Professor Brian Coxs 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 Reithian role of television in the 21st century. All of which will make his IBC keynote Television in an expanding Universe' unmissable.
You're taking part in the keynote Q&A session Television's expanding Universe', part of which will examine the physics of television and how TV is evolving. Briefly, how do you see things developing over the next decade or two?
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. 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. There are also significant downsides if you take a Reithian view of television, however. I see television as a powerful cultural force - it can and does influence people. 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. 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.
You've mentioned both Cosmos' and Connections' as programmes that inspired you when you were young. Cosmos' has recently been reimagined. Can you imagine a show as complex as Connections' famously was being recommissioned today?
Yes I can. What I couldnt imagine a few years ago was a series of 13 parts being commissioned, until Fox did it with Cosmos. And that was a success, so perhaps we in the UK can learn something from the US about science commissioning! That was a bold move based, at least in part, on a belief that a science series of the scale and scope of Cosmos' might actually do some good! Bravo!
One of the most notable sections of Cosmos saw Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about the controversial' subject of climate change. Does making programming with co-production money inevitably mean you have to allow for fundamentally anti-science attitudes?
No. There can be no compromise in the presentation of science. Science represents our best view of a given subject area or question at any given time. The consensus shifts of course, as new data and understanding become available - this is the origin of the power of science - but this does not mean that all knowledge is controversial . It would be idiocy to allow a TV executive to nuance a scientific statement to appease sections of the audience. It would undermine the very foundations of our civilisation in fact, and I would not allow some fool armed with a skinny latte and the results from a focus group to do that!
Where lie the main difficulties in engaging the modern television audience with science?
In the heads of some in the television industry.
Is science programming on the back foot in the current broadcast landscape? Or does the success of series such as Wonders show that there is a genuine thirst for knowledge out there?
There is of course a genuine thirst for knowledge. I have met very few people who are 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? What happens when a star dies? As I allude to in my earlier answers, 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 to be at least partly Reithian. And let me repeat, I think the new Cosmos was a Reithian programme.
During Stargazing Live: Back to Earth', you had to interrupt a fascinating debate between generations of NASA astronauts to let a robot dog ask a dumb question. Is this always going to be a tension in science programming: the educator versus the entertainer?
Yes, that was dumb, and I blame myself for letting it happen. It was live, after all, and presenters can and should take responsibility for the direction of their own programmes.
What recent developments in physics have most excited you?
It's a tremendously exciting time in physics, and in biology actually. The discovery of the Higgs boson was genuinely important, and opens up an entirely new avenue in our exploration of the Universe at the most fundamental level. Inflationary cosmology, where we are beginning to develop theories that can at least speak of what happened before the Big Bang that created our part of the Universe, is another exciting area. And in biology, the precision that DNA sequencing has brought to areas such as human evolution is exciting. As is the new work on the origin of life.
Given an unlimited budget, what subject would you like to cover in a series? And, conversely, given a BBC4 budget, what would you like to examine?
There is no need for unlimited budgets - a standard drama budget would do! I would like to make a history of science, with an emphasis on the fact that the history of science is also a history of ideas, a sor
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Professor Brian Coxs 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 Reithian role of television in the 21st century. All of which will make his IBC keynote Television in an expanding Universe' unmissable.
