Tomorrow's World was a long-running BBC television series, showcasing new (and often wacky) developments in the world of science and technology. First aired in 1965, it ran for 38 years until it was axed at the beginning of 2003, ostensibly because of falling ratings.
The original show was hosted by veteran broadcaster and one-time Spitfire pilot Raymond Baxter , and by its heyday in the 1970s, it was attracting 10 million viewers per week. Baxter was famous for pointing out features of the inventions with military precision using his faithful Parker pen ("as you will see: here, here and here"). Later on, other presenters associated with the show included Michael Rodd , Judith Hann (the longest-serving presenter, with 20 years on the show) and Howard Stableford . The idiosyncratic and ever-cheerful Bob Symes showcased smaller inventions in dramatised vignettes such as "Bob Goes Golfing". These often presented challenges for film directors with which he worked when a close-up was required as Bob's own invention-related exploits in the workshop had resulted in him losing parts of several fingers: it was hard to find a finger that didn't look to gruesome to show on screen!
The show was usually broadcast live, and as a result became famous not only for its technology demonstrations but also for the occasional failure of the technology to work as expected. For example, in demonstrating a new kind of car jack that required much less effort to operate, the jack disintegrated when trying to actually lift a car. Pressing on in the face of such adversity became a rite of passage, both for new presenters on the show and for the young Assistant Producers whose job it was to find the stories and make sure this kind of cock-up didn't happen. The show was also occasionally parodied, for example by Not The Nine O'Clock News, which featured TW-style demonstrations of such inventions as a telephone ring notification device for the deaf - powered by a "micro-pro-cessor" looking suspiciously like a "Shreddie" (a kind of cereal biscuit), and later by the second series of Look Around You.
In many cases the show offered the British public its first chance to see key technologies that are now commonplace, notably:
Perhaps the best-remembered item in the programme's history was the introduction of the compact disc, when presenter Kieran Prendiville demonstrated the disc's supposed indestructibility by spreading strawberry jam on it. The show also gave the first British TV exposure to the group Kraftwerk, who performed their then-forthcoming single Autobahn as part of an item about the use of technology in musicmaking.
Featured inventions that didn't change our lives included disposable paper clothes, a fold-up car that fitted into a suitcase and numerous gadgets such as miracle chopping boards for the kitchen. Members of the public frequently sent in their ideas and the production team sometimes found it difficult writing replies. How to balance being encouraging and, at the same time, to find a new way to say that yet another dog-diaper gadget to catch poop before it hits the ground probably wasn't right for prime-time TV. Like every popular TV show, Tomorrow's World also attracted bizarre viewer correspondence in green ink from time to time, including a persistent man who claimed to have "found the earth's volume control" and, if the programme didn't feature his story, he would "blow the whole thing wide open". During the early 1990s a gay clergymen who had fallen hopelessly in lust with one of the male presenters also wrote in repeatedly proposing a discreet relationship.
During the 1990s, the series attempted to modernise its format and approach, with mixed success. More "populist" presenters such as Carol Vorderman, Philippa Forrester and Peter Snow came in, and the live studio demonstrations were dropped in favour of purely prerecorded items. The final series, presented by Adam Hart-Davis, Kate Humble and Roger Black, attempted to revert back to the original live format of the show, even using a remix of one of the theme tunes used during its more successful years, but ratings continued to fall, and with only three million viewers in the last series the BBC decided to axe the show. At the time they said that they would produce a number of science special editions under the Tomorrow's World "brand" from time to time, but as yet none have appeared.
Many see the show's decline as a classic example of the "dumbing down" of which the BBC has been accused; others suggest that the decline is inevitable given the increasing complexity of modern technology, making it harder to put across to a lay audience in a couple of minutes. 250 words is not much to say what an invention is, how it works, what it means for our lives and to provide some entertainment along the way. Yet another interpretation is that the ending of the show marked a change in the public's expectations of science and technology. The show was launched along with a rash of other TV series such as Horizon that explicitly linked science and technology to the future in a technocratic, optimistic and arguably naive way. Today we know that new knowledge brings both good and bad and perhaps a more sophisticated approach to presentation is required to do it justice, though very hard to reconcile with the demands of mass-audience early evening television.
A little known fact is that virtually all the master video tapes of 1970s and early 80s episodes containing the first showing in public of numerous new technologies were erased as part of a general BBC cost-cutting exercise, recycling video tape at a time when a half-hour spool cost hundreds of pounds. Fortunately, an enthusiastic viewer recorded many of the deleted episodes on an early and now long obsolete home video recorder (a Phillips N1500) and kindly made his tapes available for copying during the early 1990s. As a result, true devotees can still see re-runs on the TechTV television network.
Tomorrow's World is also in the Guiness Book of Records for being the first programme to be presented by a computer generated character.
Last updated: 05-24-2005 17:47:19
