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Songs in the Key of S

Music / TV Comedy

Whenever I watch Look Around You, I’m almost more amazed by the music than anything else.

Don’t get me wrong. The idea that I could write anything like Look Around You is thoroughly ridiculous. But I at least feel I understand it, and a little of how it works. Gelg’s musical talent is magical and mysterious to me. My brain can’t even begin to comprehend it.

Sadly, despite the odd suggestion from Serafinowicz over the years, there has never been a Look Around You album released. (You’d think Warp would have been an obvious home.) But that doesn’t mean that – scattered across the internet – there aren’t ways of hearing lovely, clean, extended versions of some of Gelg’s finest.

So in lieu of that album – which I still hope will happen at some point – let’s see what we can scrape together.

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A Weekly Look at the World of Science and Technology

TV Comedy

Today, we’re going to go down a particularly odd rabbit hole, even for this site. On the plus side: here is a 15 year old mystery, definitively solved.

So let us take a trip to my favourite comedy of the 2000s, Look Around You. Specifically, the DVD commentary on the first episode of Series 2, Music. But hey, Peter Serafinowicz, was Music really meant to be your first episode?

SERAFINOWICZ: This wasn’t meant to be our first episode, was it?
POPPER: No, and a lot of people on the net sussed that as well, didn’t they?
SERAFINOWICZ: Yeah. I don’t know, we…
POPPER: We were going to start with Sport.
SERAFINOWICZ: We were going to start with Sport, but… yeah, we changed it, didn’t we? Maybe it was a bit of a mistake to start with this one, cos it’s such a different one…
POPPER: I wonder if we should have started with the next one, Health. Medibot.1
SERAFINOWICZ: Yeah, probably.

Discussion about transmission orders is like catnip to me. I am the person who wrote this particular monstrosity, after all. And personally speaking, I think Serafinowicz is correct here. I love Music, but – Live Final aside – it’s definitely the most format-breaking of the episodes. It feels weird to break your format when you haven’t even established it yet.2

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  1. MED-I-BOT! 

  2. Having Sport go out first would also make sense for another reason – it contains the “Thanks ants / Thants” joke. That version of the joke going out in the third episode always felt a bit strange, being a straightforward replication of the famous Series 1 moment – the show had already moved past it. 

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