About the producer
Nic Guttridge joined the BBC last year after ten years of programme-making within the independent television sector. He's specialised in a wide range of observational and issue-led documentaries. His last major projects were "Simon's Heroes" (a 20 year anniversary film following Simon Weston and other war veterans on their emotional return to the Falklands) and "The Life of a Ten Pound Note" (which followed the first 500 miles of a tenner's life, dipping into the worlds of the diverse people who inherited it along the way). Lab Rats is Nic's first solo directing project.
I have never been a scientist. In fact, I have never pretended to understand even the most basic of scientific principles. Had you asked me, I would have told you that Boyle was what you did to eggs, fission was what people did in big wellies on riverbanks, and Kelvin Scale was a kid at school who always beat me in spelling tests. But that was before Lab Rats.
Our brief was to make a series of intelligent but entertaining programmes which would present scientific ideas in a new way. The plan was to create a science series which didn't feel like a science series, but which involved you in the experiences of its two central characters. Their on-screen relationship would be the pivot on which everything turned. Or is that the fulcrum?
Each week these characters, the Lab Rats, would take on a different scientific "road-trip", putting themselves through a range of bizarre and sometimes dangerous experiments to find out more about how their bodies - and, therefore, how everyone's bodies - work. It was a new approach to science on television and it all sounded great.
Enter Mike Leahy and Zeron Gibson.
Getting to grips with the science was going to be tough. But getting to grips with Mike and Zeron made getting to grips with the science seem like a walk in the park.
It was always going to take a rare combination of personalities to make Lab Rats work. And in Mike and Zeron we have a combination of personalities which, thankfully for the sake of world order, is very rare indeed. One of the suggested titles for Lab Rats was "Mad Scientists". In some ways it would have been more appropriate. These guys are nutters. They have to be.
Suppose, for example, I approached you in the course of making the episode on male fertility, with this escalating series of requests. At what point would you have told me where to go?:
"OK guys, we need to look at the relationship between testicle size and sperm count".
"I'd like you to compare the size of your testicles".
"We're going to do it by getting you to take plaster cast moulds of your balls".
"You're going to be making the moulds in the back of the chimpanzee enclosure at Dudley Zoo".
Mike and Zeron told me where to go when I asked them to do it for a second time, with a female chimp blowing raspberries at them. Nothing seems to be off limits with these guys, which is an absolute gift when it comes to devising ways of making difficult or sensitive points in an engaging way.
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Content last updated: 23/08/2005
