Customer Reviews

Look Around You: Season One

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Look Around You is one of the most criminally overlooked works of this millennium. How anything this funny could escape international acclaim at near-obnoxious levels is beyond me. This is absurdist comedy at its best, as if Monty Python and Mr. Wizard had a baby, who was maybe dropped on its head. Though the 8 episodes are only 10 minutes long, there are plentiful special features which make this worth your money. Please, please, please buy this. You'll be happier for having seen it, and we'll all be one step closer to season two's DVD release.

Too hilarious. If you do not enjoy smiling, then I wouldn't recommend this...otherwise, for the rest of us, this is quite possibly one of the funniest series I've personally ever experienced. Real, quality British humor. Great, just great.
One thing though, your dvd player has to have the proper regional encoding or you'll have some problems watching it.
Arrived in great shape, exactly as described.
Definitely recommend.

What more can I say? This show had me doubled with laughter every minute. From the confusing to the ever-so-slightly dangerously insane, Look Around You presents a very unique genre of comedy in the disguise of a perfectly factual 1970's "Science for Schools" programme. Having been exposed to such boring stuff at school (in the 90's) when these outdated shows often contained lines such as "Perhaps one day we will have electicity in our own homes!" Look Around You provided an utterly brilliant parody. I would recommend this to absolutely anyone. If you buy nothing else this year, buy this. Then next year you can save up for Look Around You 2!!

Considering all these videos are on YouTube, the only reason you'd want to buy this is to get all the nice goodies that come with the DVD, and are available nowhere else. And most of those are pretty good; the producer commentary is great, though the guest commentary is basically just a pathetic laugh track; there are these CeeFax pages, which are pretty neat and comedic; the rest of the bonus features are either not very memorable or already available on YouTube at a lower video quality, for free.

The one bad thing- the thing I can't stand- is the DVD menu transitions. They're designed to take a very long time, which is funny at first, but the humor fades quickly, leaving annoyance.

I recommend you buy this DVD, though. It's one of those now-I-have-the-complete-experience things.

I discovered this series many years ago and imported the UK DVDs to see them all over and over. My 10-year-old son loves them, and the whole family chuckles and laughs so many times while watching that it's a delight to just pop one on at random.

For (ahem) older viewers who may have had the pleasure of short science films in grade school (or worse yet, film-loops), the tone and presentation of the Look Around You shorts is so spot on you may not realize they're completely ridiculous. In fact, it's the seriousness with which these are presented that makes them so awesome. Don't be surprised if you show someone one of these and they think it's real... it's that convincing!

MATHS is my favorite, since I'm a math geek in real life, but they're all enjoyable. This first series is far superior to the second series, so if you're going to get only one, this would be my recommendation!

Sing along to the computer-generated pop hit "Little Mouse," be amazed at the sound-absorbing properties of bumcivilian, and calculate Imhotep's height from a math problem (he's invisible!). Learn how to perform tricks to amaze your friends, like causing a giant pair of scissors to appear in the sky for a brief time!

All these and more await you in this completely hilarious, dead-pan collection of scientific shorts!

Look Around You is a spoof of a genre of television programming that those of a certain age will remember well, namely the BBC's educational programmes for schools during the 70's and 80's that we were often plonked in front of when the teacher was off sick or it was raining too hard to be let out for play.

The format is simple - each week's "module" takes a particular subject (Calcium, Maths, Water, Germs, Ghosts, Sulphur, Music, Iron and Brain) and explores it in the manner of a pre O Level science or maths educational programme, by way of a series of experiments. Much of the humour derives from the nostalgia evoked by the subject matter which is enhanced by the slightly grainy, washed-out appearance of the film stock and by the way that various props and themes hark back to the "good old days".

The real laughs, though, come from the sheer silliness of it all. We learn in the first module that Maths stands for Mathematical Anti-Telharsic Harfatum Septomin and that the largest number in the world is about 45,000,000,000 (although mathematicians suspect that there may be even larger numbers). Later, we learn that Ghosts can't whistle but that the Gloriette 5000 - a complex arrangement of diodes, marbles and valves - enables us to make visual contact with the dead and that they can be very helpful in performing lab experiments. More humour is derived from the naming (fastidiously done with DymoTape) of mythical items of lab equipment (the Besselheim Plate, the Lady Jane Grey tube, the mafipulator and so-on) and the way in which the lab technician is careful to indicate each item as described with his pencil. It's really worth while watching this very carefully as much satisfaction can be derived from the little details that pass you by on the first viewing (the labelling of the chemical jars in the opening credits, for instance, or the lab technician's hand injuries during the egg boiling experiment).

It may sound a little childish (and it is, of course) but it is done with such po-faced panache and exquisite timing that it is pulled off to perfection. Indeed, such is the quality of the observational humour that it is actually quite difficult to remember that you are watching a spoof and I am convinced to this day that I did in fact watch one of the episodes as an 8 year old, back in 1974 in Mrs McIver's science class.

That said, it should be clear to you that the humour may well go way over your head if you haven't experienced this sort of programme as a child so this is probably not for everyone.

The DVD comes with some extras; a set of spoof Teletext pages that are well worth sitting through and a music video that would probably give My Lovely Horse a run for its money. I'd also recommend that you buy the second series - a different beast altogether but done in much the same vein.

"The brain is basically a wrinkled bag of skin, filled with warm water, veins and thought muscles. Think of it as a kind of modified heart, only with a mind or brain. The opposite of the brain is probably the bum. It's nowhere near as intelligent as the brain. It doesn't have to be as it only needs to make very basic calculations."

If you grew up in a British comprehensive between the seventies and eighties, you'll immediately recognise the visual style and distinctive narrator of this utterly accurate spoof of schools science programmes. But to describe it as a parody of educational shows doesn't begin to do it justice: the inventiveness of the sight gags and surreal humour have never been rivalled, much less bettered, in any TV show of a similar type. Peter Serafinowicz and Robert Popper keep the bizarre wit consistent through a variety of short-and-sweet episodes, and the whole thing has the air of an instant modern cult favourite. Your enjoyment of the series, as with all comedy, will largely depend on your appreciation of its very particular out-of-left-field sense of humour. But if you give it a chance, it's unlikely that you'll be disappointed... and you'll almost certainly never look at calcium the same way again!

This video spoof was absolutely hilarious. At first it could pass as a legit science program of yester year then the fun begins!

A funny show. My girlfriend had told me about this show. I lOve the humor, the play serious reporters from the 70's.
The topics are so silly it's great!

I love Look Around You! What a great buy...now when will they release Series TWO? Can hardly wait! :)