Stargazing Live

What a great idea for a programme! Everybody has some sky, somewhere. It's winter so there's a lot of nighttime and astronomy has lots of nice touchy-feely pretty pictures - so it won't be too hard for anyone. We'll get some celebrities in to entice people to watch and some scientists who can wave their arms around and we'll have a presenter whom people "like" and maybe someone who's good at impromptu work, in case there are some suprises -- how about a comedian? Oh and a rock star who studied astronomy before becoming famous - just to validate it. Great. I'll make some calls.

I can almost visualise the planning meeting for an outreach type, semi-scientific, mostly popular series of programmes. All it needed after that was a snappy title. It's about stargazing, and .... and ... it'll be live ... How about "Stargazing Live"? Brilliant.

So, what happened. Well, it was cloudy - the whole time. Apart from a brief gap in the clouds right at the start of the first night, there was no live stargazing at all. A point that was duly glossed over during the three consecutive nights the programme was broadcast on. The highlight of the shows was one brief instant where the presenter who'd obviously drawn the short straw and therefore was located in the cold, dark field just turned to do a piece to camera when a meteor flashed past in the background, Otherwise it was a perfectly ordinary science programme: Lots of talking about abstract things. Lots of images from Hubble (which nobody has ever managed to replicate simply by looking through a telescope, anywhere, ever, even with the biggest instruments in the world. I wish producers would just once use "real life" images - but then who'd watch? Lots of pieces recorded earlier and the obligatory presenter jetted off to an exotic location, just because they could.

The celebrity turned out to be Jonathon Ross who did a good impression of a complete newcomer and managed to convey an air of utter boredom with his role of "Here's a 'tel - e - scope' girls and boys. Now the nice man will show us how to use it" as one of the presenters took it out to a field, fiddled about for a few seconds and proudly announced "There's Jupiter" without managing to show anybody how he'd done it. At which point Ross' comment was along the lines of "is that all?".

The show fulfilled it's role of being aspirational and I'm sure that more than a few viewers rushed out to the shops over the next few weeks and bought themselves telescopes, while still flushed with enthusiasm. Sadly, that's where the programmes left them. Having dangled the bait of people going "ooooh" right on cue and showing many fantastic images of things you could easily photograph yourself: provided you had spent 10 years and several billion dollars/pounds on getting a large telescope into orbit. There was no actionable information in the programmes of how to go about observing. What sorts of telescopes are suitable for beginners. Nor any practical information on how to set them up or what sort of expectations you should have for what you'll see. And worst of all, they didn't want to spoil the message by reminding people that there had been no stargazing live during the entire three nights of the series - and that in all likelihood you'd be lucky to get one decent evening's observing in any given month.

If the BBC had commissioned a programme about personal investments and then focused all their attention on what, theoretically was possible and shown highly edited footage of one person actually getting a return: no matter how paltry or without showing how much effort (and luck) had gone into that success story, they'd be crucified for irresponsible journalism. However, it 's perfectly OK for them to present a hobby as being just there for the picking up, with no discussion of the costs, what you can realistically expect to get from it or what to do once you've spent your money. While they never went as far as exhorting anybody to go out and buy anything (that was probably their escape), they definitely presented the programme in an oversimplified way and implied that it was a simple 2-step process: get a telescope, point it at the night sky and you'd be off. My personal view is that they did amateur astronomy a great disservice and set up an unattainable set of expectations. Sure, they raised it's profile and increased awareness, but how many people who bought into the implied message now have a telescope in the cupboard under the stairs that they took out once, but never got set up properly and now wish they'd never heard of astronomy?