‘Programmes of Real Cultural Significance’: BBC2, the Sciences and the Arts in the Mid-1960s

Abstract

The advent of BBC2 provides an ideal focus for the study of the place of science in culture. Existing historical work on the televisual representation of science and technology looks only at science programming. This article proposes that such an approach misses what the medium supplies to the account of its subject. As a corrective, this article compares the treatment of science with that of other intellectual and cultural subjects, taking the case of the four monthly programmes that occupied the channel's initial Saturday evening 8.45–9.30 slot, treating: science (Horizon), social science (The Human Side), literature (Writers' World) and music (Workshop). Considering questions of televisual technique and grammar, it uncovers a common genealogy for all but the social science programme in the style and conventions of the arts magazine, Monitor. This suggests that the comparative study of television programmes can help the historian address the difficult terrain of ‘high’ culture as it was negotiated in the fluid circumstances of the 1960s.

Educational Imperialism: Phantom India and The Non-Aligned Movement’s New World Information Order, 1969-1980

“…18 From its inception, BBC-2 struggled to achieve an appropriate balance between highbrow programming and the audience's engagement. 19 Although this trend would mark the channel's early years, the introduction of colour television in 1967 managed to temporarily curtail these anxieties by fusing a novel televisual technology (colour) with an ambitious new form (TV history). Purposefully, the BBC-2 docu-series were produced to showcase all the possibilities of colour.…”

Music, metaphor and modernism: Barrie Gavin’s composer portraits

“…In the 1950s, Glock edited The Score, the music journal he founded, and served as chair of the Gavin arrived at the BBC during a period in which the broadcaster was re-evaluating and re-thinking the role of documentary on television as a medium for information and entertainment (Boon 2017;Walker 1993;Wyver 2007). This rethinking can be felt in the development of documentary techniques as well as more general editorial philosophies.…”

“…(Walker 1993: 49) , the series to which Gavin made numerous contributions. Reflecting the Glockian ethos of music at the BBC in this era, Workshop displayed a 'comfortable elitism' in its aspirations and content (Boon 2017: 339), with Gavin's 'Pierre Boulez: Portrait-Analysis-Performance' (first broadcast on 22 August 1966) a notable example of this approach (Boon 2017; see also below).…”

“…Barrie Gavin's Composer Portraits 1965-2017 My first encounter with Gavin's treatment of modernist music was in a film broadcast in 1999 as part of the BBC Two series Masterworks: Six Pieces of Britain. The subject of the film was the composer Harrison Birtwistle (born 1934) and his 1972 orchestral work The Triumph of Time, which as a student in the 1990s I had first got to know through performances by Sir Simon Rattle with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.…”

From engaged citizen to lone hero: Nobel Prize laureates on British television, 1962–2004

“…Nonetheless, the small number of programmes featuring Nobel laureates as recipients of the award makes it possible to identify an evolution in the presentation of these highly visible scientists (Goodell, 1977). I discuss these programmes in relation to oral history interviews conducted in 2014–2015 with former Horizon editors and producers 1 and in the light of an emerging historiography of British science television (Boon, 2014, 2015, 2017; Boon and Gouyon, 2015; Farry and Kirby, 2012; Gouyon, 2011b, 2014, 2016; Jones, 2014).…”