When you've grown up with Raymond Baxter and Michael Rodd showing you...
...how the future's supposed to look, some disappointment with how it all eventually turned out seems inevitable. (Note: Although this entry is primarily intended to shame 7th_tableau into making his Alphas post without slagging off the SyFy channel, it also serves to demonstrate why I despise the BBC for abandoning key tenets of its Charter in the name of ratings whoredom.)
The Smart Alec whippersnappers who found it increasingly easy to mock, parody, and eventually cancel Tomorrow's World, possibly in the mistaken belief that the future had arrived now, so it was okay, weren't just betraying a heritage of wonder and joy at the marvels of science, they were failing to understand the catalyst principle at work in a fragmented televisual culture. There is a bottom line of significance in play, but it's not the one manifesting in falling audience numbers - arguably leaving a dedicated hardcore element who, suitably inspired, might actually go out and bloody well invent something - it's that amorphous, less easily-defined one about the value of knowledge.
Society didn't get sick, it got slick. Reinventing a late-night, ratings desert of a programme about ballroom dancing, and turning it into a garish juggernaut of a primetime talent show hosted by a fossilized chin in a wig, became the epitome of in-house "success" for the corporation. Backs were slapped, bubbly was consumed, and - eventually - a knighthood was coughed up for the ageing autobot at its helm. Nobody said this game had to be fair, or even sane, but when arguments were made in some quarters four years ago for the return of the Beeb's longest-running popular science programme, the ears and eyes that mattered were distracted by noisy, shiny things elsewhere.
If I show you an archived series of snapshots of Tomorrow's World it'll only serve to deepen the irony of its demise, since most of you weren't even in existence for its heyday, although the same could be said with regard to Come Dancing before it got "strict":
http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/tomorrowsworld/8001.shtml?all=2&id=8001
If it were to return, and I wouldn't be saying any of this if there wasn't a minor buzz to that possible effect currently doing the rounds (again), it would look different. A less frenetic Gadget Show with sub-par human transplants from Click and whatever creature happens to be shagging the commissioning editor over at CBBC, most likely. There would be reasons to hate it, and reasons not to watch it, as there always were, but at least it would carry the faint titular promise that we still have a tomorrow, and that it might not be quite as shitty as today.
Edit: To the anonymous donor, thank you for the kidney, it was very tasty* paid account time extension. There's probably a slightly kinky Kim Wilde video on YouTube for a song from the '80s which adequately expresses my feelings on the matter.**
*I so rarely get the opportunity to paraphrase Jack the Ripper these days.
**"You Keep Me Hanging On". Not "Kids in America". Oh yes, here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNyRU0fKHAY
The Smart Alec whippersnappers who found it increasingly easy to mock, parody, and eventually cancel Tomorrow's World, possibly in the mistaken belief that the future had arrived now, so it was okay, weren't just betraying a heritage of wonder and joy at the marvels of science, they were failing to understand the catalyst principle at work in a fragmented televisual culture. There is a bottom line of significance in play, but it's not the one manifesting in falling audience numbers - arguably leaving a dedicated hardcore element who, suitably inspired, might actually go out and bloody well invent something - it's that amorphous, less easily-defined one about the value of knowledge.
Society didn't get sick, it got slick. Reinventing a late-night, ratings desert of a programme about ballroom dancing, and turning it into a garish juggernaut of a primetime talent show hosted by a fossilized chin in a wig, became the epitome of in-house "success" for the corporation. Backs were slapped, bubbly was consumed, and - eventually - a knighthood was coughed up for the ageing autobot at its helm. Nobody said this game had to be fair, or even sane, but when arguments were made in some quarters four years ago for the return of the Beeb's longest-running popular science programme, the ears and eyes that mattered were distracted by noisy, shiny things elsewhere.
If I show you an archived series of snapshots of Tomorrow's World it'll only serve to deepen the irony of its demise, since most of you weren't even in existence for its heyday, although the same could be said with regard to Come Dancing before it got "strict":
http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/tomorrowsworld/8001.shtml?all=2&id=8001
If it were to return, and I wouldn't be saying any of this if there wasn't a minor buzz to that possible effect currently doing the rounds (again), it would look different. A less frenetic Gadget Show with sub-par human transplants from Click and whatever creature happens to be shagging the commissioning editor over at CBBC, most likely. There would be reasons to hate it, and reasons not to watch it, as there always were, but at least it would carry the faint titular promise that we still have a tomorrow, and that it might not be quite as shitty as today.
Edit: To the anonymous donor, thank you for the kidney, it was very tasty* paid account time extension. There's probably a slightly kinky Kim Wilde video on YouTube for a song from the '80s which adequately expresses my feelings on the matter.**
*I so rarely get the opportunity to paraphrase Jack the Ripper these days.
**"You Keep Me Hanging On". Not "Kids in America". Oh yes, here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNyRU0fKHAY