Tom Lawton is an inventor, and a father. He has
already fathered two children – Barney and Rufus. And he has already invented a
few inventions, like a recordable alarm clock, a 360-degree lens for a
smartphone camera, and honking handlebars ("handlebars that honk", he
explains) for a child's scooter.
Now he's inventing a boat. Well, boats have been
invented obviously. He gets that. But then he's making some modifications,
turning it into a houseboat/floating experimental test bed … I'm not sure what
the hell it is, to be honest. Tom's head, turned inside out, floating on the
water, something like that? They're calling it Tom's Fantastic Floating Home (Sunday, Channel 4).
Barney, six, is helping, as he does with a lot
of Tom's projects. "Barney's got such a different perspective on
things," says his father, proudly. "It's such a wonderful perspective
to welcome into your world." Perspective is one of Tom's favourite things,
I'd say, judging by how often he mentions it. "Sometimes it's just nice to
change your situation so that you can see you life in a different
perspective."
First thing is to sort out some security. What,
put a padlock on the door, something like that? Pah! That's not the way Tom and
Barney do things. "I love the idea of being able to capture an all-seeing,
kind of like out-of-body perspective of where you live," says Tom,
somewhat predictably. So security is going to be a helium balloon, with a
360-degree spy camera that looks down from above. CCTV, where CC stands for
Cloud Cuckoo."The perspective would be amazing," says Tom.
"It flies in the face of your usual home-security device, but just how to
get this idea off the ground," says the narrator, about Tom's
pie-in-the-sky eye-in-the-sky idea. He's puntastic to and beyond the point of
irritation, this narrator. Landlubber Tom was "well out of his depth"
when it came to boats, needed "someone with practical nous to float his
ideas past". Shut up! That person, with nous, is Tom's engineer pal
Hadrian, who generally finds Tom's ideas a bit off-the-wall. Ha! You missed one
there, Mr Narrator. Hadrian is called Hadrian Spooner by the way. Or is it
Spadrian Hooner … Agh!
Anyway, Tom and young Barney build a prototype
security system – one of Barney's teddy bears attached to a couple of helium
balloons. And they immediately lose teddy, to the sky. Tethering seems to have
been overlooked. Undeterred, they send a camera and a photo of themselves to
the edge of space with the help of a man who has a meteorological balloon. I'm
not sure what it has to do with security, but they have a lovely time doing it
and chasing the balloon – and it almost certainly provides new perspectives.
Oh, and then the final completed version, Balloon Cam 3.0, becomes untethered
from the boat, and floats away too. Suddenly my padlock's beginning to look
quite smart, if a little boring. I'm wondering if Tom's inability to tie things
down is in any way symptomatic of wider aspects of his character. Mrs Lawton
looks like she knows. It must be hard having a baby and (essentially) two
six-year-olds, one of whom is actually six and the other she is married to.
To hell with security. Shelter is important too.
They build a retractable roof structure for their boat, inspired by an
armadillo, and by an amazing sliding house in Suffolk, and by a drawing Barney
did of a house with chairs on the roof. Inside-outside, that's what they're
thinking – living inside-outside the house, or the boat, thinking
inside-outside the box, turning Tom's head inside-outside and floating away in
it. And they end up with this big gold tent, maybe a little bit like armadillo,
or an ammonite, but also like something Jennifer Lopez might wear on a cold
day. I'd like to see what happens when the breeze gets up; I'm thinking it
could end up with the security system, and the teddy bear, in the sky.
They build a beer cannon out of a toilet-brush
holder, because who wants a beer that doesn't explode when you open it? And a
self-contained hydroponic garden, complete with goldfish, that could be quite
clever if it works.
I think I'm now less clear about what Tom and
Barney are actually doing than I was at the beginning. I suspect they may be
too. It doesn't really matter; they're having a nice time doing it, whatever it
is. And, despite the annoying voiceover, I'm having a nice time watching too.
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