Good Technology

Over four weeks this summer, the BBC granted us the God-like ability to look into the future - or at least to look back at past ideas for the future from the vantage point of the present. Tomorrow's World Time Machine screened reports from the popular science programme's last three decades, providing a mildly dizzying exercise in remembering the future as it might have been. Wholly in keeping with television's current awareness of its fabulous archival wealth, the series matured Tomorrow's World to cult status for an audience with reinvented sensibilities.

Tomorrow's World's original success lay in its role as a semi-official authority on the near future, offering sneak previews of the life to come which were all the more impressive for their relevance to our daily lives. And herein lay its slightly tweedy Britishness: a self-deprecating penchant for amateurism which is all the more poignant in retrospect. The Honourable Brenda Carter, for instance, was a pioneer in the domestic usage of solar power. The fact that her house has subsequently burned down was reported by the presenters with admirable gravity. Similarly, a report on the development of the 'silent baked bean', being carried out by Dr Leaky of Cambridge, was dragged to the precipice of low humour by the admission that his testing equipment consisted of 'two balloons and some wine-making equipment'. Along with a machine for folding pullovers and a high-pressure pan scourer, these kinds of home-spun inventions were the quasi-comic shell in which the more serious concerns of the programme were housed. A community project in Scotland for breast cancer screening was inspired by an item on Tomorrow's World, as was an audio learning device which has subsequently been adopted by thousands of special care units.

In essence, the complexities of science and technology were being translated into simple and benign terms for the general public, with demonstrations and controlled experiments adding a touch of drama to the magazine format of the show. Here was the future, with all the awkwardness of infancy, seen from a largely pre-computer society reliant upon cumbersome electronics or mechanical devices. Most importantly, the Tomorrow's World of the 60s and 70s was a foretaste of the future in which science was still visible, rather than virtual. If the future had a physical emblem, it was the ovular plastic mouldings associated with 'space-age' design, and its sound was that of the first Moog Synthesiser, demonstrated on the programme in 1969 as a musical instrument developed in a laboratory rather than a studio.

The programme's reports possessed a set of common denominators which appeared to have been borrowed from a notion of the future created by the popular culture of secret agents and space movies - signified by the glamour of Concorde and the Apollo space shots. But over three decades they would shift from projecting a Utopia to warning a Dystopia. The depressive drift of these reference points, as received or inherited ideas, were best described by a montage of filmed interviews with young school children, made in the 60s, 70s and 90s. Atomic warfare, global warming, wide-scale unemployment and the replacement of pets by machines were all suggested, with eerie accuracy, by children for whom technological progress was meant to be solving problems rather than creating anxiety. The sense of science being benign and the future laden with robotic conveniences had changed into a more apocalyptic notion of technology as a Faustian contract with global disaster, the future a precarious exercise in social survival.

The beginnings of this shift could be seen in the failure, during the early 70s, of the supposedly revolutionary 'automated systems' developed to control such mechanisms such as the Advanced Passenger Train (APT). In retrospect, the very term 'automated systems' has become somewhat doom-laden, and indeed, the tilting mechanism on British Rail's Advanced Passenger Train famously caused acute nausea in its few test passengers as well as failing to work under any save the most controlled conditions. Consigned to the graveyard of locomotives at Didcot Parkway, the APT became a typically British symbol of the failure to solve a simple problem and, by inference, the consequences of trying to get above oneself. Ironically, the Virgin group of companies is now planning to buy an entire of fleet of new and improved APTs, subsequent to the system's technical development over the last two decades in Italy.

What emerges from this retrospective viewing of Tomorrow's World is less a sense of science becoming classically threatening than an affirmation that developments in the technology of post-industrial society have always been mirrored in the Gothic mythologies of popular culture. In this much, for example, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is simply the prototype for Terminator (1984) or the more recent spoof secret agent film, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997). In the latter, Mike Myers' Dr Evil regards alter-ego Powers with a cruel smirk and asks: 'So, Mr Powers, before I send you to an unnecessarily complicated death, what do you think of your quasi-futuristic clothing?' Powers' cartoon of popular culture's engagement with ideas of the future underpins the idea - expanded by the Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland into a virtual theology - that a generation of media consumers are emerging with a perception of the present shaped by pop mythologies of the future. Indeed, Tomorrow's World's vision of the future now looks closer to comedy than apocalyptic dread. As Dr Evil discovers, when he attempts to hold the Earth to ransom with demands he thought out 30 years ago: today, threatening to burn a hole in the ozone layer unless he's paid a million dollars will provoke nothing more than laughter.