3 out of 5

Producer: Paul Kriwaczek

Produced to make the then-emerging ‘micro computer’ seem more accessible to everyday users, ‘The Computer Programme’ revisits similar material for several passes over its ten episodes, and seems a little confused as to whether its trying to excite us or frighten us, but dated as it is, it ends up being a fairly entertaining informational, both for its historical interest as well as the carryover to today from which modern technological-dunderheads would still benefit.  (Or not, since they’re dunderheads.)  Our hosts, a (purposefully?) doofy freelance journalist who’s meant to represent the completely uninformed computer user, and a ‘nerd’, who gets excited about the tech and walks us through some basics, do a good job of playing out both sides of the coin in an affable manner that neither insults either party or makes bridging the gap seem unfeasible.  Occasionally, we get a paranoia expert with a comic book voice who, at the end of a segment, will preach ominous humans-are-lazy robots-are-the-future predictions.

The structure is fairly straight-forward – show how computers are currently being used in one fashion or another (generally in relation to a specific business or industry), then break this down into a very basic process that the micro computer can handle, which is demoed for us via the nerd having the doof script some Basic lines which execute the desired function, and its then extrapolated to how high-end computers handle this on a larger scale, and how it might play out in the future.  Most of the predictions are accurate enough – that computers with more and more computing power would grow smaller and smaller and that many paper trails would be reduced to remote communications.  There are even some difficult abstracts tossed out, such as the concept of money just being a representation of money, predicting the bit coin before that was even a thing.  The concept can only be explained and re-explained so far, though, and after five episodes the themes seem to be somewhat repeating, just with different examples.  In order to keep our attention, the format of the show starts to include some sillier props and skits to ‘illustrate.’

One of the more interesting aspects is the continued return to explaining humans role in matters.  Some of the nerds interviewed have no problem thinking about a future with a computer doing all the work – the assumption could be that understanding, to whatever extent, how programming still must be programmed to mimic behaviors – whereas a lot of the regulars are rather steadfast in how humans can never be replaced, a boorish doctor even going so far as to insure us that computers can never counter our ‘superior’ intellect (total paraphrasing there).

Overall, the series accomplishes its goal, I think, of trying to relate the home PC to new users, which was a bit more difficult in the day where we didn’t have graphical friendly user interfaces.  There’s a good, general structure in place, although they lose a bit of ‘wow’ factor once some of the initial demos are displayed and then must start tossing out some wilder ideas (cookie-producing fields…) to keep our imaginations stoked.  The hosts are friendly and clear in making their points, and its nice and brief at 30 minute sessions.  Computer fans will enjoy it, and if you could get your fucking button mashing mother to sit down and watch it with a straight face, she’ll be confused that there are no Windows examples, but maybe it will help break her brain a bit about how the relationship between user and device actually works.