Brilliant or Bonkers: Weird Inventions & Innovation Debates

EP 23 - A Single Use Time Machine

A time Machine! But you can only use it once to go back in time. Where and when would you go? Would you bring something back? Change something in the past? Or would you observe something? Would it be Brilliant or Bonkers? Amanda stuns dad into silence when she tells him where she would go in time. What does Grandma Joey have to do with the assassination of Lincoln? What is better: the sermon on the Mound or the first night Romeo & Juliet in the Globe Theatre? Joins Amanda and her Dad as they debate the single use Time Machine.

EP22 - Going to Hogwarts. For Real.

Episode: The Hogwarts School After a visit to Warner Bros Studios London, Amanda pitches a chain of schools where every classroom looks like Hogwarts. Real curriculum, real exams, but floating candles, house dining halls, and a potions lab where chemistry used to be. Mark and Amanda debate whether designing schools to inspire children rather than contain them is the most important educational reform of the century, or whether dressing up a primary school in someone else's imagination is the most expensive kind of borrowed magic. Along the way: what Ofsted and the Daily Mail would each do with a Warner Bros licensing bill on a state school, the awkward truth that Hogwarts itself is an elite boarding school for the magically gifted, and the bigger, sharper idea hiding underneath about the bookends of life we've stopped designing for. The Judgement Giraffe rules.

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.