ENVIRONMENT:'I really enjoyed being in Clare. We had sunshine and horizontal rain. We drank a lot of Guinness and whiskey'. Dick Strawbridge and Jem Stansfield are men on a mission to save the planet. And they're determined to engineer a way, writes Catherine Foley.
AT TEATIME tomorrow, two eco-engineers, Dick Strawbridge and Jem Stansfield, who are on a mission to save the planet, will once again catapult themselves into the sittingrooms of television viewers around the country.
The star presenters of Planet Mechanics, a new National Geographic series, excel at pitting their brains and their bodies against a range of ecological challenges. Strawbridge, who grew up in Ballyclare, Co Antrim, and Stansfield, a Shropshire lad from Telford in the UK, travel to places as disparate as Venice, Liverpool and Doolin in a quest to test their theories and their resourcefulness.
At all times, experimentation is the name of the game in the series, which will be broadcast at 6pm on Sundays over the coming weeks. The men both say that the most exciting programme they filmed last year was in Doolin, Co Clare, where they sought to harness wave power and create electrical energy (watch it on Sunday, May 11th).
According to Stansfield, Clare won out against exotic Andalucia and beautiful Venice because of the fun they had hanging out with other surf enthusiasts, including John McCarthy, who set up Lahinch Surf School, as well as top surfers Rosie (Ronan) Harkin and Keith Harkin, two surfing friends, who are not related.
"I really enjoyed being there. We had sunshine and horizontal rain," recalls Strawbridge. "We drank a lot of Guinness and whiskey."
Strawbridge "is a very big bloke and a bit bossy," laughs Stansfield, who is the younger and less disciplined of the two. Comparing himself to the Antrim native, Stansfield, who now lives in Cornwall with his family, says: "We're very different in that Dick spent 20 years in the army and I've spent most of my life being ridiculous and cheeky."
Whereas Strawbridge's "innate practicality wants to drive it forward", Stansfield's impulse is to experiment and try something else. Creating machines under the pressure of time sometimes means Stansfield has to compromise his high standards of craftsmanship, he says. "It grates on my soul when things are hammered together . . . I always want to build things well," says Stansfield, who has a degree in aeronautics from Bristol University as well as being a qualified welder.
Strawbridge says the two of them have contrasting personalities that complement each other. "I'm the one with the common sense," he says, adding that he occasionally gives his fellow presenter "a thump" but, he adds, "he has a work ethic. It takes very long hard days. You can't be a slacker. We regularly did 18-hour days and he's a bright lad. It's the first time we've worked together. We had our grumpy moments. You go through the whole gamut of emotions."
Strawbridge and his family were the focus of the BBC series It's Not Easy Being Green, when they moved to their new home at the seaside, and set about making their own renewable energy and providing their own food. He also presented BBC2's Crafty Tricks of War, which demonstrated his practical skills by reconstructing and testing some of the most unusual inventions of war. Before that, on taking a sabbatical from the army, and equipped with his degree in electrical engineering, he was plucked from obscurity to take part in Channel 4's Scrapheap Challenge series.
Growing up in Ballyclare, he says he was the one in his family who took things apart. In Planet Mechanics, the two presenters bring ingenuity, creativity, dexterity and skill, knowledge and determination to bear on a range of problems that are connected with the environment. The toughest job was turning massing shipping containers into student accommodation in Liverpool. They created an electric-powered boat to help clean the canals of Venice, and the hottest job was harnessing wind power for a traditional windmill in Andalucia in Spain when they set about helping a farmer pump water from a well to his cattle.
This Spanish programme was filmed in an area in Andalucia, which is known as the "frying pan of Spain", they recall. At the end of filming, they cooked a traditional paella and "we had a great party there, but all-in-all the craic was much better in Ireland," says Strawbridge.
The most satisfying task was building a truck that could run on waste wood, for the Trees for Cities environmentalists, based in London. It was based on technology that the Scandinavians had used in the second World War to power tractors, explains Strawbridge. "We'd very few clues for that one," he says. They broke down in Piccadilly Circus and were stopped by a policeman. That was the most rewarding project, says Stansfield, because the self-sustainable vehicle "fitted the bill so perfectly for the client".
Planet Mechanics will be broadcast until the end of May on the National Geographic channel each Sunday at 6pm