Connections (1978)
'An Alternative View of Change.'
And now for something different. James Burke’s Connections was first broadcast in the autumn of 1978, directed by Mick Jackson of the BBC Science and Features Department in association with Time Life films. It’s superb. In my opinion, one of the best television documentary series of the 1970s, and still eminently watchable today.
On a cold winter’s evening on the 9th November, 1965, the Sir Adam Beck power station at the Niagara Falls failed, plunging Manhattan into sudden darkness:
At precisely eleven seconds past the minute the two tiny metal projections made contact, and in doing so set in motion a sequence of events that would lead, within twelve minutes, to chaos. During that time life within 80,000 square miles of one of the richest, most highly industrialized, most densely populated areas in the Western world would come to a virtual standstill. Over thirty million people would be affected for periods from three minutes to thirteen hours. As a result some of them would die. For all of them, life would never be quite the same again.
From The Trigger Effect, Episode One, Connections (1978).
And so begins Connections (1978), James Burke’s brilliant ten-episode series, explaining how discoveries, scientific inventions, and historical world events are interlinked, so that one might trace the evolution of the stirrup (used by the Norman knights at the Battle of Hastings) to the discovery of air pressure; or how the Black Death led to the Hollerith punch-card tabulator and modern computer programming. We’re very much in the sphere of what might today be called geo-politics, even futurology, altho’ I’m not sure if those terms were used back then.
Incidentally, the weird radiophonic music used right at the beginning of the programme sounds remarkably like the soundtrack to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), used in the bits when civilisation moves up a notch. And Connection’s very first episode, The Trigger Effect, almost a pilot, has a whiff of that very 1970s preoccupation, the collapse of civilisation, fuelled, I think, by the possibility of nuclear armageddon, and then, later the oil crisis of 1974: a theme also explored in television series such as Doomwatch (1970-1972), The Changes (1975) and The Survivors (1975).
Described by The Washington Post as ‘one of the most intriguing minds in the Western World’, James Burke read Middle English at Jesus College, Oxford, before teaching at the British school in Bologna. From astrolabes to armillary spheres, from Galileo to the invention of gunpowder, Burke is your authoritative friend, guiding you through the complexities of technological and cultural change, an erudite Humpty Dumpty in thick pebbled glasses and flared Safari Suit, with the gift of the gab and a dry sense of humour.
