If I wanted to be solipsistic about this, I could say that the opening episode of The Virtual Revolution, the new BBC Two series about the changes wrought by the internet, is also the story of theartsdesk.com. It certainly felt personal at times. But then we print journalists, now launched together into cyberspace, are but one (very important, naturally) sub-atomic particle of what is variously described here as "the fastest change since the Industrial Revolution" and "the most exciting development since Gutenberg".That Gutenberg remark was made by disenchanted Twitterer Stephen Fry – just Read more ...

“New programme, new set, new city,” said Kirsty Wark by way of introduction to the BBC’s new flagship culture programme, The Review Show. It replaces Newsnight Review and goes out after the current affairs programme that spawned it, but now in its own discrete slot. The offspring has left London and moved to the BBC’s fabulous waterfront studios in Glasgow, has brightly coloured seats for its guests and even gets to stay up late: The Review Show lasts 45 minutes, as opposed to half an hour when it was part of Newsnight.It may seem perverse, then, that the opening hour-long special was about Read more ...

For Horizon's fascinating investigation into the ancestral relationship between man and dog, a record-breaking number of illustrious boffins had been compressed into 60 minutes of television. We met Dr Anna Kukekova from Cornell University, who has been conducting research into which gene makes silver foxes (dogs by any other name) either tame or wild. I'm sure other viewers were as thrilled as I was to make the acquaintance of Dr Adam Miklos, from an unprounceable university in Budapest, who delivered shards of insight into the way humans instinctively understand the shades of meaning Read more ...

In space, no-one can hear you snore. The opening two-parter of Defying Gravity introduced us, in a sluggish and tortuous manner, to the six-year mission of the spacecraft Antares, which contains eight astronauts and will visit seven planets, starting with Venus. Everything was meant to be stirring and momentous as mankind took up the baton previously lifted by the likes of Vasco da Gama and Neil Armstrong, to pursue the quest for knowledge and new frontiers. More prosaically, the trade journals tell us that Antares may be brought down by networks pulling the financial plug before it can be Read more ...