Kent Farnsworth recalls what his father, Philo, thought about television. 'Throughout my childhood his reaction to television was: 'There's nothing on it worthwhile, and we're not going to watch it in this household, and I don't want it in your intellectual diet'.' But in People Of The Century (World, 10pm), Philo Farnsworth is remembered as the genius who invented television. Folklore has it that when he was just 14, while tilling his family's potato field with a horse-drawn harrow, he had the inspiration that an electron beam could scan images on a screen in the same way as the harrow etched patterns on the earth. In 1927, aged 21, he put the principle into practice, creating the first television picture.
Farnsworth's achievement is recognised by being included in the CBS and Time list of '20 Great Minds, Great Discoveries'. But like some other great minds featured in the programme, he did not receive credit at the time. Corporate America, in the form of the Radio Corporation of America, contested his claim and fought a bitter legal battle over royalties. Farnsworth won, but his royalty rights ran out long before profits were made from his invention.
His disappointment contributed to a nervous breakdown. And he was not just disappointed by his treatment at the hands of industry executives who tried to write him out of the history of television, but by having created a monster that allowed people to 'waste a lot of their lives'. It is a feeling some share when their children are determined to waste 30 minutes of their day glued to repeats of the blatantly commercial melodramatics of My Fair Princess II (Home, 6.30pm).
Farnsworth might have regarded People Of The Century as a little more worthwhile, for being a chance to look back and remember amazing minds like his.
But the medium of this programme is strictly limited for such a task. The three minutes designated to Albert Einstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jean Piaget can only whet the appetite.