Trivia / Panorama

• Missing Episode: In 1955, Christopher Mayhew, a longtime Labour Member of Parliament who also did some work for the BBC, was convinced by his old school chum, psychiatrist and drug researcher Dr. Humphry Osmond (who coined the word "psychedelic" and was Aldous Huxley's advisor for his hallucinogenic experimentation) to do a Panorama segment where he would bring BBC cameras to his living room and take mescaline (still legal at the time), with Osmond monitoring him and asking questions about the drug's effects. The surviving footage is amusing and disturbing at the same time. Mayhew, a very low-key, proper kind of guy, stays calm throughout, and his descriptions of things like being dazzled by his living room curtains or perceiving his cameraman "disappearing in time" are very dry and clinical. Likely because of the controversy of the subject, and the sheer strangeness of the whole thing, the BBC shelved the episode. Mayhew talked about it a lot over the years, and the network finally aired footage of it in various specials of odd TV moments decades later.
• Streisand Effect: When the Church of Scientology uploaded footage to YouTube of presenter John Sweeney losing his temper, the resulting publicity boosted that episode's ratings. Made worse a few years later when a follow-up episode showed that Sweeney - along with former Church members - had been harassed by Church execs, including one of the men assigned to handle the BBC.

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