Horizon was the natural home for the Bill Brysons of the BBC who once inspired a generation of young viewers to believe they could understand the universe. Writing in one of the many internet pages lamenting its decline, Matthew Stibbe described how he watched a Horizon documentary in the early 1980s about computer graphics, which was "the catalyst for a lifelong career in technology". Then the populists at the BBC overthrew the popularisers, dismissing their insistence that the corporation must tackle difficult subjects as the presumptuous affectations of remote elitists.

To his subsequent mortification, Stibbe helped them. As the journalistic fashion turned, the BBC organised focus groups on the future of science programming - a self-evidently stupid idea because if the participants did not know about the latest developments in science, they could not offer an informed opinion on what science programmes should cover.

The BBC did not care and Stibbe found that "the event was full of people who had no understanding of science. One of them was espousing a firm belief in astrology. When I administered words of guidance and admonition, she snapped back and said, ‘What do you know about the wisdom of the ancients?' as if this was the clinching argument. In the end, I was so frustrated that I started coming up with crazy ideas for future programmes. For example, ‘Inside Hugh Grant's brain'."