
Out the way.
Simple, isn't it? You're wasting all that time, all right.
- You've done both.
- Don't make no never mind, do it? - That's really ugly.
- It's gonna go down your Gilbert, ain't it? Whilst Oz and I try to work out what your Gilbert is, and why you'd want to stuff carrots into it, our guests are still far from merry.
Oz, though, has come up with a solution that also gets around the rule that says he can't touch a drop until dinner.
This is good.
This is a new invention and it gives you all the pleasure of drinking, without the irritating business of having to drink and it's called the Whisky Cloud of Peace.
Now, although this might get you round the sergeant major, please bear in mind that this idea has come from a man dressed like a Smurf.
You've got a plastic bottle like this and a bottle of whisky.
You put a tiny bit of whisky in here.
I mean, really, half a tot.
That's probably too much in fact, well, not too much.
OK.
Now shove that in here.
Got that in there, like that, and now you've got the foot pump.
Let's go I feel a bit bad.
The constant bullying by the sergeant major has clearly destroyed Oz's mind.
The seal at the top is holding this in.
Look what happens now.
Wow! So the sudden catastrophic drop in pressure makes a bit of the whisky evaporate.
- Effectively, it boils.
- Yeah.
Whoosh it! Take a Breathe in.
Breathe in.
Ding dong merrily on high! - What do you feel like? - Mm.
- That's good.
- It's not bad, is it? But what would the guests think? - Are you ready? Are you ready? - Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- Merry Christmas.
- And (Laughter) Before we took Oz's brain child onto Dragon's Den, we thought we should give the Department of Health a quick ring.
The nice lady on the telephone told us, "The Department of Health does not endorse this product and we don't recommend the use of such a device because of a lack of evidence about the health effects of inhaling alcohol.
" There, we've told you, but there's still something nagging at the back of my mind, like a troublesome brain elf.
Where's our snow? With our guests tranquilised by Oz's ghost of Christmas spirit, I sneak away with Simmy and Sam for snow-making attempt No.
3.
Never before in the Man Lab have we been so continually thwarted in an endeavour.
It's going to take two pairs of glasses.
What we decided we needed was a much harsher shock to our water vapour, so Simmy has got this cardboard tube and nailed it together.
What is it, Simmy? Simmy and Sam? Right, we've got a cardboard tube and we've put in a copper coil in here, - which will run out a vessel of nitrogen.
- Mm-hm.
Right.
We'll have liquid nitrogen coming into the coil.
It'll come round, out of these little holes.
- That'll give us our extreme, cold environment.
- How cold? - Minus 200 and something? - Just under 200 degrees.
- That is 196.
- Right.
- Then, this represents our mist in our cloud.
- (Hisses) Yeah.
- That's just water? - Water and compressed air just to get it out.
That will go into our super-cool environment and hopefully will get a few crystals forming.
So snow will fall out of the bottom of the cardboard tube.
Basically.
It's not very high-tech, I admit.
Well, most of the best things are not.
Before we start the attempt, it's worth seeing just how cold liquid nitrogen is.
I've put these gloves on, because it is obviously minus 200 and it would hurt if you got even a splash of it on your fingers.
Shall we have a look and see what temperature it's at? Flower in.
(Sizzling) Flower out.
(Crunching) - (Chuckles) That's cold.
- Oh, yeah.
If we can't create snow with this, then I'm Father Christmas.
OK, we'll ask Roy, the nitrogen expert, to come and turn on the nitrogen supply for us.
(Hissing air) Good King Wenceslas Minus 66.
Minus 70.
Minus 74, look at this.
- Shall we introduce a little bit of moisture into it? - Yeah, yeah, go on.
Not too much though.
- Well, shall we see what we've got? - Yeah.
Roy, can you back it off a bit? And just look at that.
It's hopeless.
It's harder than it looks, this, isn't it? If I looked out of the window and saw that, I wouldn't say, "Ooh, it's snowing!" The point about clouds is that cloud droplets are not water droplets like this.
They're microscopic, really.
These are actually quite big blobs of water that we've got going in.
- You want something - Really fine.
that can barely fall to earth, it's so fine.
- Absolutely, yeah.
It's quite hard to mimic though.
In desperation, we try using the Man Lab kettle Seen any snow yet? but to no avail.
I think you can turn it off, Roy.
- Thank you.
- Thanks.
But as we contemplate total defeat, there's a possible solution staring me in the face.
The thing is snow of sorts does form.
That's snow.
If there was just a way of blowing that off, into a big flurry I mean, cos there's moisture in the air anyway, that's why that's like that.
Well, don't forget the stuff that is settling on there, we can't even see, is a vapour.
- That's just from the air.
- Yeah.
We don't need to introduce anything.
So we don't have holes, we don't have liquid, we just have a coil, which is super-cooled.
Yeah, so like a cold version of the coil inside a central heating system, - inside the water tank.
- Yeah.
But the opposite, cos it's got nitrogen going through it.
You need it to freeze on the pipe, but not stick to the pipe.
A basic system that freezes nothing more than fresh air is simplicity itself and that immediately makes us seasoned Man Labbers deeply suspicious.
The thing is, I can't believe that no-one else has ever thought of this.
Mind you, other people don't think like Man Lab, do they? And that's probably just as well.
We're now at turkey time minus 90 minutes, and crafty tugs on his whisky cloud haven't affected Oz in the slightest.
Whoops.
Put those back in there.
James isn't looking.
What you're trying to do is roughen up the surface so that when you actually put them in the goose fat - the goose fat in the roasting tin - they - (Clatter) - Whoops! They suck up all that fat.
Despite being a hazard to both himself and our dinner, Oz manages to smother the pre-boiled spuds with goose fat and rosemary and is now ready to take the turkey out to rest.
Meanwhile, our guests are being kept entertained by a giant party popper - (Cheering) which Sim has cooked up.
But there's still something missing from the table.
The Christmas cracker was invented in 1846 by a deluded baker called Thomas Smith and, since then, we've had to endure over a century-and-a-half of cracking disappointment.
Here is a Christmas cracker and it's rubbish, really.
You get a pathetic phut! You get a paper hat that would barely fit on the head of the five-year-old child who made it.
You get a stupid novelty, such as this pack of three cards that will be landfill within 48 hours and then you get a joke that wasn't even funny in 1954.
We can do better.
Yes, this sad menagerie of crap hat, tired joke and inexplicable combined comb and ruler toy is scraping the very bottom of a barrel of laughs.
So, in keeping with our theme of blowing things up this Christmas, we're starting with the bang.
The charge contains 40mg of high explosive.
It's a very small amount, so it will destroy the cracker.
- There's a small bullet hit.
- I know why it's called a bullet hit.
I think it's because, in war films, they put these under people's clothing, and it explodes with a blood pouch to make it look like you've been hit.
- Yeah.
Essentially, it's a squib.
- A squib? Yeah, that's the other alternative name for it.
I don't actually want to blow the guests up, I'm quite happy to give them a mild shock.
So that's a pull switch.
When you pull that out, it completes a circuit with that battery there.
Yes.
- And these wires trigger the charge.
- Yes.
- And you've not tested it yet.
- Let's try it.
Martin, would you arm? So, if you two pull it, and I stand here, I'll be OK? - I would stand a few steps back.
- OK.
(Drum roll) - So you've got the switch end.
- Yeah.
OK.
OK.
(Resonating bang) - There you go.
- That's pretty cool.
Now that our guests' ears are leaking blood, we'll give them a really nice hat to wear.
Each of our guests will receive in their cracker, instructions for how to make a hat and then, from a pile of paper, they'll be able to produce something like, for example, this Samurai warrior's hat.
And I have to say it's better, isn't it? We decide to improve the awful Christmas cracker jokes by getting rid of them all together.
This left us free to apply all our creativity to the most disappointing bit of the cracker: The gift.
Rather than spread universal gift ennui with our crackers, we've decided to add an element of jeopardy.
We've invented something called cracker roulette.
All of our crackers look exactly the same.
Each of our ten guests will have to select one at random, but here's the thing - one of them will contain this: It's £500 in tightly bundled, crisp, used notes.
But other crackers may contain something not quite as desirable.
Oh! Oz, the train.
The 7:48 from a dark corner of the Man Lab imagination races to the table.
Who's first? It's Rebecca.
When you have dared to take a cracker, step over here to the window.
- Go on! - Put on the glove.
Holding your cracker, offer it to the hand.
Wooo-hooo! It will pull the cracker with you.
Your surprise will fall out here for us all to see and laugh at.
Ready? Eurgh! - You've got one on you! Argh! - (Laughter) Next up, Dr Ben.
(Laughter) (Toots) - (Cheering) - Woo-hoo! I've got an inheritance tax account form to fill in.
(Laughter) - Pull! You let down - (Laughter) The sergeant major gets even more "cranky".
(Laughs) - Yes, please, Hand.
- Woo! (Cheering) (Laughter) (Cheering) Ooohhhh! Money! Oh! You luckywine expert.
- Clarke, that was my cracker.
- (Laughter) All right, I'm off.
- You've left 20 quid behind.
- (Laughter) - Remove the turkey! - Whatever you say, boss.
Here we go.
Back to the roast and Oz's victory at crackers is quickly tempered by the threat of 50 push-ups unless he makes some gravy.
There's a great basin in there.
A great basin of lovely, lovely juice.
That's the heart of the gravy.
I'm gonna shove that in as well, cos potato water adds starch, but it also adds flavour.
Look sharp! Stir faster! - Stir faster? - Quiet! As Oz stirs for his life, Simmy makes his excuses and leaves the table for a final attempt to bring a white Christmas to the Man Lab.
We have a stainless steel tube acting as a big heat exchanger, which is not doing too much at the moment.
But, if I introduce the liquid nitrogen, you will then see that the moisture on the outside around me is being sucked into the freezer and freezing in the very cold environment we have here.
We'll just keep a constant stream of liquid nitrogen coming through the whole thing, because we're introducing outside air to cool onto our little heat exchanger.
You can already see it now, building up.
What I would call snow.
It looks like snow.
Tastes like snow.
It's quite pleasant, really.
At last, after failure in the air and on the ground, the simple act of fresh air coming in contact with a super-chilled surface seems to have paid off.
The only question is, can Sim make enough of the damn stuff for a whole snowstorm? Right, carving turkey.
There are lots of theories about how to do this.
The Americans think you should cut it in half and then chop the breast one way, other people think you should take the legs off- I'll show you how I do it.
First, you make sure the knife is sharp, using Oz's grandmother's sharpening steel.
If you keep your knife in good condition, a few strokes downhill like that should put the edge back on, which it has done.
I believe in using a pointy knife for reasons I'll show you in a minute.
That was Oz's grandmother's ancestral sharpening steel.
This is my ancestral grandmother's carving fork.
It might be my great-grandmother's, I'm not sure.
First of all, remove the leg.
Simply slice down there.
You'll find where the joint is.
Well, of course, I say that, and it's never that easy when it's a real big 'un, is it? Where is it, Oz? - I'm expecting you to find it.
- It's got no joint.
You know, you find it, you're the expert.
It has no leg joint.
- It's that and you can Tilt forward.
- (Cracking) - Where's it gone? - It's somewhere in there.
Look, you can see it waggling about.
Yeah.
That's it.
Yeah.
- There you go.
- You'd be absolutely useless as a surgeon.
I'm putting that on one side.
We will have that in a moment.
Now, there are various theories about removing the wishbone and so on which I never bother with.
I think, with a big turkey like this, you can treat it almost like a cube.
Certainly, like a pyramid.
Sharp knife, fork in.
Slice.
You want nice, elegant, thin slices.
The reason you have a pointy blade is so you get down into the corners, round the rib cage.
See, there's a lovely slice of turkey.
Next one.
Down there, point of the knife.
Clean, sliced turkey, nice and thin.
That bit fell off.
What a shame.
Cook's piece.
Against the odds, and to some extent the Oz, our army-inspired turkey timetable has worked wonders.
As the last few seconds of turkey time tick away, and zero hour is upon us, so is our feast.
Hey! And, because our plan has worked and it's all gone according to plan, we are ready.
Lovely boys.
Here it is! - (Cheering) - Turkey time! Using the meticulous turkey timetable, the throbbing temple vein of our socially maladjusted sergeant major, and the sheer determination coursing through our bones, Oz has ridden the gravy train to complete success.
- Merry Christmas! - What a gent.
(Laughter) (Chatter and laughter) - Mm.
- Looks all right.
But it's not over just yet.
There's still that other thing to finish.
Silent night Holy night - Good.
If you could just entertain yourselves for a bit, Sim and I have to go and sort a few things out.
Right, where have we got to? James, this is about number four or five prototype.
We've tried coils, we've tried liquid nitrogen through - Humidifiers.
- Everything.
Everything.
So this has got coil, tube, nitrogen and freezer combined.
Yes.
The whole point of this, of course, is to surprise our guests.
They have been surprised by cracker roulette and the maggots and the 500 quid but, as they digest their food, in August, thinking, "This is reasonably Christmassy, I suppose," there will be a flurry of snow and the illusion will be complete.
- Isn't that right? - Yes.
Good.
Right, let's do it.
It was time to collect the last, priceless, snowy scrapings Fluffy, fluffy snow.
before Sim powered up the trusty tinsel cannon for our freezing, festive finale.
Right, here we go.
Throttle back a bit.
(Cheering) O Come All Ye Faithful (Squeals) Whichever way you look at it, that is snow.
It is snow.
I defy you to argue that that isn't snow.
Look at the definition.
Look at it under a microscope.
Put it on a Christmas card.
Ask people to ski on it.
Ask Bing Crosby to sing about it.
It's snow.
(Squeals) - (Cheering) - We've run out of snow.
- I thought there'd be loads.
That's it, but - You're kidding.
That's a week of work and about £5,000 worth of liquid nitrogen.
We've got the equivalent of a Chinese takeaway.
(Laughter) - What else can we find? Have we got any? - Look.
Bit of a back-up.
Where the hell did you? How did you do that? What is it? It is the kind of super absorbent polymer that you get in babies' nappies.
- Fake snow, then.
- Feed it in.
OK, this might be the first nappy bombardment in human history, and we might have caved in slightly on our no fake snow policy but, luckily, they're all too whisky clouded to care.
And, anyway, Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without a bit of a bodge.
And so, with our Christmas dinner descending into good-natured chaos, we could rest safe in the knowledge that, through invention and industry, we had brought forth Christmas cheer for one and allin August.
Something I've been looking for, since I was a teenager: A white Christmas, and there it is, through our own efforts.
Christmas, though, is not just about trivial things like snow.
- Let us think what it's actually about.
- (Laughter and chatter continues) It is, we're told, a time of goodwill to all men, and that's a wonderful thing.
Old animosities are cast aside, as we join in communal revelry, wars stop for a game of football, all that kind of stuff.
Once In Royal David's City But, hang on a minute.
Why is Christmas the time of goodwill? Why do we imagine that we can discharge our duty of decency to our fellow human beings for a week or two in December and then forget about it? Surely, the message coming out of that rude seed in the manger, with the witless ass in attendance, and the poor shepherds, and the gold-laden Magi looking on together as equals is that goodwill is a 24/7 requirement.
And it doesn't matter if you're not actually a Christian.
The nativity has given us a simple potent symbol that all people can embrace as their own.
A star, a permanent light in the deathly darkness of the night sky, leading all of humankind out of its mortal dread, towards peace, harmony and salvation.
A merry Christmas, one and all.
(Distant siren) Theme from Man Lab (Siren approaches) A strange light in the garden.
It doesn't quite work for me, as a symbol.
Here, in our grotty grotto, we are going to banish festive fecklessness and the ghosts of Christmas Past and do everything properly.
In tonight's bulging sack: We have a blast, felling our Man Lab Christmas tree.
In three, two, one, fire! - We make some crackers crackers.
ALL: Whoa! We make Christmas dinner, with military precision.
It's turkey time! And good King Wences-Oz leans out of a window in an attempt to create our own snowstorm.
Fantastic.
(Sleigh bells jingle) Ding dong merrily on high In heaven, the bells are ringing Ding dong verily the skies Are riv'n with angels singing, GI So here it is: Christmas.
Everybody's having fun.
It's a time of gifts and goodwill and silly jumpers, of dull dads saying, "God bless us, one and all" in an overdramatic voice.
Many wonderful things.
But what is the one thing that makes Christmas actually feel like Christmas and not August, which is when we're filming this? We decided to conduct one of our Man Lab surveys.
20% of our respondents voted for spending two weeks in a country that doesn't celebrate Christmas.
Only 8% voted for turkey.
And 1% for a game of charades - although no-one was quite sure what they meant.
However, an overwhelming 60% of our sample said that Christmas is only really Christmas with a proper Christmas tree.
The Christmas Tree Here is our tree.
It's a 35' sustainable monster.
Now, earlier in the year, in normal Man Lab, we cut down a tree by the old-fashioned method of axe and saw and it took absolutely ages.
For Christmas, we've come up with something much more modern and, crucially, quicker.
Follow me.
This is Charlie.
He's an explosives expert and we're going to be using this: This is linear cutting charge, a sort of explosive draught excluder.
It's very widely used in the demolition business to slice through things like the concrete or steel verticals of big buildings so that they fall in a nice, neat pile and can be quickly swept away.
All we're asking it to do is separate this feeble fir tree from its stump and this burns at a rate of four miles per second.
The circumference of the tree is almost exactly three feet, so I've calculated that this job will take one-ten thousandth of a second.
The thinking behind this fir felling fatuousness is as follows: The draught stopper consists of a foam tube inside which is a plastic explosive and a strip of copper.
When the explosive goes off, the copper is blasted through the tree like a knife through an overcooked sprout.
The copper bit there is sort of a big, circular penknife blade.
- It will be, when it's been squeezed - When it goes bang.
We cut the tube to size, stick it round the tree and we're sorted, save for a small addition quite difficult to source in August.
To impart a suitable yuletide flavour to these proceedings, we're going to disguise our bit of explosives as tinsel, but please, seriously, don't do this at home.
Job done.
Right, now, just to borrow a bit of advice from 5th November, it's time to stand well back and never return to your tree once it's been exploded.
Axes? They're for Vikings.
- Right, here we go.
Charging.
- (Electronic whine) Line one in three, two, one.
Fire! Wow! Oh, it hasn't worked.
Hang on, it has.
Holy mother of Santa! Look at that! Wow! Look at that! That is superb.
Clean, efficient quite expensive, yes, I know, but, nevertheless, a superb way to cut down a tree.
However you measure it, and including the Richter Scale, that was a success.
All that remains is for our own East End elf Rory to drag it back to the Man Lab.
Here, then, is our loveliest of trees, erected by the magic of yuletide television in the corner of our Man Lab.
It's even better than it looks, because we've mounted it on this powered, rotating plinth, that I can operate from this piece of very modern electrical equipment down here.
Off it goes, allowing us to display all sides of the tree, and not just the bit facing the room and, better still, by rotating this knob, I can change the speed, so I can make the display more dynamic.
This also has the added advantage of getting rid of Rory for us.
How about that? Now, later on, we'll be showing you how to decorate a tree of this size in the modern, Man Lab way.
But, before that, we're going to move into the kitchen and interfere with time itself.
Follow me.
We're gonna cook a right corker of a Christmas feast for our special Man Lab guests.
Expecting proper food with no lumps or raw bits are Doctor Ben, who helped me explode a dead budgie a few weeks ago, Mat McIvor, the lead singer from Love Fungus, Razor Ruddock, who shouted at me when I missed a penalty, Simmy and various people from our office who are fed up with the usual gruel.
Cooking well for a large number of people is difficult, so we've drawn a table and created our own time zone.
It's called turkey time and here it is.
And here is zero hour, when everything is ready to serve.
From this very, very handy, very clear, colour-coded chart, we can work out that, for example, at zero hour turkey time minus three hours and 30 minutes, somebody must peel the parsnips.
At zero hour minus three hours 45 minutes, somebody has to read the instructions on the bread sauce packet.
It's all perfectly clear.
There's no excuse for making a baubles of this.
We'll try that baubles joke again later on, cos I'm sure it'll work.
Meantime, quickly grab a pen and write all this down, before we move onto something else.
I'm now going to declare it turkey time minus five hours and 30 minutes.
In charge with logistics, and not imbued with the spirit of goodwill, is Sergeant Major Weston and, on extra duties in the cook house, is Lance Corporal Oz Clarke.
Carry on, Sergeant.
Clarke, put that down! Go over there and tell me about turkey weights and timings! - Go! Come on! Move yourself! - Keep your hair on.
Now, the two most important things about turkey are how many people have you got, and a turkey of basically 1 kg will do about two people, so a 6kg turkey like this will do 12, 13 people.
Secondly, timings.
If you put the oven at about 190 degrees Centigrade, that's Gas Mark five, about 20 minutes per kilogram - six of those, therefore six kilograms, two hours, plus you need to add about 90 minutes - that's 9-0, minutes at the end.
So two hours plus 90 minutes, three-and-a-half hours.
Three-and-a-half hours.
Dead simple.
Good.
Now for the stuffing and some advice from the sergeant.
- Hurry up.
- All right, then.
Time waits for no turkey.
Every second counts.
This is an electric stove.
Right.
Most importantly, our sergeant major is under strict orders not to let Oz touch a drop until dinner is served.
- What are you supposed to be doing? - Turkey, right, er So, leaving Oz to struggle with his cold turkey, we turn to the problem of dressing our tree.
It is estimated that, every year, British men spend 60 million man hours decorating Christmas trees by hand.
At any one point in the 48-hour run-up to Christmas Day, at least 30 of them are in casualty with bauble-related injuries sustained falling off a small step ladder.
Now, we like to pretend that it is a joyous, tinselly communion in the bosom of the family, but it isn't, let's be honest, it's Dullsville.
So I asked Sim, our Socrates of the socket set to bring some military thinking to bear on this problem.
- This is the barrel of a mortar.
- Hm-mm.
Compressed air mortar, fires anything that'll fit inside that tube.
The mortar is a weapon that's been around since as early as 1453 and, like Jeremy Kyle's gob, nothing good has ever come out of it.
Extremely popular in both World Wars, its bombs could be aimed to fall directly into trenches.
Our 60psi controlled-action bauble mortar though, has the rather more jolly task of firing meaningless, festive guff at our tree.
It's like being the Wright Brothers, except we're decorating a tree, not improving humankind with the invention of powered, controlled and sustained flight.
Simmy welds up a few joints and we fit a valve for the compressed air.
Our mortar is ready to deck the halls at 50 paces, but it still lacks a certain something.
Right, the only thing that's missing from this, Sim, is some sense of it being a proper, military weapon.
It needs to be camouflaged, so that it blends in with its surroundings.
- That's what you do with a mortar, isn't it? - It is indeed.
Let's paint it.
No-one would suspect anything.
OK.
Inaugural fiery tail bauble loaded.
- Pressurise.
- Charge.
Full bar.
Fire at will.
(Cheering and laughter) Right, more.
For those of you who haven't served in the Christmas military, the mortar works very simply.
A remote compressor feeds air to a reservoir in the mortar, which is controlled by a valve.
Lovely.
When the valve is released, whatever symbol of goodwill is in the tube is fired out.
It is the pipe of peace.
(Laughter) Look at that.
Sorry, can we just? I just wanna point this out before the tree gets away.
No step ladder, no effort, admittedly one of the baubles has shattered, but you don't see that from this side, so that's OK.
But then, a snag.
Ooh.
(Chuckles) - That's a bit rubbish.
- Yeah.
How are we gonna do tinsel? Cos it does need proper tinsel for that tree to look suitably cheesy and Christmassy.
Sim had an idea and will now shout it at you.
This is a four-stroke petrol normally-aspirated leaf blower, air cooled and it's given me an idea.
(Leaf blower whirs) Now that we have a fair smattering of traditional baubles on the tree, Millie and I are going to add these symbolic tool decorations, partly because they embody the spirit of Man Lab.
More importantly, let us not forget that the Christ child himself would have been familiar with tools such as these, - in the workshop of Joseph, the poor - (Whirring) Never mind.
Nice.
Blowing leaves around is pointless, so Simmy's converted the irritating contraption into a breach-loaded tinsel machine gun.
Say hello to my little festive friend.
Fire! Fire! - That was excellent.
- That went really well, didn't it? It looks brilliant.
Put lights on.
- Ready? - Yeah.
(Cheers) Aaaah! - How good is that? - Lovely.
That's the first Christmas tree in history, as far as we know, to be decorated ballistically, but it isn't quite finished yet because we have the crowning glory of the Christmas tree to attach: The fairy.
Now, this is indeed a ballistic fairy.
It's shaped rather like a World War I German Zeppelin bomb.
If our thinking is correct, it will fly through the air and her arms will just drop over a branch at the top of the tree, from where she can look down on us all benignly.
Fairy in the hole! Breach closed.
Wait for it.
Maximum pressure.
Is that fully closed? - (Laughter) - (High-pitched voice) Hello! (High-pitched voice) Who's that? - That's really spooky.
I don't like that.
- (Laughter) (High-pitched voice) What are you doing here? Fire! Oh, dear.
Wahey! I think I saw her head come off.
I think the head came off.
And so I bask in the festive glow of our tree, contemplating the casualty of war.
- She's got no head, that's terrible.
- (Laughter) - Soon, our guests will be here.
- (Kettle whistles) They will expect food, a tree and gifts.
It's better to receive than give, so let's confront the misery of wrapping up presents.
Now it is commonly held that men cannot wrap things up but, of course, that's cobblers, because wrapping things up is easy.
I'll show you, using the example of this house brick.
Lay out your paper.
Put your brick to one edge.
Two, three, four, plus an extra one to allow for the overlap, then you can cut your paper.
Then you simply fold the paper over the gift item, stick it down and then you form the ends into triangles.
It really is fantastically easy.
However, it's never actually like that, is it? Because you end up, on Christmas Eve, with 20 oddly-shaped gifts that you've bought as distressed purchases from your local petrol station, rolling around in a drunken stupor, with bits of sticky tape stuck all over your face and missing The Guns Of Navarone.
There is, however, an easier way to do all this.
This is a vacuum-packing bag.
It's used by people to store pillows, spare duvets and other things that ought to go to the dump.
We have taken some and we have coloured them red and indeed green.
It is now a simple matter of opening up the bag, putting in the gift item, like so, sealing the bag along this special press-together edge like so.
Now you take any domestic vacuum cleaner.
This is what one looks like.
You unscrew this cap like that.
You apply the nozzle to that, turn on (Air hisses) (Turns vacuum off) Put the cap back on and there you go.
You've freed up enough time to watch The Guns Of Navarone and probably The Bridge Over The River Kwai as well.
What could be simpler? Ooh, I wonder what it could be? Meanwhile, as Oz is still prepping the potatoes and feeling like he's in M ASH Faster! Get a move on! let me tell you about a grand undertaking which we'd begun a little earlier.
We'd already checked off the top answer on our Man Lab Christmas survey by getting a tree.
While that was making its way to the lab, we set about dealing with the second-highest answer.
It was much more tricky.
Here is the Christmas card that Richard Hammond sent me last year.
In fact, I've been getting cards something like this for most of my 48 years and it shows - in direct contravention of my lifetime's experience - some snow.
Now, I have never actually seen it snow on Christmas Day.
I've never even heard it forecast for Christmas Day, which gives the Met Office, in fact, a 100% reliability record.
The thing is, we are British.
We love talking about the weather.
We can print as many cards like this as we want, but the fact remains we can't do anything about the weather.
We cannot actually make it snow.
Or can we? You see, it's been done before.
On 13th November, 1946, science's Vincent Schaefer and Bernard Vonnegut performed the first attempt at cloud seeding, during a flight over New York.
By dumping 6lbs of dry ice into a target cloud, the two boffins discovered that tiny, liquid droplets in the cloud could be instantly transformed by this super-chilled shock into ice crystals.
The minute ice crystals then collide and grow into snowflakes until, finally, it snows.
Bernard Vonnegut, incidentally, was the brother of novelist Kurt Vonnegut.
My brother was unavailable, so I've teamed up with Oz Clarke.
Don't worry.
The flasks contain dry ice.
- My name's Oz.
How are you? - Hello, Oz.
I'm Max.
- I'm your pilot.
- I'm glad to hear it.
Right.
Oz, scramble.
A bit harder.
This doesn't bode well.
He has to open the window a bit later on.
(Door repeatedly slams) I'm now beginning to worry about what scientists call the Oz Uncertainty Principle, in which the inclusion of an Oz in an experiment or undertaking has a detrimental effect on the results, rendering them meaningless or even hazardous.
(Bleeping) - Well? - Lovely.
That sounds like Oz coming now and the conditions are almost perfect.
The thing to remember is you can't do cloud seeding if you have no clouds at all.
It's why it isn't an answer to the world's drought problems.
You can't make a cloud in perfectly blue sky by this method.
What you need is a cloud with some water already in it and then you encourage it to become rain or, in our case, snow.
We have very good clouds.
High up, the paler clouds are not particularly good for rain but, underneath those, nimbostratus, these ones, uniformly dark grey, falling rain or snow.
That is what we want.
They're ready to produce water and, if it's frozen, of course, it's snow.
We just need to make it do it here, rather than wherever it was intending to do it, probably somewhere over there.
- Right, they're just below us.
- I can see them.
- See James' red sweater? - Yeah, looking like the Queen of Norway.
We are remaining very, very true and faithful to the original Schaefer and Vonnegut experiment.
We've got the same amount of dry ice, at the same temperature - minus 78 or thereabouts.
We're also throwing out some table salt, because the very tiny particles will form the nuclei of the cloud.
They are the little droplets, normally dust or even bacteria in the atmosphere, around which the cloud droplets form, and then they eventually turn into rain or, if it's cold enough, snow.
Oz and his pilot climbing quite hard now.
Oz, you should recognise them.
You have just climbed through nimbostratus, which is a rain-bearing cloud, exactly the sort of thing we're after.
- That one? Is that any good? - That's perfect.
Wonderful.
This is the pilot.
Oz has just prepared himself: He's got his goggles on.
He's got his goggles on? Right.
You should be above them, ready to chuck your stuff out.
OK.
Window.
Voilà .
PILOT: We're ready! - Oh! - He's done it.
- This is it.
This is gonna work.
- It worked in New York in 1946.
It'll work here.
- Roger.
I'm ready.
OK.
I'm gonna go.
(Grunts) (Laughs) OZ: Come out! Come out! Done! Done! Fantastic.
Now we've gotta see if it's snowing down there.
Er, nothing down here.
Figgy pudding.
No sign of snow or even a light drizzle, but we are not to be deterred, so Oz readies up another flask of dry ice and salt and tries again.
Wind direction is favourable.
The clouds above us are also favourable.
Now! Go! Yes, come on.
Please snow.
No, we're not getting anything down here, not a sausage, or a raindrop, or a snowflake, just a terrible view of Rory's pants.
- So let's look for another cloud.
- OK.
- Again and again, we tried.
- The cloud in front of you looks perfect.
It's big and black and lovely.
Dump it in there.
Go on! The clouds refused to play snowball and our winter wonderland remained, in case you'd forgotten, Augusty.
We have entrusted a fairly technical operation - ie removing the lid from a Thermos flask - to a wine connoisseur.
That may not have been such a good idea.
- Max, I've got one secret weapon with us - OK.
What's that? which is a bottle of Kentish-brewed beer.
- Local beer.
- Oh, God.
It seems to me, all this nonsense about dry ice and salt and all that rubbish, what you need is some good hops and good Kent barley going straight through the cloud.
I don't think the alcohol idea will work, Oz, to be honest.
The idea is to give the cloud a cold shock, not to get it clattered.
OK, here we go.
Kentish beer.
As predicted, the Oz Uncertainly Principle had rendered the experiment meaningless.
Our supplies were exhausted and the way the wind was affecting Oz's face was terrifying the pilot.
I'm very sorry to report that it hasn't snowed here on the Christmas tree, but thank you very much, anyway.
JAMES: Return to base.
- Roger.
Returning to base.
Thanks for your help, Sierra Alpha.
See you later.
Let's not forget that, in the original experiment, it didn't snow immediately, it snowed a bit later.
So let's just hang on.
There's rain.
I've got rain on my face.
There's no denying that since Oz turned up, it has started raining a little bit.
There's a bit more.
And more.
It's raining.
It's raining, isn't it? It is raining.
Look at this.
This is not TV trickery.
There isn't somebody standing over there with one of those things you use when you're ironing.
That is rain.
And that was just the start.
I know Bing Crosby never dreamed of a wet Christmas, but it's halfway there.
Look at it! It may have been about to rain anyway, but I don't think it was.
Look at that.
It's chucking it down.
It's not snow, but it's not cold.
If it was cold, that would be snow.
Oz, you've done it.
Fantastic.
It's a miracle.
That is incredible.
From the stuff you use for a Genesis concert, we've changed the weather and we're not giving up the snow either, we'll try with snow again in the Man Lab but, for now, look at it! Oz Clarke did this.
(Chuckles) OK, it wasn't the blizzard of Oz that we'd been hoping for.
It might have been too warm for snow and it might have shrunk my favourite Christmas jumper.
But, for one glorious moment, co-pilot Oz "I can't get in or out of an aeroplane" Clarke delivered the goods.
The question remained though.
Could we ever really make it snow? Back at the kitchen, and our Man Lab pacemaker experts have informed us that Oz can't be subjected to the sergeant major any further, so I've stepped in.
- Oz? I think the thing is - Is this the neck end? Yeah, but, because it's been de-gutted, it's like a tube, you can shove it in either end.
The next thing is to work out how we actually cook it and keep it moist.
Now, I'm a bit of an old-fashioned, "put bacon over the top" chap.
What about you? Yes, I am, but I think, for people who've not done it before, there are two methods of doing it.
One is turn the bird upside-down and roast it in the tray, then turn it over later and put the bacon on.
But, for safety, you do it in the wrapped in foil method.
Unfortunately, I sent one of our I know.
When you go to buy the foil, for roasting your turkey, especially if you're doing a big one, you get the extra-wide turkey roasting foil, not this sprout roasting foil that one of our feeble-minded callow youths have bought.
- It doesn't matter.
- I've never seen such small foil in my life.
Wrapping the turkey in foil means that the juices will stay in the meat and cooking it upside-down means that they will concentrate in the breast.
- OK.
Turkey in, on its back.
- Upside-down? - Upside-down.
Breast end.
- You realise it's a poncey chef way of doing it.
I would have thought you of all people would not wanna do it this way.
This is why there was a sergeant major in the original plot.
Our turkey is now going in 27 minutes 8 seconds too late.
Our guests are on their way and I still need to organise the festive entertainment.
There are many sad side effects to Christmas: Unwanted gifts, thick head, broken telly, remembering your family is absolutely awful, and, of course, getting fat.
But, not in Man Lab, because here is the Man Lab exercise centre, which some of you will recognise as the Swiss army bicycle from earlier in the series.
Now, what is the point of an exercise bicycle? Where is the incentive to pedal? Well, we have one because, tragically, the transformer in our record player has broken and now the bicycle powers the music so, if you stop pedalling, everybody will hate you.
Since we already resent him for his youth and wit, I put Rory on the bike.
Wait for it.
(Distorted music) - (Jumble of notes) - Too fast.
- (Music slows) - Bit faster.
That's it.
That's it.
Rory the red-faced pedaller was doing a great job, but I needed something grander for my guests' amusement.
Something deeper, crisper, and certainly more even.
Right, let's return to our attempts to make it snow.
Earlier on, Oz threw some CO2 out of the window of a small aeroplane, onto a cloud.
We were very surprised when this didn't work, but the fact is that it didn't.
A sensible man might accept defeat at this point, but sod it, it's Christmas.
So, filled with a festive, kamikaze recklessness, we're going to make the job even harder, by trying to make it snow indoors, right over our unsuspecting guests.
What may help us in our quest is a fluke discovery made by our favourite cloud-seeding pioneer- Vincent Schaefer.
He discovered that if he breathed into a freezer containing super-cold dry ice, the vapour would be instantly shocked into becoming millions of microscopic ice crystals.
It seemed like a good starting point.
This is a humidifier.
It is a device that produces - you'll see this as Sim plugs it in - a little stream of water vapour - that is vapour, it's not steam from a kettle.
We're going to put this in the freezer, which is running at a temperature of, what, minus 12? - More like minus 18.
- Minus 18.
There's the humidifier running.
You can just see the beginnings of our cloud forming.
A lot of people - old people especially - will look at the sky and go, "It's too cold to snow", but that is not true.
If anybody says that to you, you can punch them in the face.
The Met Office says it's not true and I've been to the North Pole where it's chuffing cold and there was snow all over the place.
Although we know that water freezes at nought, in clouds, because there is energy in the vapour, it sometimes needs a temperature as low as minus 40 to remove all that energy and form the ice crystals.
So it's not too cold to snow in our freezer.
If anything, it may not be cold enough.
Inside the Polystyrene box is a block of solid CO2 - carbon dioxide - or dry ice as it's commonly known, with which you would be very familiar if you've ever been to see Genesis or Pink Floyd.
It's called dry ice because it can perform the remarkable trick of jumping straight to a solid to a gas, without going through the liquid stage.
It's at minus 78 degrees naturally.
This will shock our cloud and hopefully make instant crystals form, which would then turn into snowflakes.
Go! Look at that.
- (Laughter) - It's a load of cloud.
When it comes to making snowflakes, naturally-occurring clouds have two big advantages over our freezer-made version.
As even a drunken buffoon in a Gillingham scarf would have noted, real clouds are A: Huge, and B: They're blown around the sky.
To help our snowflakes form, we need to make our captive cloud more windswept.
We're going to try and increase the distance that they move inside here with this small fan, which will create very turbulent conditions inside the freezer compartment.
- That's brilliant.
- Look at our cloud.
As the temperature plunges minus 40, our cloud makes it difficult to see what's going on.
But, then, like a small boy looking out of the window on Christmas morning, - Sim makes an exciting discovery.
- I can see snow.
Look! - He's right.
Look at this.
Look at this.
- It's forming.
JAMES: There's snow on the fan.
- (Laughter) Can you see that snow? The fan has now frozen up and stopped, although we do have in front of it a small patch of what might be considered snow, but that we suspect is actually frost.
We'll just show you the fan.
Is it snow? Yeah, I think that's sort of snow.
It's white, fluffy and cold, but does it pass the internationally-recognised standard test? I'll throw it at Sim and see.
Does this feel like a snowball? No.
(Laughs) Baubles.
So we do have to think about this a bit harder, but that is that's a beginning.
It's cold and it's white and it's on the floor.
The results are inconclusive.
Considering we've only made enough for a scale model of Richard Hammond, we're going to have to improve our methods of production if we're to astound our dinner guests with a real indoor snowfall.
Well, there you go.
Doesn't turkey time fly when you're having fun with popular science? I'm off back to the kitchen.
Ding Dong Merrily On High Now, the carrot and, I suspect, an argument.
In fact, I'm so confident of this being an argument that I've added the argument to our scheme here, in turkey time.
We've got 15 minutes for it.
Anyway, peeling a carrot, rather like a parsnip, I find it works better if you just wet it slightly and then the blade - You don't have to peel it.
- Yes, you do.
You honestly don't.
Modern carrots, you do not have to peel.
You just rub them.
- Modern carrots? - That is a modern carrot.
It's a carrot.
There is a school of thought that says - I'll divide this in half and show you what I mean - that you should cut them into what people like to call batons, ie lengthways, like that.
That is considered the posh way to cut a carrot.
But, after many years of experimentation, I have decided that the school dinner lady way, which is to cut them into circles, like so, actually makes for a better tasting carrot.
The only reason I Wait for it! The only reason I can think of for that is that if you cut them into a circle, you get a better ratio of surface area to volume, so they cook quickly, which is nice if you like rather undercooked vegetables as I do.
Which you Wait! which you don't necessarily get, if you cut them up into batons like that.
Yes, I know it's considered posh and it makes you a member of the middle classes, but what are we interested in? Outmoded Victorian conventions or carrots that taste nice? - Go.
- You're absolutely full of it, James.
- It's nothing to do with middle-class things.
- It is.
It's nothing to do with calling it a baton.
The carrot's flavour changes, like that, not across.
There, you've got a different flavour from there.
That's more intense there.
That's a sweeter flavour there.
If you do it lengthways like that, through one enjoyable moment of chopping your carrot, you get two or three different flavours.
- Not your way.
Also I think that - No, I'm going to have to disagree with you.
Meanwhile, our guests have arrived and they're bored.
(Inconsistent music tempo) (Music slows then speeds up) I don't believe that the sugars will caramelise at the temperature of steam.
- All right, then - Hey, you two fellas, stop arguing! Just chop the bleeding things up.
Hack 'em up.
- You haven't got a preference? - No.
Look, I'll show you what a preference is.
Out the way.
Simple, isn't it? You're wasting all that time, all right.
- You've done both.
- Don't make no never mind, do it? - That's really ugly.
- It's gonna go down your Gilbert, ain't it? Whilst Oz and I try to work out what your Gilbert is, and why you'd want to stuff carrots into it, our guests are still far from merry.
Oz, though, has come up with a solution that also gets around the rule that says he can't touch a drop until dinner.
This is good.
This is a new invention and it gives you all the pleasure of drinking, without the irritating business of having to drink and it's called the Whisky Cloud of Peace.
Now, although this might get you round the sergeant major, please bear in mind that this idea has come from a man dressed like a Smurf.
You've got a plastic bottle like this and a bottle of whisky.
You put a tiny bit of whisky in here.
I mean, really, half a tot.
That's probably too much in fact, well, not too much.
OK.
Now shove that in here.
Got that in there, like that, and now you've got the foot pump.
Let's go I feel a bit bad.
The constant bullying by the sergeant major has clearly destroyed Oz's mind.
The seal at the top is holding this in.
Look what happens now.
Wow! So the sudden catastrophic drop in pressure makes a bit of the whisky evaporate.
- Effectively, it boils.
- Yeah.
Whoosh it! Take a Breathe in.
Breathe in.
Ding dong merrily on high! - What do you feel like? - Mm.
- That's good.
- It's not bad, is it? But what would the guests think? - Are you ready? Are you ready? - Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- Merry Christmas.
- And (Laughter) Before we took Oz's brain child onto Dragon's Den, we thought we should give the Department of Health a quick ring.
The nice lady on the telephone told us, "The Department of Health does not endorse this product and we don't recommend the use of such a device because of a lack of evidence about the health effects of inhaling alcohol.
" There, we've told you, but there's still something nagging at the back of my mind, like a troublesome brain elf.
Where's our snow? With our guests tranquilised by Oz's ghost of Christmas spirit, I sneak away with Simmy and Sam for snow-making attempt No.
3.
Never before in the Man Lab have we been so continually thwarted in an endeavour.
It's going to take two pairs of glasses.
What we decided we needed was a much harsher shock to our water vapour, so Simmy has got this cardboard tube and nailed it together.
What is it, Simmy? Simmy and Sam? Right, we've got a cardboard tube and we've put in a copper coil in here, - which will run out a vessel of nitrogen.
- Mm-hm.
Right.
We'll have liquid nitrogen coming into the coil.
It'll come round, out of these little holes.
- That'll give us our extreme, cold environment.
- How cold? - Minus 200 and something? - Just under 200 degrees.
- That is 196.
- Right.
- Then, this represents our mist in our cloud.
- (Hisses) Yeah.
- That's just water? - Water and compressed air just to get it out.
That will go into our super-cool environment and hopefully will get a few crystals forming.
So snow will fall out of the bottom of the cardboard tube.
Basically.
It's not very high-tech, I admit.
Well, most of the best things are not.
Before we start the attempt, it's worth seeing just how cold liquid nitrogen is.
I've put these gloves on, because it is obviously minus 200 and it would hurt if you got even a splash of it on your fingers.
Shall we have a look and see what temperature it's at? Flower in.
(Sizzling) Flower out.
(Crunching) - (Chuckles) That's cold.
- Oh, yeah.
If we can't create snow with this, then I'm Father Christmas.
OK, we'll ask Roy, the nitrogen expert, to come and turn on the nitrogen supply for us.
(Hissing air) Good King Wenceslas Minus 66.
Minus 70.
Minus 74, look at this.
- Shall we introduce a little bit of moisture into it? - Yeah, yeah, go on.
Not too much though.
- Well, shall we see what we've got? - Yeah.
Roy, can you back it off a bit? And just look at that.
It's hopeless.
It's harder than it looks, this, isn't it? If I looked out of the window and saw that, I wouldn't say, "Ooh, it's snowing!" The point about clouds is that cloud droplets are not water droplets like this.
They're microscopic, really.
These are actually quite big blobs of water that we've got going in.
- You want something - Really fine.
that can barely fall to earth, it's so fine.
- Absolutely, yeah.
It's quite hard to mimic though.
In desperation, we try using the Man Lab kettle Seen any snow yet? but to no avail.
I think you can turn it off, Roy.
- Thank you.
- Thanks.
But as we contemplate total defeat, there's a possible solution staring me in the face.
The thing is snow of sorts does form.
That's snow.
If there was just a way of blowing that off, into a big flurry I mean, cos there's moisture in the air anyway, that's why that's like that.
Well, don't forget the stuff that is settling on there, we can't even see, is a vapour.
- That's just from the air.
- Yeah.
We don't need to introduce anything.
So we don't have holes, we don't have liquid, we just have a coil, which is super-cooled.
Yeah, so like a cold version of the coil inside a central heating system, - inside the water tank.
- Yeah.
But the opposite, cos it's got nitrogen going through it.
You need it to freeze on the pipe, but not stick to the pipe.
A basic system that freezes nothing more than fresh air is simplicity itself and that immediately makes us seasoned Man Labbers deeply suspicious.
The thing is, I can't believe that no-one else has ever thought of this.
Mind you, other people don't think like Man Lab, do they? And that's probably just as well.
We're now at turkey time minus 90 minutes, and crafty tugs on his whisky cloud haven't affected Oz in the slightest.
Whoops.
Put those back in there.
James isn't looking.
What you're trying to do is roughen up the surface so that when you actually put them in the goose fat - the goose fat in the roasting tin - they - (Clatter) - Whoops! They suck up all that fat.
Despite being a hazard to both himself and our dinner, Oz manages to smother the pre-boiled spuds with goose fat and rosemary and is now ready to take the turkey out to rest.
Meanwhile, our guests are being kept entertained by a giant party popper - (Cheering) which Sim has cooked up.
But there's still something missing from the table.
The Christmas cracker was invented in 1846 by a deluded baker called Thomas Smith and, since then, we've had to endure over a century-and-a-half of cracking disappointment.
Here is a Christmas cracker and it's rubbish, really.
You get a pathetic phut! You get a paper hat that would barely fit on the head of the five-year-old child who made it.
You get a stupid novelty, such as this pack of three cards that will be landfill within 48 hours and then you get a joke that wasn't even funny in 1954.
We can do better.
Yes, this sad menagerie of crap hat, tired joke and inexplicable combined comb and ruler toy is scraping the very bottom of a barrel of laughs.
So, in keeping with our theme of blowing things up this Christmas, we're starting with the bang.
The charge contains 40mg of high explosive.
It's a very small amount, so it will destroy the cracker.
- There's a small bullet hit.
- I know why it's called a bullet hit.
I think it's because, in war films, they put these under people's clothing, and it explodes with a blood pouch to make it look like you've been hit.
- Yeah.
Essentially, it's a squib.
- A squib? Yeah, that's the other alternative name for it.
I don't actually want to blow the guests up, I'm quite happy to give them a mild shock.
So that's a pull switch.
When you pull that out, it completes a circuit with that battery there.
Yes.
- And these wires trigger the charge.
- Yes.
- And you've not tested it yet.
- Let's try it.
Martin, would you arm? So, if you two pull it, and I stand here, I'll be OK? - I would stand a few steps back.
- OK.
(Drum roll) - So you've got the switch end.
- Yeah.
OK.
OK.
(Resonating bang) - There you go.
- That's pretty cool.
Now that our guests' ears are leaking blood, we'll give them a really nice hat to wear.
Each of our guests will receive in their cracker, instructions for how to make a hat and then, from a pile of paper, they'll be able to produce something like, for example, this Samurai warrior's hat.
And I have to say it's better, isn't it? We decide to improve the awful Christmas cracker jokes by getting rid of them all together.
This left us free to apply all our creativity to the most disappointing bit of the cracker: The gift.
Rather than spread universal gift ennui with our crackers, we've decided to add an element of jeopardy.
We've invented something called cracker roulette.
All of our crackers look exactly the same.
Each of our ten guests will have to select one at random, but here's the thing - one of them will contain this: It's £500 in tightly bundled, crisp, used notes.
But other crackers may contain something not quite as desirable.
Oh! Oz, the train.
The 7:48 from a dark corner of the Man Lab imagination races to the table.
Who's first? It's Rebecca.
When you have dared to take a cracker, step over here to the window.
- Go on! - Put on the glove.
Holding your cracker, offer it to the hand.
Wooo-hooo! It will pull the cracker with you.
Your surprise will fall out here for us all to see and laugh at.
Ready? Eurgh! - You've got one on you! Argh! - (Laughter) Next up, Dr Ben.
(Laughter) (Toots) - (Cheering) - Woo-hoo! I've got an inheritance tax account form to fill in.
(Laughter) - Pull! You let down - (Laughter) The sergeant major gets even more "cranky".
(Laughs) - Yes, please, Hand.
- Woo! (Cheering) (Laughter) (Cheering) Ooohhhh! Money! Oh! You luckywine expert.
- Clarke, that was my cracker.
- (Laughter) All right, I'm off.
- You've left 20 quid behind.
- (Laughter) - Remove the turkey! - Whatever you say, boss.
Here we go.
Back to the roast and Oz's victory at crackers is quickly tempered by the threat of 50 push-ups unless he makes some gravy.
There's a great basin in there.
A great basin of lovely, lovely juice.
That's the heart of the gravy.
I'm gonna shove that in as well, cos potato water adds starch, but it also adds flavour.
Look sharp! Stir faster! - Stir faster? - Quiet! As Oz stirs for his life, Simmy makes his excuses and leaves the table for a final attempt to bring a white Christmas to the Man Lab.
We have a stainless steel tube acting as a big heat exchanger, which is not doing too much at the moment.
But, if I introduce the liquid nitrogen, you will then see that the moisture on the outside around me is being sucked into the freezer and freezing in the very cold environment we have here.
We'll just keep a constant stream of liquid nitrogen coming through the whole thing, because we're introducing outside air to cool onto our little heat exchanger.
You can already see it now, building up.
What I would call snow.
It looks like snow.
Tastes like snow.
It's quite pleasant, really.
At last, after failure in the air and on the ground, the simple act of fresh air coming in contact with a super-chilled surface seems to have paid off.
The only question is, can Sim make enough of the damn stuff for a whole snowstorm? Right, carving turkey.
There are lots of theories about how to do this.
The Americans think you should cut it in half and then chop the breast one way, other people think you should take the legs off- I'll show you how I do it.
First, you make sure the knife is sharp, using Oz's grandmother's sharpening steel.
If you keep your knife in good condition, a few strokes downhill like that should put the edge back on, which it has done.
I believe in using a pointy knife for reasons I'll show you in a minute.
That was Oz's grandmother's ancestral sharpening steel.
This is my ancestral grandmother's carving fork.
It might be my great-grandmother's, I'm not sure.
First of all, remove the leg.
Simply slice down there.
You'll find where the joint is.
Well, of course, I say that, and it's never that easy when it's a real big 'un, is it? Where is it, Oz? - I'm expecting you to find it.
- It's got no joint.
You know, you find it, you're the expert.
It has no leg joint.
- It's that and you can Tilt forward.
- (Cracking) - Where's it gone? - It's somewhere in there.
Look, you can see it waggling about.
Yeah.
That's it.
Yeah.
- There you go.
- You'd be absolutely useless as a surgeon.
I'm putting that on one side.
We will have that in a moment.
Now, there are various theories about removing the wishbone and so on which I never bother with.
I think, with a big turkey like this, you can treat it almost like a cube.
Certainly, like a pyramid.
Sharp knife, fork in.
Slice.
You want nice, elegant, thin slices.
The reason you have a pointy blade is so you get down into the corners, round the rib cage.
See, there's a lovely slice of turkey.
Next one.
Down there, point of the knife.
Clean, sliced turkey, nice and thin.
That bit fell off.
What a shame.
Cook's piece.
Against the odds, and to some extent the Oz, our army-inspired turkey timetable has worked wonders.
As the last few seconds of turkey time tick away, and zero hour is upon us, so is our feast.
Hey! And, because our plan has worked and it's all gone according to plan, we are ready.
Lovely boys.
Here it is! - (Cheering) - Turkey time! Using the meticulous turkey timetable, the throbbing temple vein of our socially maladjusted sergeant major, and the sheer determination coursing through our bones, Oz has ridden the gravy train to complete success.
- Merry Christmas! - What a gent.
(Laughter) (Chatter and laughter) - Mm.
- Looks all right.
But it's not over just yet.
There's still that other thing to finish.
Silent night Holy night - Good.
If you could just entertain yourselves for a bit, Sim and I have to go and sort a few things out.
Right, where have we got to? James, this is about number four or five prototype.
We've tried coils, we've tried liquid nitrogen through - Humidifiers.
- Everything.
Everything.
So this has got coil, tube, nitrogen and freezer combined.
Yes.
The whole point of this, of course, is to surprise our guests.
They have been surprised by cracker roulette and the maggots and the 500 quid but, as they digest their food, in August, thinking, "This is reasonably Christmassy, I suppose," there will be a flurry of snow and the illusion will be complete.
- Isn't that right? - Yes.
Good.
Right, let's do it.
It was time to collect the last, priceless, snowy scrapings Fluffy, fluffy snow.
before Sim powered up the trusty tinsel cannon for our freezing, festive finale.
Right, here we go.
Throttle back a bit.
(Cheering) O Come All Ye Faithful (Squeals) Whichever way you look at it, that is snow.
It is snow.
I defy you to argue that that isn't snow.
Look at the definition.
Look at it under a microscope.
Put it on a Christmas card.
Ask people to ski on it.
Ask Bing Crosby to sing about it.
It's snow.
(Squeals) - (Cheering) - We've run out of snow.
- I thought there'd be loads.
That's it, but - You're kidding.
That's a week of work and about £5,000 worth of liquid nitrogen.
We've got the equivalent of a Chinese takeaway.
(Laughter) - What else can we find? Have we got any? - Look.
Bit of a back-up.
Where the hell did you? How did you do that? What is it? It is the kind of super absorbent polymer that you get in babies' nappies.
- Fake snow, then.
- Feed it in.
OK, this might be the first nappy bombardment in human history, and we might have caved in slightly on our no fake snow policy but, luckily, they're all too whisky clouded to care.
And, anyway, Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without a bit of a bodge.
And so, with our Christmas dinner descending into good-natured chaos, we could rest safe in the knowledge that, through invention and industry, we had brought forth Christmas cheer for one and allin August.
Something I've been looking for, since I was a teenager: A white Christmas, and there it is, through our own efforts.
Christmas, though, is not just about trivial things like snow.
- Let us think what it's actually about.
- (Laughter and chatter continues) It is, we're told, a time of goodwill to all men, and that's a wonderful thing.
Old animosities are cast aside, as we join in communal revelry, wars stop for a game of football, all that kind of stuff.
Once In Royal David's City But, hang on a minute.
Why is Christmas the time of goodwill? Why do we imagine that we can discharge our duty of decency to our fellow human beings for a week or two in December and then forget about it? Surely, the message coming out of that rude seed in the manger, with the witless ass in attendance, and the poor shepherds, and the gold-laden Magi looking on together as equals is that goodwill is a 24/7 requirement.
And it doesn't matter if you're not actually a Christian.
The nativity has given us a simple potent symbol that all people can embrace as their own.
A star, a permanent light in the deathly darkness of the night sky, leading all of humankind out of its mortal dread, towards peace, harmony and salvation.
A merry Christmas, one and all.
(Distant siren) Theme from Man Lab (Siren approaches) A strange light in the garden.
It doesn't quite work for me, as a symbol.