Brilliant or Bonkers: Weird Inventions & Innovation Debates

EP 21 - Vampire Hearing

What if you could programme your earbuds to filter out the crying baby on the plane, the annoying colleague at work, or — controversially — your own spouse? Not sci-fi: the University of Washington already has it working, and it's two product cycles from your ears. Mark and Amanda dig in. Is this the most important accessibility breakthrough of the decade — finally giving the hard-of-hearing, the autistic, and the migraine-prone their cities back? Or is it the audio echo chamber that finishes off shared public space, available from £400 a pair? Along the way: babies and the social contract, marriages saved or quietly ended, a new class divide where silence becomes a paid amenity, and the question nobody's asked yet: Vampire hearing? The Judgement Giraffe weighs in.

EP 20 The Piggy Patch - Hide the stains and make them go away

The shirt is white. The bolognese is red. The school photo is in twenty minutes. Every parent knows this exact moment of dread — and this week, Olga thinks she's solved it. In a Brilliant or Bonkers first, the referee has stepped into the ring with her own invention: the Piggy Patch. A plaster-sized sticker with a cartoon pig on the front and a slow-release detergent layer on the back. Stick it on the stain, let your child play, and two hours later peel the pig off and the mess is gone. Shame solved. Stain dissolved. Amanda is suspicious. Mark is delighted. The Judgement Giraffe has notes. Brilliant, bonkers, or a little of both?

EP19 - The Bacon Tree

Amanda wants to grow bacon on a tree. No pigs, no farms, just plant it and wait. Mark thinks she might be onto something — because someone has already done it with seaweed. This week on Brilliant or Bonkers: the chemistry of bacon, the world's only patented bacon-flavoured plant, and whether a "bacon orchard" could feed the future or whether trees simply refuse to play along. Verdict from the Judgement Giraffe at the end.

EP18 - EarMark - Earn money by reading

What if every page your child read automatically earned them pocket money? This week Mark and Amanda look at The Earmark — a physical bookmark with a small display that tracks how many pages a child has read and shows their earnings in real time. Parents link it to an app, set a rate (say, £0.01 per page), and the cash transfers automatically from parent account to child account when the session ends. No nagging. No gold stars. Just cold, hard, literary cash. The name says it all: it's a bookmark, you earn with it, and to earmark money means to set it aside for a purpose. It might be the cleverest piece of edtech we've seen — or a fast-track to raising an adult who never reads for free.

EP17 - The Fluffdrum for stuffed toys

Every family knows the moment. The suitcase is full, the child is crying, and Mr Elephant is being left behind. This week Amanda pitches her solution: the Fluffdrum — a home device that compresses stuffed toys flat for travel, then restores them to full cuddly condition on arrival using warm air and five robot arms. The system has three parts. A roller press stays at home and squeezes toys into airtight smart pouches before the trip. A travel unit called the FluffDrum — about the size of a large water bottle — makes the journey with the family. On arrival, the FluffDrum's five silicone robot arms get to work through a porthole window, physically restoring the shape of the toy while warm air re-lofts the filling. The whole cycle takes six to eight minutes and runs off a USB power bank. Amanda's key insight is that warm air alone isn't enough. Loft and shape are two different problems — a flat ear needs something to press it back out, not just heat. The robot arms solve the shape problem. Mark pushes back on whether it actually saves space — if the drum travels with you, haven't you just swapped a bear for a box? Amanda's answer: only the flat pouches and the drum travel, never the roller press. The paradox dissolves. He also raises the airport security question, saved deliberately for the end: a cylindrical device with five mechanical arms and a heating element. The audience can guess how that goes. The verdict lands somewhere genuinely in the middle. Brilliant if the arms work perfectly and the FluffDrum is beautiful enough that children want to put their toys in it. Bonkers if it creates more demand than it solves — because if you own a FluffPacker, the argument for bringing seventeen bears just got a lot stronger.