Analog Baroque TV
Aug. 19th, 2006 09:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusHow out of touch -- and yet totally in sympathy -- can you be? I watched a YouTube clip of Look Around You, Episode 1, Series 1, Module 1: Maths on Mischa's blog thinking it was something from the 1970s, and laughed all the more uproariously when the dry, absurdist jokes came along. I quickly realized this was a brilliantly-designed, rather convincing spoof on the familiarly weird educational TV we had in Britain in the late 70s and early 80s, stuff like The Open University. (Here, to give you an idea of what that was like, is a little clip from a real Open University module about Pi Tangent Functions.)
And here, without further ado, are the eight ten-minute modules of the first series of Look Around You, which isn't a 1970s educational series, but a comedy series screened on BBC 2 in 2002. The whole series is on YouTube, but you can also buy it on DVD with extras:
Module 1: Maths
Module 2: Water
Module 3: Germs
Module 4: Ghosts
Module 5: Sulphur
Module 6: Music
Module 7: Iron
Module 8: Brain
Look Around You was created by Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz. They met in 1998. In an interview, Popper explains that "we had this shared experience of being forced to watch horrific schools science modules at school. We realised it was basically a pretty untapped area. We decided we should write something based on those old shows".
They made a 20 minute short called "Calcium", which led to a deal with production company Talkback (known for Chris Morris shows like Brasseye and The Day Today) and a commission from the BBC.
"Once we started writing we then watched lots of stuff - shows like "Experiment", "Physics In Action", generally the work of writer/director Jack Smith who made all those educational shows. We watched a lot of old stuff and kind of ended up talking in the narrator's voice and one day "Look Around You" came out. When repeated it's kind of bullying. We liked that... We loved the vaguely dictatorial tone of stations like Radio Moscow, and all the music used. All very heraldic and bombastic. That influenced us when we did the music certainly, and we listened to lots of Boards of Canada, Benge and Warp artists. Stuff like that."
The visual brilliance of the series is down to Gideon Corby of Shynola, also responsible for the brillant graphics in the Chris Morris series Nathan Barley (they had DVD owners freezing frames frequently, only to find insulting messages from Morris addressed to "DVD wankers!"). The gloopy synth music, credited to "Gelg", is also by Popper and Serafinowicz.
After my initial confusion, I began to feel, as I watched this brilliant series, that I knew exactly where its aesthetic was coming from. Conceived in 1998 just like my "Little Red Songbook" album, wasn't this "Analog Baroque TV"? (The Analog Baroque style was actually inspired by the music for an Open University unit entitled Christopher Plantin, Polyglot Printer of Antwerp.) Didn't it relate to my trajectory, in the mid- to late-90s, away from the pre-chewed "otherness" of neo-retro-lounge music and towards an even further-out "radiophonics" style influenced by Raymond Scott, Plone, Boards of Canada and Delia Derbyshire? Didn't it recall the brilliant 80s Peel session "Let's Evolve!" by conceptual pop group Sudden Sway, also a "module", and also a spoof on the Open University? Wasn't it close to the theme music I made in 2000 for Questia.com commercials, some of which can now be heard introducing my Wired podcasts? And weren't the Wired pieces I now write on things like piezoelectical systems getting perilously close to the science nerd chic so affectionately parodied in these shows? Wasn't there some parallel between the sans serif, 70s science didactic style of Look Around You and the "benign sobriety" of my current favourite graphic designer, James Goggin? And didn't the academic-absurdist humour of this show remind me of my favourite French cartoon series of the 60s, Les Shadoks? Wasn't this the TV equivalent of The Unreliable Tour Guide?
Apparently Look Around You re-appeared in 2005 with a Series 2 which models itself more on Tomorrow's World (BBC1's long-running technology series, which used to air right before Top of the Pops every Thursday), and sounds, to me, slightly less original than the first series -- although based on sketch clip Birds of Britain, it's just as funny.
"These fascinating creatures came to our planet suddenly in 1962," the narrator tells us. Note that down in your copy book.
And here, without further ado, are the eight ten-minute modules of the first series of Look Around You, which isn't a 1970s educational series, but a comedy series screened on BBC 2 in 2002. The whole series is on YouTube, but you can also buy it on DVD with extras:
Module 1: Maths
Module 2: Water
Module 3: Germs
Module 4: Ghosts
Module 5: Sulphur
Module 6: Music
Module 7: Iron
Module 8: Brain
Look Around You was created by Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz. They met in 1998. In an interview, Popper explains that "we had this shared experience of being forced to watch horrific schools science modules at school. We realised it was basically a pretty untapped area. We decided we should write something based on those old shows".
They made a 20 minute short called "Calcium", which led to a deal with production company Talkback (known for Chris Morris shows like Brasseye and The Day Today) and a commission from the BBC.
"Once we started writing we then watched lots of stuff - shows like "Experiment", "Physics In Action", generally the work of writer/director Jack Smith who made all those educational shows. We watched a lot of old stuff and kind of ended up talking in the narrator's voice and one day "Look Around You" came out. When repeated it's kind of bullying. We liked that... We loved the vaguely dictatorial tone of stations like Radio Moscow, and all the music used. All very heraldic and bombastic. That influenced us when we did the music certainly, and we listened to lots of Boards of Canada, Benge and Warp artists. Stuff like that."
The visual brilliance of the series is down to Gideon Corby of Shynola, also responsible for the brillant graphics in the Chris Morris series Nathan Barley (they had DVD owners freezing frames frequently, only to find insulting messages from Morris addressed to "DVD wankers!"). The gloopy synth music, credited to "Gelg", is also by Popper and Serafinowicz.
After my initial confusion, I began to feel, as I watched this brilliant series, that I knew exactly where its aesthetic was coming from. Conceived in 1998 just like my "Little Red Songbook" album, wasn't this "Analog Baroque TV"? (The Analog Baroque style was actually inspired by the music for an Open University unit entitled Christopher Plantin, Polyglot Printer of Antwerp.) Didn't it relate to my trajectory, in the mid- to late-90s, away from the pre-chewed "otherness" of neo-retro-lounge music and towards an even further-out "radiophonics" style influenced by Raymond Scott, Plone, Boards of Canada and Delia Derbyshire? Didn't it recall the brilliant 80s Peel session "Let's Evolve!" by conceptual pop group Sudden Sway, also a "module", and also a spoof on the Open University? Wasn't it close to the theme music I made in 2000 for Questia.com commercials, some of which can now be heard introducing my Wired podcasts? And weren't the Wired pieces I now write on things like piezoelectical systems getting perilously close to the science nerd chic so affectionately parodied in these shows? Wasn't there some parallel between the sans serif, 70s science didactic style of Look Around You and the "benign sobriety" of my current favourite graphic designer, James Goggin? And didn't the academic-absurdist humour of this show remind me of my favourite French cartoon series of the 60s, Les Shadoks? Wasn't this the TV equivalent of The Unreliable Tour Guide?
Apparently Look Around You re-appeared in 2005 with a Series 2 which models itself more on Tomorrow's World (BBC1's long-running technology series, which used to air right before Top of the Pops every Thursday), and sounds, to me, slightly less original than the first series -- although based on sketch clip Birds of Britain, it's just as funny.
"These fascinating creatures came to our planet suddenly in 1962," the narrator tells us. Note that down in your copy book.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Decayed futurity
Date: 2006-08-19 12:31 pm (UTC)I did like the character of Leonard Hatred (http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/lookaroundyou/people/leonard.shtml) in the second series, though.
The writer Mark Samuels (http://www.marksamuels.net/) coined the phrase 'decayed futurity', that I find similar to analog baroque. I think many people born in the sixties and seventies have this kind of sensibility. His stories are full of decaying sixties architectural monstrosities, test-card brainwashing and so on.
Re: Decayed futurity
Date: 2006-08-19 01:01 pm (UTC)Re: Decayed futurity
Date: 2006-08-19 01:17 pm (UTC)Maybe someday it will appear in Wikipedia.
I happen to know - because I'm in it - that an explanation of the aesthetic of decayed futurity appears in this book (http://www.lulu.com/content/172690), which is, I believe all that now remains of the ill-fated Horror Quarterly, for which you once gave a very interesting interview.
Just to be really self-indulgent, I'll quote a part of the essay in question, which deals with 'decayed futurity' in the film Ringu:
"The writer Mark Samuels described this species of decay aptly as ‘decayed futurity’. To me it is a kind of decay that, on the surface bright and shiny, is based somewhere upon huge redundancy and waste. And I believe that this aesthetic of decayed futurity also plays a part in Japanese horror. I would like to examine its expression now in the films of Nakata Hideo ... With regard to the video tape itself, this is an excellent example of decayed futurity within a single object. The video tape is ‘technology’, and yet we are living in an age where technology is no longer a word unequivocally linked with a bright, shiny future, or even a bright, shiny present. We are able to fetishise some technology now in the way that we might antiques. What of a record player? What of one of the original games of electronic tennis? What of the Moog synthesizer? We see technology now in a far more nuanced way than we used to. It is possible to have all sorts of associations to do with time, place and atmosphere about one particular example of technology. And so with the video tape. We are very familiar with it. It is old enough now to have collected some dust in our group unconscious, or, if you prefer, our individual memories. It is even, along with audio tape, a form of technology that seems to be on its way to obsolescence. These are all prime factors in the aesthetic of decayed futurity."
Reading that again, I can't help thinking there was some conscious Analog Baroque influence there.
Re: Decayed futurity
Date: 2006-08-19 01:23 pm (UTC)Re: Decayed futurity
Date: 2006-08-19 01:42 pm (UTC)I see the website is back up, too!