How do you shave raspberries? What’s a Bakerloo bell jar? How do you make sulphagne? The mysteries of the universe are revealed in these hilarious spoof ‘educational modules’

Many of us will remember teachers clumsily battling with VHS players as they tried to put on videos of old and outdated science experiments. These would invariably feature close-ups of pencils pointing at circuitry, and be boringly narrated by expressionless men with sideburns. It’s these vintage Open University broadcasts that are targeted by Look Around You, a series of 10-minute curios that first aired on BBC2 14 years ago. They’re as hilarious and colourful a lampooning as The Day Today was of Newsnight.

Created by Robert Popper (who went on to make Friday Night Dinner) and Peter Serafinowicz (who had just provided the voice of Darth Maul in Star Wars), Look Around You was O-level science reshaped by anarchists. Its creators sought to inject humour into, for example, the terrifying cold war information films they had watched in their adolescence. One such public information film – the Donald Pleasence-voiced Dark and Lonely Water, about kids playing near a pond – is still cited as one of the scariest things ever broadcast.

In the spoof “educational modules”, viewers are treated as students, and given problems to solve that require a protractor, a pair of compasses and some brain-enhancing chewing gum. One idea they float would involve audiences being taught how to correctly shave raspberries before coating them in gold. Everyday lab apparatus is absurdly renamed – a conical flask becomes a Bakerloo bell jar – while deadpan narration is supplied by Nigel Lambert, who assures us that the largest known number is 45 billion, and the main use of snow is entertainment.

Every joke hits the same target: how readily we swallow what the TV feeds us. As with Chris Morris’s Brass Eye, you’re bombarded with important-sounding nonsense, such as germs originating in Germany, or champagne reacting violently with sulphur to form sulphagne. Some of the presented facts are clearly bats; others seem plausible; and some require a second viewing to catch – man making use of iron since the stone age, for example, or maths being an acronym for Mathematical Anti-Telharsic Harfatum Septomin.

The programme fixes on all the absurdities that those vintage school programmes presented as normal, or glossed over entirely. There are the white-coated scientists whose faces you never see (why?); the clock countdown that precedes the title sequence; the anonymous hands creeping over flasks labelled with Dymo tape (“Michelle”, “Meths”, “Moths” and “Maths”). There’s the twinkly Yamaha CS-70 soundtrack, scientifically designed to seduce Boards of Canada fans. Plus there are the programme’s testimonials, which include guest commentaries by Trey Parker and Matt Stone. There is even Simpsons creator Matt Groening describing Look Around You as “one of the funniest shows I’ve ever seen”.

Popper and Serafinowicz would collaborate again on a studio-set second series, not to mention a fake religion, Tarvuism (“Six months ago I was in prison for arson – then someone gave me a brochure, and now I’m a priestmunty at my local Chabbernaggle!”). But these shows capture them at their funniest and most insightful. Now, note that down.