Every now and then the BBC will turn up a programme so good that we forget just how much we resent paying the TV licence fee, almost.
One such show is tonight and for the next two nights with Stargazer, where the mystery's of the universe are shoved before our eyes and some clever dick with a white coat and pens in his top pocket explains it all.
That's what i love about this types of show, the sheer size and speed of everything in the universe that makes it hard to comprehend.
Astronomy is fascinating, but sometimes it isn't easy to get your head around and it doesn't help when scientists talk about something being light years away because many of us don't really have a concept of light years and even if you know that a light year is about 6 trillion miles, it still doesn't really register because it is just too large a number.
So how can we make sense of all this?
As usual, we turn to Monty Python to explain things and although some of their figures are not strictly 100% accurate, they are close enough.
3 comments:
I saw Stargazer last night too. Those shots of Mars and Jupiter were absolutely amazing.
By the way, I'm totally in favour of license fee. It's the best value for £145 I can think of. The bottom line, for me, is that the fee is the price we pay for not having a ad every 10 minutes. And for having shows of intelligence (like Stargazer) made with regularity. I watch almost no TV when I'm in other countries (NZ, Aus, US)... The constant advertising makes any kind of enjoyable viewing pretty much impossible for me. Not only that, the race for the advertising buck makes content very much a case of a 'race to the bottom' (lowest common denominator). It's getting worse in the UK now too, on the other channels anyway, but we should defend the uncommercialised nature of the Beeb tooth & nail.
I agree about the adverts, i just don't like the mandatory aspect of having to pay it. Shows like this, the other Coxy show Wonders of the Universe and the brilliant Frozen Planet does make me less hardened on it though.
If we made the fee optional, then who would pay it? Not many people, sadly. People are like that.
Then, every time you tried to watch a 'commercial hour' of telly, it would take over an hour and a half (minimum, in all likelihood it would be more) and we'd have people screaming meaningless infomercial bullshit at us when we were trying to follow the intricate plot of 'The Killing' or 'The Wire' or something like that (which is already a challenge).
Anything that's on ITV I already only watch online or on-demand, as I can't stand the advertising (and this level of advertising is actually kept artificially low by the fact that there's none on the Beeb... If there was suddenly ads on the Beeb, then the brakes would be off and you'd see at least twice as many on ITV).
Yeah, 'Frozen Planet' was mentally good too; you've got great taste :)
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