What if you never had to set foot in a supermarket again — but still got to pick your own bananas? This week Mark unveils the Shoppy: a robot that rides in your car, deploys itself when you park, and does the whole shop while you sit back with a coffee. You watch through its camera on an app and approve the fruit and veg yourself, and it conveniently forgets the sweets aisle exists.

But here's the twist: maybe you don't own it. Maybe the supermarket does, and you just connect to one as you pull into the car park — which means the store still gets to tempt you with its offers. And when two robots reach for the last discounted chicken? They settle it, naturally, with rock paper scissors.

It looks like Wall-E... but with human hands. Amanda thinks that's deeply creepy. Mark's already working out how to make money from it. And the Judgement Giraffe — who can see over every slow walker but still can't get past them — has some feelings.

Brilliant, or bonkers? You decide.

Texting is instant, but is it any fun? After a trip to a War museum, Amanda pitches her boldest invention yet: a robot pigeon that flies handwritten notes to your friends' windowsills.

Mark counters with Blackadder, Speckled Jim, and the awkward fact that stamps exist. Along the way: the heroic pigeons of WWI, robot birds that actually fly. Is this the vinyl record of communication or the world's most over-engineered envelope? The Judgement Giraffe decides.

It's the Brilliant or Bonkers Worldcup Special! This week Amanda & Dad set out to fix football.

The crowd takes over. Dad suggests electrodes in the boots that buzz players left, right or middle. Having viewers at home pick the penalty takers and letting viewers at home overrule the manager's bench. Mark and Amanda pull apart four ways to hand fans real power over a football match. One of them rewards attacking teams. The others might just ruin the game. The Judgement Giraffe decides.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

What if every page your child read automatically earned them pocket money?

This week Mark and Amanda look at The Earmark — a physical bookmark with a small display that tracks how many pages a child has read and shows their earnings in real time. Parents link it to an app, set a rate (say, £0.01 per page), and the cash transfers automatically from parent account to child account when the session ends. No nagging. No gold stars. Just cold, hard, literary cash.

The name says it all: it's a bookmark, you earn with it, and to earmark money means to set it aside for a purpose. It might be the cleverest piece of edtech we've seen — or a fast-track to raising an adult who never reads for free.

Every family knows the moment. The suitcase is full, the child is crying, and Mr Elephant is being left behind. This week Amanda pitches her solution: the Fluffdrum — a home device that compresses stuffed toys flat for travel, then restores them to full cuddly condition on arrival using warm air and five robot arms.

The system has three parts. A roller press stays at home and squeezes toys into airtight smart pouches before the trip. A travel unit called the FluffDrum — about the size of a large water bottle — makes the journey with the family. On arrival, the FluffDrum's five silicone robot arms get to work through a porthole window, physically restoring the shape of the toy while warm air re-lofts the filling. The whole cycle takes six to eight minutes and runs off a USB power bank.

Amanda's key insight is that warm air alone isn't enough. Loft and shape are two different problems — a flat ear needs something to press it back out, not just heat. The robot arms solve the shape problem.

Mark pushes back on whether it actually saves space — if the drum travels with you, haven't you just swapped a bear for a box? Amanda's answer: only the flat pouches and the drum travel, never the roller press. The paradox dissolves. He also raises the airport security question, saved deliberately for the end: a cylindrical device with five mechanical arms and a heating element. The audience can guess how that goes.

The verdict lands somewhere genuinely in the middle. Brilliant if the arms work perfectly and the FluffDrum is beautiful enough that children want to put their toys in it. Bonkers if it creates more demand than it solves — because if you own a FluffPacker, the argument for bringing seventeen bears just got a lot stronger.