Debuting tonight at the unusual time of 10:40 -- between "The Office" and "Trailer Park Boys" -- BBC America's new mini-miniseries "Look Around You" is a pitch-perfect parody of educational films of the late '70s and early '80s. (British educational films, but not so different from the domestic variety.) It captures its model not only in its picture quality, design and antique synthesizer score, but also (in a rare and laudable show of restraint) in the way that none of the jokes refers to or reflects our present day -- nothing violates the bygone mood.
Created, written, enacted and scored by Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz, each of the eight episodes -- or "modules" -- last 10 minutes or less, an example many television series could profitably follow. It will probably be funniest to people who remember the era, especially to those who were in school then, but it should work on anyone with a bent for the absurd. You don't need to be a scientist to get the humor, either, but it would be good at least to know that water doesn't actually boil at 1,000 degrees, that the normal human temperature is not 96.4 degrees and that there already is a name for a circle ("this unusual shape, a uniformly curved line that somehow joins up with itself"), and it's "a circle." (It's good to know those things anyway.) Much depends on the deadpan panache with which narrator Nigel Lambert delivers a line like "What are birds? We just don't know."
