Have you recently lost a fiver behind a sofa that’s too heavy to lift easily, or perhaps you’ve dropped a crucial screw inside your car’s engine? The Snakescope could help you to salvage either.

This 34in-long, black, semi-flexible tube looks as though it has been made from bits of an Anglepoise lamp of 1980s vintage. At the tip is a webcam that reveals whatever you are probing. There is also an LED with adjustable brightness to illuminate, for instance, a kitchen pipe as you scavenge around trying to locate your wife’s engagement ring that somehow slipped off her finger during the preparations for Sunday lunch.

The Snakescope’s camera-head and cable are both said to be waterproof and a supplied clip-on magnetic attachment enables it to retrieve metallic items even from hard-to-reach places such as down the side of a fridge.

The camera is only VGA quality of 640x480 resolution, but that’s enough to distinguish between a piece of treasured jewellery and potato peelings even amid a fair amount of sink gunge.

In order to use the Snakescope, the device must first be connected to the USB socket of a Windows-based laptop. You can then capture some footage or stills with it for closer inspection or perhaps to amuse the children as you chase a mouse underneath a kitchen cupboard. In tests it worked well.

At the very least, Snakescope enables children to satisfy their inherent curiosity about what is inside a nook or cranny in the garage without you having to call the fire brigade to release one of their arms when it all goes wrong.