• click here to return to the homepage •
| YOU ARE HERE : Home > Categories > Entertainment > Television > Richard Hammond Builds a Planet | |
| ProdID: 6007 - Richard Hammond Builds a PlanetType of Show: Educational Nature and Science | Product Score: 8.0 |
|
This exciting mini-series uses stunning interactive CGI and draws on interviews with the world's top scientists to show step by step how a world is put together. A cosmic construction foreman supervises each stage in the building of earth, the solar system and the galaxy, but like any construction project there will be mistakes, and minor slip-ups have surprising consequences. with his trademark wit, Top Gear's Richard Hammond opens up a cosmic toolbox to build the whole thing, piece by piece, from the top of a two-mile high tower in the Californian desert. As an engineering challenge it doesn't get much bigger! |
|||||||
|
I love science, and I love to learn, but I find that many books can come across boring and unexciting. So when I find a tv series that attempts to visually teach science, I am always curious to determine the effectiveness. I found the overall format to be a little too much. Two one-hour episodes were difficult to take in all at once. A 30-minute, or 45-minute block would be much more suitable for an educational program. Watching the episodes, I thoroughly enjoyed the way in which things were portrayed to give an appropriate sense of scale; comparing a small brick, to 30 Mack trucks, it is easier to understand the proportions than by saying how many millions of tons there are (large numbers are so hard to visualise). While I learnt many new things, I found there was a lot of information missing. An example is the host showing how stardust accumulates together to form larger bodies, but doesn't explain why the large body is suddenly super hot liquid rock. Another example is when illustrating how one planetary body is formed, and then just skips to the entire solar system existing. Small things like that create gaps in knowledge, and lead to a slight loss in interest. I found the first episode very interesting, and I really enjoyed seeing the experiments that show the mechanics of what is occurring on a local scale, but the second episode was far less enthralling. The gaps in what they were explaining got larger, only showing one aspect, and assuming that we know the rest, and by the end of the episode, the title "Richard Hammond's Bucket List" seemed more appropriate. It started off well, but it needed shorter episodes, and more of them. Trying to explain the construction of a universe in one episode is never going to work. The CGI was good at keeping it interesting, but the show really needed a greater depth of information to provide. |
| User Comments |
| Printed at 07:58:24pm on Tuesday 15th July 2025 |
