Look Around You

My brother posted a plug for this BBC comedy a while back. At first I thought it was some kind of weird joke or he had a link to web page for the BBC from the Eighties. Then I watched a couple of the sample clips to discover they weren’t serious. They were solid demonstrations of that dry British wit. Fortunately, this show is carried on BBC America through my Dish. 
 
I finally caught a whole episode and it was pretty funny, especially if you grew up during the Seventies and early Eighties. Look Around You is a parody of those old educational shows in the UK (we have equivalents in the States) plugging new inventions, discoveries and predictions about how life will be different in 2000. The level of detail to the wardrobe is accurate and hiliarious (feathered hair, wide ties, the color schemes). The technology is even better. They must have rummaged all over the UK for some of the clunky stuff we used to call state-of-the-art (a VCR the size of three DVD players, computer programs loaded from cassettes). The presentation from the actors is what really sells the show though. They have that authoritative, dry, matter-of-factly demeanor I recall from the real programs of the past. Some of the future tech is ridiculous on purpose such using coffee to sanitize a toilet, but most of it is hilarious because I recall some of the goalposts Western Civilization had set back then. And yes, the main host, Peter Packard is played by the actor who was the terse roommate in Shaun of the Dead so there is no way this show is from the BBC’s archives. 
 
For me it’s definitely very different from other BritComs like their outright comedies Absolutely Fabulous or Fawlty Towers. This one is more in line with the Ali G Show which means most Americans won’t get it. As the Europeans say, America was declared an irony-free zone with the election of Reagan.