Despite my almost eight years in Britain as an astronomer, I suppose I have to be embarrassed to admit I’ve never actually watched “The Sky At Night”, apparently the longest-running show on television (possibly in the whole world, not just the UK). But I’m watching this evening’s episode, mostly because I’m on it. I was filmed during last month’s trip to the Planck launch. As always, it was painful to realize the fat figure with the bad posture and annoying voice was actually me. But it was fun to watch Patrick Moore do his studio interviews, with a style and...
Posted by Andrew on June 8, 2009 10:15 PM
This week, Stephen Hawking was awarded the Copley Medal, and the BBC took the opportunity to broadcast the Today Show direct from the Royal Society, in what seemed to me a fairly amateurish production. Professor Peter Coles reprised his usual and welcome role as an anti-Hawking-hype nay-sayer. Another commentator (sorry, I’ve forgotten whom) made the crucial point that Newton, Einstein and Maxwell really invented entire new disciplines of physics with reverberations in almost everything we physicists do. In contrast, Hawking’s most famous work, on black hole radiation and quantum cosmology, consolidated existing strands (and is no less brilliant for that)....
Posted by Andrew on December 3, 2006 10:40 AM
BBC4 let us spend a night with my New Jersey homeboy, Bruce Springsteen. Selections from The Seeger Sessions, recorded with a BBC audience at St Luke’s in London, gave us middle-aged Bruce as protest singer, rocking up some folky standards. This may indeed be what the world needs now, but with its whitebread, bespectacled audience, it had a kind of NPR/Garrison Keillor feel (think Andy Kershaw without the hard-rockin’ Peel influence, and worse jokes?). But during the next hour, recorded at the Hammersmith Odeon with the E Street Band in ‘75, when Springsteen started singing “Thunder Road”, it sent chills...
Posted by Andrew on May 20, 2006 12:16 AM
While I was out last night planning the overthrow of religion with my fellow amoral atheists, the BBC was broadcasting a documentary in which it presented a poll showing that nearly 40% of Britons thought Intelligent Design or Creationism is the best explanation of life on earth. So it appears that Britain, too, is being swayed by the crackpots....
Posted by Andrew on January 27, 2006 9:54 AM
For some reason, the BBC's Today Program had a feature on the Big Bang and its purported problems confronting modern data. Apart from the woefully misguided Eric Lerner, the discussion was relatively nuanced and at least attempted to distinguish between a wrong theory and an incomplete one -- the questions that the Big Bang, as it stands today, leaves unanswered. The Big Bang per se is simply the idea that the Universe started out hot and dense and has been expanding ever since. This is borne out in great detail by observations such as the expansion of the Universe itself;...
Posted by Andrew on September 21, 2005 9:39 AM
The Observer also reports on the supposed anti-US bias of the BBC's Katrina reporting, citing a second-hand report from the always fair and balanced tycoon Rupert Murdoch on a conversation with Tony Blair. The PM supposedly referred to the BBC's coverage as "gloating" and "full of hatred of America". Even Bill Clinton seemed to echo these criticisms. I'm not so sure: I was in the US for the entire week of Katrina, and the reporting there was no less angry: angry not at the people of New Orleans, of course, but angry at the government for its slack response, its...
Posted by Andrew on September 18, 2005 12:27 PM
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