Dear Sir/Madam

Below are four ideas for TV programmes/documentaries which you might like to consider:

1) A documentary (or better, a series of documentaries) looking at and comparing a member (or members) of the “idle rich” with a member (or members) of the “idle poor”, and at society’s (different people’s) attitudes towards them.

2) A series of programmes (with infinite scope for dealing with a multitude of topics at varying levels of comprehension) on the history of philosophy, science, technology and medicine, with the central goal of portraying past views of the world, supposed knowledge and practice in their historical context, thus helping to cultivate more appreciation for modern knowledge and understanding and for those who contributed to it.

For example, the Copernican Revolution is taken completely for granted nowadays with very few people having even the remotest appreciation of just how amazing it was (and still is). Every school child now knows that Earth is a “planet” which spins on its axis and orbits the Sun, rather than being stationary at the centre of the universe with everything in the sky revolving around it, although that is what the evidence of our own eyes (if we looked) and “common sense” would tell us.

Just 400 years ago, anyone suggesting to the man in the street that Earth was a “wandering star” (which is what “planet” means in the Greek from which it is derived) like Mars, Venus or one of the other “wandering stars”, which could be seen wandering across the night sky against the background of fixed stars, would have been considered completely mad. And with good reason. In those days, most people observed the sky (with no TV to watch after it got dark) and could see that they, standing on the Earth, were at the centre and that everything revolved around them! Nowadays very few people give the sky any more than an occasional glance, and simply believe what they are told and taught at school.

I would like the programmes to convey an impression and cultivate an appreciation of how our ancestors saw the world (admittedly, no mean task), in order to cultivate an appreciation for (and hopefully also some amazement at) what has been discovered in the meantime. It is particularly interesting for us in Britain, because, together with other European countries, we have played a major role in the amazing developments of the past 300 - 400 centuries. It didn’t happen in some distant part of the world, but right here involving our direct forebears, often expressing themselves in a language that we can still understand.

You cannot separate science from philosophy, from which it developed. Not so long ago, people we would now call scientists, referred to themselves as “natural philosophers”.  For the greater part of human history, technology got by without science and developed very slowly. But when the connection was made not so long ago they formed a loop of mutual positive feedback, which led to the exponential rate of development in knowledge, understanding and technology we are now still experiencing. Many people realise that something very exceptional and important is going on, but because we were born into it, are surrounded by it, and are being carried along with it, it very difficult to appreciated just what an amazing journey we are on, from where it has brought us, where we are now, or where it is taking us.

It is marvellous journey, but also a very dangerous one, which currently, although we are desperately trying to avoid facing up it, is taking us rapidly towards disaster (in a nutshell because the material aspirations of 7 – 9 billion people, most of them keen to emulate the “American way of life”, and our growth-dependent economy, are not sustainable on a planet with limited resources and a finite carrying capacity). It is essential that as many people as possible gain an understanding of where we are heading, which means understanding where we are at the moment and where we have come from.

Understanding that, we will start to appreciate what we now have, both in the way of knowledge and in the material standard of living it has facilitated, but which we take almost completely for granted. It is this lack of appreciation which is largely responsible for the disastrous course we are currently on.

3) A running, open-ended documentary about the initiation and development of a community (in Barkingside, where I soon hope to be moving) based on ideas that I am in the process of developing  and publishing on my website, as an element (and example) of the sustainable society, which over the coming years will gradually replace existing, non-sustainable, mass consumer society.

4) A running open-ended documentary about the initiation and development of a number of cooperatives as elements of an alternative sustainable economy.

Needless to say, I would like to be actively involved if you should decide to take up any of my ideas.