For a glorious few weeks this summer Durban's Botanic Gardens were home to a maypole, an open-air "lounge" of suspended garden chairs and an assortment of enormous metal sculptures. The man behind these creations, commissioned for the Wickedly Odd dining experience last Christmas, is international television producer Clinton McLean.He counts among his creative achievements an eight-year run as the construction manager, art director and production designer of the Emmy-nominated Scrapheap Challenge and Junkyard Wars television shows."The honest truth is I completely lied my way into it," says McLean, relating the story of how he first gained the welding skills that would prove the gateway drug to his decades-long construction habit."I was living in digs in London with very artistic people - it was a creative hub."A woman walked in one morning and asked: 'Can anyone weld?' I said: 'Yep, I can.' I had never seen a welder before. So on my first day boxes arrived with a welding machine and she asked me to put them together. I said: "Sure' and ran off."We were in a junkyard, so I went to one of the workers and said: 'Mate, show me how to weld, how the machine is put together and I'll give you £20'."He gave me a 20-minute lesson. I put the welding machine together. It took me an hour and it's supposed to take 10 minutes."He welded a few things to get the hang of it. Thus began a 16-year career spanning the UK, US and South Africa."It's more a question of what I didn't make in those first years. We ran an engineering show so we built about 380 different machines in that show. We built hovercraft, aeroplanes, mud diggers, rocket-propelled motorbikes - anything."The art side of it was more set-related stuff - building big steel sets. I got to squash cars up, flip cars and weld them back together."These days McLean spends most of his days in Durban, working on smaller but equally rewarding productions.He's excited about the city's creative potential."Up until three years ago I did lots of design. I still go to Los Angeles to do production design and installations for brands - amazingly fun projects like converting a train into something else, putting rock stars on it and travelling around the country."I converted Jimi Hendrix's house on Venice beach into a museum, which was super fun."The response to his projects in Durban so far, he says, has been "exactly what I always suspected it would be"."I think Durban is crying out for some design diversity and that's what I hold on to. I like living in Durban. I like the vibe, the people and the lifestyle."..