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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?"
they should try hosting the show naked.
nudity can make anything better.
While its future shows may suck, "Big Thinkers" will make you think. I would actually PAY for this on dvd (unencoded of course!)
I'm not sure whether or it's shown in Britain, but you should look into it.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Science Survivor?
What's he doing now-a-days? I always thought he was cool. Maybe it's just his name? His show must of had quite a budget to do some of the stuff that he did. I think it was owned by Disney.
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You mean a plastic dinosaur spinning!?
"Bill! Bill! Bill! (It's alive!"
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
If so, it was ok, although kinda weird, could tell it was from the UK they were always in labs in the UK and stuff was like what the crap? heh
I agree with an earlier poster, Big Thinkers is a far superior show, I don't watch TechTV much anymore, anyone know if they still show new Big Thinkers?
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.
With the Internet, it becomes more and more difficult to keep shows like this on the air. Once upon a time, 'Tomorrow's World' gave you a glimpse of things you'd otherwise never know existed (at least at the time of viewing). With the Internet, anything heralded on television has been already discussed on the web a thousand times.
from slashdot:
The BBC news site reports their decision to ditch the Popular science show, Tomorrows World , after 30 years.
from the article:
Tomorrow's World, the BBC's long-running popular science programme, has been dropped from its weekly TV slot after almost 40 years
Would it have been so hard to take a peek at the article, Hemos?
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.
For a while he was doing engineering commentary for the show battlebots, but I can't think of anything he's done since then (or if he's still doing it).
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.
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It's nice to see something on /. that's not so U.S.-centric. I enjoy listening to 'Quirks and Quarks' on CBC (Canadian public radio) on occasion, but I havn't seen a science TV show of any note ever. I mean, The Learning Channel can be interesting, but they hate to go into detail about anything.
I would venture to say (and I used to work for CBC-TV) that TV is a medium that can't afford to go into detail at all, and therefore will never produce great science programming.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
here on the other side of the pond the Discovery Channel still gives us great scientific programing, like " Dopey interpretations of quantum theory for morons who think Battlestar Gallactica was a historical document but flunked grade school math" and "I was abducted by an alien ghost that rode down on a killer tornado from Atlantis for Jesus".
Man, hard core tech programing just don't get no better than that. Maybe you Brits should import some of it to fill the gap.
KFG
The best one was on April 1st one year where they asked you to vote for something by touching your television screen.
I touched Phillipa.
I often wonder if corporations like BBC aren't too quick to just chuck a long-running series without attempting changes, even radical ones (like the poster who suggested nudity, which was my first thought-but in a 'remove the stodginess' sort of way.
Being an Australian, I have only seen this show a dozen times, but Tomorrow's World really did capture alot of stuff that wouldnt have been seen on other science programs..
In Australia we used to have "Beyond 2000" which ended a almost 10 years ago or so, didnt get quite as nerdy as TM though..
Tomorrow's world will be missed.. by those who watched it... and those who poked fun at it
-- If at first you don't succeed, lie!
Television could be so great, but instead it's a cesspool.
--Mike
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
is the true lack of depth. For me, it only worth watching these shows if they show off some new gizmo. Otherwise, most science shows I've seen have the depth of a 6th grade science textbook. Of course shows with great depth would require more than 30 sec sound bites and explainations that took more than the time between commericals. Anyway, most people would probably not watch a show of any depth... it would get canned.
(Caution: This is not a flame, its an observation)
Accentuate the positive, don't waste your mod points on the negative.
"Several generations of Britain's scientists and technologists grew up watching TM."
Well if they grew up watching TM, then hopefully they will not mind the passing of Tomorrow's World too terribly.
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.
When I was younger, I really enjoyed Bill Nye the science guy. Of course, shows like that don't really appeal to adults. I'm now enjoying Big Thinkers on TechTv. The interviews with the actual scientists who developed the theories being discussed are what make a good science show.
"Anything that's invented after you're 35 is against the natural order of things" - Douglas Adams
Maybe the problem is that most British nerds were watching some show with abbreviations TM.
Here in the U.S., most science shows have switched to the "MTV generation attention span format". This involves taking 10 minutes of content, then stretching it out to 45 minutes in length with attention-grabbing fillers.
These typically include things like cheesy, inaccurate and endlessly repetitive computer simulations of explosions, ancient pyramid tours or space probe flybys. Also popular are sad attempts at creating a "suspensful" plot, such as a melodramatic voicover accompanying the same tired scene: a computer monitor reflected in the eyeglasses of a scientist pecking at keyboards in a strangely lit office. Time-elapsed shots of radio telescopes at sunset are another sure-fire time filler.
I often wish they'd bring back the "old guy standing in a field giving a half-hour monologue" format. Those guys usually knew a lot about what they were talking about, and they worked to cram it into the time available, not the other way around.
My idea for a new tech show is one that is an Iron Chef/Junk Yard wars cross. You put a team of engineers together and give them an electrical component that they have to build something with like in Iron Chef. The teams would have electronics labs with wires, circuit boards, etc. and they would make whatever they could in a certain amount of time. Then there would be a panel of judges that rates the usefulness of the item built and whoever wins over the most judges wins.
They removed the Christmas quiz with people like Clive Sinclair as guests!
And most importantly, the studio element of the show with scientific demonstrations etc.
Phillipa Forrester really didn't have a clue (see the Brass Eye special), at least Adam Hart-Davis has something to do with science!
Conclusion: bring back Howard Stableford (where is he now?!) and actually invite people in to show off cool stuff! :)
beyond tomorrow (use to be beyond 2000 in the 90's)
or, if it is still being made, Next Step (the science and tech show not the OS/Computer)
both use to be on the discovery chanel in the 90's before the womanification of the stupid thing...now beyond tomorow is on tech TV and I could not find anything on next step////both were great and infact, I first heard about Java on beyond 2000 back in 94-95
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Instead of putting all of your efforts into one drawn out television series, focus instead on one or two strong mini-series of documentaries. "Blue Planet" and "Evolution" (PBS) come to mind as quick examples. The Discovery channel has made a market out of this kind of a thing, with all of the dinosaur and "what if" based shows. Good stuff, and the production quality (I.E. entertainment value) of such ventures are great. Next, interesting works of modern man are always entertaining, like "Modern Marvels". I'm sure that the producers could find some other interesting topic and make a similar show.
If you're a US-based viewer, it changed networks. It started Monday on TechTV.
Look at the impact this way. Alot of children do watch television. I used to watch it, but not as much. I still flip through the channels however. Many a time, I've come across a channel showing something about technology, or space, or something scientific, and I'll leave it there. Learning something new, is ALWAYS a good feeling. With the loss of this show, we may in fact hinder our chances of having children decided to choose a scientific field, to major in, and thus lose their creative input on the world of tomorrow. I hope they replace the show with another cutting edge science show, or maybe a show that talks about various world events, and the conspiracy theories that they relate to (I love reading about them here at /.)
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Wouldn't that be interesting if our beloved Slashdot starts taking video/audio submission (someday)? So instead of just reading headlines at Slashdot, we'll be reading, listening and watching headlines submitted to Slashdot. That's like new generation of tech news? Many people here submit stories that we can categorize into "Tomorrow's World", so it might become something to... watch, listen and read. How does this idea sound? If and when something like that gets on the net, we're not gonna miss shows like "Tomorrow's World", are we?
From my point of view what killed TW was a gradual, slow change in the kind of stories they showed. When I used to watch TW religiously, back in the mid-late 80's, the vast majority of their items were to do with either consumer technology inventions (CD's, home computers and so on) or physical sciences (string theory, birth of the universe, or, more paractically, the first mention I ever heard of quantum computing and quantum encryption back in 1988 or so). During the 90's, in what seemed to me to be a misguided attempt to win ratings, the show gradually changed to a more human-interest type show, all about biology, genetics, medicine, until by the late 1990's that was all there was: no inventions, no physical science news, no astronomy, just item after item of medical discoveries, biotechnology, with the odd reference to the BBC's 'Webwise' project to get people hooked up to the Internet.
That was when I stopped watching it, it just didn't interest me any more. I appreciate the importance of medicine and the biological sciences (although these interest me less than the physical sciences and associated inventions), but there just wasn't anything else on TW, and it got boring because of this.
I don't think I'm alone in feeling this - I've met quite a few geeky Tomorrow's World ex-fans who say the same thing, they just stopped running the stories that interested them. It's quite a tragedy - in an attempt to make the programme trendier and gain mainstream audience share, they completely killed off their core audience, and the production team seemed to have absolutely no idea what the problem was. It's entirely the BBC's own fault.
Oh well, here's hoping they'll wake up one day, realize their mistake and revive it, just like they have with Doctor Who.
N.B. The last sentence used a technique known as irony. Some of you may wish to study and attempt to understand it.
For the love of God, please replace it with anything other than another "Robot Wars" type of show.
I've always loved "science of tomorrow" shows. My personal favorites being the old Discovery Channel shows "Next Step" (hosted by the guy with the moustache that later went on to host "C|Net Central" on USA Network, if memory serves) and "Beyond 2000" (a BBC production, if I remember correctly). Admittedly, "Beyond 2000" had a built-in expiration. But it was still quite entertaining.
Maybe Dave Chalk could fill the void. "Today we're reviewing a tablet PC. They're the wave of the future and come with nifty pointy-sticks. Don't worry if this all sounds too technical, we'll explain more about pointy-sticks after the commercial break."
120x120 at 8bit color. Don't you people think!?
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
I always wondered what would happen to the show "Beyond 2000" when 2000 finally got here. Well after 2000 the show still ran on for a bit, wasn't as popular though. Now I think it's off the air.
I think that technology doesn't amaze people as much anymore as it used to. I'm still waiting for those flying cars to hit the market. Maybe they'll be introduced once electric cars die out.
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
When they present a story, they repeat the same material three times (using slightly different wording each time) just to make sure that the viewers comprehend. It is like watching Teletubbies.
The content they present is beyond 'light'. They never go into any depth. They don't sray from the press release upon which they based the segment.
And they dwell on safety. All they care about is safety. Did I mention that safety is important to them? (A good example is the segment on a new line of kitchen appliances that have lower magnetic fields. They [or rather the manufacturer's press release] implied that magnets are dangerous to your health. Nothing was offered to back up this claim.)
I remember when the Canadian Discovery Channel purchased Tomorrow's World. They jumped up and down for joy at acquiring the BBC's flagship science program. After airing two episodes, they realised what a collosal mistake this was and pulled it.
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I loved that show. Watched it all the time in 4 and 5th grade. I got quite a collection... in fact, I brought several episodes into my 5th grade class to watch when they matched the current unit.
Perhaps one of the best science/history shows that's ever been on television, and I know I'm not alone in thinking this.
Unfortunately, TLC has replaced it with such inspiring fare as "Trading Spaces" and "Junkyard Wars", and Discovery (Canada) has no hope of picking it up, they're too busy re-running "Guiness Prime Time" - the record keepers, not the beer.
It's sad that every damn form of media is being dumbed down to sensationalist joe punchclock filler - surely there are more than 5 people out there who'd like to see something with SOME substance.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Old geek T.V. host
He gets naked on the air
Viewers eyes will bleed
Don't give me none of this "nature theme" business.
Beyond 2000 use to be on the Discovery Channel 10-15 years ago when the network's goal was to educate, unlike now where everything is about sharks, the military, and guys with accents showcasing dangerous animals.
You're so right.
They had some real crap on Tomorrow's World simply so it'd appeal to Joe Sixpack and five year olds.. both of who WEREN'T THE MAIN GROUPS WHO WATCHED THE SHOW!!
Tommorrow's World would spend tons of time looking at stupid inventions like quicker ways to open tin cans, or 'Young Innovators' fairs where 8 year olds would invent automatic dog food dispensers.
Instead of focusing on such jevenile crap they should have focused on cool widgets, technologies that could change the world, and things of some importance to science, rather than things which make it easier to do the washing up.
mogorific carpentry experiments
I am still pissed off about Bill Nye. He came along quite a bit after Beakman (of Beakman's World), which was many orders of magnitude better that that shallow clone pretender Nye could ever hope to be. It was simply more fun, more interesting, and did a better job explaining the science than Nye's puffery. Plus it had a guy in a rat suit, and the beloved assistant Josie.
Like so many other of the truly fine things in life, Nye had much biigger backing and after a while Beakman was gone. Now I just get sad whenever I see Nye. I hope he has realized his crime to humanity and joined a monestary to live the rest of his days seeking forgivness for displacing Beakman from the airwaves.
If you think my rant is something, take a look at Nye Vs. Beakman. The page is a sad reflection of real life in that Nye still won even though the comments about Nye were dead on.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Absolutely amazing program. All three series of Connections are still available on VHS, and the first on is available on DVD.
s id=22
http://www.documentary-video.com/ShowSubject.cfm?
I treated myself to the DVDs last year, and they're every bit as good as I remembered, and not that dated (since they're mostly dealing with the history of technology). Well, apart from his suit...
It took me awhile to figure out that 'alloy-mini-um' they kept going on about was aluminum.
-
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.
..from everybody who complains the /. is US centric. ;)
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junkyard wars is great.
I love the episode where the guy carves a prop, with a chainsaw, and it works. If anybody ever says, I won't need math for what I want to do, have them watch that show.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Beyond 2000 started out as "Towards 2000".
As 2000 approached, they made the name change. I also believe it switched networks in Australia.
Those early NOVAs were like little detective stories. They left loose ends loose and open questions open. Everything was not wrapped up at the end of an episode. Production values were low, but the narration (great narrator, too) would stand by itself with the picture turned off.
I would love to see a remake (a la Michael Apted's "Seven Up") reuniting the original NOVA crew with the original scientists. Did they keep at it or drift off and let others answer those all-consuming questions? Did the questions ever get answered satisfactorily?
If anyone knows of transcripts or tapes of these old shows, do tell!
Their they're doing there hair.
I'm sure many here would disagree, but the best science show I've ever seen is PBS' NOVA. If the BBC doesn't already carry this somewhere then they absolutely should. This series totally inspired me as a kid, and now that I'm actually doing science as an adult my admiration for it has only grown. Nothing else on TV comes close to conveying what it's actually like to be a scientist.
For lighter fare I'd recommend either Scientific American Frontiers or the already mentioned Beyond 2000.If New Scientist doesn't already have a TV series, though, they really should.
Tomorrow's World was never the same after Raymond Baxter stopped doing it.
And the BBC are just dumbing down the remaining shows that need 4 brain cells to watch. Sky are hitting them hard when it comes to prime time viewing, the only thing that gets viewers on the BBC is EastEnders.
But I hate the way they have phucked up science programmes. Walking With Dinosaurs was portrayed as a scientific show. IT WASNT! It was a bunch of script writers making up crap from pictures of fozziled bones. How can you deduce all that crap they showed from that?
First they cancel Dr Who and now Tomorrow's World. How will the Brits learn about science?
junkyard wars is great
Then you'll love Demolition. Two teams, an assortment of power tools, and races like "fit this car into these suitcases" and "fit this office into this filing cabinet". It's brilliant!
Tomorrow's World was good. It taught me about cool new things like the internet.
But now we don't need it, because we have cool new things like the internet.
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BBC seems to be beginning to ditch their flagship shows.
It's Tomorrow's World now, after killing off Angus Deayton from Have I Got News For You.
They should have kept real scientists on the show like Heather Cooper, Howard Stableford and Kate Bellingham. Does anyone remember the Brass Eye Special involving Phillipa Forrester where she lost all credibility?
Does anyone admit to remembering "Mr. Wizard"? Gee, it worked in the B&W nuke-fearing, pre-disney 50's.
You gotta love Bill Nye the Science Guy!! What do you mean he's just for kids?
I am sad to see this show go - As I child I would sit there in rapture as they showed me robot-suits and flying cars
None of it ever came to light - But when you are a kid the idea of people actully having powered robo-suits - Or microwaves that cooked meals in a few seconds - Or any of the thousands of other things they showed - It brought out the kind of wonder and love of technology that breeds a good slashdotter
Oh well - Maybe my kids will be using Nerocannula and be jacked straight into Virtu-Slash-Online
CBC has a great radio show called Quirks and Quarks. If you live in Canada, you can listen on CBC 1 Saturdays @ noon. Best of all, you can download each segment in ogg, mp3, or real formats, put them in a playlist, and create your own custom show!
The recently appointed head of the BBC is Greg Dyke inventor of Roland Rat.
He is planning to make BBC larger and much dumber. There are currently protests against the legality of the mandatory licence fee (understandable when the BBC actually offered public service). Tommorow's world could have been updated or saved, however it's a little too intellectual and middle class for Greg "Roland Rat" Dyke.
</rant>
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On y va, qui mal y pense!
... and has been dead for a while.
But I don't think it's necessarily because they alienated their geek audience with all that "soft" science stuff. I think it's because they're simply abandoning proper science coverage completely.
These days, scientific innovation is complex stuff often operating at levels 99% of the population have no clue even exist (e.g. quantum physics). Explaining it in a visual medium reliant by definition on pictures is usually just about impossible. Despite all the recent cloning coverage, I doubt you'd find hardly anyone on the street who could tell you what the Human Genome Project is, or even what DNA is.
The BBC is fighting for its life to defend the licence fee, and to do so it has to broaden its appeal. Science is the first major category for the culling. After One Man And His Dog, natch.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
This program is soooooooooooo shite! Now if they can just get rid of the rest of the BBC output and the TV TAX!
Just more BBC lefty liberal environmentalist propaganda! And we are made to pay £112.00 ($168) in TV Tax each for a load of moronic crap like this else we are sent to prison and given £1000 fine! How liberal is that?
Remember C|Net, on your television. I forget what channel(s) aired it and have no idea when it went off the air. But their was a block of shows with C|Net being the flagship. "The Edge" I think was one of the baby C|Net shows. I remember the hosts being outstanding: energetic, intelligent, perfect for the audience. I remember a good-looking blonde as well! I don't get this TechTV channel I keep hearing about, and I don't think I have BBC; both channels are probably premium channels thru Cox. Are there any other decent technology shows on standard cable television?