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You wait ages for a clip of Carol Vorderman on Tomorrow's World - then a user by the name of "FR Hamilton" goes and uploads pretty much *every* episode she presented.

I won't post them all here, for obvious reasons - so I'll post just three, including her first.





Everyone knows, of course, that Carol hosted TW for less than a year before being forced off the show for advertising Ariel detergent. And everyone knows that there was uproar over this - although Michael S, commenting on TV Cream's TW page, feels she deserved to go: "The advert featured a *very* similar reconstruction of the TW set and it’s obvious she was abusing the authority granted to her as the presenter of the programme."

*Not* everyone knows, however, that Carol arrived as part of a year-zero revamp of the show, which did away with the studio demonstrations and all the '80s and early '90s presenters bar Howard Stableford (who I assume enjoyed doing TW so much that he didn't mind being demoted to number 2 behind Carol). This revamp also brought about the swimming baby (who survived into the new millennium), as well as a theme tune that was arguably less memorable than even Chris Blackwell's (which it replaced), let alone Dankworth's.

Would it be fair to say that there was a touch of Birtism about this revamp? Birt considered popular science programming a priority when he took over as DG proper, while new editor Edward Briffa's remark, "It was enjoyable to be parodied on Not the Nine O'Clock News and Ben Elton for the wobbly shots and fingernails, but those days are largely over I'm glad to say... we are going to give people damn good science stories and catch their imagination" sounds rather Birtist too.

Carol, meanwhile, argues in her book that it wasn't her decision to join TW in the first place, and also that, technically, she *wasn't* sacked - that Ariel wanted her to do another advert, that the BBC *legitimately* terminated her contract as a result, and that the press twisted the story. The aforementioned Michael S would probably disagree...

In hindsight Tomorrow’s World was one of those long-running formats that originated in the 60s and barely survived the 90s with the help of numerous revamps, but was definitely past its sell by date by the early 00s, similar to Top of the Pops.

The thing about Tomorrows World is that a lot of the sort of technoloical innovations it used to showcase and demonstrate aren't happening now the same way.

The thing people watched it for and what it was most famous for covering were consumer electronics, devices and formats. But nowadays everything is just a computer and most innovation is just new software that utilises existing technology. They'd be just demonstrating the latest phone app idea every week

Of course there's always new innovations in fields such as medicine, but they were always the boring bits of TW that no one cared for

Your right that tunes was Crap. Isn't click a near replacement for tw?

Not really. Click is technology: online/computers/phones/new media. Tomorrow's World was science as well

Tomorrow's World wasn't doing especially well in the early nineties - in 1991 it was moved from 8pm to the 7.30 death slot against Corrie, and got a bit of a radical revamp then as well. John Diamond joined the line-up to look at The Lighter Side Of Technology, albeit only for a few weeks, and there were other changes too. But I remember it wasn't especially well-received and there was a feature about it on Biteback with people arguing it wasn't any good anymore and a bit of a shambles. I remember they showed a clip of Carmen Pryce spectacularly forgetting her lines during one item.

So the 1994 revamp was seemingly an attempt to give it a bit of a shot in the arm, what with Judith Hann going as well, and as you say it was no longer live, instead being made up of Vorders linking reports shot on location. It could easily have been the case they got Howard to stay around for continuity's sakes. I remember it being pretty relentlessly dull in this incarnation, and it wasn't until the next revamp in 1997 with Peter Snow and Flipper Forrester that they managed to get the balance right.

Was it true Carol was sacked simply because she was in an advert for Ariel or something?

Did I see a trail recently for something using Tomorrow's World as a strand name rather than the name of a specific programme?

Yes, playing on the nostalgia of the name more than anything I imagine: http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/mediapacks/tomorrows-world

This theme tune is still great though.

This was the best TW theme from the 90s. It come from Divine Comedy's "In Pursuit of Happiness". but the BBC edited it

https://youtu.be/9uED254fWjU?t=11

Whatever happened to Lindsay Fallow? She was on a lot of techy/sciencey stuff at the turn to the century and then just disappeared