theibcdaily
Executive Summary 29 Preparing for the future
“The responsibility of the TV industry is to be at least partly Reithian”
Television in an expanding universe
Professor Brian Cox OBE Region: UK
Interviewed by: Andy Stout
Professor Brian Cox's books and TV programmes about science have been read and watched around the world, and he is very much at the forefront of a new generation of scientist/broadcasters making science engaging and accessible to millions. Professor of Particle Physics at
Manchester University and a key part of the ATLAS and the CERN Large Hadron Collider projects, he is passionate about the role of television in the 21st century. All of which made his IBC2014 keynote ‘Television in an Expanding Universe’ unmissable.
“It seems clear to me that the
trend will be towards increasing fragmentation and perhaps towards the elimination of the 'channel' as we know it,” he says. “That’s already happening with on-demand services like iPlayer, Apple TV, etc. This will be seen as a good thing in some circles, in the sense that there will be more choice but there are also significant downsides if you see television as a powerful cultural force. “The increasingly old- fashioned model, where channels such as BBC1 broadcast a diverse range of programmes to a more captive audience, is important if you see one of the functions of television as being to operate as part of the education system – introducing people to new ideas and new subjects that they may not otherwise have come across,” he said. “Whether this is a
rearguard action – and in reality, we’ll all have to ghettoise at the feet of the market – is a good question. But even if such
fragmentation is inevitable, we can regret it and ask what that will do to society in the longer term.” There is of course a genuine thirst for knowledge. Cox says that he's met very few people not interested in the great questions: Are we alone in the Universe? How did the Universe begin and how will it end? How did life on Earth begin? How did humans evolve? And even the not so profound questions, such as: What happens when you fall into a black hole? Can we build a time machine? “If science programming is on the back foot then it is because of a lack of conviction amongst broadcasters, and a lack of appreciation of the responsibility of the television industry,” he says.
For the Professor, one problem in modern television is the amount of time and budget given to writing and pre-production rather than the filming. People’s time is expensive, he believes, and that tends to compress the writing phase. A relatively inexpensive way to make better programmes would be to allocate a slightly increased budget to the writing time. Are some subjects, such as a detailed examination of quantum mechanics, still largely beyond the scope of primetime examination?
Not so, says Cox. “The
problem with quantum mechanics on screen is that it’s very difficult to make it visual. The ideas themselves are not un-presentable by any means. What we need is a clever director or executive to come up with a defining idea for a series. In Wonders of the Solar System, [head of BBC Science] Andrew Cohen had a simple idea – tell the story of the planets using landscapes on Earth. We need something similar for quantum mechanics, and that’s the hard bit! The physics is easy.”
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