Abstract
This chapter introduces the dominant framing, centred on scientific progressivism and underpinned by an evolutionary framework, which features in contemporary big-budget BBC science documentary series. Introducing the major literature and theoretical concepts on which this book draws, the chapter outlines the books’ approach towards analysing past broadcast media within their historical and institutional contexts. Summarising the books’ main arguments the chapter précis the idea developed across the subsequent chapters, that by analysing science media on evolution, we can understand how progressive and secular humanist narratives became embedded in the normative framings, narrative structures and visual devices used across broadcast genres today.
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Notes
- 1.
Matilda Eve Dunn, Morena Mills, and Diogo Veríssimo, ‘Evaluating the Impact of the Documentary Series Blue Planet II on Viewers’ Plastic Consumption Behaviors’, Conservation Science and Practice 2, no. 10 (2020): e280, https://doi.org/10.1111/csp2.280; Jennifer Males and Peter Van Aelst, ‘Did the Blue Planet Set the Agenda for Plastic Pollution? An Explorative Study on the Influence of a Documentary on the Public, Media and Political Agendas’, Environmental Communication 15, no. 1 (2 January 2021): 40–54, https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2020.1780458.
- 2.
Ben Dowell, “The BBC lines up Planet Earth III for 2022”, Radio Times Online, February 18, 2019, https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/documentaries/planet-earth-3-bbc-2022/ (last accessed 16/06/2021).
- 3.
Viewing figures are taken from Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board Online, https://www.barb.co.uk/viewing-data/ (last accessed 23/03/21). The series aired in among other countries, Australia, Austria, Iceland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Slovakia and the US. See Wonders of the Solar System, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonders_of_the_Solar_System (last accessed 23/03/21).
- 4.
See, for example, Barry Shitpeas and Philomena Cunk discussing Brian Cox’s ‘Wonders of Life’, segment in Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe, February 21, 2013, BBC Two.
- 5.
Will Mason-Wilkes, ‘Divine DNA? “Secular” and “Religious” Representations of Science in Nonfiction Science Television Programs’, Zygon, 55:1 (2020): 6–26, https://doi.org/10.1111/zygo.12574.
- 6.
Will Mason-Wilkes, ‘Science as Religion? Science Communication and Elective Modernism’ (PhD, Cardiff University, 2018), http://orca.cf.ac.uk/109735/, 273–277. In addition to his own publicly stated personal humanist beliefs, media commentators quickly began to associate Cox’s documentary approach with various secular humanist and atheist movements. See: “BHA welcomes its newest Distinguished Supporter, Professor Brian Cox, as he talks “Big Science” at BHA’s annual Voltaire Lecture”, Humanists UK Press Release, April 8, 2010, https://humanism.org.uk/2010/04/08/news-527/ (last accessed 23/03/21); “The Wonder Years”, The Times, September 1, 2011, 2; Jonathan Sacks, “Without God we tend to start worshipping ourselves”, The Times, February 23, 2013, 79; and Eliane Glaser, “Comment: The altar of Cox and co: Many popular scientists are atheist, but they use religious language and cast themselves as priests”, The Guardian, March 1, 2013, 38.
- 7.
Mason-Wilkes, 273.
- 8.
Jon Turney, ‘Telling The Facts Of Life: Cosmology and the Epic of Evolution’, Science as Culture 10, no. 2 (1 June 2001): 225–47, https://doi.org/10.1080/09505430120052301.
- 9.
Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Harvard University Press, 1978): 201.
- 10.
James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (University of Chicago Press, 2003); Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences (University of Chicago Press, 2009); Ian Hesketh, ‘The Recurrence of the Evolutionary Epic’, Journal of the Philosophy of History 9, no. 2 (1 January 2015): 196–219, https://doi.org/10.1163/18722636-12341300; Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt’s New World (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), 235–248.
- 11.
Robert Bud, ‘“The Spark Gap Is Mightier than the Pen”: The Promotion of an Ideology of Science in the Early 1930s’, Journal of Political Ideologies 22:2 (2017): 169–81, https://doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2017.1298548.
- 12.
For a striking case study of how geopolitical fears infused scientific discussions and scientists utilised popular mediums and narratives to bypass the mechanisms of institutional science, and in doing so popularised controversial ideas about violence among apes, which were often extrapolated to theorise on the emergence of aggression in humans, see Erika Lorraine Milam, Creatures of Cain: The Hunt for Human Nature in Cold War America (Princeton University Press, 2019).
- 13.
Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, Unifying Biology: The Evolutionary Synthesis and Evolutionary Biology (Princeton University Press, 1996). For a UK-focused history of the evolutionary synthesis, see: Maurizio Esposito, ‘Utopianism in the British Evolutionary Synthesis’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Defining Darwinism: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Debate, 42:1 (2011): 40–49, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2010.11.007.
- 14.
Peter J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea (University of California Press, 1989).
- 15.
A notable non-UK focused history of science media that has informed this book is Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette, Science on American Television: A History (University of Chicago Press, 2013).
- 16.
Both Bud, ‘“The Spark Gap Is Mightier than the Pen”’; and Allan Jones, ‘Science in the Making: 1930s Citizen Science on the BBC’, History of Education, 49:3 (2020): 1–17, deal with a limited selection of science radio broadcasts from the 1930s. While a history of the earlier science popularisers on American radio is provided by Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette, Science on the Air: Popularizers and Personalities on Radio and Early Television (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
- 17.
See Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom: Volume V: Competition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Jean Seaton, Pinkoes and Traitors: The BBC and the Nation, 1974–1987 (Profile Books, 2015); Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff, A Social History of British Broadcasting: Volume 1 – 1922–1939, Serving the Nation (Wiley, 1991); and Andrew Crisell, An Introductory History of British Broadcasting (Psychology Press, 2002).
- 18.
For illustrative examples of their work see: Tim Boon, ‘1962: “What Manner of Men?”: Meeting Scientists through Television’, Public Understanding of Science, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662518805314; Allan Jones, ‘Science, the BBC and the Two Cultures’, in Broadcasting in the UK and US in the 1950s: Historical Perspectives, ed. Jamie Medhurst, Sian Nicholas, and Tom O’Malley (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 101–20; Peter J. Bowler, Science for All: The Popularization of Science in Early Twentieth-Century Britain (University of Chicago Press, 2009); Jean-Baptiste Gouyon, ‘From Engaged Citizen to Lone Hero: Nobel Prize Laureates on British Television, 1962–2004’, Public Understanding of Science 27:4 (2018): 446–57, https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662518760790.
- 19.
David A. Kirby, Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists, and Cinema (MIT Press, 2011); David A. Kirby, ‘Harnessing the Persuasive Power of Narrative: Science, Storytelling, and Movie Censorship, 1930–1968’, Science in Context, 31:1 (2018): 85–106, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269889718000029; and David A. Kirby, ‘The Devil in Our DNA: A Brief History of Eugenics in Science Fiction Films’, Literature and Medicine 26:1 (2007): 83–108, https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2008.0006. For introductory texts on science fiction and science fiction television see: Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint, The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction (Routledge, 2011); and J. P. Telotte, The Essential Science Fiction Television Reader (University Press of Kentucky, 2008).
- 20.
Alexander Hall, ‘A Humanist Blockbuster? Jacob Bronowski and The Ascent of Man’, in Rethinking History, Science, and Religion: An Exploration of Conflict and the Complexity Principle, ed. Bernard Lightman (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019).
- 21.
Derek Bousé, Wildlife Films (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 14–22; Jean Seaton, Pinkoes and Traitors: The BBC and the Nation, 1974–1987 (Profile Books, 2015); Timothy Boon, Films of Fact: A History of Science in Documentary Films and Television (Wallflower Press, 2008).
- 22.
For more on Adams’ career see: Allan Jones, ‘Mary Adams and the Producer’s Role in Early BBC Science Broadcasts’, Public Understanding of Science 21:8 (2012): 968–83, https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662511419450.
- 23.
Bowler, Evolution; Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science; and Nasser Zakariya, A Final Story: Science, Myth, and Beginnings (University of Chicago Press, 2017).
- 24.
David Miller, The Circuit of Mass Communication: Media Strategies, Representation and Audience Reception in the AIDS Crisis (SAGE, 1998), 9.
- 25.
Roger Silverstone, Framing Science: The Making of a BBC Documentary (BFI Publishing, 1985).
- 26.
Robert M. Entman, ‘Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm’, Journal of Communication 43:4 (1993): 52, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1993.tb01304.x.
- 27.
For an overview of the major approaches to content analysis with regard to media frames see: Jörg Matthes and Matthias Kohring, ‘The Content Analysis of Media Frames: Toward Improving Reliability and Validity’, Journal of Communication 58:2 (2008): 258–79, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2008.00384.x.
- 28.
For example, Secord, Victorian Sensation; and Miller, The Circuit of Mass Communication.
- 29.
Fern Elsdon-Baker, ‘Creating Creationists: The Influence of “Issues Framing” on Our Understanding of Public Perceptions of Clash Narratives between Evolutionary Science and Belief’, Public Understanding of Science 24:4 (2015): 422–39, https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662514563015; Stephen H. Jones, Rebecca Catto, and Tom Kaden, eds., Science, Belief and Society: International Perspectives on Religion, Non-Religion and the Public Understanding of Science. (University of Bristol Press, 2019).
- 30.
Fern Elsdon-Baker and Bernard Lightman, Identity in a Secular Age: Science, Religion, and Public Perception (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020); Amy Unsworth and David Voas, ‘The Dawkins Effect? Celebrity Scientists, (Non)Religious Publics and Changed Attitudes to Evolution’, Public Understanding of Science (2021), https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662521989513.
- 31.
Thomas Aechtner, ‘Galileo Still Goes to Jail: Conflict Model Persistence Within Introductory Anthropology Materials’, Zygon 50:1 (2015), 209–26, https://doi.org/10.1111/zygo.12149; Stephen H. Jones et al., ‘“That’s How Muslims Are Required to View the World”: Race, Culture and Belief in Non-Muslims’ Descriptions of Islam and Science’, The Sociological Review 67:1 (2019), 161–77, https://doi.org/10.1177/0038026118778174; and Thomas Aechtner, ‘Darwin-Skeptic Mass Media: Examining Persuasion in the Evolution Wars’, Journal of Media and Religion 13:4 (2014), 187–207, https://doi.org/10.1080/15348423.2014.971559.
- 32.
The deficit model describes an approach to science communication that assumes lack of interest, support or belief in a scientific subject is caused simply by ignorance or lack of knowledge. Jane Gregory and Steven Miller, Science In Public (Basic Books, 2000), Chap. 4. For more on the deficit model in relation to broadcasts on creationism and evolution see Chap. 7.
- 33.
For more on the launch of Independent Television (ITV) in 1955 see Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom: Volume IV: Sound and Vision (Oxford University Press, 1995); and Bernard Sendall, Independent Television in Britain: Origin and Foundation 1946–62 (Springer, 1982). Despite the ongoing popularity of offshore pirate radio stations, it was not until the autumn of 1973, following the passing of the Sound Broadcasting Act (1972) that the first legal independent radio stations were launched. Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, 1995, 885–89.
- 34.
The original listings for all of the BBC show referenced throughout this book can be found online at the digitised version of the listings magazine the Radio Times: BBC Genome Project, http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/ (last accessed 16/06/21). The descriptions featured in the listings were written by the individual production teams creating each show, and therefore provide a relatively accurate proxy for surveying BBC content across this period. For more on the history of the magazine see Tony Currie, The Radio Times Story (Kelly Publications, 2001). All BBC copyright content reproduced courtesy of the British Broadcasting Corporation. All rights reserved.
- 35.
A version of this corpus focused on the years 1945–2009 first appeared in Alexander Hall, ‘Evolution on the Small Screen: Reflections on Media, Science, and Religion in Twentieth-Century Britain’, in Identity in a Secular Age: Science, Religion, and Public Perceptions, ed. Fern Elsdon-Baker and Bernard Lightman (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020).
- 36.
Julian Huxley, The Stream of Life (Watts & Co., 1926).
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———. ‘Galileo Still Goes to Jail: Conflict Model Persistence Within Introductory Anthropology Materials’. Zygon 50:1 (2015): 209–26. https://doi.org/10.1111/zygo.12149.
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Hall, A. (2021). Introduction. In: Evolution on British Television and Radio. Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83043-4_1
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