Horizon

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Horizon is a weekly documentary show broadcast on the BBC. It is shown on BBC Two and each separate instalment lasts for 50-minutes. The documentaries focus on the world of science, looking into all fields from biology to chemistry and the environment to medical exploration. It also incorporates history and geography into its programmes, examining a wide scope of subjects. The programme is hugely respected around the world, especially ...
...Film & Television Arts presented Horizon with the BAFTA Television Award for Best Factual Series or Strand. In 2003 it won the prestigious Images et Science award for best medical documentary and the Carl von Linne Award at the Living Europe film festival in Sweden. That year, a Horizon co-production with WGBH Boston won the Emmy for best documentary. Recent awards include the Royal Television Society Award and the Prix Italia.


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--Introduction--

Horizon is a weekly documentary show broadcast on the BBC. It is shown on BBC Two and each separate instalment lasts for 50-minutes. The documentaries focus on the world of science, looking into all fields from biology to chemistry and the environment to medical exploration. It also incorporates history and geography into its programmes, examining a wide scope of subjects. The programme is hugely respected around the world, especially in the science community. Many people view it as the leader in producing the documentaries that it does, always setting the standard by which all similar programmes are judged. In this review, I will do my best to describe this programme in as much detail as possible. I hope that once you finish reading this, you go away eager to watch it.

--Presentation--

The programme uses a number of different forms of media to put across the points and information that have compiled. The programme starts off with an introduction that includes what the programme is about, a number of images from the documentary are shown and a narrator explains them. The narration continues throughout the show and they often use clips of interviews that they have done with key people in the field that they are discussing. When looking at things in history or the future when predictions and estimations are being made they use a range of graphs, tables and other forms of presentation media. This is good because you can see for yourself any trends or anomalies in the data. Archive clips are also used wherever necessary. Each individual show is very well put together and you never get lost when you are watching, unlike in some programmes which bombard you with pretty irrelevant information for the sake of it.

--Content--

As I have already mentioned, each week the programme showcases a specific thing from the world of science. A recent programme looked into, ‘What really killed the dinosaurs’. A scientist had challenged the widely accepted theory that the dinosaurs were killed by the impact of a huge asteroid on the earth. When the asteroid was said to have made impact, dust was thrown into the atmosphere blocking out the sun and forest fires ravaged the earth’s surface thus wiping them out. That scientist had unearthed evidence that the impact that was blamed for the dinosaur’s extinction was far too early and that they remained in existence for a long time after this. The scientist did concede that this impact would have dented the population and the number of species that lived, but their complete extinction was the result of a much newer impact. After investigating the layers of the Earth’s surface, the conclusion was reached that more than one impact and chain of events were responsible. This was a really interesting programme that had many twist and turns, you just didn’t know what the outcome was going to be until the end. The programmes do tend to concentrate on things that are of an interest to the ordinary population and this documentary certainly was.

--Education--

This has to be one of the most highly informative programmes on the television. It explores a number of subjects and issues and really goes into depth in its investigation to find the truth and uncover different possibilities. You can build up a wealth of knowledge about many things and this will help you in the future when you come across similar things in your life time. It is a programme that people of any age will learn from, but none more so than youngsters and young adults. Many of the things that are discussed in the programmes will be things that they have little or no knowledge of. The documentaries ‘open up’ the world and enable them to get a different view on things. As a teenager myself, I have learnt many things from various different shows, much of which I wasn’t even vaguely aware of beforehand.

--Horizon Airing Time and Extra Information--

The programme is shown every Thursday night on BBC2. It goes out at 9.00pm and the duration of each documentary is around 50 minutes. The programme does air for most of the year, but there are times when it is not shown, when a new series is being researched and filmed. There are no scheduled repeats of the programmes, although older broadcasts are shown whenever the BBC has a gap in its schedules that needs filling. If you have missed any of the programmes or you want to see those that are scheduled for airing in the future, then you can do so at: www.bbc.co.uk/horizon. They also have an archive that gives details of older programmes and there is also a database of scripts from the documentaries. There are links to other websites that may be related to a programme and these tend to be very useful and highly relevant.

--Awards--

In 2002, the British Academy of Film & Television Arts presented Horizon with the BAFTA Television Award for Best Factual Series or Strand. In 2003 it won the prestigious Images et Science award for best medical documentary and the Carl von Linne Award at the Living Europe film festival in Sweden. That year, a Horizon co-production with WGBH Boston won the Emmy for best documentary. Recent awards include the Royal Television Society Award and the Prix Italia.

--Conclusion--

I always try to be around a television every Thursday night to catch the latest programme. If not, I make sure that I set a video recorder or somebody else to do it for me. I really enjoy watching the programmes because they are very well presented and highly informative. The subjects that are covered should interest everybody and in most cases be very relevant to things that are part of their lives. You will learn about things that you never knew existed and in great detail at that. I would recommend that you make a good effort to try and watch this, if you already don’t. You can always rely on the team that put the Horizon programmes together, to come up with a very interesting topic and in most cases highly controversial views about it.

 

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