Look Around You: Season 1 Pilot - Calcium

DocShadow6603 HN recommenders · 2016–2024
830K views · comedy · evergreen · Uploaded 2014-12-18

The pilot of the British comedy series Look Around You, a deadpan parody of 1970s and 80s school science programmes, in which the scientists examine calcium.

HN commenters recommend it as a surreal, perfectly observed parody of old educational films, and quote it in jokes.

Watch on YouTube

7 comments from Hacker News

@nkurz2016 · in “James Burke: Connections, Episodes 1-10 (1978) [video]”

Likely because they first encountered it on PBS, some Americans are unaware Connections was a BBC production: [LINK] Even less known these days (by Americans, at least) is that Connections was but one of many extraordinary educational science series that the BBC produced in the 1970's. Original footage of one of the best of these was recently rediscovered and finally made available on the web: Look Around You: Season 1 Pilot - Calcium [VIDEO] Watching it again today, it's hard to understate the positive impact this series had on British science education, and the obvious "leg up" it gave for Britain's technological prowess.

Strongly recommendsView on HN
@nudgeee2018 · in “JSBeeb – JavaScript BBC Micro Emulator”

10 PRINT "LOOK AROUND YOU "; 20 GOTO 10 RUN As seen in the BBC cult classic Look Around You intro, [VIDEO]

@wcarss2021 · in “Let us now praise tiny ants”

I really wondered if this would be related to the mockumentary "Look Around You"[1]'s somewhat famous "Thanks ants... Thants"[2] line. If you're reading my comment and you haven't run across these, you might find them pretty amusing. But... it is (reasonably) not related to those things at all. 1 - [VIDEO] 2 - [LINK]

RecommendsView on HN
@leoc2021 · in “50 years ago, The Electric Company used comedy to boost kids' reading skills”

Children's TV nostalgia, eh? Back in the '80s the earliest UK TV in the morning was often a long countdown clock leading into a couple of hours of very slow-paced and somewhat haunted old schools programming [LINK] [LINK] . Now that's the stuff of memories. The whole first series/season of the early-2000s TV series Look Around You [LINK] was a parody of this programming: [VIDEO] .

@jeffrallen2022 · in “5 Megawatt Nitinol Engine by Mcdonnell Douglas (2015) [video]”

I believe this was also covered in the British educational programme named "Look Around You" ( [VIDEO] ). /s

@cal852023 · in “When did Alan Partridge first appear on television?”

Look Around You [0] is little known even in the UK, but I think a lot of HN readers might love it. It's a surreal but perfectly observed parody of the 80s/90s educational videos we used to watch in school science classes. [0] Episode 1: Calcium [VIDEO]

Strongly recommendsView on HN
@matthewmcg2024 · in “Visiting Scarfolk, the most spectacular dystopia of the 1970s (2016)”

This strikes me as a darker version of the late 70s early 80s British educational videos aesthetic captured in the Look Around You series. Example: [VIDEO]