The BBC’s problem with science | Martin Robbins
As Ed Vaizey offers to meet with the BBC to discuss the representation of women on air, it's time to highlight another minority group excluded by broadcasters - scientists
Cleverness and science are to television what children and animals are to television. I first realised this during an episode of BBC Question Time, a politically-themed game show in which morons compete with a dimly-sentient studio audience to see who can make the most stupid remark; the prize being fleeting infamy on Twitter.
It was November, 2009. Hackers had stolen some boring e-mails about climate change from a university, and dullards on the internet were busy concocting elaborate conspiracy fantasies about them. For some reason the BBC had devoted a significant chunk of its current affairs output to coverage of their inane wittering. This included a question on Question Time, and the producers carefully selected a panel consisting of three politicians, spoof columnist Melanie Phillips, and one plucky defender of science – the comedian Marcus Brigstocke.
Brigstocke is a very clever man, but he's not a scientist, let alone one with appropriate expertise in the subject. There were no scientists. There are almost never any scientists. A chap from the show later explained that this was because they hadn't known in advance that there would be a 'science' question, but that is the shitty excuse of someone who believes 'science' is something you drag out of the loft on special occasions to do party tricks, rather than a natural part of public discourse.
Much of the BBC's science policy - to the extent that such a thing can be said to exist - seems to be predicated on this belief. God forbid that science should leak out from its carefully-firewalled home on glossy science programmes and contaminate current affairs output with its horrible facts. Even those women are allowed more guest slots than scientists.
All political questions lie at least partly within the domain of scientific or empirical study, but the idea that policy might actually have something to do with 'facts' or 'evidence' is one of the biggest taboos in modern politics. This institutional ignorance is encoded in the unwritten rules of Parliament itself; members can't call another MP a liar in the Commons, yet are free to lie at will to the public without the slightest threat of official sanction. In that respect, the rules of parliament are like the rules of a paranoid dictatorship, imprisoning whistle-blowers rather than dealing with the corruption they uncover.
The same attitudes have crept into television. The BBC's drive to avoid bias is admirable, but - whether through laziness or fear - journalists have fallen into the trap of believing that avoiding bias means avoiding any kind of judgement. The idea that a policy or political statement might actually be objectively, empirically, scientifically just wrong is alien to such people.
Instead we live in a bizarre place where it seems almost every half-baked opinion – no matter how stupid or irresponsible – must be broadcast to the world as valid and equal. In this polluted environment, attitudes to things like 'facts', 'evidence' and 'science' range from indifference to open hostility, as Adam Rutherford discovered when he made the mistake of appearing on Today recently.
The Today programme claims to be serious, but seems to work on the basis that the best way to enlighten viewers is to take two people and force them into a sort of intellectual-masturbation death match. Graham Linehan appeared on the show last year to discuss his adaptation of The Ladykillers and found himself ambushed by questions that weren't just hostile, but sometimes completely bizarre.
Rutherford's experience with John Humphrys was little better (audio). Every question was designed to put the guests on the defensive or to create conflict, and even reasonable points were phrased in an aggressive manner. Hasn't science lost its romance? Isn't this all a waste of money? Don't you wish you got some of the money that CERN gets? When his guests provided answers, such as Rutherford's neat explanation of the economic benefits of investing in scientific research, they aroused an "mm" or were ignored. Worse, Humphrys seemed almost proud of his own ignorance of the subject; it's hard to imagine a presenter treating economics or the arts in a similar manner.
While it's good that some of these questions are asked, the negative, confrontational approach doesn't do the audience any favours. As Linehan said last year:
The style of debate practised by the Today programme poisons discourse in this country. It is an arena where there are no positions possible except for diametrically opposed ones, where nuance is not permitted and where politicians are forced into defensive positions of utter banality. None of it is any good for the national conversation.
Speaking of debates, can you remember the last time you saw two proper scientists having a good one on mainstream television? Even the BBC's dedicated science programming rarely ventures into such territory, preferring to remain in the safe world of recreating GCSE-level text books in glorious 1080p. Science is built on conflict and debate, and yet little of this is exposed to viewers. When shows like Horizon do cover a hot topic it tends to be through a soft-filter – a narrator interviews people separately, calmly explains both sides, tells us which one is most likely, and moves on. The debate seems remote, distant and calm.
This doesn't just lead to boring programmes; it's also poor journalism. The BBC Trust's 2011 report on science found that only about an eighth of broadcast news items about research included the voice of an independent expert in the field, not involved with the research in question (see Alice Bell's blog for some interesting coverage of that report).
The tedious excuse is that science is complicated, and that having scientists debating and discussing their field in depth would be too elitist for audiences to cope with. It's curious that nobody seems to roll out the same reasoning when it comes to say sport, the arts and humanities, or economics. Thus Newsnight Review is free to discuss weighty issues like "gender and children's literature" or the merits of the Turner prize shortlist, while Professor Brian Cox is left telling us how far away the Sun is.
When scientists are allowed to get clever, TV producers are forced to go to absurd lengths to compensate. Witness Cox's recent 'Night with the stars', in which Cox was allowed to explain aspects of quantum theory on condition that various comedians and celebrities were brought on to act dumb and reassure the audience that nobody really understands this stuff. It was fun I admit, but if the BBC filmed a lecture about the life and works of Dostoevsky, do you really think they'd have a succession of celebrities coming on stage to look bewildered by the clever man's long words?
Why pick on the BBC? Undoubtedly the commercial channels are worse, but then I expect them to be. The whole point of the BBC is that - because of the unique way it is funded - it can take risks that other broadcasters can't, and make specialised programs for smaller audiences that might otherwise be unrepresented. Its portrayal of science is one-dimensional and disconnected: it fails to capture debate and the nature of progress in science; and it fails to appreciate the connection between science and our daily lives, between empirical research and the political questions of the day. This can and should change.
@mjrobbins | layscience@googlemail.com
Correction: The standfirst originally suggested Ed Vaizey was meeting with the BBC, rather than offering to set up a meeting. This was brain-melt on my part and I've corrected it.
The Broken Britain delusion | Martin Robbins
Hugh Muir's depiction of an increasingly angry and intolerant society is based on little more than a collection of things he doesn't like. 21st century Britain is probably as great to live in as it has ever been
"Angry Britain: why are we becoming so intolerant?" That's the titular question of a piece by Hugh Muir that appears to have escaped from the Daily Mail website last night. Mysteriously unasked is the question "are we getting any more angry and/or intolerant," but Muir does offer us a few clues.
There have apparently been three instances reported in the press of "apparently ratty women berating fellow passengers on the public transport network." Three. This is clearly violence of Baghdadian proportions. It can only be a matter of time before warring factions of middle aged women lay waste to the entire transport system, causing the kind of disruption not seen since 8.45 this morning.
Muir then demands that the reader, "consider what we say these days to get a laugh," before quoting recent gaffes from the orifices of Jeremy Clarkson and Ricky Gervais. The last time I checked I wasn't Jeremy Clarkson or Ricky Gervais, nor indeed Hugh Muir, so can anybody explain to me what the word 'we' is doing in there?
Media types seem to love using the 'editorial we' to pretend that they're some sort of spokesman for the masses, when they blatantly wouldn't know a mass of humanity if it arrived in their living room demanding gruel. Muir is a diary editor for the Guardian, and as such he can claim to represent approximately 0.00000014% of the UK's population. He certainly doesn't represent me; even less so the tens of thousands of people who complained about the comedian, or the patron saint of mid-life crises.
"What do we like on the telly? Reality shows, the louder and coarser the better." No, 'we' do not. You apparently do, and it's mighty brave of you to admit it, but don't drag me into your depraved and degenerate viewing habits please. I'd rather my parents caught me watching internet porn than have them discover I watched Big Brother until the third series. In any case, how exactly do these "shows highlighting celebrities desperate for cash" lead to anger? Are gangs of Olly Murs fans roaming the streets of Essex smashing windows and abusing bus passengers?
The final two prongs of this rusty old pitchfork of an argument are football and schools. Football in Britain has its problems, but this isn't the 1980s - things have been improving steadily in the beautiful game for twenty years and Muir offers little evidence to the contrary. Football hooliganism has been around since Victorian days, and what we have now is nothing like the bad old days of the 1970 and '80s.
As for schools, the endemic use of homophobic insults by children is a real and serious problem, but hardly new. In past decades racist, homophobic and sexist views were far more openly displayed across the whole of society. Sex between two men was illegal in England until the 1960s, and before 1861 it was punishable by death.
In short, Muir takes a bunch of things that he doesn't like, and declares that therefore Britain is getting angrier and more intolerant. He doesn't attempt to elaborate on how much angrier or more intolerant, or over what period; nor does he offer a single shred of concrete statistical evidence to back up his ill-defined claims.
And ironically, it's this that makes me angry (damn you Muir, you win!). I'm utterly fed up of this tedious, hysterical 'broken Britain' narrative that a collection of people in the media seem determined to hammer us with ad nauseam until through sheer force of repetition it becomes accepted wisdom, and everyone's spirit is crushed.
I'm thirty years old, and even in my short lifetime Britain has become an immeasurably better place to live in. Most British people are healthier, and - in spite of the shitty economy - wealthier than any of their ancestors could have dreamed of. Our health service is one of the best in the world. Not content to rest on our laurels after producing the likes of Shakespeare, Newton and Darwin, the British still punch far above our weight in science, literature and the arts.
Homes have been transformed by amazing new technology that clever British people remain on the forefront of developing. You can read this article on the world wide web that a Brit invented, using an iPad designed by a Brit and powered by a cutting edge mobile processor developed by a British company, and yet tedious morons still insist that 'we don't make anything anymore'.
In spite of tuition fees more people get a better education than at probably any other period in history. Crime is low, and war - for most of us - is mercifully distant. The swaggering bigotry that was commonplace when I was at school in the 80s still exists, but far less openly.
Of course we still have our problems - particularly in the current economic climate - and we always will have; but by almost any honest, objective measurement I can think of, things are better now than they ever were. I can't think of any time I'd rather be alive than now, and I'd rather be living in Britain than almost any other nation. Why are so many people determined to believe otherwise?
