Drones are the thing now – dropping bombs utilitarianly out of the sky, having a GoPro attached to them for an overhead shot of the crowd at Glastonbury, or just being zipped at you by a polo-shirted shop assistant whenever you go near a Hamleys. It makes sense, then, that they have their own show: Airmageddon (Saturday, 8.25am, CBBC). And it’s for kids!

The concept of Airmageddon is simple: four teams of two compete in various basic tasks – navigating three-dimensional obstacle courses, picking up magnets and putting them down inside a loop of LED lighting arranged artlessly on a concrete floor, that sort of thing – before going head-to-head in a final-round dogfight to the death to decide the winner.

Inevitably, a few of the children use the team-of-two format to bring along their dads, all boasting “practical dad” close crops and showing off their “enthusiastic dad” touches like making a drone look more Scottish using a load of coloured sticky back plastic. The only girl competitor, Phoebe, brings along her curiously-cynical-for-a-12-year-old-like-she’s-definitely-seen-some-shit friend, Freya. “Is that your concentrating face?” Freya whispers during a difficult head-to-head. “Shut up,” Phoebe hisses. If it wouldn’t be entirely inappropriate in every conceivable way, I would like to be Freya’s friend.

There is something about tech challenge shows that demands colour-coordinated gilet-wearing and an air hangar backdrop, and Airmageddon happily complies: the teams compete in a high-ceilinged arena while a morass of children bay for blood from behind a protective glass window. It feels like a natural extension of your Robot Wars, your Knightmares – cutting-edge technology rendered lacklustre by people in green khaki bottoms. Essentially, these are weapons of war the children are playing with. What next? The Chuckle Brothers presenting arena-style submarine combat? Helen Skelton getting little Jimmy and Rosie to navigate bomb-disposal robots over sand ramps?

Rachel Stringer and Air Marshall. Photograph: Alex MacNaughton

Maintaining this uneasy balance between deadly weaponry and innocent fun are the house drones, which are assigned names and personalities. W.A.S.P is a wasp-shaped drone whose acronym is never explained; G.U.A.R.D, ditto. The drone that pilots each course beforehand to illustrate how it’s done is called P.I.G., is shaped like a pig, and is clearly made of foam pieces sprayed gunmetal grey. Why P.I.G. is a pig remains a mystery throughout.

The idea that Airmageddon is somehow real and not just a load of drone enthusiasts, smoke machines and foam pigs is maintained by Will Best, the show’s anchorman. You might remember him from his previous role of “being slightly too enthusiastic on T4”. Will seems to be genuinely buzzing about spending his Saturday in a freezing warehouse watching a load of inelegantly piloted “controlled” aircraft. The children absolutely, visibly loathe him.

As final duo The Hovering Hornetz prepare to take the obstacle course challenge, Best engages in some anti-banter with them. “Have you got a strategy for dealing with the W.A.S.P.?” he asks Cameron and his co-pilot, Cam. “Just ignore him,” they say. They are boys forced to play PlayStation with their weird older cousin who talks to them as if they are idiots. “Maybe,” Best says, “maybe they’ll be scared of you, because hornets are much more hardcore than wasps!” They don’t answer. “Right? OK, good stuff guys!”

The Hovering Hornetz almost instantly crash into the Pillars of Precision (everything has a name, even tubes of drainpipe stood on their side), and then the recriminations start. “I just thought he was just going too fast,” wingman Cam says of his crestfallen mate. Et tu, Cam? You can see the rift form immediately. These boys will never speak again after the next two years of forced school friendship. And they will look back on this and think: “I never should have pied Cameron off on CBBC for crashing into the Pillars of Precision. I never should have competed on shonky TV drone show Airmageddon.”