Robot Wars is back, and the machines triumph over the presenters - series 10, episode one, review

We keep being told robots will take our jobs. On Robot Wars (BBC Two) they have always done the hard work. They clash, spin, flip. Sparks fly. The house robots have always been evocatively named. Matilda. Shunt. Sgt Bash. Sir Killalot. Dead Metal. What flesh-and-bone human could hope to compete with these steel paragons?  

Nor do they shirk their media duties. At a model engineering exhibition a few years ago, it was my privilege to meet Matilda, one of the intimidating female icons of my childhood. She posed quite happily for a selfie. Perhaps historians will look back and see the programme as a premonition: bristling electronics and machinery duking it out to an audience of gurning and increasingly redundant humans. 

We are now up to series 10, although it is really series three of the relaunch. The contestant robots have become more professional, and the flipper more or less established as the key weapon. Perhaps partly as a consequence, the contestants are leant on more heavily to be “personalities”, rarely a good idea with people who spend all their free time in the garage. The most egregious example in this first episode was the medical student with a robot called Donald Thump. The robot was hopeless, although not as bad as his owner’s impression of the US President. 

Dara O Briain and Angela Scanlon, on presenting duties, are too arch, the latter almost mockingly so. There is a time to tease a nerd, but it is not when he is at the controls of a 100kg fighting machine. As ever, the only human earning his crust is Jonathan Pearce in the commentary box. What a stroke of genius his hiring was. The beauty is that he plays it completely straight. He gets almost as worked up about a piece of cladding falling off as he would about England winning the World Cup. When our robot overlords are welcomed at last, I hope they treat Pearce mercifully.