Public service broadcasting

Now, it's very easy (not to mention fun) to mock Channel 5 for being naff and tacky and so forth. But if I'm going to do that, I feel it's only right to give it credit where credit's due, and it seems that credit is, at the moment, most certainly due. I'm talking about the new series Big Ideas That Changed The World, in which, well, big ideas - like capitalism, Christianity, democracy and environmentalism - are explained by leading experts in that subject. And when I say leading experts, I don't mean some beardy bloke from a university, I mean people you've actually heard of - Desmond Tutu, Tony Benn, Josef Stiglitz (okay, most of you probably haven't heard of him, but I have) and so on.

Now, this is the kind of thing that gets me really, really excited, which is no doubt very loserish, but hey - that's why I'm doing Social and Political Sciences at uni when most of you probably wouldn't touch it with a bargepole. Still, I think you should watch Big Ideas That Changed The World, because it looks truly, truly ace. Frankly, I think the BBC should be ashamed of itself, using public money to make rubbishy reality shows and Out-Take TV while Channel 5 - I mean, come on, Channel 5 - are trying to explain things that really matter in a 45-minute slot at 7.15pm on Tuesdays (that's 7.15pm on Tuesdays - put it in your diary).

I'm deeply irritated that I missed the first one (Communism, narrated by Mikhail Gorbachev - Gorbachev, for Christ's sake! Am I the only one who's hugely impressed by that?), so I thought to make up for it I would plug the series on my blog and hope some people listened. Tomorrow's is feminism with Germaine Greer, and I intend to watch it despite having several good reasons not to (namely, I find Germaine Greer faintly irritating, I'm not all that interested in feminism and I have truckloads of revision to do). You should too.

You never know, you might learn something.