I had forgotten how good cosmos and carl sagan was.

[jetboy]

enjoyed this,the space ship bit is good, or its all greek to me..

don

[SleeperService]

I totally agree. He did a lot more to popularize space than anybody else and his death left a gap nobody else has come close to filling.

[jetboy]

more sagan,

don

[davecov]

It was a great series and I still have the hardback book of the series that I bought at the time somewhere in my cluttered house!

Dave

[Kallisti]

This series was made at a time when TV Executives didn't assume the audience was mouth-breathing morons with the attention span of a retarded goldfish, so you don't get the modern tricks of "Let me tell you what I'm about to tell you, this is what I'm telling you, this is what I just told you" every 15 minutes. It also doesn't try to inject false jeopardy/drama into every situation, nor does it focus on the "personal journey" of every participant and their dog. Carl Sagan doesn't go around asking everyone how they FEEL all the time.

Modern "science" programming is done by people who don't understand science and don't think anybody is really interested in it - ie by liberal arts graduates. So instead of letting the science talk, they fill the screen with polar bears or landscapes or worry about what shirt a scientist is wearing rather than what has been achieved.

One of the most memorable (for me) science programmes was a BBC one called A Key to the Universe which was all about particle physics, Quarks and quantum mechanics. It was made in the early-mid 70s and it was astonishingly interesting to someone like me and I ended up at university with one of the people who appeared in the program as my tutor! I just can't imagine it being made anymore, especially now that Horizon has been dumbed down so far.

[Eric Mc]

However, it does look like the BBC are showing the the version they showed back in 1980 which was ten minutes shorter each episode compared to what was shown in the USA.

I watched this seriously originally in Ireland on RTE - who showed it a few months before the BBC - and then I watched it on the Beeb. I noticed straight away that the BBC version was missing some crucial bits and that there were obvious jumps in the editing.

The reason why this happened was because the BBC used to have "slots" in their schedules for US made programmes - usually dramas such as "The Rockford Files" or "Kojak". These programmes were made with commercial breaks in mind so ran for 45 to 50 minutes with 10 to 15 minutes of ads.

When the BBC showed them, they obviously didn't show the ads so they gave them a 45 to 50 minute slot in the schedules.

When they showed "Cosmos", they put it in one of these 50 minute "American" slots. The problem was that "Cosmos" was made for PBS in the US, who doesn't show ads. So its 60 minute running time was a genuine 60 minutes. Rather than show it properly, the BBC lopped 10 minutes out of each programme.

To see the series as Sagan wanted us to see it, you need to buy the boxed set.