One strand of my reading this week has been taken up with Tim Boon's new book Films of Fact: A History of Science in Documentary Films and Television. Wallflower Press has published this in the same series as my Vision On; there's also a tie-in exhibition at the Science Museum, plus this New Scientist video of very early science films, with an interview from Tim.
There's much that's really interesting in the book, but one of the things that particularly fascinated me was his exploration of the relationship between scientists and the BBC in the 1950s.
Scientists in the 1940s and early 1950s lobbied both individually and collectively to shape how radio and the new medium of television dealt with science, technology and medicine. And while the Corporation resisted much of this pressure, they listened attentively and made a number of concessions, including the appointment in July 1950 of the aged Nobel prize-winner Sir Henry Dale.
Tim's conclusion to Chapter 6 sums up the way the relationship eventually panned out:
Scientific organisations had sought to control the BBC's coverage of science, but the mechanisms they proposed had not been accepted. The BBC's most senior staff had retained the arrangement under which contact with scientists that affected programme content was left as the responsibility of individual producers.
What I was struck by is that while the outcome was much the same, there was a huge difference between the organisation of scientists and their contemporaries in the arts. As far as I've determined, there was next-to-no official engagement with television by artists (apart from on individual films) or by the arts establishment -- and no sense that this was the business of the arts. Doubtless snobbery towards the upstart medium played its part -- and one can sense this in the reflections of the Arts Council in these years -- but certainly there was a very different idea within science and in the arts about whether or not broadcasters had any responsibility to both the subject and its publics.
One other footnote is the book's characterisation of the long-running BBC strand Horizon when it started in May 1964.
"In the first discussions about this series," Tim Boon writes, "its proponents wanted to make it a scientific analogue to the arts magazine show Monitor, which had been running since 1958... The first episode was a profile of Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome. This clearly shows how the ambition to transfer the arts format to the scientific sphere worked. In this portrait, Fuller is treated as a creative figure worthy of respect..."
Interesting how Monitor led Horizon here, just as a decade or so later, with the prestige presenter-led meda-series, Civilisation led The Ascent of Man.
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