Look Around You! - the source

A while back I posted about the BBC show Look Around You!, a parody of distance learning shows from the late 70s and early 80s. I find the parody hilarious, but I have come to understand through the years that satire is only funny if you're in on the joke.

So, I'd like to let a few more folks in on the joke. I'm assuming that the Look Around You! shows are spoofing British versions of the shows from the videos below. Admittedly, the shows below are a little more plot-driven that Look Around You! is, but it's still a paper thin plot.

The videos below are from KET, Kentucky Educational Television, the PBS network that I grew up watching on the Louisville PBS stations. They were designed to help prepare adults for their GED (General Education Development) tests. If those tests were passed - and they're still around and available - then the person would effectively have earned a high school diploma.

The shows would be played on local PBS or often available as VHS tapes at local libraries. Students would watch the shows and work through a workbook that they would have ordered and purchased in advance. I remember shows in math and English, but I assume that there were also social studies and science shows, too. The shows that I remember tended to have loose plots tying the lessons together. 

There was the English program...

...the math program...

You can even check out what the workbook would have looked like thanks to the magic of YouTube.

And, yes, I remember watching some of the shows because I was that nerdy. I would have been in elementary or middle school at the time and likely would have looked at most of the concepts as being things I already knew.

But, man, I was always down for some 3-2-1 Contact. 

Ekspolsiv trappevask (explosive stair)

Ikke gjør dette hjemme

With a name like that - loosely translated as "Don't Try This At Home" or "Never Do This At Home" - a show is allowed to take a few liberties.

In this clip, the hosts have found a creative way to clean the stairwell quickly. They combine hydrogen peroxide (assumedly 30%) with potassium iodide (a catalyst promoting the quick decomposition into water and oxygen gas) in a soapy solution. To that they add a bit of (as seen in the original video - skip to about 24:25) n-heptane (though the translated captions call it 'gasoline') making for an explosive, highly theoretical dry finish to the 'clean-up.'

I'm thinking that the process goes about as well as they had expected it to.

For bonuses, I'll embed a video of the same folks showing how quickly an improperly-handled grease fire can get out of hand.

The Mystery of Matter

 

Edit: I'm reposting the videos since PBS took them down. They might or might not stay posted by this account. A short clip is above. I'll put the full episodes after the jump.

How can you not love that fake nose and beard there on Dmitri Mendeleev (as played by Michael Aronov) in PBS's The Mystery of Matter: Search for the Elements.

The show is a three-episode 'series' exploring seven key events and people in the discovery of the elements that make up the periodic table. In the course of those 180 minutes, the series name checks dozens of legendary chemistry - Glenn Seaborg, Marie and Pierre Curie, Henry Davy, Harry Mosley, Joseph Priestly, Antoine Lavoisier, Dmitri Mendeleev, and many, many more.

Each event is detailed in a mixture of historic recreations - including dialog taken directly from the historical writings of the scientists involved - and contemporary scientists commenting on the discoveries. The series shows high production values in the historical recreations really selling the stories brilliantly.

In moments, the series is brilliant and engaging, detailing both the human and scientific side of the stories. We hear of the sexism that required Pierre Curie to insist that Marie receive the credit she deserved, the tragedy in the death of Harry Mosley in Turkey during World War I, and the national security concerns of Glenn Seaborg during the discovery of plutonium in 1941. The totality of the series is almost too informative, however, as watching it for more than maybe half an hour at a time leads to information fatigue.

This series will be highly useful in small doses within the classroom, especially the Dmitri Mendeleev excerpt up above (lengthier than embedded above.)

All three episodes can be found on the series website.

Look Around You!

The Look Around You programme was produced in 2002 and 2005 by the BBC and makes a brilliant mockery of self-teaching programs from the early to mid-1980s, the sorts of programs that were shown here in the US on PBS stations and required you to send away for a workbook through which you would follow along as the program ran.

The first season had eight ten-minute episodes, and the second season had six thirty-minute episodes. The episodes ranged in topic from water, calcium, maths, brain, and computers. The humor is bone dry but certainly present, and the science is atrociously wrong throughout.

In this premier episode, I particularly recommend skipping to...

• 6:17 - calcium molecule (including triple helix) and the dread Helvetica Scenario
• 8:00 - the refining of calcium from 6 tonnes of teeth per day
• 9:22 - the return of the Helvetica Scenario
• 10:10 - a very weird thing (whose name I can't figure out) on a pillow
• 12:20 - the nonsensical reaction between calcium and sodium chloride to form Thompson's oil
• 13:10 - calcium oxide vapor's paralytic properties
• 13:30 - the effects of helium gas upon calcium - using a ping pong ball to demonstrate that the calcium pile hasn't really disappeared after the helium exposure at 2.5 quorums per second - showing calcic image misplacement
• 16:20 - the differences between calcium and intelligent calcium
• 20:42 - some advice about calcium

It's tough to get full episodes online, but DVDs can be purchased.

Most of the clips on YouTube are much shorter than the one I've embedded above....check them out after the jump...