Big Ideas is a Canadian television series produced and broadcast by TVOntario, on the air since 2001. The program showcases public intellectual culture. It was conceived by Wodek Szemberg who continues to serve as producer of the program. The show presents public lectures by acclaimed university educators and other distinguished guests. The show is intended for a general audience. The original host, Irshad Manji, was succeeded by Canadian actor/director/playwright Andrew Moodie on 2006-01-07.
Big Ideas airs on TVOntario on Saturday and Sunday at 5 PM, with repeat airings at 5:00 AM on Sunday and Monday morning.
In 2007, Big Ideas held its Best Lecturer competition for the second time. Dr. Michael Persinger, from Laurentian University, received the best-lecturer award.
Podcasts of the current lectures are available through the Big Ideas website as well as from iTunes.
Big Ideas is also the name of an unrelated PBS series that originally aired in 2003, as well as of a radio series on Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio National.
The show will be terminated in spring 2013 as a result of budget cuts at TVO.
Famous quotes containing the words big and/or ideas:
“We have no prairies
To slice a big sun at evening—
Everywhere the eye concedes to
Encroaching horizon,
Is wooed into the cyclops’ eye
Of a tarn.”
—Seamus Heaney (b. 1939)
“Forgetfulness is necessary to remembrance. Ideas are retained by renovation of that impression which time is always wearing away, and which new images are striving to obliterate. If useless thoughts could be expelled from the mind, all the valuable parts of our knowledge would more frequently recur, and every recurrence would reinstate them in their former place.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)