They showed us this video in my general chemistry for engineers class the day before Thanksgiving when most students had gone home. I'm glad I stayed. :)
My chemistry teacher showed us this as a joke but acted all serious about it, it was funny because it took some of us a while to realise it was a parody
The first time I saw Look Around You was "Iron", we were shown it in a Chemistry lesson (at A-Level), totally without context, just assuming we were watching some video. Once you yourself had realised it was satire, it was fun to watch other people doubt themselves. Some lasted nearly the whole episode.
It gets even more surreal when you're in the early 2000's and your teacher wheels out an ancient CRT Television and VCR to show the class one of these... experiences.
The meat on this comedy bone for me is the attention to detail in virtually every audio/visual department. A lesser creator would put over-exaggerated film scratch overlays over 25fps video and expect the writing to do the lion’s share of the work, but Serafinowicz & Popper clearly did their homework and found an equally focused crew to help them achieve an authentic look. This along with Documentary Now & Key and Peele hit a satisfying sweet spot for me - an equal balance between strong writing and direction & laser focused production design.
I recently learned Helvetica runs in my family. Dr suggested I get all of my teeth amd bones surgically removed. I won't be able to lift weights or eat hard foods anymore but it's better than coming down with Helvetica
Please don't spread fake news like this. Without teeth, humans would be unable to process foods and would starve. It says so near the start of the video.
I have a very weird, specific memory of this show. I was on a high school youth group church retreat and me and the two other high school guys were up late in the hotel flipping through the channels and we hit this specific episode on Adult Swim when they were running it for a short period and we had NO idea what was going on. Like had NO idea if this was real or not. And then we got up and did Jesus stuff like worship music and service projects, but this show haunted us. I don't know where one of those guys ended up. The other, I think, has a wife and two kids now. And here I am, watching this on RU-vid alone at 2:15 in the morning. Funny how life works.
Yes, I had a similar experience where this show would come on, and it is so dry that you can suspend disbelief for a really really long time, and you’re flying.
southrules: back in the 70s I inadvertently came across the Monty Python episode about the Blancmange (from the planet Skyron in the Andromeda galaxy) who used a ray gun to turn all Englishmen into Scotsmen in order to “win at Wimbledon”. I was stoned, and it cracked me up 🤪😂
It's incredible how many small and easy to miss jokes they manage to pack this with. Like the "heated to 1200 B.C." joke around 8:50, I only heard that one the second time I viewed this.
look you cant have just anyone operating your Henrys, and Lance is one of the best. Or was. Henry the VII was a bit too clever, too quick, and too mean for Lance.
Acharacle & Achiltibuie Henry was an advanced video compositing system from Quantel. It’s probably referring to that; or possibly in the credits as a joke if they liked the sound of the term.
@@booklover8546 Most of this is made up, intentionally wrong or just plain random, yet delivered as science and fact. What makes this so good is that it doesn't mean anything - it's Absurdism at its most profound. A racist remark about gypsies fits this description, don't you think?
@@sphinxtheeminx thank you for your reply and description. I just wasn’t happy with the comment being made in the show, even though it’s quite an old show now, as I found it quite offensive, racist and I just didn’t really understand it x
@@booklover8546 Rest assured, all thinking folks will have found it racist and offensive. One of comedy's functions is to shock us into taking a side on a range of political and philosophical issues - eg I can take a human being dropped from a great height for comic effect, but not a dog. Why? That's what I am forced to ask myself. The best comedy (IMO) is complex and challenging.
@@sphinxtheeminx yeah I get what you mean, to break it down, it’s basically dark humour and it’s whether the person viewing can handle it or not. I just didn’t understand it and didn’t really like it but thank you for understanding, explaining and replying x
A perfectly executed homage to all those ITV and BBC educational programmes of the 1970s and 1980s. The opening montage of clips along with use of synth music, and the title narration, is warm and nostalgic.
Perfectly captures those 70's programmes for schools. You'd have to watch it more than once to get all of the verbal and subtle visual jokes. Brilliant stuff 😁
If you like this synth music style, check out the hauntology electronic music genre. Try listening to groups like The Advisory Circle, Belbury Poly, Pye Corner Audio and Listening Center as well as all the others. Check out the record label Ghost Box. Many of the hauntology groups are inspired in part by this type of style, in other words the style of synth music that was common in educational videos of the late seventies to at least the early eighties. Also, another intresting genre to check out is library music, which is a general type of music that was composed for commercial use. You may hear this type of music in movies and TV shows a lot of times, and some of it is really creative stuff because the composers aren't usually bound by formulaic big commercial interests. A good YT channel amongst others to check out some of this music is Sonne Immage. Hope this is of some interest to someone.
@@jacobforsman3897 It was of interest to me! I came here looking exactly for this purpose, to find the electronic music from these films that inspired this, so thanks.
You still sometimes see those calcium bins outside primary schools and sports centres, most councils stopped doing collections about twenty years ago, though.
I played this to my year 7 class via RU-vid final day in school. Thick class lapped it up. I even explained that our bones talk to the brain. Months later, I was asked if we were to watch anymore old science videos. I might fire another one up
+Scrotumgrinder O'Coolihan yes I did. It worked a treat. I was rumbled at end of term when a pupil spotted on the DVD "Sophie off Peep Show" and asked, "sir, how come it's a 1970s vid but Sophie off peep show is in it???" Aggghhhh
Oh god. I just watched that for the first time. I think everyone should be made to watch it, especially world leaders. Sort of a "This is what happens if you **** everything up". Absolute helvetica.
The intro where theres no one at the park outside of the apartment complex is the funniest. Are you touching particles that were used to make my human slaves? Im pretty sure we can use those again. What do you see? Ghosts.
I still can't get over how "Petri Dish" is precisely as idiotic of a name as "Besselheim Plate"; the difference only exists for people used to the arbitrary bit of nomenclature. Same with "mifibulates" and "percolates". The Jabberwocky-esque effect got brilliantly pulled off here.
Vestin They aren’t 100% arbitrary; Petri dish comes from the name of the guy who invented it, and “percolate” comes from some roots for “strain through”, but your point still stands. Those are just the tip of the iceberg, too; there’s also a reference to 12000 BC as a temperature at 8:50, the helium experiment refers to “Syndefrit’s [sic] constant of 2.5 quorums per second” when talking about gas flow, et cetera.
@@DaveDexterMusic I think there's another aspect to it entirely. Much like in "Alice in Wonderland", where you get a genuine experience of childhood ignorance by being presented with texts where you don't know half the words (since they're made up); here you get served a genuine experience of being faced with educational material that you're too dumb to understand. Every term seems foreign, you haven't read the previous chapter, and every bit of presumed prior knowledge used as a stepping stone in explaining more recondite concepts is complete news to you. If anything, the video serves a very _realistic experience_ alongside its humor and weirdness :).
I remember watching this programme at school just before the St Frankenstein's Day holidays. Happy memories, apart from the Helvetica Scenario, obviously.
I'm so back in secondary school whenever I watch this. Roll in the TV! It makes me uncomfortable in a retro way that I never thought possible. Love it.
Americans should understand that this is a perfect equivalent of those 'You see, Jimmy' educational movies that they poke fun at in The Simpsons: 'COME BACK ZINC!' Only it's the 1980s and it's British.
I remember first watching this at school when I was a young boy. I'll be paying my old therapist a visit on Monday after seeing those Helvetica sequences again.
+Chris Embry Back in my day we called that nightmare fuel. You young people must all have calcium growths where the common sense area of the brain should be.
Watching this on the day BBC brought back educational programmes for coronavirus lockdown kids and I'd take this every time. Who'd have thought we'd actually find something even worse than Helvetica to deal with... 😱
I remember being shown old educational VHS videos like this during the late 90s in Finland. Probably British ones that had been dubbed. I'm glad I saw them so I can appreciate Look Around You way more.
I like to imagine that this is a science show from the 1970s in an alternate universe where the atomic weight of Calcium actually IS 44 and whatnot, and calcium IS actually made from teeth.
Well, the fact that EVERY other fact they mention is either explicitly false or completely fabricated, from Geographical information, the names of common items, the properties of compounds, how EVERY LITTLE THING has been purposefully chosen to be completely untrue, it was the Faceless man clawing at the glass that tipped you off?
Brilliant writing and perfect spoof - the BBC education progs had exactly this style and tone - really clever and the beginning of an excellent series.
The BBC Micro at the start brings back memories ... on school breaks we used to sneak up to the computers on display in a shop (ZX Spectrum + maybe an Acorn or C64, I remember the ZX) and enter like a 4 line program to say something (probably rude )and also, and this was important, a random beep, set it off, then sneak away. Line 10 was a pause to give us time for the getaway after such a shocking deed.
