For those of us who live in towns, not cities, news of a forthcoming BBC/Open University TV series on Towns, presented by Nicholas Crane – the first of four programmes will be broadcast on Thursday 28th July at 9.00pm on BBC2. Colleagues from the Faculty of Social Sciences Gerry Mooney, Matt Staples, and Geoff Andrews have helped with the academic input to the series, which includes such places, towns, as Perth, Totnes and Ludlow (but not Swindon). There is an associated booklet with the series, and other online resources, which can be accessed via the OU’s OpenLearn site – the series will have its own site which goes live the day before the first showing on July 27th. The series and these associated materials explore the “many of the ways in which towns have come to be the places they are today; places that, while shaped by often very different histories, are also looking towards futures that might be very different but which are all characterised by uncertainty.”