Joseph DeMartino
Senior HTF Member
I could swear I saw these two series mentioned in another thread recently, but a search of this forum turned up nothing.
Starting this past Saturday The Science Channel ran a "classic science TV weekend" (which actually ran into the early part of this week) highlighting great science shows of the past. Two of them were The Ascent of Man: A personal view by Jacob Bronowski and Connections: An alternative view of change written and presented by James Burke. I watched these two series during thier original presentations on American television on PBS in the 1970s and 80s, and was surprised to find in watching them that I still remember whole chunks of them word-for-word. TSC ran both series in their entirety, which presented me with a problem: For the first time my 40 hour TiVO proved too limited - something I never expected to happen.
I mostly time-shift with the TiVO, recording one show while watching another, grabbing shows that air at hours when I'm away from home. I don't archive shows, and 9 times out of 10 I watch them within 24 hours of when they air and immediately delete them. But with these two shows I wanted to record them all (at reasonable quality) and transfer them to videotape - which meant letting them run in real-time and thus having to save them for days until I could get the episodes transferred.) Given the amount of other stuff I normally record, and still wanted to, I found that I simply could not keep all the episodes of both - especially since I hardly ever user the VCR anymore and only had a single blank tape in the house the night I realized my dillema.
The upshot of all this is that I've managed to archive The Ascent of Man onto two VHS tapes, but had to dump Connections, deleting some episodes unwatched so that I could keep Ascent long enough to finish transferring it.
Three observations about both shows:
1) Despite some of the science in each having been overtaken by events, they both remain informative and entertaining. Burke and Bronowski, each in his own way, has a charm that is hard to resist - though I prefer the rumpled Bronowski to the slicker and glibber Burke. Along with Cosmos these two series constitute the "triple crown" of popular science television up to about 1990. Few shows have even approached their level of quality since, and I can think of none that had the magic intersection of subject and host and these three did.
2) The most striking place where the shows seem dated is not in the scientific theories they present (although Bronowski does present as fact that 1970s view that some lines of Neanderthal man survive in modern Europeans, something disproved in recent years by DNA evidence) but in the "state of the art" computer systems they use to illustrate their points. Bronowski's morphing of the various hominid skulls on a greenscreen cathode ray tube or Burke's illustration of "computer power" with a tape reel looked like something out of a time warp. Yet both have pertinent things to say about where computer and communication technology might (from their perspective) take us - which often turns out to be where it has taken us from ours. Given that Bronowski died in 1974, the year after he filmed his series for the BBC and the very year it first aired in the U.S., I'd say that's pretty good prognostication.
3) Based on the quality of the broadcast masters used by The Science Channel, both these series are in dire need of restoration and repair. The colors are badly faded and the video looks too soft, even for the telecine work of the time.
I think it is a crime that these two series (and Burke's follow-up Connections II, for all that I find it less interesting than the original) are not available on home video at all as far as I can tell, and certainly not on DVD - as they surely need to be. Given the dismal levels of science education and general understanding and appreciation of what science is and what it does among the general population, shows of this calibre are needed more now than when they were first broadcast. Burke and especially Bronowski make it clear that science and mathematics are intensely human endeavors, that they are the work of people with passions, likes, dislikes and prejudices just like our own, and that the product of that work affects us all profoundly in our daily lives. They are not subjects only of interest to odd-balls and egg-heads and "brains" and that one need not become a scientist in order to understand what science is and how it works, and how to judge scientific evidence and assertions.
Today science issues are often also political issues, and only a scientifically literate population can make wise choices about such issues. One of the reasons that these issues have become so bitterly fought in recent years is that the loudest advocates on all sides tend to be scientific ignoramuses, while the vast majority of the public doesn't understand the issues or the science well enough to realize this - much less to form their own opinions and urge the government towards the action (or inaction) that seems like the best solution to them. Instead they stay on sidelines or they join the side that most appeals to their existing prejudices or their emotions, mouthing slogans written by others in support of positions they don't understand - vast opposing armies of the ignorant, led by the equally ignorant, or by the cynical who will use a "scientific" issue to advance some other agenda entirely.
I don't give that overview of the situation - without specifics and without labels - to invite the kind of political disucssion rightly forbidden on this forum, but to point up the importance of having a population that understands, is interested in and cares about science. Bronowski and Burke and Sagan make their viewers care about science. They explode the stereotype of science and math as dull, dry, boring subjects engaged in by the kind of people you woudln't want to spend five minutes with. At the end of each episode of their series we felt sad that we only got to spend an hour in the company of these men - and that we'd have to wait a week to do so again. Children introduced to science in this way will at least see the possibility of the subject being interesting, however awful their textbooks and teachers may be in the classroom.
The shows also less directly teach history, again rescuing it from the sheer awfulness that passes for much of American education, and even literature. Burke and Bronowski (and Sagan, though to a lesser degree if I recall correctly) expect their audience to have a least a smattering of education and even to have read a few books. That's probably too much to expect from today's high school students, but if Bronowski's discussion of the Lake Poets and Romanticism's relation to the Industrial Revolution, or the connection between The Marriage of Figaro and the French Revolution inspire viewers to learn more about literature as well as science and history, so much the better.
Cosmos, of course, is available on DVD. I think it is high time it was joined by the other two jewels in the Science TV Triple Crown. I have no idea who owns the home video rights to these shows, or how to go about petitioning for their release. I hope someone here does. When I went to TVSshowsondvd.com I was appalled to find Connections barely mentioned and The Ascent of Man not even listed. I was checking from work, so can't log in and start voting, by I certainlly will when I get the chance.
So, who else saw all or part of these series, last weekend, who will join me in an effort to get them the kind of DVD release they deserve?
Joe
Starting this past Saturday The Science Channel ran a "classic science TV weekend" (which actually ran into the early part of this week) highlighting great science shows of the past. Two of them were The Ascent of Man: A personal view by Jacob Bronowski and Connections: An alternative view of change written and presented by James Burke. I watched these two series during thier original presentations on American television on PBS in the 1970s and 80s, and was surprised to find in watching them that I still remember whole chunks of them word-for-word. TSC ran both series in their entirety, which presented me with a problem: For the first time my 40 hour TiVO proved too limited - something I never expected to happen.
I mostly time-shift with the TiVO, recording one show while watching another, grabbing shows that air at hours when I'm away from home. I don't archive shows, and 9 times out of 10 I watch them within 24 hours of when they air and immediately delete them. But with these two shows I wanted to record them all (at reasonable quality) and transfer them to videotape - which meant letting them run in real-time and thus having to save them for days until I could get the episodes transferred.) Given the amount of other stuff I normally record, and still wanted to, I found that I simply could not keep all the episodes of both - especially since I hardly ever user the VCR anymore and only had a single blank tape in the house the night I realized my dillema.
The upshot of all this is that I've managed to archive The Ascent of Man onto two VHS tapes, but had to dump Connections, deleting some episodes unwatched so that I could keep Ascent long enough to finish transferring it.
Three observations about both shows:
1) Despite some of the science in each having been overtaken by events, they both remain informative and entertaining. Burke and Bronowski, each in his own way, has a charm that is hard to resist - though I prefer the rumpled Bronowski to the slicker and glibber Burke.
Along with Cosmos these two series constitute the "triple crown" of popular science television up to about 1990. Few shows have even approached their level of quality since, and I can think of none that had the magic intersection of subject and host and these three did. 2) The most striking place where the shows seem dated is not in the scientific theories they present (although Bronowski does present as fact that 1970s view that some lines of Neanderthal man survive in modern Europeans, something disproved in recent years by DNA evidence) but in the "state of the art" computer systems they use to illustrate their points. Bronowski's morphing of the various hominid skulls on a greenscreen cathode ray tube or Burke's illustration of "computer power" with a tape reel looked like something out of a time warp. Yet both have pertinent things to say about where computer and communication technology might (from their perspective) take us - which often turns out to be where it has taken us from ours. Given that Bronowski died in 1974, the year after he filmed his series for the BBC and the very year it first aired in the U.S., I'd say that's pretty good prognostication.
3) Based on the quality of the broadcast masters used by The Science Channel, both these series are in dire need of restoration and repair. The colors are badly faded and the video looks too soft, even for the telecine work of the time.
I think it is a crime that these two series (and Burke's follow-up Connections II, for all that I find it less interesting than the original) are not available on home video at all as far as I can tell, and certainly not on DVD - as they surely need to be. Given the dismal levels of science education and general understanding and appreciation of what science is and what it does among the general population, shows of this calibre are needed more now than when they were first broadcast. Burke and especially Bronowski make it clear that science and mathematics are intensely human endeavors, that they are the work of people with passions, likes, dislikes and prejudices just like our own, and that the product of that work affects us all profoundly in our daily lives. They are not subjects only of interest to odd-balls and egg-heads and "brains" and that one need not become a scientist in order to understand what science is and how it works, and how to judge scientific evidence and assertions.
Today science issues are often also political issues, and only a scientifically literate population can make wise choices about such issues. One of the reasons that these issues have become so bitterly fought in recent years is that the loudest advocates on all sides tend to be scientific ignoramuses, while the vast majority of the public doesn't understand the issues or the science well enough to realize this - much less to form their own opinions and urge the government towards the action (or inaction) that seems like the best solution to them. Instead they stay on sidelines or they join the side that most appeals to their existing prejudices or their emotions, mouthing slogans written by others in support of positions they don't understand - vast opposing armies of the ignorant, led by the equally ignorant, or by the cynical who will use a "scientific" issue to advance some other agenda entirely.
I don't give that overview of the situation - without specifics and without labels - to invite the kind of political disucssion rightly forbidden on this forum, but to point up the importance of having a population that understands, is interested in and cares about science. Bronowski and Burke and Sagan make their viewers care about science. They explode the stereotype of science and math as dull, dry, boring subjects engaged in by the kind of people you woudln't want to spend five minutes with. At the end of each episode of their series we felt sad that we only got to spend an hour in the company of these men - and that we'd have to wait a week to do so again. Children introduced to science in this way will at least see the possibility of the subject being interesting, however awful their textbooks and teachers may be in the classroom.
The shows also less directly teach history, again rescuing it from the sheer awfulness that passes for much of American education, and even literature. Burke and Bronowski (and Sagan, though to a lesser degree if I recall correctly) expect their audience to have a least a smattering of education and even to have read a few books. That's probably too much to expect from today's high school students, but if Bronowski's discussion of the Lake Poets and Romanticism's relation to the Industrial Revolution, or the connection between The Marriage of Figaro and the French Revolution inspire viewers to learn more about literature as well as science and history, so much the better.
Cosmos, of course, is available on DVD. I think it is high time it was joined by the other two jewels in the Science TV Triple Crown. I have no idea who owns the home video rights to these shows, or how to go about petitioning for their release. I hope someone here does. When I went to TVSshowsondvd.com I was appalled to find Connections barely mentioned and The Ascent of Man not even listed. I was checking from work, so can't log in and start voting, by I certainlly will when I get the chance.
So, who else saw all or part of these series, last weekend, who will join me in an effort to get them the kind of DVD release they deserve?
Joe
