Until this afternoon I'd found myself resisting Brain Cox's new series Wonders of Life. The synergistic combination of BBCiplayer and an i pad came to its own when I prepared tea and listened/watched the first episode all at the same time. The resistance comes out of vague annoyance at his current ubiquity catalysed by jealousy of what he gets to do..
He obviously likes getting out and about and whilst his illustrative examples were well chosen part of the wonder of life is that amazing things are right on your doorstep. If he'd been talking on Radio 4 to Melvyn Bragg he could have done the same job in quarter of an hour and saved most of the budget. But television demands images, it needs glamorous wall paper to carry us between profound statements. And therein lies a problem.
I used to run a "Science in Society" AS level course at the local Sixth Form College. It did pretty much what it says on the tin. Back in the days of video recorders I recorded loads of science and technology programmes off the telly. Numerous editions of Horizon and Equinox as well as the full set of a personal favourite, "The Secret Life of Machines". All the video tapes were catalogued. Students could borrow them for research and from time to time we'd watch one in class. To make sure that attention was given where attention was due we'd watch a programme and write note and to keep myself busy I'd write notes too. In the early 1990's a single Horizon would generate 3/4 sides of closely written A4 notes. I'm not sure I would have got more than a page off Brian. I suspect that this reduction of content has become a general tendency. I know that I keep finding myself urging modern day programmes to hurry up.
Television is primarily a visual medium and as tellys have got bigger there's an even bigger need to keep up the flow of images. For a programme dealing with natural history or geology the images can directly illustrate an underlying argument but, when dealing with more abstract subjects, they can seem contrived, often break the flow and take away the opportunity to develop an extended argument.
There are some topics that can work on the radio but don't stand a chance on the telly. I once heard a series of interviews with paedophiles on Radio 4. On TV there would have had to be pixelated, or otherwise disguised, pictures of the contributors. Unlike on the radio, where you couldn't tell that these weren't otherwise normal people, there would have been no choice but to see them as somehow strange.
As for Brian, it turns out he's alright. One little scene summed it up for me; swimming in a salt water lake with millions of golden jellyfish he simply remarked "Don't think I'm being hyperbolic but this really is amazing". He just is the sort of person who would use the word hyperbolic in ordinary conversation and if he says things simply that's not because he's talking down to anyone but because that's the best way to be understood. Like David Attenborough, you can tell that he's not just delivering a script.
The only little thing that I think he might have been slightly unhappy about were the graphics which gave different animals' typical energy consumption to silly numbers of significant figures. When the caption says 3.871 joules/sec does it really mean somewhere between 3.8705 and 3.8714 or are the extra figures in there just to make them seem more authoritative. I'd have preferred "about 4 joules/sec" and as a physicist I'm sure he would too.
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