--- title: "Look Around You" year: 2002 kind: "series" canonical: "https://film.one/tv/look-around-you" fi1m_score: 83 critics_reviews: 3 published: "2026-09-17T15:01:47.941314+00:00" updated: "2026-09-17T15:02:24.947840+00:00" region: "US" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Look Around You (2002) Created by Peter Serafinowicz, Robert Popper · 30m · Comedy **Fi1m score: 83** · Critics: 3 of 6 reviews so far *In a sentence:* Every fact is wrong, every voice is calm, and for a moment we believed the lot > Popper and Serafinowicz’s spoof of the schools science programme is as exact a parody as British television has made: the film stock, the synthesiser, the pauses. The second series, with presenters on screen, is funny too, but the first is the one to show people. ## Synopsis A schools science programme from the age of the classroom television, first shown on 10 October 2002 and remade with every fact replaced. A Narrator (Nigel Lambert) guides pupils through a module, over film of white-coated scientists at lab benches and test tubes, and pauses so they can take each result in. In the second series, first shown on 31 January 2005, the programme has presenters on screen: Jack Morgan (Robert Popper), Pam Bachelor (Olivia Colman), Peter Packard (Peter Serafinowicz) and Pealy Maghti (Josie D’Arby) speak to the camera with complete confidence and no accuracy at all. Tim Kirkby directs; Popper and Serafinowicz write. ## Review Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz have remembered something most of us worked hard to forget: the schools science programme, shown to classrooms in the 1970s and 80s on a television wheeled in on a trolley, in which a calm man explained a subject over film of beakers and nobody in the classroom learned anything. *Look Around You* is that programme, remade shot for shot, with every fact taken out and something wrong put in its place. Tim Kirkby directs. The first series went out on 10 October 2002 in eight parts; a second, in six, followed on 31 January 2005. It is among the most exact parodies British television has produced, and one of the funniest, with a reservation about the second series that we will come to. The exactness is the joke. The film stock is grainy and slightly orange. The title cards use the fat rounded lettering of the period and sit on screen a beat too long. Under everything runs a synthesiser, humming and burbling the way those programmes did when they had nothing to say and needed a noise. Kirkby keeps the camera still, lets a hand in a white cuff enter frame to pick up a test tube, and holds the shot until the pause itself is funny. Nothing on screen tells you it is a comedy. The whole thing depends on that. Nigel Lambert narrates, and is the lead in all but billing. He has the voice of every teacher who ever asked you to be quiet, patient and wholly certain, and he never lets on. Each module takes a subject and explains it with total confidence and no accuracy whatever, then pauses so you can take it in. There is a moment, which we will leave you to find, when Lambert states something that cannot possibly be true in the exact tone he would use for the boiling point of water, and we laughed until we could not see the screen. It was the seriousness that did it: nothing about the sentence was delivered as a joke, so it landed as one. Then he moved on to the next fact as if nothing had happened, and we were gone again. The second series gives the programme faces. Jack Morgan (Popper), Pam Bachelor (Olivia Colman), Peter Packard (Serafinowicz) and Pealy Maghti (Josie D’Arby) are on screen and speaking to us, rather than heard over film of beakers. Colman is the best thing in it; she plays a presenter of unshakeable brightness whose smile does not move when the item in front of her goes wrong. D’Arby matches her. Popper and Serafinowicz, playing men who believe they are at the cutting edge, are content to look foolish, which is the right instinct. Our reservation is that the second series is funny in a different and slightly lesser way. The first works because nobody on screen knows anything is wrong; the format itself is the straight man. Once there are presenters, the jokes are told by people who plainly know they are jokes, and the calm that made the first series so strange is harder to keep up. A few of the running gags are asked to run further than they can. It is still a good comedy. It is a less unusual one. There is a second caveat, and it applies to both. If you never sat in a classroom while a man on a trolley explained the properties of iron, some of this will be a precise recreation of something you have never seen, and for a while it will play as noise. Give it two episodes. It comes. Set against the British tradition of the straight-faced spoof, this stands close to *The Day Today*, which most critics have already noticed and which is the right comparison. Its ambitions are smaller, its targets less important, and its hit rate, in the first series at least, is higher. Watch it one module at a time, with the lights low, and resist the urge to start the next. You will fail, as we did. *Fi1m score 83, published 17 September 2026.* ### Reviews we read (3) - **The Guardian** (90/100, inferred): The critic praises the series as a hilarious spoof of outdated educational science programs, comparing it favorably to The Day Today. They highlight the absurd renaming of lab equipment and deadpan narration as particularly effective elements. [Read](https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/jan/28/look-around-you-box-set-review-science-anarchists) - **Vulture**, Curtis Gwinn (85/100, inferred): The critic describes the series as a cult classic that perfectly captures the tone of dusty 1970s and 1980s educational films through deadpan absurdity and misleading experiments. He singles out its surreal execution and influence as standout qualities, recommending it as essential viewing. [Read](https://www.vulture.com/2010/12/hands-up-who-likes-me-the-bad-education-of-look-around-you.html) - **Collider**, Andre Dellamorte (80/100, inferred): The series stands out for its precise, absurd comedy that recreates the feel of old educational films while delivering unexpected non-sequiturs and visual gags. It rewards rewatching due to its layered jokes and straight-faced delivery. [Read](https://collider.com/look-around-you-season-one-dvd-review/) ## Details - **Created by:** Peter Serafinowicz, Robert Popper - **Creator:** Peter Serafinowicz, Robert Popper - **Director:** Tim Kirkby - **Writer:** Robert Popper, Peter Serafinowicz - **Cast:** Robert Popper as Jack Morgan; Olivia Colman as Pam Bachelor; Peter Serafinowicz as Peter Packard; Josie D'Arby as Pealy Maghti; Nigel Lambert as Narrator; James Serafinowicz; Eve Popper as Queen Elizabeth IV; Daisy Robertson as Queen Elizabeth III - **Runtime:** 30m - **Release (the US):** 10 October 2002 - **Genres:** Comedy ## Where to watch in the US - Tubi: free, sd *Checked 2026-09-17.* Also available in: US. Add `?region=XX` to this URL for another country. ## If you liked this - *The Day Today* (1994): The news, remade by people who had studied its every tic and believed none of it - *Garth Marenghi's Darkplace* (2004), Fi1m 83: Eighties hospital horror recreated so exactly the cheapness becomes the performance — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/tv/garth-marenghis-darkplace.md) - *Documentary Now!* (2015): American parodies of famous documentaries, played straight, with the same devotion to period grain - *Forgotten Silver* (1995): Peter Jackson’s fake history of a lost New Zealand filmmaker; many viewers believed it - *Brass Eye* (1997), Fi1m 86: Chris Morris turns the same deadpan on current affairs television, with far crueller intent — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/tv/brass-eye.md) --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/tv/look-around-you