Charlie Brooker's Screen burn: Science Of The Movies

'Nar Williams is the world's most enthusiastic nerd. I found myself curiously proud of him'
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Get him, the geek: Nar Williams, host of Science Of The Movies.

I'm a geek. In 1998, while co-presenting a radio show about technology, I was loaned a Diamond Rio, one of the first commercially available MP3 players. It connected to the computer via the parallel port, had a tiny monochrome LCD display, could store 32MB worth of music (roughly an album's worth), and absolutely blew my mind. It had no moving parts! The music came from nowhere! It was clearly alien technology; an enchanted futuristic device straight from a Buck Rogers movie. Excited beyond belief, I ran all over London showing it to everyone I could find.

Absolutely no one gave a shit. "But there's no tape, no CD, no minidisc; the music comes from its memory!" I'd squeal. And they would yawn in my face.

A few years later these people could be found cooing over the iPod like it was a baby meerkat that had just beamed down from space. "It's amazing," they'd pant, "there's no tape, no CD, no m ..."

"Whatever," I'd grunt bitterly. They'd look wounded and go back to stroking their new discovery like it was an emperor's sex organ.

Zip forward to now and it's commonplace to hear people discussing how many gigs of hard disk space they've got left without having to lower their voices in case the "norms" overhear them. Geekdom is so mainstream it has entire TV series dedicated to it. Series like Science Of The Movies (Sun, 10pm, Discovery Science).

I chose to preview this under false pretences, glancing at the title and figuring it would be a myth-busting exercise in which scientific experts pooh-poohed Hollywood's lax grasp of physics, grumpily pointing out that if a sheet of glass hit David Warner's neck at 50mph, his head wouldn't really be sliced off as cleanly as it was in The Omen. I was looking forward to being told that you can't actually see laser beams in space for the 500th time. Instead, I was confronted by a 60-minute show about programmable motion-control cameras. And being a geek, I sat through it, only getting truly restless when they started discussing the frequency-hopping spread spectrum wireless communication system they were using. That's how nerdy this is.

If you're wondering, motion-control cameras (STAY AWAKE) have been used to shoot everything from the assault on the Death Star to the spectacular six-minute in-car chase sequence from Children Of Men. It effectively replaces the cameraman with a robot capable of endlessly replicating the same move without once losing focus or trying it on with the lead actress. It's capable of producing amazingly immersive sequences (as in Children Of Men), but is more often used to construct technically incredible shock-and-awe routines which dazzle the eyes but bypass the soul. Fittingly, the technology behind it is also used on production lines to screw the tops on plastic bottles and vacuum-pack slices of processed meat.

But the quality of the films themselves isn't even up for discussion. As far as this show's concerned, the movies are almost irrelevant; they're just extended demo modes for the technology behind them. The host, Nar Williams, is possibly the world's most enthusiastic nerd, touring digital effects houses with an expression of unaffected delight on his fizzog, loudly sorting everything he surveys into one of three categories: "cool", "awesome" or – occasionally – "intense". At one point he shakes hands with the man who designed the camera system used in the first Star Wars film, and the footage pauses so Nar can gasp, "Dude, I don't believe I'm shaking hands with the guy who blew up the Death Star!" on the soundtrack.

In short, Nar is the kind of person who'd still be excited to get his hands on a Diamond Rio. Which possibly explains why, even though I'm predisposed to find people who worship Star Wars and say "dude" so intensely annoying I'd queue in the rain to watch them having their heads pulled off with hooks, instead I found myself curiously proud of him. An openly geeky man, openly geeking his way around an openly geeky TV show which doesn't have to apologise for its own existence. We've come a long way.

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