We think of the BBC as little more than a plummy-voiced Austen-adaptation factory and indefatigable news brand, but apparently, rampant, hermetic experimental comedy is still on their docket, decades after the Monty Python concoction blew up the laboratory and became a worldwide rerun favorite years after the fact. Originally created in 2002, Look Around You is a sober, uncompromising skewering of '60s and '70s science-education programs, the sort we saw way back when, shown on rickety 16mm projectors in classrooms, but of course brimming with distinctly British tics.
The very idea of instruction is the show's toilet paper, thoroughly if discreetly used. Proceeding as if part of a larger curriculum we know nothing about (the calmly officious narrator constantly instructs us to consult workbooks we don't have), we learn through experiments that ants can make an igloo out of ice cubes, a solution of water and nitrogen gas results in a golden liquid "otherwise known as 'whiskey' -- a refreshing drink enjoyed by all," germs "come from Germany," brain surgery isn't all that difficult, and that there is a "largest number in the world," though there is research that suggests that there might be another number exactly one digit larger.
Creators Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz (who's had his own show since, and provided the voice to Darth Maul in Star Wars: Episode 1) are consistently inventive and crispy, and even if we're not familiar with the presumably wretched British films being parodied, the condescending tone, great corner-cutting leaps of logic, and cripplingly nerdy dullness should still be familiar to anyone over the age of, say, 28.
If it's not (is classroom media much better now, or still criminally unengaging?), the comedy works anyway because the space the show occupies is the universal expanse between scientific understanding and the great wilderness of children's ignorance. You can tell them anything, and if you're on the BBC and sound teacherly and confident, they'll believe you. I wonder how Popper and Serafinowicz resisted somehow presenting Look Around You to grade-schoolers as the real deal, just to see how long it'd take the tykes to figure out they're being had.
Look Around You ("Look around you!" the narrator intones repeatedly at every episode's onset, in one instance interrupting kids spraying graffiti) was short-lived, but it garnered serious fanship -- Matt Groening is a devotee, and the DVD is commentaried by the likes of Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright (who also appeared in bit roles), Michael Cera, Jonah Hill and Adult Swim sensations Tim & Eric.