Christmas Special James May's Man Lab

Hello, and welcome to this special edition of Man Lab

where it really is Christmas Day in the workhouse.

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. Boff.

We make some crackers crackers.

We make Christmas dinner with military precision.

It's turkey time.

And, good King Wenceslas-Oz leans out of a window

in an attempt to create our own snowstorm.

Fantastic.

# Ding dong merrily on high

# In heaven the bells are ringing

# Ding dong verily the skies

# Are ridden with angels singing. #

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.

# O, Tannenbaum, O, Tannebaum. #

Here is our tree.

It's a 35 foot 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.

So, 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.

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 1/10,000th 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 a sort of a big circular penknife blade.

It will be, yes, when it's been...

-When it goes bang.

-..squeezed under.

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.

# The rats ate all the presents

# And the reindeer ran away. #

Job done.

Right, just to borrow a bit of advice from the 5th of 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.

Line one, in three, two, one, boff.

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 is our loveliest of trees,

erected by the magic of Yuletide television

in the corner of our Man Lab.

And 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.

Watch this. 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 going to 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,

Matt McIvor, the lead singer from Love Fungus,

Razor Ruddock, who shouted at me a lot 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.

And 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 absolutely no excuse for making a baubles of this.

We'll try that baubles joke again later on

because I'm sure it'll work.

Meantime, quickly grab a pen and write all this down

before we move on to something else.

I'm now going to declare it turkey time minus

five hours and 30 minutes.

In charge of logistics, and not especially imbued

with the spirit of goodwill, is Sergeant Major Weston.

And on extra duties in the cookhouse 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.

Turkey. The two most important things about turkey

are how many people have you got

and a turkey will basically, one kilogram will do about two people.

So, a six kilogram turkey like this will do 12, 13 people.

And 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, erm, er...

So, leaving Oz to struggle with his cold turkey,

we turn to the problem of dressing our tree.

It is estimated every year British men spend 60 million man hours

decorating Christmas trees by hand

and, that 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 stepladder.

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, compressed air mortar,

fires pretty much 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

instead of improving humankind

with 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 now ready to deck the halls at 50 paces

but it still lacks a certain something.

The only thing that's really missing from this, Sim,

is some sense of it being a proper sort of 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.

# War, war is stupid

# And people are stupid

# And love means nothing in some strange quarters. #

No one would suspect anything.

0K, inaugural, fiery, tailed bauble.

Loaded.

-Pressurise.

-Charged.

Four bar, fire at will.

Hurray.

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.

Look at that, sorry we can just,

I just want to point this out, before the tree gets away.

No stepladder, 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.

Oh, oh-oh-oh-oh.

-That's a bit rubbish.

-Yeah.

-How are we going to do tinsel?

Because 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.

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

but, 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...

LEAF BLOWER REVS

Never mind.

Nice.

Blowing leaves around is pointless. So, Simmy has converted the

irritating contraption into a breech-loaded tinsel machine gun.

Say hello to my little festive friend.

Fire.

Fire.

That was excellent.

That worked really well, didn't it?

It looks brilliant. Put lights on.

-Are you ready?

-Yes.

-Wey-hey.

-Aah.

-How good is that?

-Lovely.

There you are, that's the first Christmas tree in history,

as far as we know, to be direct 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.

And, 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.

Breech closed, wait for it. Maximum pressure.

Is that fully closed?

Hello, who's that?

That's really spooky, I don't like that.

What are you doing here?

Fire.

Oh, dear.

-I think I saw her head come off.

-Think the head came off.

And so, I bask in the festive glow of our tree

contemplating the casualties of war.

But she's got no head. That's terrible.

Soon our guests will be here. They will expect food, a tree and gifts.

It's better to receive than give so let's confront the misery

of wrapping a present and get it over with.

Now, it is commonly held that men cannot wrap things up

but, of course, that's cobblers

because wrapping things up is, in fact, 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 distress 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 things

that really 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.

Put the cap back on.

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?

# Magic moments. #

I wonder what it could be?

# When two hearts are caring. #

Meanwhile, as Oz is still prepping the potatoes

and feeling like he's in Mash.

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.

And the thing is, we are British, we love talking about the weather

and 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 the 13th of November 1946, science's Vincent Schaefer

and Bernard Vonnegut performed the first attempt at cloud seeding

during a flight over New York.

By dumping six lbs 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.

-Hello, Oz.

-How are you mate?

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.

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.

Lovely.

That sounds like Oz coming now

and the conditions are actually 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.

And we have very good clouds.

High up the paler clouds are stratocumulus,

not particularly good for rain.

But underneath those, nimbostratus, these ones,

uniformly dark grey, falling rain or snow.

That is exactly what we want.

They're ready to produce water

and if it's frozen, of course, 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.

I can see them. I don't know what they're doing.

See James's red sweater.

Yeah, I can see him looking like the Queen of Norway.

We are remaining very, very true and faithful

to the original Schaefer and Vonnegut experiment here.

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.

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'

that you have just climbed through nimbostratus

'which is a rain bearing cloud'

of exactly the sort of thing we're after.

-That one, is that any good?

-Yeah, perfect. Absolutely wonderful.

'James, this is the pilot. Oz is just preparing himself.

'He's got his goggles on.'

He's got his goggles on?

Right.

You should be just above them ready to chuck your stuff out.

OK, window open.

-He's done it.

-This is the lid. This is going to work.

It worked in New York in 1946, it'll work here.

I'm ready. OK, I'm going to go!

Done, done.

Fantastic, now we've got to see whether 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.

-Is there any 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.

Let's look for another cloud. OK.

Again and again we'd tried.

The cloud in front of you looks perfect, big black and lovely.

-Dump it in there.

-Go.

But the clouds refused to play snowball.

And our winter wonderland remained, in case you had forgotten, Augusty.

Actually, 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.

Now, Max, I've got one secret weapon with us.

OK, what's that?

-A bottle of Kentish brewed beer, a local beer.

-Oh, God.

And it seems to me that if all this nonsense

about dry ice and salt and all that rubbish,

what you need is some good hops,

a good Kent barley going straight through the cloud.

I don't think the alcohol idea will work, Oz, really.

The idea is to give the cloud a cold shock not to get it clattered.

OK, here we go. Kentish beer, do your best.

As predicted, the Oz uncertainty 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. 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 that you use when you are 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.

I mean, it may been about to rain anyway, but I don't think it was.

Look at that. It's chucking it down.

I mean it's not snow, but it's not cold.

If it was cold that would be snow.

-Oz, you've done it.

-'Fantastic.'

It is 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 with snow either,

we'll try with snow again in the Man Lab.

But, for now, Oz Clarke did this.

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 in 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.

-Yes.

-I think the thing is...

Is this the neck end?

Yes, but because it's been degutted

it's sort of 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.

I'm a bit of an old-fashioned put-bacon-over-the-top chap,

what about you?

Yes, I am, but I think the people who've not done it before,

there are two methods of doing this.

One is, just 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 a big one for lots of people,

you get the extra wide turkey roasting foil.

Not this sprout roasting foil

that one of our feebleminded callow youths bought.

But it doesn't matter we can still make it work...

I've never seen such small foil in my life.

Wrapping the turkey in foil means the juices will stay in the meat,

and cooking it upside down means they will concentrate in the breast.

-OK, turkey in, on its back.

-Upside down?

-Upside down.

You realise this is an incredibly poncey chef way of doing this?

And I would have thought you, of all people,

would not want to do it this way.

This is why there was a sergeant major in the original plot.

Our turkey is now going in 27 minutes and eight 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 that 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 down

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.

Too fast.

A bit faster.

-# Are you hanging up... #

-That's it.

Rory, the red-faced pedaller, was doing a great job

but I needed something grander for my guest's 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

and 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 are 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 supercold 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.

Of course, a lot of people, old people especially,

will look at the sky and go, "Eeh, 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, in any case,

I've been to the North Pole where it's chuffing cold

and there was snow all over the place.

The fact is that, 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.

But let's see.

Inside the polystyrene box is a block of solid CO2,

carbon dioxide, or dry ice as it is commonly known,

with which you will 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 from 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.

It's a load of cloud.

When it comes to making snowflakes, naturally occurring clouds

have two big advantages over our freezer-based 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.

So, we're going to try and effectively increase

the distance they move, inside here, with this small fan

which will create very turbulent conditions

inside the freezer compartment.

That's brilliant, I don't know what it's doing.

Look at our cloud.

As the temperature plunges past 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.

There's snow on the fan.

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 certainly 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.

-Baubles.

So, we do have to think about this a bit harder,

but that's a beginning.

It's cold and it's white and it's on the floor.

The results are inconclusive and, considering we've only made enough

for a scale model of Richard Hammond,

we will have to improve our methods of production

if we're to astound our dinner guests with a real indoor snowfall.

There you go, doesn't turkey time fly

when you're having fun with popular science?

I'm off back to the kitchen.

Now the carrot and, I suspect, an argument.

In fact, I'm so confident of this being an argument that,

I have added the argument to our scheme in turkey time.

We've got 15 minutes for it.

Anyway, peeling a carrot, rather like the parsnip,

I find it works better if you just wet it slightly

and then the blade...

-You don't have to peel it.

-What? Yes, you do.

-You honestly don't...

Modern carrots, you do not have to peel, you just rub them.

-Modern carrots.

-That's 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 baton,

i.e. 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.

And the only reason I can... wait for it.

The only reason I can think of for that is, 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 don't necessarily... Wait!

Which you don't necessarily get if you cut them up into batons.

I know it is considered posh and it makes you a member

of the middle classes, but what are we interested in?

Outmoded Victorian contraventions or carrots that taste nice. Go.

You are absolutely full of it, James,

it is nothing to do with middle-class things.

-It is.

-It is nothing to do with calling it a baton.

The carrot's flavour changes like that, not across.

There you have got a much different flavour from there.

That's a more intense flavour there, that's a sweeter flavour there.

If you do it lengthways, like that, through one enjoyable moment

of chopping your carrot up on the plate,

you get two or three different flavours.

Not your way. Also, I think...

I'm going to have to disagree with you there.

Meanwhile, our guests have arrived and they're bored.

# Please, Daddy Don't get drunk this Christmas

# I don't want to see my Mama cry. #

I don't believe the sugars will caramelise at the temperature

-of steam which is how we'll cook...

-All right...

You two fairies, stop arguing,

just chop the bleeding things up, all right, just hack 'em up.

-You haven't got a preference.

-No,

I'll show you what the preference is, boy.

Out of the way, simple, innit? You've wasted all that time.

-You've done both.

-Don't make no never mind, do it?

What the hell's that?

-That's really ugly.

-It goes down your Gilbert, innit, hey?

Whilst Oz and I try to work 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.

Right, 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 you've got 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,

drop 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 at what happens now.

Wow.

So, it's 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?

Umm, 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...

Before we took Oz's brainchild on to 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 tranquillised by Oz's ghost of Christmas spirit

I sneak away with Simmy and Sam for snow making attempt number three.

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 and Sam.

Right, we've got a cardboard tube

and we've put in a copper coil in here.

-Which will run our vessel of nitrogen.

-Right.

We'll have liquid nitrogen coming into the coil

and it will come out of those little holes

that will give us our extreme cold environment.

How cold? Minus 200 and something?

-Just under 200 degrees, I think, 196.

-Right.

Then, this represents our mist in our cloud.

That is just water?

Water and a bit of compressed air just to get it out and atomise it.

That will go into our supercool environment.

Hopefully we'll get few crystals forming.

So, snow will fall out of the bottom of the cardboard tube.

Basically, yes, it is not very high tech, I admit.

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've got even a splash of it on your fingers.

-Shall we have a look and see what temperature it is?

-Yes.

Flower in.

Flower out.

That's cold.

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.

Minus 66, minus 70, minus 74. Look at this.

Shall we introduce a little bit of moisture and see what happens?

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 that.

In desperation, we try using the Man Lab kettle.

Seeing any snow yet?

But to no avail.

I think you can turn it off, Roy.

-OK.

-Thanks.

But as we contemplate total defeat,

there's a possible solution staring me in the face.

The thing is, snow of sorts does fall.

That's snow.

If there was just a way of blowing that off into a big flurry.

I mean because 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 as a vapour.

Exactly, that's just from the air.

So we don't even need to introduce anything.

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 because 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

clearly haven't affected Oz in the slightest.

Whoops. Chuck 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 and

put goose fat in the roasting tin,

they just... 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 that 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 Chinese 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.

First, in keeping with our theme of blowing things up this Christmas,

we're starting with the bang.

The charge contains 40 milligrams of high explosive

but it's a very small amount so it will destroy the cracker.

-It's a small bullet hit.

-I know why it's called a bullet hit.

It's because in war films, they put these under people's clothing

and it explodes with a little blood pad

to make it look like you've been hit by a bullet.

-Yeah, essentially it's a squib.

-A squib?

Yeah, that's the other alternative going for it.

I don't actually want to blow the guests up. I'm quite happy to...

This is it.

Give them a mild shock. So that's a pull switch.

When you pull that out, it completes the 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.

-You've got the switch end?

-Yeah. OK.

OK.

And 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 traditionally awful

Christmas cracker jokes by getting rid of them altogether.

This left us free to apply all our creativity

to the most disappointing bit of a 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

and 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.

Aargh.

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.

Put on the glove.

Holding your cracker, offer it to the hand.

It will pull the cracker with you

and your mystery surprise will fall out here

for us all to see and laugh.

Oh you've got one on your neck, you've got one on your neck.

Next up, Doctor Ben.

I've got an inheritance tax account form to fill in.

You let down.

The sergeant major gets even more cranky.

Yes, please, hand.

You lucky wine expert.

Clarke, that was my cracker.

-I'm off.

-You've left 20 quid behind.

Remove the turkey.

Anything 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

and that's the heart of the gravy.

I'm going to shove that in as well

because potato water adds starch and it also adds flavour.

Look sharp, stir faster.

Stir faster.

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 see the moisture on the outside, around me,

is being sucked into the freezer

and freezing in the very cold environment we have here.

And we'll just keep a constant stream of liquid nitrogen

coming through the whole thing cos we're introducing outside air

to cool on to our little heat exchanger.

And 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 into 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.

Others think you should take the legs off before you cook it.

I'll show you how I do it.

First 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, we're not absolutely 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? It's got no joints.

I'm just waiting for you to find it.

You know, you find it, you're the expert.

It has no leg joint.

Is that...you can... it's all falling.

Oh, God, it's beautifully cooked.

-Where's it gone?

-It's somewhere in there,

you can see it waggling about. Yeah, that side.

-There you go.

-God, you'd be absolutely useless as a surgeon.

Yes. 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.

We want nice, elegant, thin slices.

And the reason you have a pointy blade

is so that you can get down into the corners, round the ribcage.

See, there's a lovely slice of turkey.

Next one, see down there, point of the knife,

clean slice of turkey, nice and thin.

That bit fell off, what a shame.

Cook's piece. Hot.

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.

Turkey time.

Using the meticulous turkey timetable, the throbbing temple vein

of our socially-maladjusted sergeant major,

and the sheer sense of determination coursing through our festive bones,

Oz has ridden the gravy train to complete success.

# Here it is, Merry Christmas

# Everybody's having fun

# Look to the future now it's only just begun. #

But it's not over just yet. There's still that other thing to finish.

Good, if you can just entertain yourselves for a bit,

Sim and I have to go and just 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...

-Humidifier.

-Oh, everything, everything.

-So this has got coiled 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, "Well 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.

Muffy, puffy snow.

Before Sim powered up the trusty tinsel cannon

for our freezing festive finale.

Here we go. Throttle back a bit.

Whichever way you look at it, that 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 the Christmas card, ask people to ski on it,

ask Bing Crosby to sing about it, it's snow.

We've run out of snow. I thought there'd be loads.

-Is that it?

-That's it but...

You're kidding. But... Hang on, but that's a week of work

and about £5,000 worth of liquid nitrogen.

We've got the equivalent of a Chinese takeaway?

What else can we fire? Have we got any...?

-Look, I know.

-Feathers.

Bit of a banker.

Where the hell did you... how did you do that? What is it?

It's the kind of superabsorbent polymer

that you get in babies' nappies.

Fake snow then.

Feed it in.

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 all...

in 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.

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 stopped for a game of football, all that kind of stuff.

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 scene 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.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

E-mail [email protected]

A strange light in the garden.

It doesn't quite work for me as a symbol.