Melvyn Bragg steps down from presenting In Our Time

I love this programme and have listened to it since its inception. My goodness though is it guilty of reinforcing two quite negative parts of British media culture to which I am quite sensitive: let’s call them boffinphobia and basicism.

Boffinphobia is where an otherwise interesting scientific topic gets downplayed by a programme or news presenter as being too difficult for them to understand, and in particular said in a dismissive jokey way.

Bragg was particularly susceptible to this! In almost every episode* that touches on cosmology he would resort to a whimsical “gosh these numbers are too big for me!” or a “wow that’s going over my head!”. There’s one notorious episode on computer science** where he’s downright rude to the guests regarding complexity. Contrast with how he can barely contain himself when showing how much he knows about Horace or Napoleon or Brahms. (I contend that the virtue signalling exhibited by claiming “maths is too hard, leave it to the boffins!” is the opposite side of the same coin to showing off how much poetry and history one has memorized.)

Basicism is where, for example, black hole discussions always talk about spaghettification and then run out of steam before the interesting stuff. Any discussion of a complex topic will touch on the first handful of spectacular introductory facts and never get any further, all on the assumption that the listener has never encountered the topic before in their lives. I know the pigeon story about cosmic microwave background already: please elaborate on the latest anisotropy findings!

In Our Time is a fantastic listen, but brace yourself for a bit of eye-rolling at — and forgive me for paraphrasing Lord Bragg’s tone a little, here — the “omg stahp, nerd stuff makes my brain hurt!” schtick.

* Bragg seems to take things more seriously when Simon Schaffer is there. Carolin Crawford is part of the dream team as well. Both are exceptional science communicators.

** Another commenter points out this is the P vs NP episode: https://www.braggoscope.com/2015/11/05/p-v-np.html

I felt you could really tell his enthusiasm was for the arts.

Which is fine, of course, everyone has preferences; but the contrast with the much more rote science episodes did make me a little sad.

> I know the pigeon story about cosmic microwave background already: please elaborate on the......

We know that story, but many non-scientists don't.

The genius of In Our Time is genuine academic discussions accessible to the lay man. I found the In Our Time discussions on ancient Greece and the arts fascinating, despite these being two subjects I have no background in and know sweet FA about.

yep, i skip those episodes

similar issues are with non european cultural topics. You often get what i'd label wikipedia-depth

In Our Time is meant to be a brief tour of basically every topic in arts, science, philosophy, etc. And yes, Melvyn has been an arts presenter for decades (his The South Bank Show started in 1978), science is not his forte.

Perhaps you'd prefer The Life Scientific with Jim Al-Kalili? More than 10 years of him interviewing scientists and covering their careers and discoveries: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b015sqc7

Alternatively, The Infinite Monkey Cage is more comedic and science themed than In Our Time, with two scientists and one idiot for every topic: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00snr0w

For me, with a STEM background (and, I, suspect for many people here) the science episodes were never the most informative (though I would still learn a great deal about the history of the subject)

I'm not sure whether someone with a background in arts or history would say the same about the other episodes.

For those who want something entirely outside the STEM-heavy HN sphere of interest, there is another great BBC podcast about social science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Allowed

Likewise - I always skip the science episodes and wondered whether there were hordes of historians tutting their way through the other episodes. It feels to me like there are two types of science episodes though - one where it's pure science, and one where it's the history of a particular branch of science. Like you, the second I could generally stick for the historical perspective, but I always wondered why they have the first type on what is ostensibly a programme about history.