James Burke stood on the roof of the World Trade Centre in 1977, looked out across Manhattan, and asked the most dangerous question in television: what happens when the electricity stops? Not as a thought experiment. Not as speculative fiction. As a documentary premise — grounded in the 1965 New York blackout that had stranded eight hundred thousand people on the subway and turned one of the most technologically advanced cities on earth into a dark, confused village.

That was the opening of Connections, the BBC series that first aired in October 1978 and quietly became the most-watched programme in PBS history up to that point. I wrote a brief note about it years ago, but the series deserves more than a passing mention. It deserves the kind of attention we reserve for things that were right before their time and remain right long after everyone has stopped paying attention.

Burke's central argument was simple enough to state and almost impossible to accept comfortably: modern civilisation is a trap. Not a conspiracy, not a design flaw — a trap in the structural sense. Every convenience we rely on depends on systems we don't understand, maintained by specialists we'll never meet, powered by infrastructure so complex that no single person comprehends the whole of it. The 1965 blackout was his proof of concept. Millions of people discovered in the space of twelve hours that they could not feed themselves, heat their homes, or navigate their own city without a continuous supply of electricity that they had never once thought about.

Nearly fifty years later, we still don't have a good answer to his question.

The format of the show was its genius. Each episode began with some historical event or invention — the plough, the watermill, Arab astronomy — and traced a chain of consequences forward through centuries until it arrived at something recognisably modern. A loom leads to computing. A medieval need to keep food fresh leads to refrigeration leads to air conditioning leads to the demographic transformation of the American South. The connections were never obvious and never forced. Burke had done the research. He walked through historical sites, handled objects in museums, and talked directly to camera with the confidence of someone who had spent years verifying each link in the chain before committing it to film.

What made this work as television — rather than as a lecture — was Burke himself. He moved. Physically, I mean. The man was never still. He'd begin a sentence in a thirteenth-century Italian church and finish it in a twentieth-century laboratory, the cut happening mid-thought so that the viewer experienced the jump as a continuation rather than a disruption. No other documentary presenter has ever used location quite like that. Bronowski stood and reflected. Sagan sat and marvelled. Burke walked and connected, and the walking was the argument.

The production values were extraordinary for 1978. Mick Jackson directed with a restlessness that matched Burke's own energy — crane shots, tracking movements through narrow streets, occasional aerial footage that must have cost the BBC more than they'd budgeted. The score by David Cain had a synthesised unease to it, something between library music and early electronic composition, that made even the most benign historical segment feel like it was building toward a revelation. Which it usually was.

Episode five, "The Wheel of Fortune," is the one I return to most often. It traces how the invention of the stirrup changed warfare, which changed feudal land distribution, which changed agricultural practice, which eventually — and this is the part that makes you sit forward — contributed to the development of the printing press. The logic is airtight at every step and completely invisible until Burke lays it out. That's the trick. He wasn't inventing connections. He was revealing ones that had always been there, hidden by the way we compartmentalise history into tidy subjects that never speak to each other.

I think about Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World sometimes in the context of Burke's project. Sagan worried about scientific illiteracy — about a public that couldn't distinguish evidence from superstition. Burke's worry was different. He wasn't concerned that people didn't understand science. He was concerned that people didn't understand dependence. That we had built a world so intricately networked that the failure of any single node could cascade through systems in ways nobody had mapped. The technology trap wasn't ignorance. It was trust — blind, unexamined trust in systems that had no obligation to keep working.

The series spawned two sequels. Connections2 arrived in 1994 with twenty episodes, and Connections3 followed in 1997 with ten more. Both were good. Neither was essential in the way the original was, partly because the format had been absorbed into the culture by then — every pop-history show owes something to Burke's method — and partly because the original had the advantage of genuine novelty. Nobody had told history that way on television before. By the nineties, plenty of people were trying to.

In 2023, CuriosityStream revived the format with Burke himself presenting, now in his late eighties and working within a CGI environment they called MindSpace. The ambition was admirable. Whether a virtual set can replace Burke walking through actual historical locations is a question I haven't fully resolved. Something about the physical presence mattered — the dust on the stones, the particular light in a medieval corridor, the sense that Burke was there and had come specifically to tell you why this place connected to something you'd never considered.

The first episode remains the most prescient. "The Trigger Effect" opened with that blackout and closed with Burke asking whether we were prepared for the next one. In 1978, that felt like a provocation. In 2026, after rolling power crises across multiple continents and a global infrastructure so interdependent that a blocked canal in Egypt can disrupt manufacturing in Stuttgart, it feels like a description of daily life. Burke wasn't warning about something that might happen. He was describing something that had already happened and that we had collectively decided not to think about.

I rewatched the full series last month. Most of it is on the Internet Archive. The picture quality is what you'd expect from late-seventies BBC film stock — warm, slightly soft, with that particular amber cast that British television had before everything went digital and cold. It doesn't matter. The arguments don't depend on resolution. If anything, the visual distance helps. It reminds you that someone was saying all of this forty-eight years ago, and that we built everything he warned about anyway.

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