I think Robert Murray-Smith would be a great host. He has some of the same energy as Burke and he has some history-related videos on YouTube that has some of the same style of storytelling.
Kathy Joseph would be great for the research side. Her book "The Lightning Tamers" is pretty good at describing some of these weird connections and interesting stories throughout the history of electricity.
After watching his videos every day for months now I am still not sure where on the "technical genius" to "free energy advocate" spectrum I should place him.
I mean most of his builds are technically correct (e.g. most of his generators produce a voltage), but he often glosses over details that in practice make the idea unfeasible (e.g. a voltage does not help you if the generator can not provide enough current).
Other times he is just wrong ... just because whales and "tree-spinning-things" have similar "wings" does not mean that you can blow up the same shape to a wind turbine size. (The reason behind that is that the smaller you get the more viscous air becomes (relatively) ... flies and other small insects literally swim through the air because of that. Imo that could be an explanation why the tree-spinny-things have a similar shape, they are just small enough that they "swim", too.)
Read down until 'similarity of flows'
https://cooperlab.wustl.edu/PracticalAdvice/Purcell%201977.p...
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u8GMcpEN9Z6aQiCvp/rule-think...
In think some of his videos are directly inspired by pages like https://507movements.com/mm_100.html ... So you might like that too :-)
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/11/fans-of-connections-...
> Television is entirely different. I remember walking around the world with a film crew, sometimes 15 people, and pointing at a bush and saying, "What am I doing here?" That's very time-consuming and expensive, and we no longer need that kind of thing. This time, there's no money. [...] Nobody went anywhere, so we didn't get up and catch planes all the time. And nothing got in the way of the story except me. All I did was stand and talk. Because of the structure, the nature of the production style, the story can move more densely and more quickly than ever before.
I don't know if I agree with him that it's a good thing. One of the things I loved about the original Connections was the experiential aspect of it. James Burke in front of a green screen is just James Burke in front of a green screen.
I think that "quality of the recordings" thing is just something you have to learn to get over. They're not actually bad.
Also available on YouTube and torrents.
If they just put up everything they already made they could charge more than Netflix IMO. Instead, god knows why, it's a limited selection that too from which some missing episodes due to the usual 'woke' rewriting of history & present (racist or whatever-ist people exist right, so what's the problem with a show having such a character? Doesn't mean it's right, nor that the show itself is that-ist).
You're in for a treat, especially if you can enjoy the 70s stylings of James Burke. I particularly enjoy his dry wit which would probably be toned down quite a bit for modern serious productions.
> the usual 'woke' rewriting of history & present
It's not so much rewriting (unless you're a publisher looking for free publicity), but attempting to not broadcast very offensive material that was considered normal back in the day (much as slavery used to be considered normal). Personally, I was quite a fan of "Till Death Us Do Part" featuring Alf Garnett as a racist bigot, but then I can appreciate irony and that the programmes were making the point that he was a character to be lampooned and pitied. However, there's too many people that would accept it at face value and use it to justify their vile racism, so I can understand that it's not suitable for modern consumption.
Britbox doesn't publish their standalone app library but googling the two names together doesn't suggest they have it either.
I suspect for much of the older stuff it's licensing issues making it not worth the time to verify, in their view. Just because it's BBC production doesn't mean there isn't 3rd party stuff that has to be checked.
That and content, they probably don't want to air everything they did in the 60s/70s for example, for fear of being buried in complaints...
It's all fixable, but may not be considered worth the effort. Sometimes not worth the effort to audit even.
FWIW Time Life were involved in a number of distribution arrangements with the BBC, there's some details here [2].
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078588/companycredits/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Life_Television#Televisio...