Merle Haggard, rough-neck country singer once sang "Toniiiight, the bottle let me down". Well, the modern equivalent of mass medication is TV, and last night, it let me down. Well, one particular programme. Mythbusters is usually a riotous programme. Staying at a friend’s house, I was introduced to these insane Americans who, during the course of one programme, blew a cement mixer up, flung a blood filled human made from jelly through a window and painted themselves gold. Well, last night’s viewing was an altogether more sober affair… mores the pity.

Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage, the two techy bods from the show, have previously dropped coins from skyscrapers to see if it would kill someone. This, perversely, appeals to my viewing needs greatly. As you can image, when I caught sight of Mythbusters in the listings, I became quite excited. So I settled down and got ready for some insane aplliance of science. The first thing the boys tackled was a myth involving JFK. ‘Great!’ I thought… ‘they’re going to get a dummy, drive him along and shoot at it from a book depository window!’ So they made a silicone human (‘c’mon… this is going to be ace!’) and shot at it. From quite close range. And not a lot happened. ‘Nevermind’ Ithought, ‘it always takes these programmes a while to get going’.

So next up, they looked at the possibilty of the urban myth, that radio signals can be picked up by fillings in your teeth. Again, I imagined one of the guys rigged up to a radio tower by his molars whilst shouting "I CAN HEAR MUSIC IN MY JAW!". Again, a sober experiment involving a Faraday cage and a man in a ponytail looking at a meter of some kind. Arrgh!

Lastly, they check out out the various myths surrounding microwaves. How they blow up when you stick metal in. Well, they popped some tinfoil in and it made a lovely  light show… but they stopped it before it KABLOOOMED. Then… a ray of hope! Hyneman made a ‘super microwave’ involving four megatrons (your average microwave has one to heat up your grub). At last! They’ll stick an animal in and pulverise it (you can see how desperate I was getting). They rigged up the homemade super microwave… and it didn’t work. End of programme. Damn.

Next week should see the boys back on their usual form, but for this week, Mythbusters let me down.[Mof Gimmers]