Kind: captions
Language: en
there are a few programs which i really
hate and i won't say them
and there are some programs a few that i
feel are really ordinary
but there are a lot of programs when you
work on them as we do for kind of days
and weeks on end and you see them and
you know they start out
in terrible shape
and somehow you get them through working
and having ideas you do get to kind of
feel a begrudging love for most of them
that they managed to pull themselves up
by their bootstraps because i have to
tell you that the process of making an
hour-long documentary is really it's
sort of like the
the proverbial sausage it's not that
pretty and i think the most amazing
thing is how
some of our best programs
how awful they were at birth and through
their childhood and their adolescence
and
you know and some programs that won
emmys one peabody's
um and so
one good thing is um
you know as we start this fall seasons
and we have a lot of our programs for
the fall or having a really difficult
adolescence um there is hope for them so
i can't really say that was true of
dirty dancing too
yeah well i'm glad to know that the guys
who make the big bucks also suffer
well television even documentary
television is a very emotional
um
story driven process it demands strong
characters it demands action it demands
a story that moves on and gets somewhere
it goes from an act one to an act three
hopefully
and um
the process of science itself uh really
shares those attributes try as we try as
we might
um yes there are some strong science
communicators with neil is a wonderful
example but they're very rare on the
ground and we we desperately hunt for
them all the time talent that can really
communicate
as neil can contagiously the the the joy
of doing the science more often a
scientist is
an academic who's lost in the detail of
his work and it's like pulling teeth to
get the story out of them and then
what i'm bombarded by all day long is
press releases from
universities and all the rest of it and
most likely it's some incremental
little development that's pushed a field
a complicated field on by a few degrees
or so on how are we going to get an hour
of great television out of that we have
to see it as part of a much bigger
process
one of the reasons why i think we wanted
to start nova science now is we would
hear of these great stories but we would
think how are we going to stretch this
to an hour
it's a wonderful story but it just isn't
that complicated in science but
great and interesting scientists who are
really good communicators who really can
speak with passion
who can speak at the level of a
non-scientific viewer
that's right there at the top and then
visuals how are you going to tell the
story with pictures
action what can people actually do what
can the correspondent do what does the
scientist do
physically that you can show
you know what's the outcome of of their
research what can you see
and something has to happen in the story
you have to start out in one place and
end up in another place which of course
you must do an anova because if you have
an hour and you just stick in the same
place i don't know what that hour is
going to be about looking through the
microscope but
and i actually think i mean the natural
science foundation helped us start nova
science now they really wanted something
to focus on current research and i think
that it was in their mind that these
stories would be very incremental and
that was kind of in my mind too
and we did a few of them and they're
really boring and so i mean i would have
i would have liked to
believe
that you could do a story that's just a
moment of time about a question that
can't be answered
i i would as a journalist myself science
journalist i would really like to
believe that you can do that on
television
but i haven't found in my experience
that that's really the case so we've
kind of evolved
and so that actually makes it much
harder to find stories because something
has to happen you have to start from a
point of ignorance to a point of
knowledge exciting
fast-moving uh controversy uh the idea
that a uh a comet came in to across
north america 13 000 years ago and wiped
out the mammoths and the other
charismatic megaphone it's a hugely huge
controversy that was unresolved in the
scientific community and we took a huge
risk in deciding to follow this
controversy because we thought it would
make an exciting program and we really
didn't know up until i was crossing
myself silently
up until about a week before air because
i was scared stiff that something would
come out that would really
um damn you know what's the right word
that would really skew the way that we
presented the program but journalists
take that as you know phil of course
journalists take those kind of risks all
the time in journalism and it's part of
the joy of the job and
what's the most fun part
i had so much fun in the leech swamp
that was
that was a lot of luckily neil went in
his bike shorts
and i wore waders
and it was a lot of fun
but probably shoot probably at this
point shooting is
and shooting with neil is really fun
sometimes as
as paula said often the most painful
programs to make come out the best
but um
with neil what what you see is what you
get he is really
really a good time what would be my one
of my fondest hopes because we're doing
a big revamp of our website and i think
there's a perfect thing for a website to
do we will never have the resources to
be able to follow up on everything
that's outdated all we can hope to do
and evan keeps track of this is to
actually correct things that are now
wrong
and that we try to do because you know
our shows are repeated and they're on
for at least four years so and they're
all on the web and they're all on the
web and they're all streamed so i think
that one of the most perfect
places to do these kind of updates would
be nova online we don't really have the
resources to do it but i think we will
in future years because we're devoting
more and more resources to our website
programs are always going to be a
minority taste but i hope that they will
always remain an important minority
taste and i hope that um
that they will always remain the choice
for people who like to think and who
like to learn
so
but it would be nice to you know ratings
are a fact of life and they are a fact
of life in public broadcasting as well
as in commercial broadcasting although
they're not as important but that
doesn't mean that they're completely
unimportant
we all want people even if we didn't
have
pressure on us which we do
to get funders and those funders want to
support programs that people watch
we want people to watch our programs
we're not just making them so that our
mothers will watch them and so that we
can watch them over and over again and
think about how smart they are so every
program choice is a balance between
what's our mission what should we be
doing what will no one else do trust me
no one else will do evo diva i mean
trust me