When I was young, back then in my primary school, when I was more or less 10 years old, I remember my favorite part during working days was a special TV program for school kids broadcast every day in the morning hours with a mixture of great educational documentaries and movies. After school we rushed home to watch those popular documentaries, giving us maybe even better knowledge enriched with colorful multimedia experiences than we could learn in school. I will always remember those days back in the 70s and later in the early 80s when the black-and-white TV era ended and color TV entered the homes in great style, probably comparable to what the internet added to home computers a decade or so ago.
The most memorable and probably the most popular TV show about nature, biology, zoology, and science in general was "The World of Survival", a famous British documentary of the time narrated by various famous people and promoted by naturalists like David Bellamy. I still remember and quote from time to time the episode where Bellamy moved the giant anchored ship only by pushing it for a couple of minutes with constant force, trying to prove water properties he was teaching about.
30 years ago, television broadcasting here in Serbia was more or less similar to other European countries, and production of educational documentaries actually was pretty good in both quality and quantity within only one national broadcaster of the time. Some would say that today's production is a little devolutionized compared to past times, most likely due to much larger competition among many studios and production companies. I mean, let's face it, if you own a national frequency today and want to survive on the cruel market (and earn a small fortune out of it), it is easier to maintain mediocre shows like "Singing Idol", "I Got Talent", "Big Brother", "Survivor", or various reality shows of any kind. Surely only a small percentage of the ratings goes for popularization of science or good history documentary shows. However, national services are funded differently, and they don't depend on commercialism so much, so by definition they would be the ones investing more in education and producing TV shows that commercial TV studios reject. Sadly, this is not true for the Serbian public broadcaster, and while their efforts in producing non-commercial programs are noticeable, this is still not enough, and surely they could look up to themselves from the past and not to the first private network next door. Hopefully this will change in the future.
To continue the story, even with only one television broadcasting back in the 70s, I was enjoying watching educational documentaries. Those times were also exciting; for example, while investigating TV schedules of the past, I ran into coverage of the complete visit of the Apollo 11 crew from their worldwide tour, only 3 months after their historical return from the Moon. I was still a baby when they landed in the Sea of Tranquility, and my mother told me that I crawled under the table during the live TV coverage, probably scared by the unusual atmosphere in the house or by the strange reactions of my parents and others crowding the room around the small B&W TV set.
However, and to conclude the great 70s, after the years filled with adventures of Jacques Cousteau in his amazing series "The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau", the best TV show of the time and probably one of the top of all time was "Cosmos: A Personal Voyage", made by the extraordinary Carl Sagan. This TV serial introduced new standards into creating scientific documentaries with CGI, acting scenes, and well-explained topics. Even the most difficult-to-understand theories are simplified and narrated in a fabulous fashion. Many years later, my first internet purchase ever was a set of 7 DVDs of the complete Cosmos series, and I watched it with the same enthusiasm as the first time.
Today, lots of things have changed since then, and the most important was the birth of television networks during the later years of the 80s and the last decade of the previous century. While the BBC in Great Britain is still one of the top producers of TV shows in the area of documentary films, with many astonishing serials like "Planet Earth", "Life", or "The Ascent of Man", the center of the industry world nowadays is moving to the US. Before any others, this is all about Discovery Channel Network, National Geographic, and History Channel. These three networks now cover almost anything possible in the world of documenting humans and nature within multiple channels broadcasting worldwide. The new century came with new technology in the form of high definition in both video and audio systems, and these networks adapted almost instantly. TV producers are now enriched not only with the possibility to use computer graphics imagery to better present nature and science but also with a new generation of presenters and narrators. In the face of young and perspective scientists and Hollywood actors are following in Carl Sagan's footsteps amazingly well, and TV documentaries are now superb shows worth watching every day.
Additionally, they are an endless source of keywords for later internet reading, simply because finishing watching the show on TV is only the beginning of reading the articles on the net within the same topic of interest. My Twitter, Google+, and Facebook accounts are filled with scientists, astronauts, TV presenters, actors and actresses, writers, broadcasters, bloggers, and all the interesting people that post extraordinary articles on an everyday basis. Not just that, this is two-way communication; most of them are open for conversations, answering interesting questions, and participating in commenting on daily events. It is the endless source of brain food.
To get back from the internet to TV and my personal habits, I made a watching list on my TV set with only documentary channels, and I must say this list is the most visited section in our typical evening. Even when nobody is watching the TV, this list is almost always on, especially last winter when Viktor and I enjoyed watching Bear Grylls in his "Man vs. Wild" or "Ultimate Survival", or "the guy who eats snakes", as Viktor calls him. This post is too short to list all the shows I am watching, but off the top of my head I want to mention "Naked Science", all TV shows hosted by Michio Kaku, Phil Plait's "Bad Universe", "Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman", "Extreme Engineering", "Megastructures", "Great migrations", "Life After People", "How the Earth was made", "The Universe" and many others. Once, in order to get the History Channel, I did change the cable provider a couple of years ago, and in my humble opinion, this is maybe the best and the most provocative channel of them all on my list. With the exception of Hitler and the Nazi period in recent years, their shows are not afraid to go on the edge of science, and even though shows like "Ancient Aliens", "The Bible Code - Predicting Armageddon", or "UFO Hunters" are, perhaps to say the least, controversial, I find them very watchable. Anyways, for breakthrough discoveries, you need bold ideas, right?
Hopefully I intrigued you at least a little with my interests and habits. There will be no bright conclusion for this post; instead, only a couple of links and articles below as a little reference for your surfing pleasure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_(TV_series)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Television_of_Serbia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/
http://dsc.discovery.com/
http://www.history.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081846/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos:_A_Personal_Voyage
http://bigthink.com/michiokaku
http://sh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear_Grylls
http://science.discovery.com/tv/through-the-wormhole/
The most memorable and probably the most popular TV show about nature, biology, zoology, and science in general was "The World of Survival", a famous British documentary of the time narrated by various famous people and promoted by naturalists like David Bellamy. I still remember and quote from time to time the episode where Bellamy moved the giant anchored ship only by pushing it for a couple of minutes with constant force, trying to prove water properties he was teaching about.
30 years ago, television broadcasting here in Serbia was more or less similar to other European countries, and production of educational documentaries actually was pretty good in both quality and quantity within only one national broadcaster of the time. Some would say that today's production is a little devolutionized compared to past times, most likely due to much larger competition among many studios and production companies. I mean, let's face it, if you own a national frequency today and want to survive on the cruel market (and earn a small fortune out of it), it is easier to maintain mediocre shows like "Singing Idol", "I Got Talent", "Big Brother", "Survivor", or various reality shows of any kind. Surely only a small percentage of the ratings goes for popularization of science or good history documentary shows. However, national services are funded differently, and they don't depend on commercialism so much, so by definition they would be the ones investing more in education and producing TV shows that commercial TV studios reject. Sadly, this is not true for the Serbian public broadcaster, and while their efforts in producing non-commercial programs are noticeable, this is still not enough, and surely they could look up to themselves from the past and not to the first private network next door. Hopefully this will change in the future.
To continue the story, even with only one television broadcasting back in the 70s, I was enjoying watching educational documentaries. Those times were also exciting; for example, while investigating TV schedules of the past, I ran into coverage of the complete visit of the Apollo 11 crew from their worldwide tour, only 3 months after their historical return from the Moon. I was still a baby when they landed in the Sea of Tranquility, and my mother told me that I crawled under the table during the live TV coverage, probably scared by the unusual atmosphere in the house or by the strange reactions of my parents and others crowding the room around the small B&W TV set.
Carl Sagan in Cosmos
However, and to conclude the great 70s, after the years filled with adventures of Jacques Cousteau in his amazing series "The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau", the best TV show of the time and probably one of the top of all time was "Cosmos: A Personal Voyage", made by the extraordinary Carl Sagan. This TV serial introduced new standards into creating scientific documentaries with CGI, acting scenes, and well-explained topics. Even the most difficult-to-understand theories are simplified and narrated in a fabulous fashion. Many years later, my first internet purchase ever was a set of 7 DVDs of the complete Cosmos series, and I watched it with the same enthusiasm as the first time.
Today, lots of things have changed since then, and the most important was the birth of television networks during the later years of the 80s and the last decade of the previous century. While the BBC in Great Britain is still one of the top producers of TV shows in the area of documentary films, with many astonishing serials like "Planet Earth", "Life", or "The Ascent of Man", the center of the industry world nowadays is moving to the US. Before any others, this is all about Discovery Channel Network, National Geographic, and History Channel. These three networks now cover almost anything possible in the world of documenting humans and nature within multiple channels broadcasting worldwide. The new century came with new technology in the form of high definition in both video and audio systems, and these networks adapted almost instantly. TV producers are now enriched not only with the possibility to use computer graphics imagery to better present nature and science but also with a new generation of presenters and narrators. In the face of young and perspective scientists and Hollywood actors are following in Carl Sagan's footsteps amazingly well, and TV documentaries are now superb shows worth watching every day.
Additionally, they are an endless source of keywords for later internet reading, simply because finishing watching the show on TV is only the beginning of reading the articles on the net within the same topic of interest. My Twitter, Google+, and Facebook accounts are filled with scientists, astronauts, TV presenters, actors and actresses, writers, broadcasters, bloggers, and all the interesting people that post extraordinary articles on an everyday basis. Not just that, this is two-way communication; most of them are open for conversations, answering interesting questions, and participating in commenting on daily events. It is the endless source of brain food.
To get back from the internet to TV and my personal habits, I made a watching list on my TV set with only documentary channels, and I must say this list is the most visited section in our typical evening. Even when nobody is watching the TV, this list is almost always on, especially last winter when Viktor and I enjoyed watching Bear Grylls in his "Man vs. Wild" or "Ultimate Survival", or "the guy who eats snakes", as Viktor calls him. This post is too short to list all the shows I am watching, but off the top of my head I want to mention "Naked Science", all TV shows hosted by Michio Kaku, Phil Plait's "Bad Universe", "Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman", "Extreme Engineering", "Megastructures", "Great migrations", "Life After People", "How the Earth was made", "The Universe" and many others. Once, in order to get the History Channel, I did change the cable provider a couple of years ago, and in my humble opinion, this is maybe the best and the most provocative channel of them all on my list. With the exception of Hitler and the Nazi period in recent years, their shows are not afraid to go on the edge of science, and even though shows like "Ancient Aliens", "The Bible Code - Predicting Armageddon", or "UFO Hunters" are, perhaps to say the least, controversial, I find them very watchable. Anyways, for breakthrough discoveries, you need bold ideas, right?
Hopefully I intrigued you at least a little with my interests and habits. There will be no bright conclusion for this post; instead, only a couple of links and articles below as a little reference for your surfing pleasure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_(TV_series)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Television_of_Serbia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/
http://dsc.discovery.com/
http://www.history.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081846/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos:_A_Personal_Voyage
http://bigthink.com/michiokaku
http://sh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear_Grylls
http://science.discovery.com/tv/through-the-wormhole/