Slashdot Mirror
BBC To Ditch "Tomorrow's World"
Pipsicola writes "The BBC news site reports their decision to ditch the Popular science show, Tomorrows World , after 30 years. It may not have had the most bleeding edge content (we often dubbed it 'Yesterdays World' ...), but it was one of the few programmes which fired the imagination of young British nerds. Several generations of Britain's scientists and technologists grew up watching TM. Lets hope the BBC fulfills its promise to replace it with more science-based shows using a different format. Which formats have worked in other countries I wonder?"
There's an Australian magazine show called Beyond 2000 that has run for quite a long time and is screened in quite a few countries starting in 1985 and still being made. The science it covered was pretty cutting edge (or at least it seemed, I was kid since I saw it last, hehe) and had interesting stories presented by interesting reporters.
As a Brit living in the US, I always found the Australian show "Beyond 2000" to be pretty damned good (and I'd never seen it before arriving in the US).
For what it's worth, I always hated the "studio" format of Tomorrow's World - I think it hurt them more than it helped, although the studio-based demonstrations that didn't work were always good for a laugh.
90% of the articles that contained any info and were the most interesting were the pre-recorded ones out wherever the technology was being applied.
Daily Planet (link) is a pretty good show. It was called @Discovery Canada, but changed a little while ago. It runs on the Discovery channel here in Canada. Read the site for more info.
The basic sleazeware produced in a drunken fury by a bunch of UCBerkeley grad students was still the core of BIND. --PV
Tomorrow's World ran on BBC 1 (used to be Thursday's before Top of the Pops). It was always a soft science show -- more entertainment than hard science. BBC 2 ran the harder science show "Horizon" - each episode of which was an hour long. I've been away from the UK for nearly 19 years so don't know if Horizon is still going -- but at the time it was an outstanding show - would compare with the likes of the better shows on TLC and Discovery. Sad to see Tomorrows World going -- but it did give a great start to James Burke who went on to do the Burke connection and Connections.
Rich people are eccentric. Poor people are strange. Me, I'd be happy with odd.
Connections (and Connections 2) can still be seen on the Science Channel, which is a Discovery/TLC offering that I get here on Cox digital cable. It's great.
But don't slam Junkyard Wars, it's a brilliant idea and a great show and definitely in a different league than the Robot Wars type shows (not to mention things like Trading Spaces).
I know this because Tyler knows this.