The first series of Look Around You was a pastiche of a certain type of School’s science TV from the late seventies. It was short, sweet and really rather funny. The new series has been stretched to half an hour, is now more of a parody of early eighties Tomorrow’s World and is not quite as funny. So far a TV review. What was always nice about the short Look Around You was by the seriousness of the science set-up, it was easy to slip in jokes about Nylon being the twentieth element of the periodic table and so on. New Look Around You illustrates the problem that populist science programmes always had in mainstream television: namely presenters who knew very little about science.
This first show, about future music, had some very spot on gags about synthesizers, the charts and so on, but the presenters did not have the authority that made me want to believe the gibberish they spouted. Why was it I could accept Lesley Judd, as a science presenter but though Maggie Philbin was a no-brain twerp. (This may illustrate the relative standing of Blue Peter vs Saturday Superstore.)
The joke in Look Around You this week that demolished the entire programme for me was that the Music 2000 competition (a competition to guess what Music in 2000 would sound like) was judged by the ghost of Tchaikovsky. A nice non-sequitur you might think, though in actuality an overly drawn out joke. My problem was more what was a science programme doing toying with ghosts. Either there was technology involved in resurrecting it, or science should have been debunking it. The whole premise of the show started to crumble with this one silly gag (it probably did not help that Harry Enfield played said ghost, which was nicely retro in itself but fell apart over the course of the show).