Day 68

Scantily clad women, violent graphic explosions and people getting hurt/humiliated, are all things that men actively seek to watch on television.
In 2003, a visionary working at Granada Productions clambered onto the boardroom table, grabbed the Head of Production by his tie and screamed at him an idea for a brand new show combining each of those elements – it was to be called Brainiac: Science Abuse.

The format of the programme was to showcase as much ludicrous behaviour as possible, all beneath a thin veil of ‘science’.
Supporting cast members to hosts Richard Hammond and John Tickle were everyday, ordinary volunteers who wore bright yellow T-shirts sporting the show’s hazard-sign inspired logo - not unlike the one I’m wearing today. The difference between mine and the ones they wore is that mine was purchased online and not handed to me as a souvenir from my involvement in one of the show's a whacky experiments.
However, that did not stop me from saying the contrary to a young woman I encountered in Bournemouth train station car park one afternoon.
As I was passing the station wearing this Brainiac tee, she screeched her car to a halt across two parking bays, flung the door open and ran towards me asking if I had been filming in the area.
To this day I’m not sure why I told her that I had, and that if she hurried, she might be able to make it back to the beach to see some of the show being filmed.
But that’s what I told her.

In a way, she learnt an important lesson about ridiculous indiviuals in car parks, proving that Brainiac was sort of educational after all.

Day 67

I first laid eyes on an Iron Fist product during my student years, positioned on a humble rail in a corner of the now-defunct clothing store Cult in Brighton’s town centre. At the time, the brand was emerging and its products sat in this store like they had crash-landed in alien terrain. They were unlike anything else on the two floors that surrounded them, boasting full-colour, XL-scale, highly intricate illustrations that weren’t hindered by zips, seams or any other typically unconquerable garment detail.

In contrast, my student bank balance wasn’t boasting anything, so I left the colourful wreckage be.
During the summer of 2012, I had another crack at Iron Fist, spotting a selection of their T-shirts hanging in a store along Camden Lock and this time, I walked away with this beauty - a giant depiction of a pirate ship framed in an oval assembly of rope, swallows, anchors and other nautical rhetoric. There are even two mirror-imaged ghostly skull formations set into the clouds overhead. In terms of colour, this design sits at the modest end of the Iron Fist scale, but the illustration detail is on par with the rest. Definitely a solid purchase.