Richard Hammond Builds a Planet product reviews

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.