James Burke - Or is it?!

Science. Where would we be without it? Let’s face it, still languishing in the Stone Age. It has had a bum rap in the broadcast media for ages. While wildlife and the arts lauded it on the primary channels, anything vaguely scientific has been largely shunted off to the sidings, tucked away in the BBC2 Horizon strand, or to the slots labelled “Presented by anyone off Top Gear” while the ladies are cooing over Downton Abbey or Countryfile.

Even Brian Cox’s fascinating recent blockbuster series The Planets was relegated to BBC2 on Tuesday evenings.

If I’m honest, I’m part of the problem. Despite my Bachelor of Science degree, even I find much of science goes over my head. There is probably much of interest to me on Radio 4, BBC4 and Channel 4 every week but, when it comes to picking something online to fill a half-hour, I usually play safe and click on a vintage Top of the Pops instead.

It wasn’t always so, and much of the credit went to James Burke. He didn’t invent the Tomorrow’s World series but, while Raymond Baxter was perched on his stool like some military prototype of Westlife, he was involved in many of the most engaging demonstrations or filmed reports. There’s a fair chance I watched many of them on a Thursday evening whilst waiting for TOTP to start and even my nine year-old self would have enjoyed this humorous yet interesting four-minute film on executive toys. There were probably around ten million other people viewing, too.

He wasn’t the only lucid and congenial presenter on the show, but by the early Seventies he had become synonymous with science on the box. Much of that can be traced back to the hours of live broadcasting the BBC devoted to the wonders of space, in particular the Apollo space missions in the late Sixties and early Seventies. 

I was by no means precocious enough to revel in all the complexities of the technology and I don’t recall insisting on staying up all night aged eight to witness Neil Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind in July 1969. Most of the programming for the Apollo 11 and subsequent flights to the moon was blokes sitting in a studio listening to Mission Control jabberings and trying to make sense of them to the viewing audience. There were so many elements of sci-fi drama being played out – would the craft crash into a crater? Would aliens pierce the spacesuits? How could the module survive re-entry to the Earth’s atmosphere? - but this was real. it was just so long and drawn out, especially for a young boy who also wanted to play football or watch Blue Peter. This is where James Burke came in.

Watching an Apollo 11 retrospective in July, fifty years after the historic moon landing, I was delighted to see a still sprightly, if somewhat grumpy, Mr Burke being interviewed about those heady days. He also explained that he fell into science programming out of the blue. He’d been an English lecturer in Italy of all places when he was lured to the BBC arts department. An executive was smart enough to recognise that Burke’s skills as a non-science teacher would be perfect for helping the layman (and woman) understand science on the basis of his being a layman himself. It was a masterstroke, especially as I never guessed this ‘deception’ for five decades.

He ticked all the boxes for a boffin: receding hair, clipped but clear speaking voice and of course those glasses. The likes of Cliff Michelmore may have been the lead presenter and Patrick Moore the ever-present expert on all matters astronomic but it was the combination of James Burke and the haunting yet thrilling bursts of Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra which symbolise the years when science could almost monopolise the airwaves in a way that only the 2012 Olympics have done since. He was our conduit to the eggheads of NASA but in the end he was just like us, on the edge of his seat as the crew of the beleaguered Apollo 13 splashed into the South Pacific on 17^th April 1970.

Burke continued to grace the schedules of BBC1 throughout the decade. I was intrigued by his primetime series The Burke Special, which ran for five series between 1972 and 1976. With a different theme each week our radio mic’d host wandered amongst a small studio audience like a modern professor in his theatre. But they weren’t lectures. Like all the best teachers, he didn’t merely impart knowledge, reciting facts and figures; he made you think. He may not have been a science professional like contemporaries Magnus Pyke (ITV’s eccentric human windmill), Heinz Wolff or Carl Sagan (whose US series Cosmos blew me away in the early ‘80s) but he had a broadcaster’s gift of addressing his audience like adults with a thirst to learn.

In Autumn 1978, the Beeb screened his big budget series Connections. In my diary I dared to criticise him for being too simplistic and “full of generalisations” but once more I was hooked by Burke’s storytelling, as in this opening sequence. By this time he had competition. After years living off scraps, for a few months we were feasting on a banquet of landmark science programmes. BBC2 showed Jonathan Miller’s fascinating The Body In Question while ITV scheduled bushy-bearded David Bellamy’s Botanic Man on the same night as Connections, requiring some hasty channel-switching. There was even a biology-heavy drama series, The Voyage of Charles Darwin. Aaaargh! Science overload! When asked what I wanted for Christmas, I hedged my bets by saying that any of the accompanying books would be fine. I received Botanic Man but what I really wanted was Connections….

There were two further series of Connections in the Nineties but I remember neither. The same is true of the mid-Eighties ten-parter The Day the Universe Changed, which focussed on the more philosophical aspects of science in Western culture. According to my 1985 diary, I did watch but perhaps by then my poor work-addled brain found such material too rich to retain. In 1980, I was still in academic mode, albeit perhaps looking for distractions from vector fields or linear algebra. My diary recorded my viewing of The Real Thing, concerning our sensory perception of reality and how it can mislead. I described it as “all good mind-boggling stuff!” Mr B never majored in platitudes. He even earned the distinction of being gently sent up by Mel Smith and Griff Rhys-Jones on Not the Nine o’Clock News. Or did he….?

Since then, of course, science has nurtured incredible technological change transforming our lives. From the iPhone to social media, manufacturing processes to advances in medicine, so much has changed for the better. Yet perhaps the legacy of James Burke and his ilk has been to infuse us with the ability to challenge and question the apparently inexorable march of science; witness the recognition of the urgent need for sustainability to counter the threat to the living planet posed by our reliance on plastics.

Fashions and technology have changed but has there been a better broadcaster at explaining science in an intelligent yet accessible way than James Burke? I don’t think so.