Maybe I did Horizon a little bit of a disservice a few weeks ago when I moaned about the appalling state of it. I still stand by everything I said then, but it’s become obvious that the BBC front-loaded this run of the series with poorer programmes.
It’s still true that some of the subject matter we’ve had this time around would have been better served it QED (or a reworked Tomorrow’s World) still existed on BBC1, but it’s true to say that there have been better editions recently.
There was the programme about The Moon For Sale which was a reasonable consideration about why we’re returning to the moon. Battle of the Brains completely belonged in another series, but it was a good programme nonetheless trying to examine what intelligence really is. Skyscraper Fire Fighters was worthwhile. And this week’s The Six Billion Dollar Experiment was a triumphant return to form looking at the Large Hadron Collider and the science behind it. It did exactly what good science TV programming should do – tackle a complicated subject, and make it accessible to the viewer. So congrats to James Van Der Pool and the team on this episode.
Next week, it’s “How to Commit the Perfect Murder.”
Hmm.
I still hate the Flash-laden Horizon website, complete with an utterly pointless vote for each programme. Seriously – we don’t need to make every programme interactive by including a “vote” element – particularly when most of those voting really don’t have a clue about the real science behind it (currently 46.8% of voters think that the 2+ billion euro machine shouldn’t be switched on).