Share

Multi Sport

The Indestructibles: Meet the Action Sport Nutcases About to Invade Your Living Room

Surfing on a Reliant Robin, drift driving on a bed and zorbing on ziplines - this new TV show is going to be amazing!

Here’s a question: What do you get when you take two TV presenters who are mad for action sports, drop them off in a random location, give them some mystery props, and tell them to make an epic stunt happen?

The answer? The Indestructibles, Mpora’s very first TV show. The first episode will be broadcast on Dave this Sunday at 5pm – and we’re pretty fucking excited about it.

“We were flying down a Welsh hillside at a stupid speed on this bed and our brakes failed completely.”

Sponsored by Casio G-Shock and filmed over the course of this summer by a crew from the mag and its parent publisher, Factory Media, the show stars TV presenters and ex-pro snowboarders Tim Warwood and Adam Gendle.

They work with builder and self-confessed professional idiot Joe Rackley, ‘science guy’ Ollie Peart and a whole bunch of athletes from the world of action sports – everyone from trials rider Chris Akrigg to Olympic snowboarder Billy Morgan  and wingsuit pilot Gary Connery – all with the aim of doing the wildest things they can think of.

“It’s simple really,” explains Ollie. “Tim and Gendle get given £1,000, two props and three days to ‘make something happen’.

“The ’something’ is typically a ludicrous concoction of ideas, and then me and Joe to pick up the inevitable pile of spaff left behind in the wake of its inception. We then have to make the ‘something’ a reality.”

Dodging Death

The ideas in the show are truly ludicrous. “My favourite stunt-wise was the ‘Human Hole in One’”, says Gendle. It involved “trying to get a BMXer to go off a jump and land in an inflatable in a lake”.

“The jump was a beast,” adds Joe. “I was a bit nervous cos the last time I did a lake jump I ended up in hospital. But I was so hyped watching the pro BMX boys do it that on my first go I floated a massive backflip, which felt amazing.”

Other episodes see the crew building a “drift bed” to test if anything could drift as well as proper drift trikes or the cars driven by pro drift driver Buttsy Butler.

“We were flying down a Welsh hillside at a stupid speed on this bed and our brakes failed completely,” says Gendle. “Joe had to crash us into some stinging nettles to stop. I didn’t know the brakes had gone until after we’d crashed, that was pretty scary when I thought how fast we’d been going.”

“I could see the disc brakes failing and sparking as Joe tried to stop,” says Tim. That was far from the only nerve-wracking moment during filming.

“Watching [freerunner] Chase Armitage do a handstand on a guardrail on the edge of a building five stories up was pretty nail biting,” says Ollie “You can’t get that stuff wrong. One false move and he would have plummeted to his death.”

“Also when Joe Rackley released himself from the Zipline as he was sliding down so he was just holding on by his hand 200ft above the water. That was pretty crazy too,” says Tim.

 

Of course it wasn’t all insanely dangerous stuff. “We took a Reliant Robin surfing,” says Ollie. “That was one of the best, but it wasn’t so much the stunt, just the situation.”

“Yeah, I had  a weird ‘what are we doing right now? is this really our job?’ moment,” says Gendle. “We were being pulled along by a jet ski on the back of this Reliant Robin in the Welsh sea with hundreds of pensioners watching us. It was just so random and funny, it felt like a cross between Only Fools and Horses and Last of the Summer Wine.

“There was like a 100 strong crowd of like 95% pensioners,” says Joe. “Ollie got a megaphone out and started chatting to them like a bingo caller.” The event made the local newspaper, with a baffled journalist telling his readers that “the identity of the group of surfers – and quite why they were undertaking the unusual challenge – is yet to be revealed.”

True Bromance

If the whole thing sounds mostly like a bunch of mates pissing about, that’s probably because it largely is. “Yeah we were just mates dicking about,” says Ollie. “It just so happened to be made into a TV show. I mean Tim and Gendle are BFF’s anyway but it didn’t take that long before all of us got to know each other.”

Each of the four brought their own strengths: “Tim has this puppy like energy and enthusiasm,” explains Ollie. “If you can’t be bothered, he can normally make you feel bothered again. And Gendle, I’ve never seen anybody pay so much attention to how stupid they can look. He’s an absolute pro.”

“Despite having hands bigger than most people’s front door, he has the dexterity of a seamstress.”

“Then there’s Joe. Despite having hands bigger than most people’s front door, he has the dexterity of a seamstress.” Rackley, who builds jumps for events like Freeze and makes his own drift trikes in his spare time, was the engineer behind many of the more mental set-ups.

 

He also brought a straight-talking wit to the crew. “One of the first things he said to me was that I looked like a cross between Anthony Worrall-Thompson and Warwick Davis,” says Ollie. “His humour is, well… offensive I suppose is how you’d describe it. He normally says what we’d would all like to say, it’s just most of us have a social conscious that stops us.”

“Joe, doesn’t, and I love that.”

The Means & The End

Of course, it wasn’t just the four of them either. “All the athletes we had on the show were incredible,” says Gendle. “They all came not knowing much about what we were doing but really threw themselves into it.

“Considering a lot of the time they weren’t even doing what they normally do: We had a big wave surfer hanging on to the back of the Reliant Robin for example!”

“Yeah they all came and just threw down,” says Tim. “We’d literally wind them up and let them go. We had drift drivers putting their lives on the line, the BMXer’s on Human Hole in One, weren’t scared on bit, and the snowboarders we’re legends.

“The standout for me was probably Dan Wakeham. A phoenix-style rise from the ashes to come and rip the dryslope loop-the-loop.”

It wasn’t always fun and games of course. “There were highs and lows,” admits Ollie. “All the episodes were hard,” says Tim. And as is always the case with TV shoots, everyone was working long hours on set. But it all four of the main men agree that the final outcome was well, well worth it.

I was involved right at the birth of this thing and can’t believe what it turned into,” says Joe. “Me and Gendo and Ollie and Joe really got on,” says Tim, while Gendle adds: “The whole crew had become a bit of a family by the end of it.”

And really, what could be better than spending a summer messing about with your mates? As Ollie puts it: “There was never a dull moment. I mean, how can you not enjoy going down white water rapids in a kids paddling pool, skidding around on electric drift machines in an abandoned warehouse or riding around on a banana boat with Billy Morgan doing backflips onto your head?”

Watch the first episode of The Indestructibles, ‘Bouncing Bombs’, This Sunday (8th November) on Dave.

 

You May Also Like

The Indestructibles: All the Latest Action from the Groundbreaking New TV Show

8 Stories of Courage and Determination in the Face of Disability That Will Blow Your Mind

Share

Newsletter Terms & Conditions

Please enter your email so we can keep you updated with news, features and the latest offers. If you are not interested you can unsubscribe at any time. We will never sell your data and you'll only get messages from us and our partners whose products and services we think you'll enjoy.

Read our full Privacy Policy as well as Terms & Conditions.

production