BBC NATURAL HISTORY VERSUS SCIENCE PARADIGMS

Abstract

In 1979 the finale of David Attenborough’s Life on Earth featured Attenborough’s iconic forest floor romp with mountain gorillas. Two decades later and Sir David was still being asked to re-enact this memorable piece of television on the Parkinson chat show. Life on Earth had become the BBC’s first David Attenborough blockbuster to be followed by The Trials of Life, The Living Planet, The Life of Plants, up to the most recent, The Life of Mammals, in 2002. The outcome of this success has been to invest BBC natural history television with scientific authority. The BBC Natural History Unit and BBC Wildlife Magazine have become dominant conduits for popular natural science in the UK. Natural history television often relied implicitly upon science for advice and subject material. Recently the links have been made explicit with wildlife filmmakers and scientists’ research depicted working hand in hand, e.g. The Blue Planet and Walking with Dinosaurs. However the very success of the BBC’s wildlife output has produced a schism between the presentation of natural history and of the other sciences, e.g. cosmology, geology, non-wildlife biology. These sciences, explored in other generic programmes, e.g. Horizon or specific series e.g. Space, are promoted separately from natural history programmes. This schism extends to the BBC’s website, www.bbc.co.uk, which separates the genres between ‘/science’ and ‘/nature’, respectively. The science of natural history not only occupies its own broadcasting niche; it works to a different paradigm.