Science TV is too nice

Andy Buckley — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 23:00:00 GMT

Well well well, another blog post, eh? So soon: it’s only been… erm, two years. Oh. Well I never promised to be prolific. This one’s come about because I grumbled briefly on Twitter about the nature of (British) pop-science TV and immediately hit the restrictions of that medium. Twitter is a wonderful way to share neat things that you find online, and to make pithy soundbites & jokes (and for describing what you’re eating, the form of public transport that you happen to be on, listing film names with comic vegetable name substitutions…), but for exploring a non-trivial issue 140 characters is, to put it mildly, a limitation. I have difficulty fitting one of my normal sentences into 140 characters. So of course I came across as a whining idiot, prompting the reply “Yeah, we really should do more about how shit it all is. You don’t see that tone ANYWHERE” from Dara O’Briain. Well, not remotely what I meant, but who can blame him? So here’s an attempt at a more coherent and nuanced version that hopefully doesn’t make me come across as an anti- science, axe-grinding git. But perhaps as a slightly grumpy science nerd, which is fair enough. There’s been a welcome rise in the amount and profile of science programming on TV in recent years, a good whack of which is due to the influence of Brian Cox’s three “Wonders” series’, the LHC start-up & Higgs boson excitement, … and who knows, maybe it’s also due to The Big Bang Theory. Discounting the mostly-gawp-fest wildlife docs, there’s been Dara’s own Science Club, Astonomy Live, Bang Goes The Theory, at least a couple of series fronted by my old supervision partner Helen Czerski… and the long-running Horizon, of course. And that’s just the stuff that I’ve noticed.

Insectnation (Posts about blog science outreach)

Science TV is too nice