The BBC Archive have released a number of old Tomorrow’s World episodes. One particular episode has the infamous ‘beachball’ opening sequence. The moment I saw that I was immediately transported back to my childhood, having just got out of the bath (Tomorrow’s World day was bath day) and sitting downstairs freshly washed in a dressing gown.
Tomorrow’s World is one of my happy recollections of a time when the BBC’s science output actually excited and engaged me. The pre-Peter Snow and Phillipa Forrester Tomorrow’s World was an excellent programme that celebrated the innovation and optimism about technology before the cynical 90s killed it all. Similarly I remember the two-programme Horizon special on the Voyager space probes as an excellent high point before the ’single scientist against the world with strange camera angles and visual metaphors’ rot that has reduced the once proud flagship science programme into the stupid dumbed down claptrap is is now.