(a) give talk

(b) go to pub.

This arrangement has a pleasing simplicity and an overwhelming logic behind it. For me, though, the sequence is usually as follows:

(a) watch other people’s talks

(b) go to pub

(c) fret about cables, props, signalling to the laptop, lighting and seat positioning for half an hour

(d) give talk

(e) gibber.

This was the fourth outing for Drinking Up Time, possibly (though probably not) best described as a peculiar sprawling lecture/performance-type thing inspired, to varying degrees, by Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell, Genesis of the Daleks, and the enormous pile of primary material gathered while trying to write a monograph about the history of brewing science for the better part of seven years without visible effect.

Overall, I’m happy that the thing is doing what it was meant to. The audience, though smallish as these things go, was… well, actually, I’ll come back to the general nature of the audience in three paras’ time. The most startling thing about it was that it included the British Science Association’s present CEO (as presently styled; “General Secretary”, the historical title, is surely a better euphemism for “person whose word goes”). He was there for the excellent and reassuring reason that he liked the idea of being at a history of science event in a nice pub. Still: DUT is a flippant and sometimes stupidly impolitic bundle of thinkage, and I did toy briefly with the merits of clambering out of the toilet window and running away.

In the event, the only thing Sir Roland queried me on was my brief description of the early BAAS – at which William Black presented his theory on thunder spoiling beer in 1837 – as a body set up to increase public involvement with science. I could entirely see his point. The Association now is concerned with engaging ‘the public’ in the sense of ‘people in general’, and makes a strategic play for audiences including children. The Association of “persons of distinction” in the 1830s was nothing like this.

‘Public’, however, is famously the most slippery term in HoS. In a nineteenth-century sense, David Brewster and chums were desperately concerned with bringing scientific discussion to a wider public. The Association’s founding declarations, with their aim to improve “the intercourse of those who cultivate Science in different parts of the British Empire”, implied a dig at the insular culture of metropolitan philosophy. The people whose knowledge and influence the Association wanted to recruit included the textile masters in textile towns; the ironmasters in iron towns; the maritime masters in maritime towns; and so on. (And, of course, practical brewer-authors like Black, whose theory sounded perfectly reasonable to Michael Faraday.) This definition of a “person of distinction” was not the one in use at the Royal Society.

Which brings me back to my audience. The established point of Drinking Up Time is to try to recruit audiences who would not otherwise be at science festival events at all – people who are intelligent, discerning drinkers (on that much I insist, hence the pub selection policy), but who generally only have evenings free, and aren’t likely to spend them wandering around university campuses. At some previous pub events, we’ve managed to achieve a fair number of regulars and semi-regulars wafting through into the function room. This time – despite having an enthusiastic landlord, which is always a blessing – the room was at least half full of other Science Festival event organisers and speakers.

Is this a problem? I wonder. “Public”, you see, is also the most slippery term in public engagement.

Nobody who’s serious about PE wants to be seen to be running a version of the fabled island economy where everyone subsists by taking in everyone else’s laundry. If the History of Science Section ran an event at and only established HoS Section people turned up, this would rightly be regarded as a waste of time and money. But what about recruiting from other disciplines? At DUT, I had people from geology, arch and anth, and others who’d found us via the science fiction event earlier in the day, whose fields I wasn’t sure about. Are these people, festooned with doctorates and Festival lanyards as they are, “the public”?

The answer is surely yes, if the practical aim is to promote contextual understanding of the history of science. If I’m doing my job properly, some of the ideas in DUT will be as unfamiliar and interesting to, say, an experienced physics lecturer, as they will be to anybody else.

In fact, DUT goes in fairly hard in rejecting the narrative of scientific progress – a conventional doctrine in HoS, but one which famously gives offence to many working scientists. I’ve had no complaints so far. This is possibly because the pill is deliberately sugared eight ways to hell by the nature of the presentation, and possibly because people keep going to the bar during the shouty bits; but it’s possibly, just possibly, because what I’m saying makes sense to them.

I have occasionally heard people in universities using the term “inreach” – by analogy with “outreach” – to describe projects aimed at persuading students, academics and/or other staff to engage with this, that or the other activity which the institution does, but they themselves (so far) don’t. “Inreach” is a repellent name for a useful concept. Scientists constitute an obvious and important mission field for HoSers. And also an instructive one, because they will not tolerate being patronised, and will rarely settle for less than proper two-way dialogue. (Although I managed to get mine to keep quiet for an entire hour by shouting about alchemy and rotten fish a lot.)

Not that we would want this as a sole focus. This year’s Section programme is, I think, pretty well balanced. We’ve also had a session of talks on HoS in Bradford, which drew a mixture of serial Festival-goers and interested locals; a hist of med session designed to draw in family historians; and the science fiction/religion session, which got a big turnout obviously involving people from all sorts of backgrounds. (“Real” two-way engagement with a sufficiently large general audience is an interesting one. A lot of people don’t want to address the right answers or the right questions, and you’re not allowed to tell them why their questions are wrong. Most vexing.)

An unexpected bonus was that the audience we managed to pull from the SF event included Una McCormack, who knows a thing or two about time travel, and immediately grasped my obscure and completely gratuitous reference to the Blinovitch Limitation Effect.

In an ideal world, in fact, I’d get the assorted publics to fill in the evaluation sheets before the event, listing their various in-joke preferences to allow tailoring, and giving special attention to any historical field they know more about than I do and can trip me up on. Then again, we must work in the real world if we insist on real ale.

Last week’s edition of Radio 4’s Questions, Questions featured a piece (on the iPlayer, starts 22:49) inspired by that traditional historical-empathy favourite, “Was Everybody Drunk All The Time (in any given period)?”

Briefly summarised, the established and reliable answer to that question is

(a) Probably not, although it’s true that drinks we think of as alcoholic – usually beer – were staple in many areas of Britain until the nineteenth century, and indeed were often safer than water or milk. Beer to be drunk through the day, though, tended to be so-called “small” beer, too weak in strength to cause any noticeable intoxication. BUT!

(b) Those who could afford to – the rich, skilled artisans, and labourers where work was plentiful – did, sometimes, engage in cultures of round-the-clock and on-the-job hard drinking which seem ridiculously excessive by today’s standards. (How did they manage to get anything done? Forms of work requiring sober workmen tended not to develop where there were not sober workmen to do them. It’s sometimes suggested that nineteenth-century factory masters, whose systems were built around the rhythms of the machine rather than the worker, favoured temperance reform mainly for this reason.)

This was the basis of the answer I gave, while my ex-CHSTM colleague Kat Foxhall tackled the medical prescription of alcohol and the public health side more generally. As normal, the broadcast segments were edited from a longer interview covering a lot of material that wasn’t used: the world will, for instance, have to cope without hearing my thrilling historical variation on “Beer is not actually made from hops…”, the standard bit of exposition which all brewery tour guides eventually end up reciting in their sleep.

I was pleased, therefore, to find out that the one bit of original primary research I’d thrown in had made the cut. There’s a lot of established work on the effects of strong beer, but I’m interested in how the strength of beer – along with its various other properties – was determined and understood. The usual answers, until around 200 years ago, had very little to do with alcohol.

Gin and other spirits were obviously alcoholic: they were described by the proportions of alcohol and water they contained, and taxed on that basis. Beer was treated more as a foodstuff which happened to make you drunk if it was strong enough. Brewers defined its strength by how much malt was needed to make it; the taxation authorities rated it very simply as either “strong” or “small”, depending on its retail price. While it was certainly possible to distil alcohol from the beer, there was no obvious reason to do so. There are thus very few recorded figures for the alcoholic strength of beer before the nineteenth century, and none at all (that I can find) for small beer.

Can we be sure, then, that small beer didn’t make you drunk? Recipes published around 1760 suggest that to make one barrel of small might require one and a half bushels of malt, or perhaps two bushels. A competent twenty-first-century home brewer, using ordinary pale malt in the same ratio, might achieve 3.5% or more alcohol by volume: the strength of a respectable session bitter, reliably drunk-making over the course of several pints.

This figure, however, enormously overestimates the historical strength… probably. There are three main reasons for this. Firstly, a bushel of eighteenth-century malt yielded far less fermentable sugar than we get from a bushel of today’s ingredients. Probably. Secondly, eighteenth-century brewers’ yeasts transformed less of the sugars to alcohol. Probably. (This was often deliberate: the residual sugars were part of the drink’s appeal, helping to sustain the drinker. Pushing the fermentation to the limit was a distillery trick.) Thirdly, eighteenth-century equipment was much less sterile, and most beer would have turned somewhat sour by modern standards. The alcoholic strength would have fallen appreciably as a proportion of the alcohol turned to acid. Perhaps.

So, what was the alcoholic strength of eighteenth-century small beer? We don’t know.

The first value I have so far traced was recorded some time around 1818 by William Thomas Brande, Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution. Brande had been determining the alcohol content of drinks for several years, originally at the request (or insistence) of Joseph Banks. The project had probably started off as a typical piece of Banksian “science in the service of the State”: reliable alcoholometric data would help to standardise the tax regime, preventing controversy over the valuation of different drinks. Most of the early determinations concerned wine, but Brande’s table of values grew to include spirits, cider and various beers.

The average strength of small beer, said Brande, was 1.28% alcohol by volume. (Modern notions of error handling had not been established: Brande probably took a simple average across a small number of trials, and quoted it to the precision that fitted his table.) This compared to 4.2% for ordinary London porter, 6.8% for the more expensive “stout” porter, and 8.88% for the famously powerful Burton ale. (Joseph Banks, apparently, did not like to be outdone. Beer from the brewhouse on his Lincolnshire estate clocked in at 10.84%. Make of that what you will.)

If Brande’s values are representative, small beer in the final decades of its regular use was not very drunk-making at all. Brande’s average is a whisker above the 1.2% which legally defined “intoxicating liquor” from 1964, although the current legislation, of 1990, imposed a lower threshold of 0.5%. Oddly enough, until Brande’s work was widely accepted, it was not considered obvious that intoxication should be defined in relation to alcohol content at all. But that’s another story for another posting.

So much for my bit. The other 90% of the interview – by volume – consisted of the usual attempts to put across ideas found in other people’s work. Those who pay attention to these things might be interested in the following:

• James Nicholls, The Politics of Alcohol: a History of the Drink Question in England. Manchester UP 2009.
• Brian Harrison, Drink and the Victorians: the Temperance Question in England, 1815-1872. 2nd ed, Keele UP 1994.
• Alan Macfarlane, The Savage Wars of Peace: England, Japan and the Malthusian Trap. Blackwell 1997.
• Judith M Bennett, Ale, Beer and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600. Oxford UP 1996.
• Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: a Social History, 1200-1830. Longman 1983.
• Richard Unger, Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. U of Pennsylvania Press 2004.
• Peter Mathias, The Brewing Industry in England,1700-1830. Cambridge UP 1959.
• Pamela Sambrook, Country House Brewing in England, 1500-1900. Hambledon 1996.

The story so far, again, in brief, and with links:

(a) The AHRC’s Delivery Plan is worded so as to give a clear and open endorsement of a Conservative Party electoral slogan.

(b) There’s no good evidence that the Conservatives, or the present Coalition Government, asked for this to happen.

(c) David Willetts appears to find the AHRC’s conduct a bit silly, and evidently wishes it hadn’t done what it did.

(d) As well he might. This has become a stick to beat the Government with.

(e) It is a mystery what the AHRC staff responsible thought they were up to. Neither the ESRC nor any of the other Research Councils has ever tried anything similar.

(f) The AHRC, usually through its Chief Executive, Rick Rylance, keeps contending that it has not done anything misjudged or out of the ordinary. Professor Rylance has denied that the Plan says what (on my and almost everyone else’s reading of its straightforward English-language phrasing) it says.

(g) The arts and humanities research community is very angry. Several thousand individuals and 32 learned societies have complained.

(h) Professor Rylance has most recently stated, presumably correctly, that revising the Plan would involve consultation with Government, but that “this is not an intention.”  He does not specify whose intention it is not, or why not.

(i) Mass resignations from the AHRC Peer Review College are looming; Rick Rylance’s credibility has, alas, become the story.

If they didn’t mean the Delivery Plan to say what the Delivery Plan says, why don’t they just change the Delivery Plan?

The AHRC’s most recent statements hint that we should accept there’s some practical reason (beyond embarrassment). They don’t say what. We might most naturally think of the bureaucratic cost of replanning, revalidation, reprinting, distribution. Quick thought-experiment, though:

Scenario 1. What if somebody were suddenly to notice that the Delivery Plan libels the Pope? Recalling and revising must at least be practically possible. If it isn’t, that’s a major failing in its own right. (When I started typing this, I was going for a reductio, but… you know… could anybody with a bit of spare time please do a quick run over it with an eye to papal business? Just in case…)

Scenario 2. What if somebody notices that the Delivery Plan contains statements contrary to fact? (Not a major thought-experiment, this one. Section 2.10.1 of the Plan discusses the AHRC’s relationship to “other government departments”. Far from being a government department, the AHRC is a non-departmental public body or, to use the picturesque term, quango. The distinction, though not sexually stimulating, is significant here. NDPBs operate at arm’s length: they are accountable to, but work independently of, government. Unless they don’t. But they’ve gone wrong if they don’t.)

In this second scenario, the Plan is not a Bad Plan: it is a Plan With A Mistake In It. There is no prejudice or shame in revising the document. Do released copies have to be recalled, as they would in the papal case? I’d say not. Publicise the correction and change the PDF on your website, and contact anyone who’s sufficiently sophisticated to be keeping a Copy Of Record on paper, like the archivists always tell you to. Job done.

Scenario 3. What if somebody notices that the Delivery Plan does not adequately convey the intended sense? If we insist on accepting that nothing shifty is going on, then we should presumably conclude from Professor Rylance’s April comments that this has actually happened. What would be a reasonable response? As for Scenario 2, I think. I, for one, would say no more about it.

Scenario Omega (in numbering, as in life, we should expect the unexpected). What if one of the parties you’re supposed to mediate between is just downright flipping appalled by part of the Plan? Even if you don’t have to worry about the other party (who has done no more than blink at it and say “Really?”), I will concede that you’ve got a more complex job on your hands, because it’s not immediately evident what the revision ought to look like, or who gets a say in deciding that.

But I think, even in the Omega Scenario, your starting offer has got to be “Here’s what we might be able to do” – as opposed to “We’re right, and you haven’t formulated an opinion so you can’t disagree.” I am struggling to understand how so many recent official statements in the name of the AHRC can possibly have come to be worded as they are, except on the supposition that the Council employs a full-time Compliance Officer to ensure maximum offence to humanities academics.

Much the same applies to historians of technology. In the hist of tech, though, there’s one common popular-history device which offends on all three of the above points in a very neat and seductive fashion. If you want to cause the maximum of annoyance to a scholarly historian of tech with the minimum of effort, show her a First.

All claims to most of the classic Firsts – the First Computer, the First Television, the First Steam Engine – are a pain in the neck. They divorce inventors from their worlds; they mistake chronology for causation; they make it the historian’s job to praise famous men, rather than to explain why the past was as it was, or how the present came to be as it is. They demand that everything proceeds linearly from one place, one famous man, and one incident; and they crash with monotonous regularity against other, equally threadbare stories which put the impossible starting-point somewhere else.

Of course, we’re constantly told (I have had this message from people in museums, broadcasting, and various points on the journalist-flack spectrum) that our ivory-tower obsessions won’t play to the public. The public, apparently, crave Firsts.

Which is why I punched the air when I saw comment #9 on this piece on the 1951 Ferranti NIMROD machine, sometimes called the “first computer games console”. I’m pretty sure this was not written by a serving academic:

Anytime you have an article about an invention “first” like this, it just ends up being a p*ssing contest between various claimants and wannabe’s anyway, especially if an American tries to claim a first (Europeans seem to have a real inferiority complex about that). It always comes down to definitions and someone is always there to point out Lord Hugh Givezashiz, who invented a mechanical videogame 10 years earlier (but never exhibited it). Then someone counters with the writings and drawings of Sir John Bloohard which proceeded Lord Givezashiz’s work by several years (though Sir Bloohard never actually built it). And so on, ad naseum.

I’m paid a lot of money not to write like that, but he’s saying what I’m thinking. First-talk, far too often, reduces to an annoying game which gets out of the historical record pretty much what it decides to put in. It’s a distraction. Real technical change is gradual, and rich in independent overlapping discoveries. That’s not a fussy academic quibble: it’s a point small children can grasp.

Mind, while many cases certainly involve nationalist chest-beating, I’m not convinced of the commenter’s claim that European status anxiety is the chief offender. The “pissing contest” can kick off anywhere, often within national borders. The most active theatre in the apparently interminable “invention of the computer” conflict, for instance, pitches the Eckert-Mauchly ENIAC design (U Penn) against the Atanasoff-Berry machine (Iowa State). The history of the First Computer question – which involves a patent ruling, some ferociously partisan internal history, a sponsored TV documentary and a Pulitzer-winning novelist – is a great deal more interesting than the question itself. Who invented the computer? Loads of people. It’s complicated. It’s a computer.

There are, of course, First Computer contenders from Europe, including Manchester’s 1948 SSEM prototype. The greatest demonstration I have ever seen of Firstism as a rhetorical battering ram appears in an off-the-cuff 1998 interview with the legendary Tony Wilson, who was a moving figure in the machine’s fiftieth-anniversary commemorations. Characteristically, his take on the matter is refreshing, incredibly charismatic, and top-to-bottom wrong.

The great shame is that interesting stories could be told about most of this technology without dragging First-talk into it at all. The SSEM is a great example; the NIMROD machine, mentioned above, is another. Built for the 1951 Festival of Britain, it was a vast electronic toy designed purely for visual impact. The original plan had been to display a fully functioning Ferranti computer, but this proved impossible in the time available: NIMROD was the most impressive single-purpose machine that the engineers knew they could rig up in a hurry.

The salesmen’s real aim, though, was to get visitors to understand the nature of the general-purpose computers Ferranti was trying to market. The awkward compromise they came up with was to sell a booklet at the exhibition which explained the difference between NIMROD and a ‘real’ computer. This indirect approach turned out not to have much effect: Vivian Bowden of Ferranti had more luck when he worked the material up into a book-length treatment, Faster Than Thought, which became the first widely read introduction to computers in Britain. Nobody, in this period, was trying to “invent the computer game”. They were trying to get some say in defining what a computer was.

The F-word is not always obscene. Sputnik 1was the First Artificial Satellite in a sense that matters. Even here, it would be naïve to conclude anything about the relative state of US and Soviet space technology from the fact of that First. But the fact of the First sent a vast number of individuals and a great deal of money down paths they otherwise wouldn’t have gone down. “The first satellite was Soviet” is a statement which explains things; “the first games console was built in 1951” isn’t.

First-mindedness is difficult to fight. It seems to have worked its way into a lot of scripts for institutional behaviour. The effect is sometimes to frustrate communication at the most basic level. Far from making things simple, it can make them far too complicated.

A museum-based colleague contacted me recently about a planned display on some early computer designs. The proposed text focused on one particular model as having introduced something called the “general register set”, an approach to machine architecture used in most modern computers. This is the kind of concept whose origins may be interesting to informed computer scientists; for the intended audience (families in general), though, it’s impossibly abstruse. So why mention it? Because it’s the best available technological First associated with that machine. The people responsible for marketing, apparently, need the description to include some reference to “ground-breaking” novelty, as this increases the chances that journalists will pick it up. I suspect they are really going to have their work cut out getting the Birth Of The General Register Set into the Metro.

But it doesn’t necessarily take a First to change the world. Indeed, sometimes it takes anything but. The point of releasing a machine without significant technical novelty is usually that it’s a safe, affordable proposition – the kind of thing, in other words, that people might buy and use a lot. In computing, the extreme example of this is the IBM PC 5150, cobbled together very quickly from not-very-powerful bits and pieces other firms had been using for years. The people who designed it knew exactly what they were doing. The “original PC” sold by the bucketload, was cloned by everyone in sight, and stands as a rare example of a design which really did have an identifiable, single-handed directing influence on an entire technological category.

As David Edgerton has pointed out, much hist of tech privileges whatever was considered “new”, at any given time, over what was actually having an effect: too many Concordes, not enough trishaws. This enthusiastic literature, he laments, is written “for boys of all ages”. When we consider whether our academic sensibilities address the needs of “the public”, it’s as well to remember that there are sections of that public who don’t feel the schoolboy’s fascination, who see Firstist history as a rather pointless succession of interchangeable Givezashizzes and Bloohards.

I was discussing the whole sorry affair recently with a friend who is a civil servant with a policy role. (Yes, you’re quite right. As a clueless humanities academic, I should have no idea that any such activity as government administration even exists, and should spend the entire time eating toasted buttered punts in the ivy-lined seclusion of a book-clad turret or something. My apologies.)

Anyway. With her permission, I’m going to quote part of her response verbatim here. I think it usefully illustrates how those of us who live in Thinkyworld need to bear in mind that other people involved in the decision-making process don’t necessarily share our starting assumptions, are almost bound not to share our working context, and may tend to stare at us in some confusion. It’s also as decent enough place from which to start thinking about policy questions more broadly. (Which is not even remotely what I was supposed to be devoting this blog to, but I can’t think of anything interesting to say about the Blagden-Gilpin experiments at the moment.)

Let’s start with the position that I, and the several thousand signatories to the original Brooks petition, and more than 25 learned societies have adopted. The AHRC Delivery Plan formally and openly endorses a Conservative Party electoral slogan; this is unacceptable; the obviousness of its unacceptability is mind-bending.

To my correspondent, it’s a bit more complicated.

Yes, it’s a Conservative party policy (actually, they are keen to emphasise, it’s not a “policy” but an “approach to government” – but I’ll spare you the details). But given they are in Government, doesn’t that make it a Government policy? I’m slightly unclear how you can accept that research can and should influence and inform policy, but argue that this particular policy is somehow different. […]

[G]iven that (we’d hope) the winning party tends to implement the policies it campaigned on during the election, how can we separate the two?

Which is fair enough. Like a couple of other people, I grasped at the term “party-political” while trying to explain why, unlike more subtle forms of political influence (which deserve serious discussion), the BS-language in the Delivery Plan must straight away be classed as mind-bendingly objectionable. The “political”/“party-political” distinction is the wrong one for that particular job. (In my defence, my mind was all bent at the time.)

Here’s a better presentation. “Big Society” – commonly elaborated as “Big Society, Not Big Government” – was coined as an electoral slogan. Its primary purpose is to get people to vote Conservative. The Conservatives, though they are approximately in government, continue regularly to contest elections. Manifestly, the AHRC should not spend money to “contribute” (in the words of the Delivery Plan) to their turnout.

My correspondent, again, doesn’t see it as clear-cut:

However hard you [as a civil servant] try to draw a line in your head – for example between making [government] policies work better (fine) and making people like the Tories more (not fine) – in practice they are hard to keep separate. The same goes for “Big Society” the election campaign slogan and “Big Society” the idea and accompanying collection of policies […]

“Big Society” basically pulls together lots of things Tories (and some Lib Dems) like – localism, a different role for the state (smaller, but the difference is more than size), more voluntarism, taking personal responsibility, efficiency and choice through more competition (in public service provision), etc.

Most people, I suspect, would end up with something like this view if their job was to enact Government policy. It’s a view which we have to engage with, if we want to end up with anything other than the conclusion that everybody hates us because they’re evil.

By “engage with”, of course, I mean “steadfastly and unblinkingly refuse to take at face value.” Because that, you see, is what we are paid good money for.

If you probe the evolution of the “Big Society” with various standard tools of the humanities trade (a rhetorician’s oscilloscope is ideal, provided you keep a parliamentary history fishknife for the messy bits), you’ll find that its function is predominantly electoral to a degree that’s rarely seen (although the same, as My Lot keep pointing out, would have applied to “Third Way” during its brief co-option by the Blair people in the late 90s). The chief point of the BS initiative is to maximise support across the spectrum of public sentiment, by presenting major state spending reductions in terms that don’t imply the collapse of social infrastructure. It may also, conveniently, make life complicated for any opposing party which wants to promote a social-voluntarist platform.

I am not a Tory, as you will have observed from the striations between my median and axial fins. But it’s not exactly the height of subversion to assert that the Conservatives have engineered an electoral strategy. (I’d have done the same myself, in the circumstances.) Said strategy, being a thing with agency in the world, ought to be studied.

Carefully.

Contrary to the impression the AHRC appears to be trying to give, “The Big Society” is not social voluntarism in general. Anyone who doesn’t see the necessity of the distinction is not doing the work of an academic.

Gordon Finlayson recently published a good piece on (or, rather, leading mercifully away from) this stuff. In brief: co-opting the BS makes no sense even from self-interest, because whoever’s claiming to be the Government a couple of years from now will have ditched it; all of this is distracting us dangerously from general questions of governmental influence on research, and specific questions about why the AHRC wants to do social policy stuff anyway.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with studying the BS, if you have the tools to do so. It’s too transient to be worth a major programme, but might make for a decent ed. vol., I suppose. Or a day conference. Next month, just across the road from me, some social policy researchers, and people working for NGOs, and political types and whatnot are going to try this out. The meeting’s being organised by CRESC, which is core funded by the ESRC, and its title is “The Big Society?” That thing on the end of the phrase there bears examination. It’s what we in the trade call a question mark or eroteme: properly used, it can convey elements of uncertainty, dissent, or critical distance. It’s a surprisingly handy little gadget for its size.

Devoted readers will recall that body’s Important Statement of 28 March, which rebuts a confused and confusing allegation made recently in an article in the Observer. The new statement focuses, rather oddly, on repeating the rebuttal in substantively the same terms as before.

Any humanities academic with experience of reading student drafts, particularly at PhD level, must have come across the problem of tactfully getting people to follow what’s known (or if it isn’t, it should be) as the Byrne Criterion: “Say something once – why say it again?” Words, in other words, are not to be wasted. Why is the Council telling us twice?

The answer appears to lie in a glide of topic (end of first para into beginning of second) from the reliably unreliable Observer piece, to the letter signed in the names of 188 academics – not all from the humanities – and published in that newspaper on 3 April (as released; and with the actual list of signatories, which the Obs stuffed up somewhat).

Is this conflation fair? (Clue to putative reader who needs everything explained twice: I’m about to argue that it isn’t. Pay attention!) The letter could hardly be clearer in its opening:

We were appalled that the Arts and Humanities Research Council intends to promote research on “the big society” as part of its current funding settlement [and here the Obs, as per usual editorial practice, inserted a reference to its story]. That the AHRC has apparently volunteered to do this is all the more craven.

You see that tharr second sentence? That’s a different claim from the erroneous one in the Obs of 28 March. Indeed, it contradicts it.

To the best of my knowledge, in fact, nobody has ever intentionally claimed that the AHRC is acting under direct duress. Pleasingly to me, though more by accident than by design, the blog you’re reading now hosts what seems to be the least-worst approximation to an unravelling of how the story came about (see here, here). The most vocal members of the concerned camp (see shovelfuls of links in my previous two postings) have also been the most scrupulous in pointing this out, before turning to the real problems. The real problems, what with being real and everything, are distinctly more subtle.

In sum:

We’re not getting worked up about this.

We’re getting worked up about this.

Which might also be an egregious misrepresentation of AHRC policy. But, as it’s an AHRC policy document, that’s also a wee bit suboptimal.

Capisce?

Good.

Three frames and counting

I mentioned last time that the evidence on Connected Communities, and the unravelling of the Observer article, have been framed in two distinct ways. Of course, the Obs piece itself, while drawing on different and discredited evidence, created a framing of its own. This framing, which started multiplying in the wild ahead of both the others, says:

The Nasty Government Did A Bad Thing!

As discursive frames go, this is a design classic. It roars like a Tyrannosaurus rex. Which is bad news, because tyrannosaurs roar very impressively in your head and not at all in reality. Cleaving loudly to this position will have no practical effect whatsoever (in the present instance. There have been plenty of situations in world history where “The Nasty Government Did A Bad Thing!” has made a positive contribution. No trace of any such situation is showing up anywhere on this here radar set).

To recap, the three frames in order of appearance are

Frame 1: The Nasty Government Did A Bad Thing! (b/w: The Haldane Principle Is Under Threat!)

Frame 2: Pointless self-appointed intellectuals give themselves a fit of the vapours over some story that the Government Did A Bad Thing. Ha ha: it’s all nonsense, as they’d have realised if they weren’t lolling about reciting Swinburne at each other all day.

Frame 3: Via confused newspaper story alleging unlikely problem, attention focuses on well-attested and comparably serious problem: lone Research Council unilaterally punts Conservative Party electoral slogan to scholarly community; has also seemingly forgotten difference between quango and Government department.

Each is more nuanced than the last – and of less interest to the casual reader. Here’s the charming little irony. Frame 3 would never have got into the general press. It would not have formed a rallying-point for academics unaided: Peter Mandler published essentially its case on the Humanities Matter blog back in January, and got very little response. Most of us didn’t see the Delivery Plan. Most of us wanted not to see the Delivery Plan.

If the well-reasoned arguments now being expressed get anywhere, via the petition or otherwise, it will – I’m afraid – be partly on account of the first two framings. Frame 1 lacks any thought, but it makes your brain scream “THINK!”; Frame 2 absolutely demanded a response, because it could not be allowed to stand. Several bright sparks, indeed, were onto it before it had time to crystallise. The first deconstruction I saw, by Mike Otsuka, appeared at 10.44am the same day the AHRC rebuttal appeared.

As with any decent historical case study, my timeline listing novelties is deceptively neat. Staring at Twitter reveals that Frame 1 is still occasionally popping up anew, usually – though not always – with Frame 2 trotting along behind it. I promise not to keep reducing everything to Father Brown parallels, but I can’t help thinking of the scandal which was unleashed upon that cleric by an overzealous newsman and retracted a mere half-hour later, far too late. In the world’s presses and rumour-mills, the “two Father Browns chase each other round the world for ever; the first a shameless criminal fleeing from justice; the second a martyr broken by slander, in a halo of rehabilitation.” The real Father Brown, who does not much resemble either, has no place in popular discourse.

The reality of the AHRC/BS flap, as expressed in Frame 3, is doing somewhat better, though there are clearly some venues where it isn’t welcome. More on that below. (Yes, I am telling you what to think, though only in my capacity as an objective observer of the documentary evidence with no possible axe to grind. You are taking everything I say at face value, aren’t you?… What? Oh well, worth a try.)

Wot hav happened so far

Thanks to the several people who wrote to say they found my previous piece informative/measured/funny. (The last is a strategic device, of course. If you want to write about something as teratogenically tedious as research council funding priorities, at length, and are not prepared to rant impressively, your best chance of holding the reader is through the expectation of a good outré adverb or nigel molesworth reference in the next par.)

I started looking more deeply into the unfolding process mainly for my own enlightenment, before realising that writing it up might actually itself serve as a very modest case study in why letting humanities scholars study interesting things at will is actually quite a good idea.

Here, then, I’ve continued the record, with all the attempts to define the course of the AHRC-BS controversy I can find, up to the end of yesterday. I probably won’t be doing likewise for future dates, because the very specific focus on this silly and sorry episode is in danger of becoming counterproductive. The more astute of the good guys have already spotted that we need to articulate what it is that we want instead: a more responsive and bullshit-averse funding mentality, acknowledging that (a) the arts and humanities can only do what the arts and humanities can do, and (b) this is enough. If this means less opportunities for jokes, so be it.

Anyway. Let’s go right the way back to Monday, 28 March, which was the occasion of two significant pieces I managed to miss last time. Clive Barnett takes an outsider’s perspective: looks sceptically at the Observer piece and wonders why people are rushing to believe it, and why we didn’t say anything in January when the Delivery Plan was publicly available. Can’t really fault him on any of that. With a few notable exceptions, we have been collectively rather stupid about the whole agenda. Don’t be stupid, folks: it’s stupid.

Secondly, James Gordon Finlayson was among the early architects of Frame 3, and I think the first to publicly use the word “craven” to describe the AHRC’s co-option of BS. The adjective has been nominated independently by at least a couple of others, and I’m embarrassed I didn’t spot it myself during my trip to the armoury. It fits with a perfection that makes you want to hug the English language.

Incidentally, co-option is not by its nature craven. The key difference between the ESRC’s Delivery Plan and the AHRC’s is that the one co-opts, whereas the other co-opts cravenly. The ESRC’s is significantly the more professional document, and is something we ought to worry about. The AHRC’s is not worrying, in that you don’t call it “worrying” if a chimpanzee steals your shoe and throws it in the sea (though you’re still a shoe down on the transaction).

29 March: Naomi O’Leary does some forensics on the published evidence of how BS-think soaked into the fabric of Connected Communities, and mixes it with interesting polemic (I’d hold back from some of this: do we know Hartley was flown from Queensland?) Concludes that the AHRC should be scrapped and replaced with a more direct funding distribution system based on peer review.

How would this work in practice? Probably as something more like the old AHRB system, with more autonomous Subject Panels. This would tend to ensure more appropriate use of any funding that’s already secured from Government, but raises the question of who would bargain for future funding and how. Somebody has to co-ordinate all the Government liaison, the review process, and the distribution.

Actually abolishing the AHRC would presumably entail shuffling much of this across to the British Academy (unless anyone wants to promote a replacement quango, manifesting its break-from-the-past credentials through some abysmally nuanced name such as “Research Consortium for the Humanities and Arts”, and a new and worse logo? Thought not). Shuffling anything from anywhere to anywhere gives various agencies opportunities to perform what Sir Arthur Gappy memorably described as “the snatching-away of the money substances”. Personally, I’m in the “Wouldn’t it be quicker and easier to mend the AHRC?” lobby.

Meanwhile, just as everyone else finally reads the AHRC Delivery Plan and comprehends what the fuss is all about, this turns up. I swear black and blue to you that this is not just me hiding behind a hastily invented persona to ramp up the evidence for Frame 2. (I’d have got the taking-the-piss-out-of-the-humanities cliché right, for a start. “[M]asturbation in Wuthering Heights” is no good: you’re supposed to invoke an analytical approach, and there must be more incongruity between the two elements. “Narratives of the hypermodern in Ivor the Engine” is a well-formed and suitably tedious example. See?)

Incidentally, the comments section on the Times Higher online piece which filled up around this time is notably less inane than usual, despite an excursion into Different Ways To Misunderstand The Sokal Hoax. There’s even a decent explanation (“kathz”, 29 March) of why the “refute” business is worth picking up on.

30 March: big guns coming out now. James Ladyman on a New Statesman blog gives a good summary of Frame 3, from the top down, for clots who don’t kno about it. More from Iain Pears. Points out that the AHRC’s most likely move is to “go silent”. If the Council is seen to accept the logic of our petition, this embarrasses it in the eyes of the Government and, on one interpretation of the rules of the game, has to entail the resignation of the Chief Executive.

This is what happens, you see. You try to fix your vision on scholarly ideals and find that you are in fact looking down the barrel of the question “Here Is An Individual, Rick Rylance By Name. Do You Want His Head On A Plate: Yes Or No?”

Even articulating such questions, whatever answer you have in mind, makes you enemies and gives some bystanders the impression that you’re not quite our kind, dear. Despite what several generations of campus novelists will tell you, a lot of us are not trained in this stuff, and find it profoundly upsetting at times. We should neither pretend otherwise nor retreat from it.

My answer, by the way: said plated head would be of very little use that I can see. The AHRC BS thing demonstrates a ground-in failure of corporate will, and you can’t fix that by making an example of someone.

Actually, you know what I’d love? I’d love it if everyone at the AHRC stayed where they were and issued a statement reading “Sorry! You’re quite right, that was a bit cretinous of us. Give us till the end of April and we’ll sort it out.” Then kept us waiting till June, but eventually did revise the plan in good faith. That, you see, is the kind of behaviour most academics can relate to.

Diana from History Workshop focuses on our great delay: “I admit that I sat in a meeting about the document in January, groaned, and thought no more about it.” I’d have done the same myself. A comment from ‘Felix’ emphasises that AHRC policymakers actually have to do the job of appealing to government, which we don’t: in striving to keep HMG and us happy, they’re caught between a rock and a soft place. Too many of us are forgetting this. But I wouldn’t go as far saying the Delivery Plan “makes a lot of sense”, what with the cravenness and everything.

Paul Myerscough in the LRB blog points out that those at the AHRC who chose to embrace the BS are scholars too; concludes that humanities academia is “a community divided against itself as never before”. I don’t buy this. If you look at the footwork of his argument, there’s some rather odd conflation going on between the observation that RCs recruit executives from inside the academy, and a standard and not greatly relevant point about grant-hunting cynicism. Evidence from the public debate rather suggests that things are moving in the opposite direction: the humanities community has been uncommonly united since around the time the “impact” crap blew up.

31 March: print edition of the Times Higher, with a brief and Frame-2ish version in the weekly roundup. There is, however, a letter from Bob Brecher including the word “craven”.

Now, a print publication like the Times Higher may have lead times of a couple of days. Most of this stuff, however, is online and pretty instantaneous. I think that, given all the above – particularly Dr Ladyman’s contribution – it’s fair to decree that from this point forward, anyone with pretensions to informed engagement who tries any Frame 2 malarkey is either not up to the job, or trying to pull the wool. Agreed? OK: on we go.

The LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog is nice about me, thus outing me as an interested party trying to pull wires. Damn. (‘Haldanegate’, incidentally, was coined by a more consummate wire-puller who remains at liberty.) One of few sources to cover the point that the AHRC’s Delivery Plan is not even a particularly good piece of cynical subservience.

Again, let’s compare the ESRC. The ESRC may be telling the Government what it wants to hear; the AHRC is telling the Conservatives what they said during the election campaign. There was surely at least a finite risk that they would respond that they could remember perfectly well what they’d said, and didn’t want to pay for it again. See also another point from Iain Pears: there are many good reasons why BS-talk might not run the length of the present administration. Suffusing it through your plan for the years to 2015 is not great cynicism, as cynicism goes.

Also in this posting, another mention of the BA thing, which does need to be cleared up, and which I’ve addressed in a comment.

1 April: Yeah, I know. Another advantage of having this dust-up in January would have been that I wouldn’t now be reading each and every story three times over to check it isn’t bylined to an anagram and contains nothing about the community values of bloody spaghetti-growers.

First up, Iain Pears is on the case, as ever: there have been Questions In The House! Well, a question, with a written answer. Julian Huppert and David Willetts batted Frames 1 to 2 about and came to the predestined conclusion and decided we could all go home. If you’ve read this far, you could have drafted the non-answer to the non-question yourself, although I hope you wouldn’t have perpetrated that number-concord snafu in the final par.

This is, of course, what you get in parliamentary politics. You’d be mad to imagine they’d have done anything else. Moaning about the chicanery is like blaming your greengrocer for ignoring the state of the Research Councils entirely and trying to sell you cabbage (except that there is nutrition in cabbage). Still, it comes across as distinctly cheeky. I wanted to shout “Hoi! I can see exactly what you’re up to!”

AHRC brass have not, in fact, been able to activate silent running, and have thus resorted to the second option on Iain Pears’ list from his earlier posting. (In a grim way, this is surprisingly fun, isn’t it? My Lot get to write both sides of the script! What shall we get the Other Lot to do next, folks? Fifty points to anyone who can work in an exciting chase sequence involving a Sikorsky helicopter. More down-to-earth is Richard Baron’s option, but it seems they didn’t fancy it, or didn’t see it in time.)

Instead, Professor Rylance gives an interview with Research Fortnight’s daily news service in which he gives an interesting clarification of the 2011-15 Delivery Plan. Please compare.

Delivery Plan: “Connected Communities will enable the AHRC to contribute to the government’s initiatives on localism and the ‘Big Society’…”

Professor Rylance: “This paragraph does not say that the Big Society is a research priority. It simply says these are the ways in which Connected Communities research could contribute…”

Emphasis mine, of course. Scholars of taste and character should read the Delivery Plan in full, and clock whether I’m quoting out of context or using boldface to devious ends. Similarly, “Connected Communities is entirely separate from the Big Society.” True in a hair-splitting procedural sense. Practically, Connected Communities was pretty nebulous till the change of government, and remarkably suffused with BS rhetoric (and, granted, not much less nebulous) thereafter.

Some people have been rumbling that the AHRC is not so much dangerously compromised, as a little bit silly and not altogether able to express itself by recourse to the English language. Maybe there’s a bit of both. And I don’t see that the fact that one’s not acceptable means that the other is.

Meanwhile, that LSE blog has a contribution from Paul Benneworth. As usual with opinion coming not quite from inside our particular tent, it’s a rewarding read. States that the existence of a fully fledged RC for the As and Hs has drastically increased their institutional status, and therefore the routine supply of funding, as compared to the 1990s situation. Unfortunately, the figures he gives are not comparable, and I’ve not got time to go digging around for better ones now.

The growth of “strategic” ring-fencing, changes in discipline coverage, and FEC have presumably all influenced the relationship between the Council’s total funding and the likelihood of any individual academic getting a responsive grant for a decent idea. Anecdotal evidence suggests that we never quite had the bonanza implied by this story, but that things have been rather better for some time now than they were for some time before that. Needs looking into. Properly. With spreadsheets.

At 18:30 the same day, we deployed the C-bomb. Stefan Collini in the Guardian’s online opinion-piece thing: four paras of Frame 3, then onto what I believe we should designate the Serious Stuff:

The problem pre-dates the coalition. For some years now, governments have been insisting that research councils allocate less and less of their funding in “responsive” mode – ie by choosing from among the strongest applications they receive from academics – and focus more and more of it on themes that can be made to seem to contribute to “growth” or to “competitiveness” or whatever other reductive aim currently enjoys political currency.

Some important words, there, and the most important among them is seem. The interesting thing about high-impact economically targeted world-leading synergistic innovation research strategies in the arts and humanities, is that they’re bollocks. We can duck the question of whether implementing such strategies is a moral duty or morally abhorrent: they can’t be implemented. You can try. You’ll get a maze of aspirational language (the seemingness in question), then a few slightly silly contended concrete examples. All will disappear off the face of the Earth when your funding cycle comes to an end and nobody renews your website.

Responsive funding is great! Responsive funding is great mainly for what it’s not. Responsive funding is not a system of giving pointless aesthetes as much money as possible to spend on whatever they like. Rather, given efficient peer review, it’s a system that targets the funding into precisely those areas where proposals that are witless or woolly or counterproductive or cranky get noticed and get swatted back for revision or immolation.

Yes, I know. “Given efficient peer review.” You could power a thrusting Fraunhofer-Institut off our collective output of ignorant-bloody-reviewer stories. But it is often done well (a fact we tend to forget, as recollections of the one unidentified imbecile who didn’t understand “long nineteenth century” or denied outright the possibility of an alveolar fricative crowd our minds). It can be done well because it allows subject communities (which may overlap) to build organically from their established expertise. Who will give meaningful decisions on whether our proposals “contribute to the government’s initiatives on localism and the ‘Big Society’”? Remember, you’ve only got the Peer Review College to play with. And not even all of them any more.

What I can’t find is an original source for a line Collini attributes to Rick Rylance: “scare-mongering and critique of the impact agenda are pointless”. I wonder what the context was for this. Let’s not worry about scaremongering, which is actually a highly effective if rather unpleasant strategy. Critiquing the impact agenda is our job, and is another area we need to shift this conversation towards.

Usually, when my students come to me with arguments in this state, I suggest they try rearranging them in chronological order to see if that helps. Applying this approach, we get the following…

2009: earliest discussion of Connected Communities I can readily find. It’s still vestigial in this RCUK annual report and THE reporting, as one of three intended cross-RCUK programmes, alongside food supply and economic slump-survival measures.

11 May 2010: after an exciting few days during which Peter Hennessy frequently appears to be the only person alive who knows what the hell’s supposed to happen next, it is affirmed that the people campaigning on Big Society rhetoric (hereafter “BS”) are approximately in charge of the country.

June 2010: Connected Communities inaugurated.

28-29 June: AHRC holds a workshop meeting to guide the focus of its Connected Communities effort. The presentation by Bert Provan of the DCLG is framed around snippets from Cameron speeches.

November 2010: call for scoping studies applications for Connected Communities. This is a general RCUK call, described as AHRC-led. It contains a muted, brief reference to studies which might “explore the possible lessons that could be drawn for” the BS “and/or” other social initiatives, including some (co-operativism?) obviously distinct from the BS vision.

6-8 December 2010: AHRC holds another workshop meeting under the Connecting Communities banner. One of the four invited presentations strongly invokes and appears to promote BS rhetoric and concepts; see Naomi O’Leary’s comments on what’s going on with the others.

December 2010: BIS Statement on the Allocation of Science and Research Funding, including the “Statement on the Haldane Principle.”

December 2010: AHRC launches its Delivery Plan 2011-15. This states that “Connected Communities will enable the AHRC to contribute [sic] to the government’s [sic] initiatives on localism and the ‘Big Society’” in broadcasting, urban regeneration, heritage, history and “Values and concepts”. Elsewhere it states that the Council “will contribute to public services and policy, collaborating with other [sic] government departments”, including DCLG on BS.

It was at this point that we should probably have flung the lid off the world and started jabbering like maniacs.

Yes, of course, the Haldane Principle is not all that, and all research is intrinsically political. The BS, though, is party-political. It was the Conservatives’ chief rhetorical device in the election campaign, and is still the only conspicuous indicator of Cameronic political allegiance. Only Cameron-friendly Conservatives want it or like it or will give it house room. Which is in no way a case against it, but which is as sure as flip a case for not making it a criterion for Research Council support. It’s bleeding obvious how to direct people’s attention to the BS without telling them what to think about it. You use something like the wording from that November call. Which they must have had on file, but didn’t use. Which scares me.

Also – the AHRC is not a government department, as those in charge of it surely know full well. This is why I think these Delivery Plans and Strategic Briefings and whatnot ought to have named authors.

However: I, for one, said nothing about that blessed document. Because I didn’t notice it.

January 2011: Peter Mandler did notice, and complained.

27 March 2011: the Observer publishes a piece entitled Academic fury over order to study the big society. This quotes Peter Mandler as stating categorically that the Government threatened to withhold funding unless funds were diverted to BS, implying that the AHRC was acting under duress. [UPDATE: Peter Mandler has commented explaining that claims he actually made concerning the British Academy, rather than the AHRC, were misreported.]

(The only sources for this new assertion are the quotation attributed to Mandler, plus one weasel passive: “It is claimed…” Comments from others – Colin Jones, Tristram Hunt, Gareth Thomas, an unnamed Oxford college “principal” – are presented so as to appear to relate to the new claim, though they could equally be responses to established developments.)

It was only at this point that the lid actually did come off the world and everyone started jabbering like a maniac.

28 March 2011: the AHRC takes the unprecedented step of posting what it describes as an Important Statement on its website, directly responding to the allegations: “We did NOT receive our funding settlement on condition that we supported the ‘Big Society’, and we were NOT instructed, pressured or otherwise coerced.” This notes that work on Connecting Communities began “in 2008”, and argues that the programme “happen[s] to be relevant to debates about the ‘Big Society’ which came two years later.”

This is then followed up by a story in the THE in which an unnamed AHRC spokesperson adds that references to the BS in documentation are merely a device to (THE paraphrase) “help policymakers understand the concept of Connected Communities.”

29 March 2011: sporadic skirmishes. Thom Brooks sets up a petition to delete BS from the list of “strategic areas”. Bert Provan on his way to becoming a national figure, if the humanities are a nation.

As ever, what people make of all this comes down to who gets in quickly with their preferred framing (‘framing’, there: one of the select supply of little bits of terminology which look like humanities cobblers but actually do something fantastically useful). There is a framing doing the rounds on Twitter at the moment which reduces in essence to this:

(a) the Observer article said a bad thing about the AHRC;

(b) the Observer article is wrong;

therefore

(c) the AHRC is not at all bad.

If I believed in neat conspiracies, I’d be invoking Father Brown here: “They would have boomed the miracle. Then they would have bust up the miracle…” There are no neat conspiracies, of course: the whole thing probably just proceeds from a ghastly error of fact or judgment on someone or other’s part, as is usual for the human race, though at an intellectual level I would be most interested in exactly how the first few pars of the Observer piece came about.

More important is the fact that everyone who bats for My Lot is now having to rush around nailing into place the alternative framing:

(a) the Observer article said that the AHRC’s enthusiastic co-option of a party-political principle was instituted under duress from the Government;

(b) the Observer article is, probably, wrong;

therefore

(c) the AHRC has presumably co-opted a party-political principle of its own free corporate will. (Its statement gives no alternative explanation.)

My professional experience tells me that the second formulation better addresses the evidence of the historical record. (It’s also probably much sounder syllogistically, though I’d want to ask a logician.) Is anybody going to fund me (or my logician) if we keep insisting on pointing this out?

Being incredibly vain, I had a good look at the blogosphere responses to “What Is One Degree?” on first broadcast. They were decidedly mixed. For the most part, people with a physics background were seriously irked or disappointed, whereas non-physicists found it a nicely put together introduction.

The ire was probably chiefly a product of the central concept. Having followed Ben Miller on a personal journey to find “the meaning” of one degree of temperature, the programme left us with very much the standard thermodynamic picture – material which, in the national schools curriculum for England, is pointed to at GCSE (age 14-16), and nailed down with Proper Formulae And Everything at A-Level (16-18). The oddity here is that, before his rise to prominence as one of TV’s leading Flanders and Swann parodists, Mr Miller was famously – and this was an integral feature of the narrative – a PhD student in low-temperature physics at the Cavvy. Now, for anyone who can operate at that level, basic thermodynamic definitions are The Rules That Lie Like Circuits In Your Brain. Viewers with a better-than-fuzzy recollection of classroom physics would have realised this, and would not have managed the necessary suspension of disbelief. Trained physicists don’t go around affecting surprise at molecular kinetics or the Heat Death concept.

The thing is… like my colleagues who work professionally on science communication issues, I am not a fan of the tendency in some scientific quarters to cry “Media representation of science needs to be more detailed and accurate!” and mistake this for an actual plan of what to do. The job of broadcast television producers is, fundamentally and irreducibly, to get the assorted buggers who own televisions out there to sit down and watch their commissions instead of switching over and watching something else. Like research-level physics, this is insanely difficult, and relies heavily on a thorough understanding of what techniques have been known to be productive in the past. Having to integrate the two sets of constraints is not exactly an aid to relaxation.

The programme as edited held very fast to various established genre conventions. The “quest” structure – all those lingering shots of Ben in what I’m told is a Citroën DS – was one; the “clown asks questions, is informed by expert” approach to dialogue was another. Mr Miller is, of course, known chiefly as a skilled performer, and it should be pretty obvious that there was some dramatic licence in, for instance, his greeting my “Heat is a mode of motion…” as news – just as I’m fairly sure that, in the earlier brewhouse sequence, he didn’t really lean over and stick his head into a stream of discharging wort. Is this kind of dissimulation acceptable? I suspect it’s unavoidable to some degree.

Some viewers lamented that the end result was “not Horizon” as they knew it, and in terms of narrative conventions they’re absolutely right: the old-established “blue chip” Horizon format relies on a rather different set of devices, discussed in a well-known paper by Roger Silverstone. The one thing that really does surprise me is that they went persistently for “clown”/“expert” dialogue in a programme built around Ben Miller, who would seem to be one of the few people on Earth who could combine the two roles and get away with it as a coherent narrative persona. Of course, it’s entirely possible that they tried that and it didn’t work.

Other complaints related to errors in the factual content. There is, however, an endlessly debatable dividing-line between “leading people astray” and “capturing the essence”, particularly given that almost all viewers of this kind of programme will never refer back to it at all, and will be left only with general impressions – as the people who make these programmes are well aware. Does it matter, for instance, that Peter Atkins’ “things even out”, in relation to entropy, was skewed as “things cool down” in the narration? Possibly not, in the grand scheme of things.

Of course, I’m not actually paid to communicate physics. I’m an academic historian: as far as public engagement goes, my role is essentially to sneak bits of socially informed historical context into other people’s science communication agendas. What attracted me to the Horizon gig is that historical and philosophical aspects were planned in from the outset: they were already talking to Hasok Chang, who has some fascinating stuff about the problem of stupid water which gets up to the boiling point and doesn’t realise it’s supposed to boil.

Note absence of spelling errors, which is also far from typical

(This, then, was an exception to the surprisingly common tendency for producers and organisers, who can perfectly well see the point of asking a trained historian about the history of socialism, surgery, socks, Sussex or Socinianism, to assume that the history of science is something only scientists do. The humanities-based HoSer who nonetheless manages to get input may find him/herself mistakenly credited as a scientist anyway. My aston for Horizon just said “Manchester University”. I do hope nobody thought I was trying to personate a physicist. I am in fact, like Ben Miller, a veteran of the Cav: the difference is that he managed a fair chunk of doctoral research before stardom beckoned, whereas I bailed out after two years of undergrad, having realised that (i) I wanted to do HPS instead for the rest of my life and (ii) I wasn’t any good: specifically, I never mastered the 741C op-amp, which as far as I could work out was designed to emit a loud “pop” and a burning smell whenever and however you plugged it in. I’m thus specifically Not A Physicist.)

Historical depth changes the game significantly in relation to those faux-naif questions. “Heat is a mode of motion” may be very basic physics now, but it was not basic, obvious or uncontentious in 1845. Your well-trained modern-day physicist is actually at a net disadvantage when it comes to grasping this: the idea’s an inseparable part of an immensely productive account of the nature of the universe, fully internalised by the physicist before she reaches legal drinking age, and seldom, if ever, to be questioned.

I will happily stand up for the need to reattach wonderment to such propositions, even if it’s done by theatrical means. I’d like to think that in an ideal world, proper historicism could crack the age-old problem of varying audience awareness: the old lags, rather than muttering “Yeah, we know”, uniting with the rookies in a chorus of “Blimey, I’d never thought about that…”

I’m not sure how far this could be done in practice, and I certainly wouldn’t hold “What Is One Degree?” up as a working example. My gut response to the history as presented (for which I was involved at the research stage but not, obviously, in the editing) just mirrors the typical scientist’s plaint: it was compressed and simplified to a level I’d want to call misleading. Of course, we’re back to “capturing the essence” vs “leading astray” again here: to give a very simple example, does it matter that Ben says “This is where modern physics started!” at the new Cavendish site in West Cambridge? Again, probably not (though it did sound odd from the mouth of a man who had just namechecked G I Taylor).

More basically, the programme as broadcast covered not only the historical and epistemic underpinnings of temperature, heat and energy, but the practicalities of present-day temperature metrology and high- and low-temperature research, urban heating, and stats in relation to climate change. That’s a lot. There is never going to be time to develop any one particular interest group’s particular thing in the way it would want.

From an HoS-and-the-public perspective, can anything be done about this? The iPlayer site gives a link to Hasok’s temperature resources: it would be nice – though much trickier than it might appear – to have online finding aids for follow-up materials being commissioned as a routine element of ‘serious’ documentary development. You know: “If you have been affected by any of the historiography in this programme, here’s a link to a relevant bit of Norton Wise”, kind of thing. (Actually, anent the mechanical equivalent of heat, here is a link to a relevant bit of Norton Wise: not paywalled as far as I can see.) Since writing this, I’ve been thinking about what the Guide To The Joule Paddle-Wheel Experiment, Aimed At Lay People But Still In Far More Detail Than You Get On The Telly, would have to include. Results next time.

Invitation Number Two duly turned up about six and a half years later. A splendid colleague at UCL STS put me in touch with some people making an edition of Horizon for the BBC, based on the question “What is one degree of temperature?” The theme – uncommonly open-ended for Horizon – obviously offered plenty of scope for the shoving-in of philosophical or historical oars. Rather unusually, the idea had come directly from the presenter, Ben Miller from off of TV and radio’s Armstrong and Miller, with whom I in due course ended up discussing thermodynamics in a copper-lined wort cooler in Wisbech. As you do.

At the time of writing, you can still see the end product here, if you can persuade the various computery bits and pieces that you’re in British TV licence-paying territory. The bit with me in it runs between 24:40 and 28:25. I notice that one of the other participants blogged his response to the end product, and I may, if I get around to it, do likewise. Here, though, I want to record my almost-novice experience of making a bit of telly. We elbow-patch-wearing academic types should probably be working to familiarise ourselves with the process, given the likely future rise of the REF impact statement as a substitute for information.

Self; TV and Radio's Ben Miller; paddle-wheel replica; Alan The Props Guy

The people who produce TV documentaries do not simply phone you up and ask you to be on the telly. They phone you up and ask you for background details on, and contacts for, things they want to know more about. Provided they don’t find what you tell them soul-crushingly tedious, and can fit it into the narrative, they may use some of it. This, of course, does not necessarily translate into an offer for you to be on the telly. There are various ways of putting across information: interviewee talking head, interviewee chat with presenter, presenter talking to camera, voice-over narration, wordless montage with that blessed music behind it. A typical docu will use most or all of these, switching between them to hold viewers’ attention. The producers may decide that your story is best fed to the presenter or narrator, or that the stunning images you’ve provided speak for themselves. You should probably chase for an on-screen “Thanks” credit if this happens, otherwise you may cease to exist.

If you do end up on screen, you may be there for either or both of two reasons: to speak as an expert; or to supervise, explain, demonstrate, or make-look-the-part something which more immediately needs to be on screen. Watching the completed Horizon, I noticed that everybody at some point Does A Thing With A Thing, be it a building or a visual aid or a piece of ferociously expensive experimental physics kit. In my case, the Thing was a replica Joule paddle-wheel apparatus. The production crew was enthusiastic about the experiment, and about the idea of doing it, as Joule did, in a real live brewery. In the interests of further authenticity (and personal convenience) I lobbied for sites nearest to Salford, but they ended up going for Elgood’s of Cambridgeshire. Elgood’s is one of the few old regional breweries to have survived into the twenty-first century as a family-run concern, and the site, conveniently for television, Looks Like A Brewery (which many breweries don’t). Wisbech is a long way out of my way, but I reasoned that I could usefully combine the trip with polishing off a bit of archives work in Cambridge.

I’ll also have to admit that I was curious to encounter Ben Miller. I have fond memories of some of his earliest and most obscure work, with and without Mr Armstrong. There was, for instance, an extraordinary radio sitcom called The Young Postmen which was constructed almost entirely without laugh-lines, but which, as my fifteen-year-old brain tuned gradually into the concepts (John Thomson played a character whose comedy catchphrase was the word “Yes”, delivered normally), became wildly and inexplicably funny.

Ben Miller is also, famously, an ex-physicist and an enigma. There was a period of a few years around the year 2000 for which he was, simultaneously, the comedian most likely to insist on introducing genuinely transgressive levels of frontal nudity into a basically mainstream TV show, and also the comedian most likely to turn up narrating a polite audio documentary about CERN, such as could be played to an inquisitive child as a capsule explanation of what Radio 4 does. He is also, as it happens, the star of two comedy sketches that speak deeply to the academic condition: Clockwatching Teacher, a masterclass in how to inspire students whilst carefully ring-fencing precious research time, and Glengarry Glen Research, which seems more prescient with every passing minute.

I digress. In the event, Mr Miller was, I’m afraid, neither a prima donna nor one of those blandly pleasant and professional but vacuous types. Sorry about that. He was very charming, and gave off that slight sense of restless urgency I associate with the people I met as an undergrad who were inevitably going to end up in charge of more stuff than I was. When not filming, he spent much of the time on the phone, discussing what I assume were sketch ideas in progress, given the unusual number of references to Vikings.

Beyond the people who are actually going to be televised, it currently seems to take about four people to make usable television. The crew I met at Wisbech consisted of the director (who was also the producer), cameraperson, soundperson, and assistant producer: this last role, for any Press Gang fans reading this, is best summarised as Kenny to the director’s Lynda. These people are then in constant phone contact with another person who deals with booking and co-ordinating things from the production office in London, or possibly from Thunderbird 5.

If you watch a recording crew doing stuff for a while, you will conclude either that they have collectively and completely taken leave of their senses, or that they are working very hard to get things done in the only way logically and practically possible. Both interpretations are completely consistent with the evidence, and you can amuse yourself by flipping your brain from one to the other in Necker cube fashion. You will need to find something to amuse yourself with, because the process involves several hours of frantic waiting. UK citizens currently paying my wages will be delighted to learn that I occupied myself usefully, having taken a laptop and some research-related reading along. I did not take any marking. Of the many great unwritten rules of academia, perhaps the greatest is that exam scripts and brewhouses don’t mix.

What surprised me most – and this might merely indicate my nasty suspicious mind – is just how little artifice is involved in the process. Nobody asked me to record one of those ridiculous ‘greeting’ sequences (memorably nailed by Verity Stob: “Hello, would you like to come in and interview me for British Channel Four?”). There was a kind of proposed script – really a detailed inventory of points the production team wanted to see covered, some of it derived from info I’d given earlier – but they hadn’t shown it to Mr Miller, and I didn’t have sight of it during filming. Most of the dialogue recorded was the result of Mr Miller asking questions I wasn’t altogether expecting, which I answered as best I could. Yes, there was the odd “Could you give us that again…?” for technical reasons (and I had to nip off to my cunningly secreted copy of the Cardwell biog afterwards, to check I hadn’t put something in the wrong decade), but it was all about as real as it could have been. Not much of the question-and-answer stuff made it to broadcast, mind: the sequence as edited was always going to centre on the prop.

I think I'm staring up at the scaffold here.

The silver-haired gent who appears without explanation in the broadcast is Alan The Props Guy. Alan, I was impressed to learn, had constructed the paddle-wheel replica by hand, guided only by descriptions. Though the replica must have been by far the most laborious element to get right, it gave the least trouble on the day, since it was transported ready-assembled and was happy to sit quietly in its jar until needed. Most of the effort and much of the delay was occasioned by the sodding wooden scaffold you see being put together in the time-lapsed sequence, whose only function was to give sufficient drop on the weights. Everyone available was eventually pressed into service in setting up and working this contraption, although the editing massively overstates my involvement: if you look closely, you’ll see me gradually retreating to the fringes as my ineptitude with mechanical contrivances becomes quietly clear.

TV and Radio’s Ben Miller, on the other hand, is some kind of DIY demon. It so happens that the day in question was part of my TRAC audit week: I could really have done with a space on the form for “Standing in a disused wort cooler watching a high-profile comedian operate a powered screwdriver”. (I forget what I did put it down as. “Other general support”, perhaps.) They even went as far as filming some close shots of him polishing off the last few bits of screwing-in to make it look like he’d done all of it, which he had – although, being real, I suppose it would have looked fake.

Even so, it was rather late when we got as far as running the paddle-wheel (which worked perfectly), and there was a bit of a scramble to get done before the light – or possibly the patience of hot and thirsty individuals cooped up in a brewery without any beer – faded. An odd day, for me, but an interesting one; the oddness was not dimmed by reasons of economy and practicality dictating that I should go on to spend the night in the ancestral home of the brewing family I was due to research the following day. (They didn’t appear to mind, being dead.)

Does it pay? Not in my experience, although the Corporation was happy to cover travel and incidentals (sorted out upfront and with great efficiency via Thunderbird Five). Ultimately, though, these things are above such vulgar considerations as earthly riches or the state of your public engagement profile: you really have to want to stand in a wort cooler describing the history of thermodynamics to a popular comedy sketch performer. I did, and quite frankly, I’d do it again if the opportunity arose – although it does seem quite earth-shatteringly unlikely that it will.