Recently I'd gotten spoiled watching nature shows from Australia that used SI exclusively. I believe I saw almost all of them on cable channels that allowed the Australian production companies to stick with SI in their narration.
So I was pretty psyched when I flipped over to a nature show that had an Australian narrator talking about the life of kangaroos in Australia. Imagine, then, my disappointment when I heard nothing but Imperial throughout the entire broadcast. However, by the end of the show I had figured out why this one was different. It was a 2002 production of Nature on PBS (well known for eschewing metric) with actual production done by the New York PBS station in conjunction with the BBC. That explains why no metric appeared anywhere. Too bad, too, because it maintains the fiction in the minds of most Americans (I'll wager, anyway) that Australia is still an Imperial country (except for those who have actually spent time there, of course.) Perhaps one of the saddest consequences of the British metric muddle outside of the UK is that (I have a hunch) most Americans labor under the misconception that the English-speaking world still uses mostly Imperial. If the UK had done as good a job of converting as the Aussies did, I suspect many Americans would have had to come face-to-face with the reality that the USA was standing essentially alone in the English-speaking world by not adopting metric in everyday life. I suspect that would have added more impetus from business and other groups to lobby the US government to put some kind of metrication program in place. Perhaps the UK government will still manage to see the light at some point and cross the metric finish line and thus (as a side effect) help us here in the States make the case for conversion. If Bil Frist can have an epiphany about embryonic stem cell research, maybe Blair (or his successor) successor can, too! :-) Ezra
