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Melvyn Bragg steps down from presenting In Our Time

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Melvyn Bragg steps down from presenting In Our Time

#21

Post by paipa »

Angostura wrote: post #17
cageface wrote: post #6

It won't be easy to find somebody with his breadth of knowledge to replace him.

I don’t think you need a particular depth of knowledge. You need someone willing to do the pre-work -clearly there are notes from and conversations with the contributors beforehand, someone with curiosity to learn about things outside their areas of expertise. A good journalist would be fine

I agree. It's almost all prep. In fact that's exactly what I recall him saying in an interview once, that he still gets stressed by the amount of reading he has to do before each and every episode. He never winged it and rely on his knowledge alone.

And making broad connections across topics wasn't his style anyway. He's a legend but the show can totally go on without him, and it should.

Re: Melvyn Bragg steps down from presenting In Our Time

#22

Post by haunter »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #14
RobinL wrote: post #2

May be of interest: https://www.braggoscope.com/directory (a categorised catalogue of episodes)

Clicked on "listen on bbc" for the Ada Lovelace episode, 404. Sad.

Here https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ada-lovelace/id7333089...

or here https://open.spotify.com/episode/5YjqWk1rqxANmNifyUW92B

or here https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0092j0x (to download the mp3 file)

BBC Sounds not available outside of the UK anymore

Re: Melvyn Bragg steps down from presenting In Our Time

#23

Post by walthamstow »

avian wrote: post #16

In Our Time has been my favorite podcast to listen. It made me appreciate how well moderated a discussion among experts can be and how poorly most moderators on other radio programs or conference panels do their jobs. My complaint with In Our Time is that BBC started inserting the "this program is supported by ads outside of the U.K." ads in the middle of the discussions. The ads start and end with an extremely annoy…

VPN to the UK and pull the back catalogue from the BBC using get_iplayer, don't get it from the podcast feed

Re: Melvyn Bragg steps down from presenting In Our Time

#24

Post by Popeyes »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #14
RobinL wrote: post #2

May be of interest: https://www.braggoscope.com/directory (a categorised catalogue of episodes)

Clicked on "listen on bbc" for the Ada Lovelace episode, 404. Sad.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b0092j0x here it is.

Re: Melvyn Bragg steps down from presenting In Our Time

#25

Post by haunter »

Popeyes wrote: post #24
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clicked on "listen on bbc" for the Ada Lovelace episode, 404. Sad.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b0092j0x here it is.

BBC Sounds not available outside of the UK anymore

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/help/questions/listening-outsid...

Re: Melvyn Bragg steps down from presenting In Our Time

#26

Post by mwaitjmp »

benrutter wrote: post #12

I looked, and there's more than 1000 available episodes of IOT on the BBC, they're all (at least every one I've heard) brilliant. I'm curious if anyone here has any particular favourites? I remember really enjoying the Plankton episode because it took me the classic IOT route of "That doesn't sound interesting, but I'll give it a listen" to looking up all the reading list. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001r1t5

There is an episode on the Epic of Gilgamesh which is absolutely fascinating. Highly recommended.

Re: Melvyn Bragg steps down from presenting In Our Time

#28

Post by haunter »

walthamstow wrote: post #23
avian wrote: post #16

In Our Time has been my favorite podcast to listen. It made me appreciate how well moderated a discussion among experts can be and how poorly most moderators on other radio programs or conference panels do their jobs. My complaint with In Our Time is that BBC started inserting the "this program is supported by ads outside of the U.K." ads in the middle of the discussions. The ads start and end with an extremely annoy…

VPN to the UK and pull the back catalogue from the BBC using get_iplayer, don't get it from the podcast feed

You don't even need VPN, you can just straight download the mp3 file of each episode https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qykl/episodes/downloads

Only the streaming options (iPlayer and Sounds) are geolocked

Re: Melvyn Bragg steps down from presenting In Our Time

#29

Post by writebetterc »

benrutter wrote: post #12

I looked, and there's more than 1000 available episodes of IOT on the BBC, they're all (at least every one I've heard) brilliant. I'm curious if anyone here has any particular favourites? I remember really enjoying the Plankton episode because it took me the classic IOT route of "That doesn't sound interesting, but I'll give it a listen" to looking up all the reading list. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001r1t5

I'll do the opposite: The P vs NP episode is aboslutely horrid. Probably the first and last time that they had any informatics people on the show. One major issue is that the experts didn't explain what we mean by "hard". Melvyn thought, as normal people do, that 'hard problem' means you've gotta be real clever to solve it, not that it takes a lot of steps to solve (and how the number of steps increases as the problem gets larger). When they had the example of purchasing Christmas gifts as a stand-in for maximum bipartite matching, coupled with Melvyn's misconception, the train wreck was a fact.

That's my memory of the event, that was a frustrating lunch walk.

Re: Melvyn Bragg steps down from presenting In Our Time

#30

Post by gorgoiler »

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

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