As a televison documentary film-maker, I first became aware of the wonderfully wild mathematical mind of Rowland Morgan in the 1990s through his weekly Guardian column Digitations. I was intrigued and got in touch. And thus began an enjoyable collaboration in which Rowland came up with a number of characteristically inventive programme ideas, almost all of which sadly did not get commissioned.
Among the ones I most regret we did not make was Factulator, an innovative and educational ecological game show involving teams of teenagers, which combined a variety of entertaining studio challenges with alarming figures about the planet’s future. Another, Daylight Robbery, proposed to investigate the astonishing but true economics of crime, the ever-mounting problem we claim to deplore but really can’t get enough of, whether in fact or in fiction.
One that did was a multipart series for Channel 4 of graphically based one-minute films, down from the five minutes originally proposed, called E-lection Thoughts, to be shown during the run-up to the 1997 general election, about important topics that politicians were failing to address. They were further reduced to 30 seconds, and unforeseen editorial interventions gradually watered down Rowland’s most arresting propositions to the point where his statistical firecrackers became rather damp squibs that got lost in the ads.
But Rowland got The Guinness Book of Records to acknowledge “the world’s shortest commissioned TV series”, giving it at least some sort of record-breaking success.
