07/01/2014 The One Show

been rediscovering his Welsh roots. Have you got anything for that?

PLAYS BREAD OF HEAVEN Ah, the homeland. It makes me feel

like singing! Thank goodness for the opening titles! So, who is the Welsh

Essex boy? Please welcome Griff Rhys Jones! Lovely to have you here. My

father never sign in many songs, but one of the songs he used to sing was

bred from heavenses and beer from the Royal Oak. If you don't know the

words, make them up! It's our second day in the new studio. Griff, you've

renovated lots of homes in your time, is there a ritual you always

do to christen a new home? Even if I like to go to a hotel room, I like

to rearrange it. I had an office not far from here a little while ago in

Percy Street, and I took for myself the basement area and made it very

cosy with arm chairs and sofas, lights with lampshades, that sort of

stuff. The problem was that everybody used to come into my

office to hang out because it was the only worthwhile place. I was the

only person who didn't really have any work to do in Talkback. It is a

double-edged sword. We are going to use Matt's dressing room as our

den! Well Griff, this is the first chance we've had to talk to you

since Mel passed away last year. Let's have a look at one of your

famous head to head sketches from Alas Smith And Jones. You know I was

very into the hippie culture, very influenced by the West Coast. You

mean down in Devon. San Francisco. I was one of the beautiful people. I

was, yes. It was a bit before I met you, of course. Yes, it must have

been. You are watching that with great fondness, of course. Pot and

kettle, but the two of us had under hung jaws and one of our biggest

fans was a dentist who used to use the picture of us to lecture! Very

sadly, after Not the Nine O'Clock News, we used to make radio

commercials and we have the microphone hanging between us. When

we came to do the television show, we liked working in that way so we

just took the microphone out and that is literally how it happened.

It would be nice if it had been an artistic idea, but it wasn't. He had

one of those faces that you just smiled and laughed, and you did a

good job of keeping a straight face. Indeed, but the funny thing, during

those head-to-head is, they were always one tape. If you are doing

about six to eight minutes of that stuff, if any mistake was made, we

couldn't start again because the audience had heard the jokes so we

were always terrified about going wrong. Sometimes you can watch, Mel

will always carry the burden, he had more stuff to say. He had the jokes

and I would do the reactions, and he would have an auto cue just behind

my left ear. Sometimes I would see him wandering away to check. Mel

Smith, a brilliant comedian, and he will be missed. Building you own

home is a dream for many people but what do you do if you don't have

building skills or a Grand Designs-style budget? Tony Livesey

has been to meet a group of people who think they have the answer. This

might look like a normal night school class with people being

taught the intricacies of DIY but this class is slightly different.

Because this lot are going to take the skills they are learning here

and use a piece of east London waste land to build their own social

housing. John has been a social housing tenant all his life, but

when his family swelled to five, his two-bedroom house wasn't big

enough. Did you approach the council and ask for a bigger property? I

did. I was told some people have been on the list for ten years and

it is a long waiting time. John found out he might be able to get a

bigger house with his name on it if he rolled up his sleeves and helped

to build it himself. For the project to succeed, John couldn't do it on

his own. He needed to find more families. They all needed to be

eligible for social housing, they all needed more children in the

bedrooms and they all needed to be able to build their new homes. John

managed to get five families on board, but is it fair that just by

showing some willingness to do some DIY they had all managed to get

their hands on a big house with a lifetime tenancy? That is when there

is an estimated 2 million people on the social housing waiting list.

Yes, says John, because in return they are getting their hands dirty.

What did you think when he said, we will build our own houses? Scared,

but excited. How does it all work? It is a community self build so we

all pitch in, helping each other with their houses as we go along.

Where will you find the time to work? We will find time in the

evenings. Nobody takes holidays and we put in a certain amount of time

each week. Be honest, when you do your own house, you are going to

take more care! In this case the housing association has hired

builders to do the bricks and mortar, John and the others have to

do pretty much everything else. What happens if the people building these

properties are not up to it? We have hired the services of a construction

company to make sure it is up to scratch. What do you get out of

this? It is part of a programme we are doing across London and we are

always looking at creative ways to provide new homes. There isn't a

builder amongst this lot, so since September last year they have been

meeting twice a week at their local college to learn some skills. It is

Hammer time! Hanging doors, fitting kitchens and bathrooms, plastering

walls, these are some of the skills they are learning from scratch. Is

this a skill you had before? Certainly not. How well have they

done? Absolutely fantastic. They have taken to it really well. Have

you had to dumb down your level of teaching? Know, in fact in some

respects we have had to speed up a little bit. I have got the know-how

now. This is a skill for life. Theoretically anyone can do this and

the government has set aside ?30 million to help you do it, but the

scheme is not for the faint-hearted. John has had to do a

lot of research and persuading to get the right people on board. It

has taken him five years to get this far and still not a single brick has

been laid. That is due to happen in February. Good luck to John and the

other tenants - I hope they get along. As this is your One Show, all

week we are asking you to send in your family photos or pictures with

loved ones, to create some artwork to decorate our new home. It is a

bit there, we need something. We're after at least 2014 photos to make a

massive One Show Family Mosaic. The Cartwright Family from Derbyshire is

the first photo - they are going to be the end of Chris's nose. And when

you send in your family pictures, you'll make up the rest of us. So

email your family photo to us by Thursday.

Last night Griff's new TV series A Great Welsh Adventure started. I

have got a bone to pick with you. I knew this was going to happen. I

thought if I ever need to make some extra money, I would do a series on

Wales, and you have got in there. Listen to my accent, I don't sound

really Welsh, I told this to ITV. I have a different point of view from

the one you would bring to it, there is still room for you. My point of

view is from somebody who does not know what the hell is going on. One

of your challenges in the series is to find the Holy Grail. I'll tell

you where it is, the first floor of a hotel in Aberystwyth. You will

ruin it for everybody out there! Keep an element of jeopardy about it

for goodness sake! Why did you want to make the show? What made me go?

You were the executive producer as well so you were heavily involved.

Yes, but it was a way of getting back to my roots. I have spent the

last 20 years with Mel, the furthest west I ever went was White city.

From memory of being a child going to Wales was about 120 miles in a

Morris Minor travelling through every single traffic light in

Britain until you got there very late at night, and by nine, it would

never cook for us because we arrived so late so we always had to eat

salad so Cardiff is associated with salad for me. This is put together

for me, the opportunity to find out about Wales. I encourage people to

get out there and explore the countryside, and you don't hold

back. Hats off to you, you have a go. Let's relive last night's

episode when you reached 100 mph on a zip wire in Snowdonia. I am going

at 90 mph! Wants at cruising speed, strange things start to happen to

your face. They used to call it G force. The sensation is literally

breathtaking. Much more extraordinary is the bird 's eye

view of human endeavour in creating this vast crater.

What else do you get up to? I am actually filming myself as I go down

there. I go gliding in the brackens and I swim. My best thing was to go

into the Beacons and swim in a mountain lake. As you may be aware,

after about October it is impossible to buy a swimming costume in Wales,

we discovered, so I had to do some skinny-dipping in the Welsh

mountains. Lets not reveal any more secrets. You can follow Griff's

journey around wonderful Wales on ITV every Monday night. Griff, you

may have found the Holy Grail, but I bet you didn't find one of these on

your travels. This is a fossilised tooth. Wow, that's a fossilised

tooth? It's huge! It's not huge, Matt, it's mammoth!

This is the North Sea. 85 miles off the Suffolk coast. Today, I am on a

fishing trip with a difference. We are trawling a sea bed 25 metres

below this vessel. But it is not fish we are after, we are hoping to

catch something more extraordinary, mammoth bones. 50,000 years ago,

this body of water did not exist. The Suffolk coastline is in that

direction and the sandy dunes are over there. Beneath me, right now,

was once part of mainland Europe, fertile breeding grounds, home to

ice age giants. I have been invited on today's expedition by one of the

world's leading mammoth specialists. Often, in the movies, mammoths get

to pick it in a very snowy landscape. Is that what it would

have been like here? No, the ice age woolly mammoth was living in a

grassland environment. Much like the Serengeti. No elephants, but

mammoths. No black rhinos, but woolly rhinos. Hyenas, Lyons. It was

quite spectacular. This giant's paradise did not last for ever.

Around 11,000 years ago, dramatic changes of climate place. The ice

was melting and the environment disappeared. At the same time, it

causes the extinction of these big animals. Britain became cut off from

mainland Europe and this one is perfect habitat was drowned in what

is now the North Sea. The remains of its past inhabitants are still here,

though. As the first nets are brought in, the decks are busy with

activity. And we strike lucky on the very first trawl. Luckier! Look! You

see? That is amazing. Look at that! That is huge. Is this

exciting, or not? Absolutely incredible. I expected a few small

bits and pieces, but that is amazing. The next job is to get the

bones out. You must be bursting with excitement? This is very, very

exciting. Can you put that over there? Don't drop it. I won't. It is

not all about size, though. Luck, a very nice bone of a female woolly

mammoth. How do you know it is female, just by looking? Because it

is so small. What have you got? It is a molar of a young individual.

This is a milk molar, so to say. So it is like that, in the jaw? Yes,

and that is the grinding surface. It is not just mammoth bones they are

finding. Luck that this magnificent specimen, the woolly rhino. They

were around at the same time? Yes. It is damaged, it here, here. This

was eaten by hyenas. You can, it is absolutely right. Just mind blowing.

That is a little story from the past, right there, in a bone.

Throughout the next few hours, we pull out more and more of these

wonderful artefacts. So are these just lying on the bottom of the sea?

Not covered with layers of sediment? They are embedded in the sediment,

in sand, covered by a layer of clay, preserving the bodies in this

condition. The sand is dredged away from the sea bed, deep in the sea,

and everything which is heavy, like the mammoth bones, remain on the

floor. Then we come with our nets and take it. You and me, we are the

first ones that have seen these bones. Nobody else has seen them

before. I am the first person to touch that bone? Exactly, 40,000

years old. This has been a really incredible day. These fines are

amazing. So far, the team have brought up more than 1 million

mammoth bones. Trawling is only part of the story. Next, we are going to

find out how they fit together to help unlock the secrets of the ice

age. What a trip! So, he is not a

fisherman, he is a palaeontologist, in it for the science? But this is

big business? There is quite a lot of money to be made. There are

millions of bones. I filled my suitcase, it's a great talking point

when people come round. The thing is, you can own a whole mammoth, if

you wanted to. Collect the pieces and do a jigsaw. The last one that

was for sale in Sotheby's in Paris, 2012, was 200,000 euros, about

?170,000. He would take a while putting together the bits, wouldn't

you? It is January, things are tight, if you cannot afford a full

mammoth, what can you get? There are a few bargain basement items. This

is the fossilised tooth of a woolly mammoth. This will set you back

about ?60. Don't give it to me, I'm not going to buy it. I think that is

reasonable. If you can't afford that, this is a fragment of a horn

of a steppe bison. A mere ?25. Running around about 40,000 years

ago? Yes, the same time as the bully mammoth. They just went down to look

at the waves, look what happened. This is bargain basement, this is

the toe of a rhino. That looks like something you could find in a

bargain bucket at a fried chicken shop, how do you know? If you buy

anything, you have to get a certificate of authenticity. If that

is out of your price range, I have something you might be interested

in. Why do you keep concentrating on me? This is free. I will set this

up. You might witness some prehistoric magic. Look at the

monitor to see what happens. If you fancy creating this origami

dinosaur, I have the details on the website.

Not quite as impressive as these. I leave them around house, people come

and say, goodness me. But this is not even a fossil, it is like real

bone. Thank you so much, Miranda. Thanks for bringing the stuff in.

The second part of your mammoth hunt is on Thursday. You make programmes

of three men in boats, another programme about three men in another

boat. Have you ever seen a cargo like this? Look at the size of that.

That is a massive oil rig. But how do you get that of the boat?

Something very large is heading for these shores. It weighs over 22,000

tonnes. It stands 236 metres tall. It cost ?123 million. It is a

brand-new oil rig called Prospector 1. It has travelled from China to

the north of Scotland by hitching a ride on a ship called The Talisman.

Transporting such a massive cargo 15,000 miles across the open sea is

a huge engineering challenge. But now that they have got us here, and

it is perched upon the ship, how do they get it off the ship and into

the water? That is the challenge facing Darren Sutherland from

Prospector Offshore Drilling. I bet you can't guess how they do it. You

have your new oil rig in place. How do you get it off the ship? The ship

is designed to submerge, a bit like a submarine. Later tonight, the

decks of the ship will be under the water and we will float it off when

it is underwater. You are going to sink the ship? We are going to

partially sink the ship. Underneath the oil rig and below the water line

is the equipment that makes this possible. But hang these walls are

the ballast tanks in the bowels of the ship. -- behind these walls. 50

of them are running end to end. When it comes time to submerge, the crew

will pump 99 million litres of water into the tanks and, before you know

it, the decor will sink beneath the waves.

But sinking a ship with a 22,000 tonne structure on top of it is not

easy. Imagine that this is the first, and this is my version of the

talisman. But the rig on top, and it becomes incredibly unstable. My ship

has one, large, half filled tank, so all of the water moves to one side.

That causes the ship to roll. By filling smaller tanks, one at a

time, it means that most of them are completely full or completely empty.

Lower it into the Cromarty Firth and... It's stable, because you

don't get sloshing about. It is 5pm and the final sea fastenings are

being removed. Eight hours later, the process is well and truly

underway. It is now 1am in the morning and the sinking of the ship

has begun in earnest. It's really very strange. I was stood down there

a few short hours ago and now there is a good foot of water, with the

waves lapping over the edges. While this is happening, the engineers are

carefully monitoring the flow of water into the ballast tanks and

checking the stability of the ship and the rig. At 7am, the ship has

sent a total of 12 metres. That is the height of a 4-storey building.

It's a bizarre sight. Now, the most tricky part of the whole process is

about to begin. So, how long have you got to get it off the ship?

Essentially we have the slack tide, for one hour. We need it because it

is such a large vessel and we need to be able to control it very

carefully and avoid colliding with the ship as we take it off. When the

crew get the call, they have to act quickly to release the lines. With

minutes to spare, it is finally floating free.

But for the ship that carried her here, the journey is far from over.

Behind me is what is left of The Talisman, the bow and the stern,

poking up like two islands in the sea. But that is all about a

change. Now the process is reversed as the water is pumped out of the

ballast tanks and The Talisman rises from the waves, ready for the next

massive load that needs to be moved around the world.

Utterly mesmerising. I have never seen a ship that big half sunk. Next

time, three men in a cargo ship! You can see Griff's Great Welsh

Adventure tomorrow. Tomorrow, Honor Blackman and Vernon Kaye will be

here, and Vernon Kaye will be talking about the next series of

Splash. If you have any videos of you, or your child's first dive,

please send them in. Now, it is our 14 pianists from Kingston School in

Bath, playing Beethoven's 14th Sonata to celebrate the start of

2014.