Scientists on the TV

Scientists on the TV: in my opinion they need to have personality, and if it is a bit eccentric so much the better: a bland personality and a subject like science is going to be a turn off. The late Patrick Moore was great because he was terrifically knowledgeable and a passionate educator. His correspondences with keen schoolboys could be unending as Chris Lintott remembered on the Life Scientific, listen here and he brought many children to astrology by writing books as well as by being a posh uncle figure on T.V.

There are many pictures of Patrick Moore as a fat old dear, when he was young he was rather handsome.

Chris Lintott does the Sky at Night now and he is very good himself. I like his enthusiasm for getting the public involved in classifying stars (and there are lots left to classify!) click here to find the site to start classifying.

Prof Brian Cox is very good because he has an attractive voice and has enough personality without making the show about himself. I used to dislike his crew for making B.C. look gorgeous everywhere he went, bathed in a golden glow from a lovely sunset in the desert/ up a volcano etc. but in his last series they let other human beings have their turn in the golden glow, children, young girls, old men, the lot. In this series BC's thesis seems to be that the whole point of the human journey, from our earliest wrigglings in the primordial soup  is.... space exploration! But I haven't watched the last episode so maybe I have misinterpreted it. It seems ironic that he tells you the meaning of our lives is the ability to explore the universe while the cameraman is shooting National Geographic-style pictures of goat-herders and nomad children who are too busy scratching a living from the dry earth to be interested in space exploration. So what about these people, Brian? No point to their lives?

Now Brian Cox is attractive to look at as long as you don't dwell on his mouth: the rest of him is fine and I like him in jeans and T-shirts. The best thing is that he is really not thinking about what he looks like.

Prof Alice Roberts has been taken on by my University, Birmingham, to spread the word about science to the masses, and I can't get on with her at all. She is too cute for words with her big smiley smile. I love her clothes and jewellery, hate her over-enunciated voice, and find everything she says boring and unclear possibly because if you take her away from anthropology, which is her subject, she isn't that confident. I liked her doing Wild Swimming, but I was already a convert (in theory rather than practice), and I daresay everyone else found it a bit bland. She is a presenter first and a scientist second, sadly.

James Burke (still with us, but not seen on TV) was very good at explaining science and communicating its importance without being a bore. Possibly he was over-exposed in the 1970s and he needed to be saved for short doses. Interestingly, he was at one time a teacher of English as a Foreign Language (like me) and his degree was in Middle English, not science, but he became well-known as a science writer and a consultant to a SETI project. (After years of watching science programmes I know what this means).

Nobody was a better presenter than Jacob Brunowski. His sentences were based on a lot of thought. Jacob Bronowski was a Polish-Jewish British mathematician, biologist, historian of science, theatre author, poet and inventor. Wikipedia

He had a good way of stopping after sentences and waiting for the next one to form in his mind. Not many do that these days, which is a shame. 

I wish we had more ecologists on TV. There was an excellent programme on the global threat to habitats on the radio last night: an entrancing conversation by very committed grownups: sad and serious though. Please try to spare some time to listen : Shared Planet

whoops: forgot to link to a personal review of science progs and science fiction on TV by Brian Cox, with Alice Roberts and Brian Blessed.

Quick: only here for 1 month