The Secret Life of Machines
Originally published at Disjunction. You can comment here or there.
When I was a youngin’, I used to eat up all the BBC programming I could get on domestic cable and PBS. Nothing makes a wee lad feel mentally superior than fostering a deep appreciation of British sensibilities. This did not stop me from being bullied, but it did result in my continued love of Python and Doctor Who (I was a member of the Doctor Who Fan Club of America).
There were two other shows that have stuck with me over the years, shows that I hope beyond hope will one day find a new life and will not simply be redone with the abashedly over the top approaches of American hosts. Those shows are Connections and The Secret Life of Machines.
Connections was a fairly successful series in which James Burke, your humble host, “connects” two events, one historical and one modern, to show the progression of chance encounters, dependencies, and advances required to get from point A to point B for something like the invention of the telephone. I quoted “connects” because the connections were often tenuous at best. Still, it was fascinating information and gave me a real appreciation for chance and improbability (that I was also reading Douglas Adams at the time probably [hee hee] contributed to my interest in improbability). I still buy every Connections-style book that Burke writes, even though they are getting less and less convincing with each new release. I also bought the Connections PC game when it was released. I love that junk.
The second show was The Secret Life of Machines. As a kid, I would often grab the nearest screwdriver and proceed to disassemble the stuff around me to see what was inside. Even though I hadn’t the slightest clue how something might work, I needed to know what was tucked inside toys, electronics, computers, et cetera. The Secret Life of Machines was like crack for me as the show would focus on one machine for an entire episode and give its history, how it worked, and how its parts interacted. I particularly remember the episodes about vacuum cleaners and refrigerators for some reason. As with Connections, the presentation of TSLoM was very dry and very informative. The pre-SquiggleVision animation certainly didn’t hurt it at all as it reminded me of the opening of Mystery, a sequence I both loved and feared (it scared the crap out of me when I was 8 watching it in the dark on a black and white TV while no one else was awake). My memories of TSLoM were later awakened when watching the animated sequences on Junkyard Wars which used nearly the same exact art/animation style when describing the requirements of the various challenges.
For quite some time now, Connections has been available on DVD but only in sets of entire series and often at the price of $150 per series. While I love the show, I’ve never found the motivation required to drop upwards of $450 to own all of it. Similarly for TSLoM, the DVD set is $200 for the series. That’s a lot of cash for learning how the Hoover company got its start.
There must be something that has prompted this outpouring of dead TV series love, right? Of course there is. A thread over at ShackNews was discussing the merits of MythBusters vs. Smash Lab. That got me thinking about the shows I do enjoy on Discovery, namely “How It’s Made” and “Some Assembly Required“. This kicked off my nostalgia for TSLoM, which prompted a web search to dive into more retro love. There I discovered that all the episodes of TSLoM are available for download/streaming! I just about crapped my pants in excitement!
You can bet I’ll be spending this evening putting these on my media server. Now if somebody would just release Connections to the public…