Look Around You

In the same fashion as Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, Look Around You is a shortlived, silly British comedy pretending to be a serious show from a couple decades earlier that found a new home late at night on Adult Swim. The first season (which actually predated Darkplace) is pretty different from the second, although I thought they were both pretty hilarious. The first is a bunch of 11 minute educational programs for science students, as the pleasant narrator tells all sorts of incorrect things about topics like maths, iron, and ghosts, and various scientists perform absurd experiments, often with way more steps than necessary, to prove their points. It's pretty absurd and a lot of fun.

I think I probably got more enjoyment out of the second season though, which took the format of a half hour news program focused on new inventions and innovations in science, as the four presenters found all sorts of interesting things like a robot that performs surgery, an orchestra of produce, and a high tech new restaurant for all the cool teenagers to get their casserole at. There's a thread running through the whole thing as it leads up to the "live" finale where all the best discoveries are brought back for an invention of the year contest, and the winner is presented an award by archive footage of Prince Charles. There's a bunch of cameos by faces of British comedy such as Simon Pegg and the other Spaced guys, which makes sense after recognizing co-creator and host Peter Serafinowicz from Shaun of the Dead. Robert Popper and he are supposedly working on a new series for Adult Swim, and I'm very interested in finding out what that is.