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I don’t get Discovery UK (heck, I don’t get Five), so I only have the web video clips to go on to judge this new series: The Big Experiment.

Interesting. It’s a stunt series, essentially the same ideas as Jamie’s School Dinners, but I don’t necessarily object to that in itself. What annoys me is three-fold:

• That a populist science series is now so unusual, it deserves attention merely for existing. My, how things have changed since Don’t Ask Me.
• That it looks like it has to cheat in order to ‘compete’ with Mythbusters and Brainiac.
• If you really wanted to make a difference, and influence children’s lives, you’d make this stuff for Bebo. But of course, there’s no commercial sense in that…

Despite this series, and a new (/rebadged) children’s engineering show the BBC are making, I still think science TV is dead. We’ve lost the culture of treating these series as routine and expected (in the same way that comedy and drama and news are), and I think the funding model is broken too. Particularly now Scrapheap Challenge has gone too, I can no longer see a career path for science TV specialists except via big documentaries.

By my reckoning, science television is no longer a sustainable industry. I don’t think it has been for a few years already.

So I’m not miffed by The Big Experiment – it just makes me rather sad and wistful. Well, apart from one thing: their claim that lifting people with helium balloons has never been done before. Umm… yes, it has. There’s the (surprisingly non-apocryphal) man-in-a-lawn-chair story, then a couple of publicity stunts for a champagne company and Coca-Cola, and then an old children’s TV show did it almost ten years back.

I remember it clearly.

I was there.

There’s lots of excitement this week about Muxtape, a super-simple web app that lets you publish song playlists. But here’s the thing – the playlists actually, you know, play. They stream. Nice.

Of course, most of the music I’ve seen on there is commercial. Obviously. Which begs all sorts of questions. Here’s Ewan Spence and I discussing some of them.

Is Muxtape heading for trouble?

I can get somewhat laissez-faire about space stuff. It’s almost forty years since we went to the moon, and I’ve never been quite convinced by the utility of manned space exploration.

But every now and then something creeps up on me, building to a vertiginous moment of astonishment. These photos are the latest cause.

There are people in there. Working in space. Doing stuff.

Woah.

Crazy.

Final Cut Studio is big. This afternoon I lugged two boxes of it back from the centre of Glasgow, having bought a second-hand copy of Studio v1 and an upgrade to v2 from the Apple Store. It’s damned heavy.

Then you realise that it ships on eight DVDs.

And then this:

Three hours of frenzied tidying-up, and:

• My office is an unholy mess.
• My desk is covered in multiple piles of paper, each effectively marked ‘urgent’. I can just about reach my keyboard, but not my mouse.
• I have a large number of cardboard boxes that need taking to the recycling centre. Of course, that’s a car journey away… and I don’t have a car. Hmm.
• Under the boxes I’ve unearthed another two substantial piles of Stuff That Needs Filing.

Bother.

The only good news is that I did find the hotel receipt from January, so I can finally do that particular expenses claim.

Flossie’s taking pictures. Good ones, too – though sadly she’s only got her mobile phone, so they don’t look as crisp as one would like when you zoom in. Bah!

(I haven’t mentioned Flossie much of late. Not because anything’s amiss; more that whatever I wrote would tend to be so stomach-turningly saccharine I’d decimate whatever already-paltry readership this blog has.)

Interesting post on Slashdot this morning – yes, I know, I was surprised too – about refactoring source code using a technique borrowed from PG Wodehouse, as related by Douglas Adams. It’s less contrived than it sounds.

I love things like this. When writing (video) scripts, I usually print them out two-up, and arrange them in a big long line. With my standard script template and writing style a page is pretty reliably a minute of television, so even for the Christmas Lectures it’s not a huge stretch of paper. The resulting stretch of paper, then, isn’t just a script – it’s a timeline of the programme.

I’ll often put the paper on the floor, and grab a big thick marker pen. Standing up I can see the shape of the whole show – see how the big story moments fall, and the relative lengths of sections – but also things like how long a passage of speech is. Too big a grey blur over on the right = too much talk without a stage direction. I’d mark up my notes, and head off for the next revision.

One of the joys of making video for the web is that one can focus on crafting a few short minutes. But sometimes I miss the brain-wrenching struggle of wrestling with longer-form structures.

Sometimes, you have to wonder if the security services deliberately aim to say things that are outrageous in an attempt to provoke a response from the public. Trouble is, I’m not sure it’s working.

We were getting into this sort of territory with some of our filming at the Cambridge Science Festival on Saturday, trying to see what the public thinks about the authorities prying into their guilty hidden secrets (ie. their genetic susceptibilities). My own view remains: it’s the job of the people to watch the government, not the other way around.

Yes, there’s a price to be paid for that, but it’s better than the alternatives.

The nominees for the Planet SciCast Awards 2008 have been announced!

The front cover of today’s Guardian carries two lead stories. The first concerns Tony Blair leading a new international team to tackle the political challenges of global warming; the second, the row over the redrawing of the boundaries of a wine-growing area in the North-East of France.

Champagne socialism?