Author: Miss Cellania / Source: Neatorama
When PBS executives started planning a new science show in the early 1970s, people in the TV business were baffled. A show about…science? Were they crazy? Audiences wanted Happy Days and M*A*S*H*, not educational shows! Luckily for us, they were wrong.
IN THE BEGINNING…
In 1971 an American television producer named Michael Ambrosino was in London and happened to see some episodes of a science-based British TV show. Ambrosino worked at Boston’s legendary public television station WGBH, and he’d been there since 1956 -just a year after it went on the air.
WGBH was a pioneer in the American public television business and by 1971 had produced several groundbreaking shows, including The French Chef (1963), the cooking show hosted by Julia Child; Evening at Pops (1970); and Masterpiece Theatre (1971). In 1970 the station had become part of the brand-new, government-backed Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), with new funding that allowed WGBH to begin thinking bigger. That’s why Ambrosino was in London: The 40-year-old was taking part in a yearlong fellowship program with the BBC -the British equivalent of PBS- to learn production techniques. There he observed the making of several episodes of Horizon, an educational science-based series that, to the surprise of BBC officials, was actually pretty popular with viewers.
SUPRA-NOVA
Horizon was a groundbreaking series of its own, having proven that television shows based on scholarly subjects could make for riveting TV.
First airing in 1964, and roughly twice a month since then, Horizon covered a wide array of subjects. The 1969–70 season alone featured episodes on the science of insanity, the psychological and physical effects of alcohol consumption, the history and science of bread, an examination of wolves (and werewolves), and the role of expert scientific witnesses in the courtroom. The format employed a narrator who spoke over footage taken mostly in the field, and regularly included appearances by some of the era’s leading thinkers, who spoke directly into the camera in a loose, informal setting. It was nothing like a dull classroom session -and audiences liked it.BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME
Ambrosino felt there was a disappointing lack of educational science programming in the U.S., and seeing the success of Horizon spurred him to do something about it. “Science is a part of our heritage, our present culture, and a major force in determining our future,” Ambrosino said in 1998. “Its absence from television, our most public medium of communication, spoke to the ignorance of its gatekeepers, who thought mostly in terms of news and the arts. Science, medicine, technology, engineering, architecture all impact our culture by determining how we live our lives. They also make for great story-telling.”
In May 1971, shortly before returning home to Boston, Ambrosino wrote a five-page letter to Michael Rice, vice president of WGBH, outlining in detail a science show for PBS. His idea: to air a series of shows on a wide variety of science-based subjects, just like Horizon. And, also like Horizon, WGBH wouldn’t make all of the shows themselves -they’d produce some of their own episodes, make others in collaboration with teams from around the world, especially at the BBC, and air already-finished pieces made entirely by other people. This approach solved several problems, not the least of which being that WGBH didn’t have the resources to make all the shows on their own, but also that it would broaden the show’s range of subjects, making them more international and encompassing, and hopefully, more interesting to the viewers. And it was also a good foundation on which to grow into the future.
NOVA TO THE GRINDSTONE
That was the vision Ambrosino laid out in his letter to Michael Rice in 1971… and Rice loved it. The letter has essentially remained the blueprint for NOVA ever since. But there was still…
The post NOVA: Making Science Cool Since 1974 appeared first on FeedBox.