Team Big Brother

Team Big Brother was a team that competed between Series 3-8 and 10 of Robot Wars, as well as both series of Robot Wars Extreme and the one-off series Nickelodeon Robot Wars.

The Team
"Ian and the family were living in the Middle East at the time of the second series, and it was young Joe Watts who first brought the show to his father's attention. "Joe had watched it on television and loved it" recalls Ian. "He got to the stage where he wanted to build one of his own." But it wasn't until the Watts family moved back to England that Joe's wish became a reality."

- Robot Wars: The Official Magazine on the origins of Team Big Brother

The team was originally captained by Joe Watts, who was only six years old when the team first competed in Series 3, and he was joined by his father Ian who drove the robots. In Series 3 they were joined by Wayland Twiston-Davies and from Extreme 1 onwards Joe's little sister Ellie joined the team. They were also joined by Ian's wife Cath and their other daughter Megan in the pits, the latter of whom made a small cameo during the televised show.

In Series 8, Joe and Ellie did not return to the team, and their younger brother Sam Watts joined the team, with Ian Watts taking over as captain. James Crawford and Jennie Barker, a respective current and former student of Watts at the University of Brighton, also joined the team.

For Series 10, Ian and Sam Watts returned, alongside two new team members, Mike Hamilton-Macy and Ryan Pratt. Due to the nature of their clusterbot competitor, all four team members took on a driving role in the series.

Robots
The team originally entered Series 3 with Big Brother, named after Joe Watts due to him being a big brother to his two little sisters. Between Series 4 and Series 7, the team entered Bigger Brother, which also competed in Robot Wars Extreme and Nickelodeon Robot Wars. In 2016, Bigger Brother's successor, Or Te (initially known as Bigger Brother 2), was entered into Series 8, although it was not selected to compete in Series 9. The team returned to Series 10 with a four-part clusterbot, The Swarm.

The team enjoyed considerable success, reaching three series Semi-Finals and the Grand Final of Series 5, finishing runner-up to Razer in the latter. They also won the Minor Meltdown in Extreme Series 2, with Joe and Ellie Watts at the controls of Bigger Brother. However, their latest entry, Or Te, was eliminated in the first round of Series 8, and was not selected to compete in Series 9.

Wins/Losses

 * Wins: 22
 * Losses: 14

Outside Robot Wars


Ian Watts also entered BattleBots 2015 with a robot named Bull Dog that greatly resembles M2 and is covered in fur (in the hopes that it would fight a opponent armed with a flamethrower and catch fire), however Bull Dog was put on the reserve list and did not get to compete.

Watts and Frizell returned to BattleBots in 2016, on a team with various British students, and Ian's son Sam. They entered Creepy Crawlies, a five-piece clusterbot, with each robot wielding a set of horizontal crushers. Each robot was designed in homage to a different insect. Creepy Crawlies suffered a destructive loss at the hands of Son of Whyachi, despite surviving longer than Ultraviolent, the latter of which still received a place in the bracket as a reserve. Creepy Crawlies would later become the design inspiration for The Swarm.

Continuing the theme of multibots used by Team Big Brother and Team Terror Turtle in Robot Wars and BattleBots, the united team entered a four-part clusterbot into the Chinese show King of Bots. The robot consists of an invertible wedge-shaped unit named Banger, and three identical invertible robots with horizontal bar spinners named Mash, Mince, and Chop. The team all dressed as chefs, to match their naming scheme of British foods.

Trivia

 * Team Big Brother's machines only reached won a heat of the UK Championship in series in which Philippa Forrester was pit reporter. This contrasts with Thermidor 2 and X-Terminator, which during the show's original run only reached the Semi-Finals in series which Forrester was not reporting.
 * Team Big Brother is one of seven teams to reach the Semi-Finals with two different robots.
 * Team Big Brother's second entry, Bigger Brother, received an Honorable Mention in The Combat Robot Hall of Fame in 2003, with the team's young members being cited along with the robot's flipper and performances in Robot Wars/BattleBots.