The Doctor Who team have now been asked to design new material to sit alongside the conventional linear

The Doctor Who team have now been asked to design new material to sit alongside the conventional “linear” programme when the series returns in the spring.When the BBC3 comedy The Mighty Boosh was premiered on broadband there were 668,000 requests, and 234,000 viewed material from another BBC3-originated show, Nighty Night, on the web and mobile phones.”You’ve got to keep experimenting, and if we don’t experiment on the creative side we will be prognosticating about these platforms and talking about digits and distribution and not thinking about the creative force behind it, because in the end that is all people really want – something that is good,” says Bennett.The results of the experiments so far suggest that there will inevitably be a period of “slicing and dicing” existing content. The online trial, introduced by Melinda Messenger, who has three children of her own, brings together 70 hours of video material taken from programmes such as Child of Our Time, Little Angels and The Human Body. Together, the programmes cover physiological, developmental and behavioural issues. Users with a broadband connection can search the material at any time by age or topic, and can, in effect, call up the wisdom of Professor Robert Winston or Dr Tanya Byron instantly.Tom Williams, who has been responsible for the overall creative approach on the TV Plus trials, was more than happy to use the Parenting service himself when his two-year-old son Isaac threw his first big tantrum.The response from users has been overwhelmingly positive, with many wanting the coverage extended beyond its current scope, the first five years of life. At the moment, the plan is to run the pilot service for six months. “It does feel like a success, but we are being cautious because no one has done this before,” says Bennett.Health and nutrition – indeed, anything to do with life skills – would also be obvious subjects for the video-on-demand treatment.

The evidence so far suggests they do.In the first two weeks since the Parenting Video On Demand site was launched last month, it has been used 43,000 times. “The BBC2 pilot will embrace much more video content on its website, and more broadband presence. You will almost be able to touch and feel what is on the channel,” she says.
The hope is that the BBC2 trial will put the channel more in touch with its audience and “open out to people’s conversations”. The new series of trials hold out hope that BBC programmes and specially designed content will be increasingly available on demand on everything from mobile phones to DVDs and broadband platforms.

The experiments reflect the fact that more than 18 million people in the UK now have broadband connections and 700,000 new homes are signing up every month, according to the latest figures. The number of mobile phones now exceeds the size of the total population. The BBC will tomorrow announce its most dramatic experiment in providing online programming – a trial that could lead to all of BBC2 being provided on broadband. Jana Bennett, the BBC director of television who has commissioned the TV Plus trials, which are already providing online content covering comedy, drama and parenting programmes, promises that the new BBC2 site will be very beautiful.

The stock was heavily traded last week on the London options market, with a surge in demand for call options, indicating that traders are betting that either results will beat forecasts or that there will be a bid for the business. “TV Plus is trying to find out if audiences want this content, which might be available in more convenient forms, at more convenient times, on different forms of platforms and devices,” says the BBC television director. But they are weighty enough to exert a gravitational pull that prevents the stars in galaxies from flying apart.A paper on the research is in the final drafting stage and should appear in a scientific journal soon.It is not time for astrophysicists to relax quite yet, however. Once the question of dark matter is resolved, there is the question of the remaining 73 per cent of the cosmos – made up of something even more mysterious called dark energy, which is forcing galaxies apart at increasing speed.”It’s fair to say there is more work to do,” said Professor Gilmore..

But there were two further unexpected findings from the Cambridge research. The first showed that dark matter actually has a “temperature” higher than that of the surface of the Sun.If it was made of hydrogen atoms, dark matter would be 10,000C and appear as a blinding light. Yet, confusingly, it does not give off any heat.The second surprise was that particles of dark matter zip about at 9km per second and are loosely packed.They are transparent to light, and unlike most particles of ordinary matter, have no electric charge. “Which is that you only find this stuff in big, magical, rather dilute lumps, about 1,000 light years across, 40 million times the mass of the Sun.” However, he admitted: “We don’t know how to interpret this clue yet.”Dark matter does not give off any light, hence its name.