Below The Horizon

I’ve complained about the falling standards of Horizon before. It appears that what was once the Beeb’s proud flagship of its science reporting has in recent years been dumbed down to a level more suited to the audience of the Teletubbies, if that wasn’t an insult to babies everywhere. I did entertain some faint hopes that the programme seemed to have improved somewhat in the latest series. The programme fronted by physicist Dr. Brian Cox was interesting and thought-provoking. Probably because it let him do the talking.

 

So I admit I had been lulled into a false sense of security when I started watching last night’s Horizon: How To Make Better Decisions. It began with the voiceover smugly stating: "You thought that deciding to watch this programme was a rational, logical decision made with free will" … "Congratulations about watching this programme, it might be the best decision you’ve ever made." On hearing this, my heart sank. This sounded like an ominous warning that the programme would prove to be a clunker. And so it came to pass; we were introduced to some irritating twit called Garth Sundem who fills pages with abstruse mathematical formulae in an attempt to pull the wool over our eyes about the decision-making process. I lasted about five minutes before I took a rational, logical decision of my own free will to turn the channel to something else. From Thomas Sutcliffe’s review of the programme in today’s Independent, I’d say that was the best decision I made last night. Tellingly, Sutcliffe ends his review with the damning observation that:

Quite. Oh, and what did I end up watching in place of Horizon? Well it was the first episode of Phoo Action. Totally bizarre, but at least it didn’t take itself seriously, and had nice caricatures of the royal princes. It reminded me of an update for the Noughties of the old Sixties Batman TV series, and was none the worse for that.