Every year, BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) hold a nationwide search for academics with new ideas that will resonate with a wider audience. These New Generation Thinkers represent some of the brightest scholars in the country and their research has the potential to redefine our understanding of an array of topics, from our history to the way we speak.
The New Generation Thinkers will have the prestigious opportunity to communicate their research by making programmes for BBC Radio 3. They will also be provided with unique access to training and support from AHRC and the BBC. New Generation Thinkers alumni have gone on to become prominent public figures in their fields, as well as the face of major documentaries, TV series, and regular figures in public debate.
Dr Passey will work on programmes around the theme of ‘Splish, splash, splosh: the sound of the sea’.
When Charles Babbage, father of the computer, looked to the sea he imagined its churning waves storing sounds and broadcasting them back. When Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne stood upon Cornish cliffs he heard in the crashing waves the sounds of an Arthurian battle – an echo from 400 years before. Joan Passey’s essay considers our relationship with water, from coastal foghorns to the “dead zones” where sound fails to travel, to the noise pollution destroying ecosystems.
The academics taking part in the scheme were chosen after a four-month selection process, including a series of day-long workshops. They have undergone training and development with the AHRC and will spend a year being mentored by producers from Radio 3’s Free Thinking programme, where they will appear to take part in discussions about a wide range of topics throughout the year. They will also be working on episodes of The Essay to be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 next spring.
Dr Joan Passey is a lecturer in the English department at the University of Bristol and is the CEH’s events officer. Her webpage is joanpassey.com.
Bristol is widely seen as the ‘Hollywood’ of wildlife film-making and is famously home to the BBC’s Natural History Unit, formally established in the city in 1957. The University of Bristol Library’s Special Collections has embarked on a 2 year project to preserve and promote the mixed-media ‘Wildfilm’ archive, supported by funding from the Wellcome Trust.
An example draft shooting script for the first episode of ‘The Living Planet’ (1984), working title ‘Planet Earth’, later re-used in the 2006 BBC series! [G. Lever]
I am the Project Archivist working to catalogue and re-package the material, making it available to search online and access in person at the Special Collections reading room. There are treatments, post-production scripts, dubbing cue sheets, filming trip planning, photographs, research and correspondence – documenting a given programme from conception to broadcast – as well as audience research reports, publicity and press packs.
A Radio Times cover from 1962 featuring Peter Scott for the ‘Look’ series [G. Lever]
A substantial part of the collection is audio-visual, including several hundred reels of 16mm film footage. Among the cans are films produced by Survival Anglia, the BBC, and ethologist Niko Tinbergen FRS (1907-1988) and naturalist Eric Ashby MBE (1918-2003). The archive also contains sound recordings, radio broadcasts and audio from talks and festivals. In Digi-Beta format there is a selection of the 150 most important wildlife films selected by BBC producer Christopher Parsons (1932-2002) and a VHS library collected by Jeffery Boswall (1931-2012), another BBC producer whose papers are also in the archive.
An example of 16mm film cans in the collection [G. Lever]
As evidence of method and technique there are two of the home-made sound-proof boxes made by Eric Ashby, enabling him to capture intimate footage of badgers and foxes in their natural state of behaviour. For further interpretation there are some unusual supplementary objects such as the penguin flipper, skulls and skin collected during filming in South America for ‘The Private Life of the Jackass Penguin’ (1973).
Eric Ashby’s home-made box for insulating sound made by camera equipment [Helen Lindsay] A dubbing cue sheet for an episode of the BBC’s ‘The World About Us’ [G. Lever]
It’s an incredibly exciting project to be involved in. I’m working alongside Peter Bassett, a producer with the BBC Natural History Unit who has acted as guardian and advocate for the collection and is a font of knowledge on the history of wildlife film making. Nigel Bryant, Audiovisual Digitisation Officer will join the project for a year to produce lossless digital preservation copies of selected material, enhancing the accessibility of audio-visual media in the collection and protecting the longevity of these fragile, obsolete formats. We’re confident the archive offers significant research value to a variety of disciplines and interests – from the history of media and television to environmental studies, anthropology, history, philosophy and music.
Consistently these films bear witness to changes in the natural world leading us towards today’s climate crisis, educating us about the animal kingdom and the landscape we inhabit, reminding us of our responsibility to protect it.
The artist Jody’s mural of Greta Thunberg on the side of the Tobacco Factory, North Street, Bristol [G. Lever]
The climate activist Greta Thunberg recently guest edited an episode of the Today programme on BBC Radio 4. During a Skype interview with Sir David Attenborough, she said:
“When I was younger, when I was maybe 9-10 years old, the thing that made me open my eyes for what was happening with the environment was films and documentaries about the natural world, and what was going on, so thank you for that, because that was what made me decide to do something about it.”
The archive has its foundations in a project led by another Bristol based organisation, Wildscreen, founded in 1982 by Christopher Parsons. Wildscreen hosts an internationally renowned biennial festival on wildlife film (the 20th anniversary festival will be held later this year, 19-23 October 2020) and supports a variety of conservation organisations. It launched ‘WildFilmHistory: 100 years of wildlife film making’ in 2008, a Heritage Lottery funded project that led to a collection of material which now forms part of the ‘Wildfilm’ archive.
Another compelling aspect of the collection is a series of oral history films made by the WildFilmHistory project, spanning all facets of film-making from producers and cameramen to composers and narrators. The interviews capture both the professional and personal alliance between subject and interviewer, enabling discussion to draw out the working relationships behind the creation of pivotal series such as the BBC’s ‘Life on Earth’ (1979) and ITV’s ‘Survival’ (1961-2001).
The content of interviews ranges from anecdotal to technical, covering the logistical challenges of filming in remote places, photographic technique, reliability of equipment, battling physical elements, ingenious ways of tackling technological limitations and reflecting on moments of fortune and failure.
It is a renowned ambition of natural history film-making to capture a rare species or behaviour on camera for the first time; paperwork in the archive documents how this is attempted and achieved, and the role narrative construction may have to play in documentary film.
In a recent speech at the World Economic Forum, Sir David Attenborough said:
“When I made my first television programmes most audiences had never even seen a pangolin – indeed few pangolin had ever seen a TV camera!”
There has been an astonishing level of cultural and technological change since the programme, ‘Zoo Quest for a Dragon’ was broadcast in 1956 on the BBC – then one channel with national coverage only recently extending beyond London and Birmingham. In his published diaries for the Zoo Quest series, ‘Adventures of a Young Naturalist’, Attenborough recollects the obstacles involved in locating species unique to regions of Guyana, Indonesia and Paraguay. Through such programmes viewers gained their first glimpse of far flung parts of the world, now increasingly accessible with the growth of air travel and the tourism industry.
Improvements in technology allow viewers to observe the animal kingdom from new perspectives. The archive spans an era during which television has evolved from black and white to regular colour broadcasting in the late 1960s, and the invention of cinematic IMAX presentation to home based on-demand UHD (Ultra High Definition) 4KTV offered by streaming services today. In the same speech, Attenborough says:
“The audience for that first series, 60 years ago, was restricted to a few million viewers... My next series will go instantly to hundreds of millions of people in almost every country on Earth via Netflix”.
As well as the BBC Natural History Unit, the archive contains material for Survival Anglia, Granada, Partridge Films and the RSPB Film Unit, and international networks like the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and TVNZ.
There is a slim body of literature and theory on the history of wildlife film, but within the archive there is a unique collection of studies and published papers by academics tapping into this potential. Two excellent books are ‘Wildlife Films’ by Derek Bousé (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000) and ‘BBC Wildlife Documentaries in the Age of Attenborough’ by Jean-Baptiste Gouyon (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
Some material relating to Granada’s ‘Zoo Time’ series (1956-1968) [G. Lever]
All this material is being described in a detailed catalogue, capturing key words such as species and filming locations to ensure relevant content can be found by anyone with an interest in the archive. When complete the full catalogue will be launched on the Special Collections webpage in the summer of 2021.
Binge-watching of boxsets on
BBC iPlayer or Netflix is a growing habit. And binge-listening isn’t far
behind. Podcast series downloadable through BBC Sounds are all the rage (with a
little help from footballer Peter Crouch). Enter Radio 4’s ‘Forest 404’ – hot
off the press as a 27-piece boxset on the fourth day of the fourth month (4
April 2019). This is something I’ve been involved in recently: an experimental
BBC sci-fi podcast that’s a brand-new listening experience because of its
three-tiered structure of drama, factual talk and accompanying soundscape (9 x
3 = 27).
Try
to imagine a world in which not only forests but every last trace of the
natural world as we know it has been erased (almost……). This eco-thriller by
Timothy X. Atack (credits include ‘Dr Who’) is set in the 24th
century following a data crash in the early 21st century called The
Cataclysm (404 is also the error message you get when a website is unavailable).
The action follows lead protagonist Pan (University of Bristol Drama alumna and
‘Doctor Who’ star Pearl Mackie), a sound archivist who archives recordings
surviving from the early 21st century. These include items such as a
speech by President Obama’s on climate change, Neil Armstrong’s remarks after landing on the moon and
Beyoncé’s ‘Crazy
in love’.
Pan is merrily deleting them all (useless and senseless). Until, one day, she
stumbles upon a recording of birdsong in the Sumatran rainforest that
inexplicably grabs her. In fact, she’s
left intoxicated, almost falling in love with it. So begins Pan’s quest to understand its origin and purpose
– not to mention her mission to
reconstruct the meaning of an almost completely eradicated world of nature.
Over the past couple of years,
I’ve been working on a project with the world-famous, Bristol-based BBC Natural
History Unit (funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council), exploring wildlife
filmmaking over the past quarter-century. We wanted to include and support a
creative dimension going far beyond the project’s more strictly academic and
historical elements. Something poetic and performative that could take the
study of nature at the BBC into new territory, and away from the visual. But
the core theme remains the same: the value of the natural world and its representation
in cultural form. This haunting drama focuses on that cultural value very
closely by exploring an alien and alienating future world without nature – a
world where the only memory of its former existence is preserved in Pan’s sound
archive.
This is a deeply historical
approach that re-unites me with a piece of research I published some time in
the journal Environmental History (2005) what I called the strange
stillness of the past – how sounds, both human and non-human generated, were
overlooked by most historians. ‘Forest 404’ also ties in with another recent
AHRC activity led by my colleague, Dr Victoria Bates. The project was called ‘A
Sense of Place: Exploring Nature and Wellbeing through the Non-Visual Senses,’
and I participated as a volunteer. It was about immersing people in natural
sensescapes using 360-degree sound and smell technologies. The idea is that we
can potentially ‘take nature’ to people who can’t go to it for a first-hand
experience.
With my partners at the BBC
and Arts and Humanities Research Council, I see ‘Forest 404’ as part of an
emerging research area known as the environmental humanities. The starting
point of ‘enviro-hums’ is the conviction that a scientific perspective, no
matter how important, cannot do full justice to the complexity of our many
layered relationships with nature.
The humanities and arts have a
big contribution to make in helping us to appreciate the value of what
ecosystem services researchers call cultural services. This denotes the
so-called non-material benefits we derive from the natural world – its
aesthetic value (beauty), how it inspires imaginative literature, painting and
music, its spiritual significance, and its role in forming cultural identities
and giving us a sense of place. Last spring, Radio 3 broadcast a week-long
celebration of all things forest and trees, following it up with another week
in the autumn. ‘Into the Forest’ was all about how forests have supplied an
almost unlimited source of inspiration for creative activity. ‘Forest 404’
confronts us with the brutal possibility of a world not just without forests
and trees but even lacking a conception of nature. And it makes us think about
how that absence impoverishes us culturally and spiritually as well as the more
obvious ecological dangers we face.
Accompanying the podcast is an ambitious online survey devised by environmental psychologists at the University of Exeter and operated by The Open University. Data on how we respond to nature has previously concentrated on the visual. This focus on natural soundscapes will add a fresh dimension to what we already know about how contact with nature benefits our physical and mental wellbeing. Give the podcast a listen. Then please do the survey – over 7,000 people have already done so. It takes less than 10 minutes.
