I’ve been clearing stuff off the TiVo, and one of the programmes I watched was an interesting looking Horizon about the threat of an asteroid strike on the Earth. As cheesy as Meteor was, as awful as Armageddon was, and as ponderous as Deep Impact was, I’ve always held an interest in the idea of an asteroid or comet ending up on target for Earth, and how the planet would react to such a threat.

Ever since I read Arthur C. Clarke’s The Hammer of God, which deals with that exact topic, and in a much more intelligent way than the three movies I just mentioned, I’ve been fascinated by the whole concept. I’ve no doubt that you could fill a few 45-60 minute programmes to completely cover the topic, but Horizon always was good with distilling down reasonably complex science into a 45 minute show — it’s an hour long now, which must make it a bitch to show on the Discovery Channel, who co-produce it these days.

So at any rate, I settled in to watch this documentary, and found myself watching — yet again — a tabloid-style programme, filled with unnecessarily dramatic music, ominous narration, and repetitive use of CG to demonstrate what bad things would happen in the event of an asteroid impact. When I say repetitive, I don’t just mean they kept showing CG clips, I mean they kept showing the same CG clips over and over again.

This isn’t just a problem with this instalment of Horizon, hence why I said “yet again” — a recent episode about American Airlines Flight 587, which crashed in New York in November 2001 was filled with similar problems — nor is it endemic to Horizon, as the past documentaries “Crowded Skies” about air safety also showed, with a ponderous, repetitive voiceover by Paul McGann and dramatic — and yes, repeating — CG reconstruction sequences.

Give us the facts, give us the stories, give us the personal experiences and recollections, but do we really have to sit through the documentary equivalent of a Deagostini 26-part special (available in all good newsagents, issue 1 £1.99, issue 2 onwards £4.99/week, not available in TSW regions) to get an informative presentation of events?

I await the inevitable documentaries on the disasters from this year with some trepidation.