Would PBS ever greenlight something as interesting and non-Ken-Burns-y as "Synth Britannia," to which BBC viewers were recently treated? The documentary is described on the BBC website as site as "following a generation of post-punk musicians who took the synthesiser from the experimental fringes to the centre of the pop stage." Were Pete Townsend and Brian Eno, who predate the musicians profiled, really "the experimental fringes"? In any case, the BBC says that the Beatles-on-Ed-Sullivan moment for synthesizer-driven music came in 1979, when Gary Numan appeared on the British show Top of the Pops. Numan's best-known song in the United States is "Cars," which brings us to one of the themes of the documentary: the link between synth-pop and the work of the English writer J.G. Ballard, known for his dystopian ruminations on modern life, most famously in the novel "Crash."