Hacker Cinema
Look Around You
2002 · TV series · 30 min episodes · 2 seasons
Created by Peter Serafinowicz, Robert Popper
LOOK AROUND YOU. Look around you. Just look around you. What do you see? A tree. A weather-vane. A discarded lollipop-wrapper. A traffic shop. All of these things, and any other things you may care to mention, have one thing in common. Can you work out what it is?
7 positive1 negative3 neutralfrom 11 commenters
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Videos commenters linked
From YouTube links in the comments below. Most are clips and trailers; “Full” means the uploader says so.
12 comments on Hacker News
I always like the compromise of the M/D/M system popularised by the British documentary series Look Around You, e.g. "January the fourth of March".
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBaVwwuErmU
Are the young people watching old episodes of "Look Around You"? [1]
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4J9MRYJz9-4 [video][1 min]
I found it funny.
And if you'd replied with that one quote from Billy Madison, rather than making a grumpy reference to it, I'd have found that funny too.
There's plenty of humour in absurdity, even without punchlines; and ravi-delia displayed a similar style of humour to the "Look Around You" TV series.
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zs315UWC2Uc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bp-lVHi2nnE . Now that's the stuff of memories. The whole first series/season of the early-2000s TV series Look Around You https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look_Around_You was a parody of this programming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBaVwwuErmU .
I always assumed it was British random dry humor, much like the show "Look Around You" [1] and more specifically their episodes around "maths" the full episode of which I can not find.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4J9MRYJz9-4
Wow great video!
I've recently been watching Look Around You and I have to assume that season 2 was directly inspired by this clip, the similarity is uncanny.
An example: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7t2yhw
In case anyone missed the reference, the "boit diabloique" (devils box) is a reference to the TV show "Look around you". The show presents itself as educational programming while slowly desending into madness. In the episode on music we are informed to never press the forbidden keys on the piano (the ones that are locked in the boit diabloique next to the normal keys). A presenter calmly demonstrates pressing one of these keys and promptly starts bleeding from the ear. While he is casually having his brain leak out we are instructed on screen to "write that down in your copy book now".
Perfect comparison.
For anyone that's not seen Look Around You, all the episodes are on youtube. Season 1 is the one to start with, there's two seasons and they're very different.
Some of this won't translate as well, the episodes are absurdist versions of shows that used to be on BBC2 very early in the morning. There would be a show as some science lesson, put on at 2am for people to tape and show in classes. I'm sure it's a pretty wide age range but I'm 30 and seeing slightly warped tapes playing this kind of thing was pretty common for me. Still, even without this I think they're pretty fun.
There's also the pilot for calcium on youtube but there's the other episodes here:
https://www.youtube.com/user/LookAroundYouDVD
The lighter side of nostalgia for that era is the British series 'Look Around You' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look_Around_You
It's a TV series of parody kids' educational films from the late 70s-80s. Immensely funny.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaI6kBVyu00
Likely because they first encountered it on PBS, some Americans are unaware Connections was a BBC production: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)
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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBaVwwuErmU
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.
Uhh...you realize this is actually a joke show? This is not a serious documentary. You can certainly still object to it being on HN, I just thought you should realize this is not actually intended to teach maths.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look_around_you