Films of Fact: A History of Science in Documentary Films and Television

Abstract

For most readers, the subject of British science films conjures up an all too familiar set of images. We envisage a celebratory montage, jump cutting between bubbling test-tubes, majestic pylons, white-coated boffins and a delighted middle-class family gazing at melamine plates filled with the successes of a decade of agricultural innovation. However as Timothy Boon demonstrates, this sense of familiarity obscures a long historical contest in which the aesthetic, political and pedagogic direction of the British science film and television was established. Films of Fact sets out to recover and, in some ways revive, the forgotten debates around the representation of science in the visual media through two interrelated exercises. It establishes a narrative history of the changing genres of scientific documentary from the Edwardian nature films of Charles Urban to late twentieth-century critical television series such as Crucible and Pandora's Box, whilst at the same time pursuing its own rigorous philosophical engagement with the idea of scientific popularisation.

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