IT has been 12 years since viewers could tune into Robot Wars each week, but now a father and son duo are set to go to battle following the return of the popular television programme.

The self-professed robot fanatics are certainly not strangers to building a robot or two in their spare time.

For more years than they can remember 18-year-old Michael Oates and his 52-year-old dad Adrian, who is a professional engineer, have spent many weekends fighting robots and then fixing the specialist machinery ready for the next round.

"We have been competing for 12 years in non-televised events and now it's finally come back to the TV we had to apply to be on it," said Michael, who attended Altrincham Grammar and is hoping to study engineering at Durham University in September.

"After the TV show ended many people still carried on building robots and there's a big community of us fighting robots every two weeks at live events.

"We all know each other so we were essentially competing with each other to be on the show.

"There are only 40 spots on the show and most of the teams on there we have known for a long time.

"It's surreal - surprisingly it's very friendly but it's seriously competitive.

"There's no other competition in the world where on stage you are smashing each other’s robots up and then lend each other parts to get the robot back together so they can fight again."

Filmed in a purpose-built fighting arena in Glasgow, 40 teams of amateur robot fighting enthusiasts battle it out over six episodes to become Robot Wars Champion 2016.

The Lymm pair – who entered under the name Team Eruption – applied for the show in the January but then had an agonising one month wait to find out if they had been selected before filming started in the March.

Michael, who is one of the youngest team captains in the competition, remained hopeful as they have previously won a number of amateur UK championships.

"The robot we applied with - Eruption - has been really successful but we were told that would not guarantee us a place on the show.

“It's about whether it was interesting enough to be on TV - that's where the claws and the extra bits came in.

“We first built Eruption in 2011 and it took nine months working weekends and evenings. It was a plain back and yellow flipper.

"When we got the call we were told we had an extra 10kilos to do something interesting with it.

"With just one month to do it in we worked every minute we could to transform it adding claws and other bits."

Following its transformation Eruption is described as a large, powerful flipper robot with a fixed gripping spike.

For Michael this is a lifelong dream of his after his obsession with the show started from an early age.

"I loved the original series and I first watched it on the TV when I was two years old," said Michael.

"I can't even remember that far back but my parents remember how I just fell in love with it.

"I watched every single episode from that moment on and I just knew it was something I wanted to do."

To watch Team Eruption in action tune into BBC Two on Sunday at 8pm.