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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.
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.
Sex - Find It
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Absolutely amazing program. All three series of Connections are still available on VHS, and the first on is available on DVD.
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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...
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.