Abstract
Beginning with early radio dramas on evolution, including a historical radio play on the voyage of the Beagle by George Orwell, this chapter outlines how it was in non-science broadcasts where the most stereotypical framing of evolution occurred. Whether explorations of evolutionary philosophy in Doctor Who, the ethically questionable science fiction of Doomwatch or in the many historical dramatisations centred on Darwinian controversies, in most non-science content, depiction of evolutionary science was often outdated, incomplete, teleological and, on occasion, simply incorrect. The chapter argues that the association of evolution with morally ambiguous scientists and reprehensible scientific practices across a range of broadcast media, movies and science fiction novels has created a normative frame that explicitly links evolutionary ideas to controversy and conflict.
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Notes
- 1.
“Strange Intelligence”, Imaginary Conversations, written by Michael Innes, produced by Rayner Heppenstall, BBC Third Programme, June 30, 1947. Excerpt from Strange Intelligence by Michael Innes reprinted by permission of Peters Fraser & Dunlop (www.petersfraserdunlop.com) on behalf of the Estate of Michael Innes.
- 2.
Rayner Heppenstall based the radio series Imaginary Conversations on a popular five-volume, nineteenth-century book series of the same name, by the author Walter Savage Landor, published between 1824 and 1829. For more on Rayner Heppenstall’s career: Gareth J. Buckell, Rayner Heppenstall: A Critical Study (Dalkey Archive Press, 2007).
- 3.
Johnson and Boswell featured in an earlier radio show in a similar vein, Conversations Out of Time (1933). However, it is likely that for his 1947 script Innes was inspired by the short story “The Monboddo Ape Boy” published by the American author of historical mysteries Lillian de la Torre, as part of her collection of short fictional stories narrated from James Boswell’s perspective, Dr. Sam: Johnson, Detector (Alfred A. Knopf, 1946).
- 4.
Stefaan Blancke, ‘Lord Monboddo’s Ourang-Outang and the Origin and Progress of Language’, in The Evolution of Social Communication in Primates: A Multidisciplinary Approach, ed. Marco Pina and Nathalie Gontier, Interdisciplinary Evolution Research (Springer International Publishing, 2014), 31–44, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02669-5_2.
- 5.
The series aired on the more culturally highbrow “Third Programme” radio station, which had only launched the previous year in 1946. Only 50% of the population could receive the station and it therefore had substantially smaller audiences than the more established “Home Service” and “Light Programme”. The series was never repeated and along with seven others, this episode was published in a limited print run in 1948. BBC Year-Book 1947 (BBC, 1947), 7; Rayner Heppenstall (Ed.), Imaginary Conversations (Secker & Warburg, 1948).
- 6.
For example, in the period 1923–2009 Charles Darwin’s Grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, a proponent of early evolutionary ideas, only featured on approximately 11 broadcasts. Interestingly, the physicist and poet Desmond King-Hele, who wrote a biography of Erasmus Darwin (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963), wrote four of these broadcasts. Other influential early evolutionary thinkers have featured even less: Comte de Buffon approximately four times, James Hutton four, and even the much debated Jean-Baptiste Lamarck only appears four times in the listings of the Radio Times . All figures approximate, taken by searching all forms/stylings of names using the BBC Genome Database (https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/).
- 7.
Desmond Morris (b. 1928) is a zoologist, popular author and broadcaster whose 1967 book The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal, which proposed evolutionary and sociobiological explanations for many distinct human features, was a worldwide bestseller. From the late 1950s onwards, he regularly featured on British radio and television. For more see Desmond Morris, “Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum, Life Story Interviews: Desmond Morris,” National Life Stories, C1672/16, The British Library, accessed June 14, 2018, https://sounds.bl.uk/Oral-history/Science/021M-C1672X0016XX-0001V0.
- 8.
For example it is entirely feasible that across the 260 plus episodes of the BBC Religion and Ethics department’s Sunday magazine The Heaven and Earth Show (1998–2007), evolution occasionally came up in an interview or discussion.
- 9.
While this is not a particularly new insight, as scholars have long reflected on the influence of science fiction on the public understanding of science, early work in this area often considered science fictions influence secondary or tangential. See, for example, Maurice Goldsmith, The Science Critic: A Critical Analysis of the Popular Presentation of Science (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 59–64.
- 10.
See, for example, Horizon: Darwin’s Bulldog (1971), a one-off special, which dramatised the Huxley-Wilberforce debate and the events that led up to this infamous, and historically contested, clash between evolutionary theory and religious dogma. For more on the event and associated debates, see John Hedley Brooke, John Brooke, and Geoffrey Cantor, Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement Of Science And Religion (A&C Black, 2000): 35–36; and Bernard Lightman, “Victorian Sciences and Religions: Discordant Harmonies,” Osiris, Science in Theistic Contexts: Cognitive Dimensions, 16 (2001): 343–66.
- 11.
John Drakakis, British Radio Drama (Cambridge University Press, 1981), 7–9.
- 12.
For a popular example from the post-war years see: Jean-Paul Sartre, Huis Clos, translated by Marjorie Gabain and Joan Swinstead, produced by Mary Hope Allen. BBC Third Programme, October 4, 1946.
- 13.
See BBC Year-Book 1934 (BBC, 1934), 109–13.
- 14.
See Drakakis, 1–36; and Paddy Scannell, “Features and Social Documentaries” in Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff (eds), A Social History of British Broadcasting: Volume 1 – 1922–1939, Serving the Nation (Wiley, 1991), 134–52.
- 15.
For example, Under Milk Wood, 1954.
- 16.
For an insight into the challenges the BBC faced in soliciting scripts from more established playwrights and dramatists who out of “ignorance and snobbery” considered radio beneath them, see: Louis MacNeice, “Scripts Wanted!”, BBC Year-Book 1947 (BBC, 1947), 25–28.
- 17.
“The Origin of Species”, How it was written, produced by Stephen Potter, presented by Cedric Hardwicke, BBC Home Service, December 15, 1944. Radio Times, December 8, 1944, 16. All BBC copyright content reproduced courtesy of the British Broadcasting Corporation. All rights reserved.
- 18.
On the Origin of Species was the only scientific book to feature in this short-lived series, other books featured included Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers. The format was occasionally resurrected under different names in the decade that followed, for example see The Making of a Novel, written and presented by Robert Speaight, BBC Third Programme, January 23, 1951. The episode of How it was written on Origins was later reworked and expanded by Potter, becoming 1948s The Evolution of a Theory. The content provided by Fisher remained, but the dramatic approach was expanded producing a two-person duologue between Darwin and his close friend the botanist and explorer Joseph Hooker.
- 19.
“The Voyage of the ‘Beagle’”, Voyages of Discovery, produced by Rayner Heppenstall, written by George Orwell, BBC Home Service, March 29, 1946. Full script: “2953. The Voyage of the ‘Beagle’”, in George Orwell, Smothered Under Journalism 1946 (Secker & Warburg, 2001), 179–201.
- 20.
In 1947 Heppenstall also produced the first-ever radio performance of Animal Farm, which Orwell himself adapted for the wireless: Animal Farm, written by George Orwell, produced by Rayner Heppenstall, BBC Third Programme, January 14, 1947. For more on Heppenstall’s relationship with Orwell see: Rayner Heppenstall, Four Absentees (Barrie and Rockliff, 1960).
- 21.
George Orwell, “The Voyage of the ‘Beagle’”, Radio Times, March 22, 1946, 4.
- 22.
Orwell, Smothered Under Journalism 1946, 182.
- 23.
For an introduction to the most common narrative approaches in television see Kristin Thompson, Storytelling in Film and Television (Harvard University Press, 2003). For a case-study that outlines the development of more complex narrative forms in US television during the 1990s see Jason Mittell, “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television”, The Velvet Light Trap 58:1 (2006): 29–40, https://doi.org/10.1353/vlt.2006.0032.
- 24.
For an introduction to these issues and concepts see: Fern Elsdon-Baker, “Creating hard-line ‘secular’ evolutionists: The Influence of Question Design on Our Understanding of Public Perceptions of Clash Narratives”, and Carissa Sharp and Carola Leicht, “Beyond Belief Systems: Promoting a Social Identity Approach to the Study of Science and Religion”, both in Fern Elsdon-Baker and Bernard Lightman (Eds.), Identity in a Secular Age: Science, Religion, and Public Perception (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020).
- 25.
For more on some of these early approaches and technologies see: Angela Frattarola, ‘The Modernist “Microphone Play”: Listening in the Dark to the BBC’, Modern Drama (2010) https://doi.org/10.3138/md.52.4.449.
- 26.
Todd Avery, Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics, and the BBC, 1922–1938 (Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2006), 61–67 and 111–136.
- 27.
John Batchelor, H. G. Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 164; and David C. Smith, H. G. Wells, Desperately Mortal (Yale University Press, 1986), 10–13.
- 28.
Avery, Radio Modernism, 90.
- 29.
Robert Bud, ‘“The Spark Gap Is Mightier than the Pen”: The Promotion of an Ideology of Science in the Early 1930s’, Journal of Political Ideologies 22:2 (2017): 169–81, https://doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2017.1298548, 171–3.
- 30.
Peter J. Bowler, A History of the Future: Prophets of Progress from H. G. Wells to Isaac Asimov (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
- 31.
Peter Bowler, ‘Parallel Prophecies: Science Fiction and Futurology in the Twentieth Century’, Osiris 34:1 (2019): 121–38, https://doi.org/10.1086/703952.
- 32.
Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint, The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction (Routledge, 2011), 31–32.
- 33.
Drakakis, British Radio Drama, 7–12.
- 34.
Reflecting the wider trajectory of the seriousness afforded to science fiction, nearly all of these early readings were part of the For the Schools slot on the BBC Home Service. See Smith, H. G. Wells, Desperately Mortal, 511 for a full list of H. G. Wells’ BBC broadcasts. “Kipps”, written by H. G. Wells, March 25–31, and July 1, 1926, various BBC regional stations; “English Literature, ‘The First Men in the Moon’”, written by H. G. Wells and read by Colin Milne, November 1935–August 1936, BBC Regional Programme; and “Dramatic reading: ‘The Time Machine’, by H.G. Wells”, For the Schools, adapted for broadcasting by Douglas R. Allan, January–August 1940, BBC Home Service.
- 35.
See respectively: Kirby Farrell, “Wells and Neotony”, in George Edgar Slusser, Patrick Parrinder and Danièle Chatelain (Eds), H.G. Wells Perennial Time Machine (University of Georgia Press, 2001), 65–75; and Richard Barnett, ‘Education or Degeneration: E. Ray Lankester, H. G. Wells and The Outline of History’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 37:2 (2006): 203–29, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2006.03.002.
- 36.
“Senior English. Dramatic reading: ‘The Time Machine’, by H. G. Wells”, For the Schools, adapted by Douglas R. Allan, May 1940, BBC Home Service; “Senior English Serial: ‘The Time Machine,’ by H. G. Wells,” For the Schools, adapted by Penelope Knox, March 1947, BBC Home Service; and “H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine”, adapted and produced by Robert Barr, January 25, 1949, BBC Television. As with most For the Schools content during the period, the radio versions of The Time Machine were repeated several times, for example the Penelope Knox adaptation was repeated again in November/December 1947.
- 37.
“Saturday-Night Theatre: The Island of Dr Moreau,” by H. G. Wells, dramatised by David Calcutt, September 1, 1990, BBC Radio 4.
- 38.
David A. Kirby, ‘Are We Not Men?: The Horror of Eugenics in The Island of Dr. Moreau’, ParaDoxa 17 (2002), 93–108; David A. Kirby, ‘The Devil in Our DNA: A Brief History of Eugenics in Science Fiction Films’, Literature and Medicine 26:1 (2007): 83–108, https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2008.0006.
- 39.
For a timeline of works of science fiction that utilise uplift in their plots, see: “Uplift (science fiction)”, last modified June 14, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uplift_(science_fiction).
- 40.
Kirby, ‘The Devil in Our DNA’, 105.
- 41.
David A. Kirby, Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists, and Cinema (MIT Press, 2011), 34–5.
- 42.
A. Brad Schwartz, Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015).
- 43.
Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Duke University Press, 2000), 114–118.
- 44.
Smith, H. G. Wells, Desperately Mortal, 511; The War of the Worlds, by H. G. Wells, adapted Jon Manchip White, May–July 1950, BBC Light Programme, and September–October 1950, BBC Home Service.
- 45.
Perhaps the most famous example is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, the original BBC 4 radio comedy series broadcast in 1978, pre-dates the novel (1979), the BBC television series (1981), the computer game (1984) and the more recent feature film (2005).
- 46.
Derek Johnston, ‘Experimental Moments: R.U.R. and the Birth of British Television Science Fiction’, Science Fiction Film & Television 2:2 (2009), 254.
- 47.
R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), by Karel Čapek, adapted by and produced by Jan Bussell, February 11, 1938, BBC Television; and Mark Bould, “Science Fiction Television in the United Kingdom,” in J. P. Telotte, The Essential Science Fiction Television Reader (University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 210. Čapek’s play introduced and popularised the word robot, from the Czech word robota, which means forced labour.
- 48.
Johnston, ‘Experimental Moments’.
- 49.
John Rieder, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (Wesleyan University Press, 2012), 97–122.
- 50.
No full scripts for either the 1938 or 1948 versions of R.U.R. are held at the BBC Written Archives, with only one small folder covering both productions, see: “R.U.R. 1938 and 1948”, T5/443, BBC-WA.
- 51.
R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), by Karel Čapek, adapted by and produced by Jan Bussell, March 4 & 5, 1938, BBC Television; “R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots)”, Radio Times, February 27, 1948, 25 & 27.
- 52.
H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells, adapted and produced by Robert Barr, January 25, 1949, BBC Television.
- 53.
John Swift, “To the World’s End in Sixty Minutes”, Radio Times, January 21, 1949, 25; and “Viewers are Saying”, Radio Times, February 4, 1949, 25. As discussed in, Derek Johnston, “Genre, Taste and the BBC: The Origins of British Television Science Fiction” (University of East Anglia, PhD Thesis, 2009), 55–56. For more on other early television science fiction adaptations see Johnston, “Genre, Taste and the BBC”, 71–109.
- 54.
The Quatermass Experiment, written by Nigel Kneale, produced by Rudolph Cartier, July–August 1953, BBC Television. Interested readers can watch the opening two episodes of The Quatermass Experiment online at the following link: https://archive.org/details/TheQuatermassExperiment-Incomplete (last accessed 18/08/2021). Unfortunately, only the opening two episodes were recorded and as the show was performed and broadcast live no video or audio of the following four episodes remains. All six episodes scripts are held on microfilm at the BBC-WA.
- 55.
Catherine Johnson, “Exploiting the Intimate Screen: The Quatermass Experiment, Fantasy and the aesthetic potential of early television drama”, in Janet Thumim (Ed.), Small Screens, Big Ideas: Television in the 1950s (Bloomsbury Academic, 2002), 181–194; Mark Bould, “Science Fiction Television in the United Kingdom”, 210–11; Johnston, ‘Experimental Moments’, 254.
- 56.
Highlighting the influence of Quatermass on subsequent SFTV, this hybrid human-cactus was later referenced in the 1980 Doctor Who story “Meglos”.
- 57.
See: Radio Critic, “Saturday Serial”, The Manchester Guardian, August 5, 1953, 3; C. A. Lejeune, “Television Notes”, The Observer, July 26, 1953, 11; Gilbert Harding, “Gilbert Harding’s Notebook”, Picture Post, November 14, 1953, 40; D. Duke, “Like Carroon”, Radio Times, September 4, 1953, 9; and P. Thomas, “Thwarted” Radio Times, September 4, 1953, 9.
- 58.
Catherine Johnson, “Exploiting the Intimate Screen”, 183–84.
- 59.
Catherine Johnson, “Exploiting the Intimate Screen”, 193.
- 60.
Derek Johnston, “The BBC “Versus” Science Fiction: The Collision of Transnational Genre and National Identity in Television of the Early 1950s”, in Tobias Hochscherf, James Leggott, and Donald E. Palumbo (Eds.), British Science Fiction Film and Television: Critical Essays (McFarland, 2014), 40–49.
- 61.
“The Vanishing Pulps”, Radio Times, December 1, 1960, 29.
- 62.
Mark Bould, “Science Fiction Television in the United Kingdom”, 209–230.
- 63.
A film version of the original series, The Quatermass Xperiment produced by UK Hammer Horror Productions and adapted for the screen by writer and director Val Guest was released in cinemas in 1955.
- 64.
See respectively: an episode of The Younger Generation: Under 20 Review (BBC Light Programme), aired on April 8, 1953 on which two newly published SF collections were discussed; an episode of Film Time (BBC Home Service) from November 29, 1951 which reviewed new SF movie releases, including The Thing from Another World (1951); and the one-off special Jules Verne and Science Fiction (January 11, 1955, BBC Home Service) on which the novelist and playwright Clemence Dane discussed her love of Verne and his influence on current SF trends.
- 65.
The Fiction of Science, by John H. Steele, June 3, 1957; Monsters in Miniature, by Kenneth Bisset, February 15, 1957, BBC Home Service; and Frontiers of Science: Space Travel, produced by James McCloy, October 11, 1957, BBC Television.
- 66.
Early successes for Newman at ABC included the space travel focused Target Luna (1960), and its sequels Pathfinders in Space (1960), Pathfinders to Mars (1960–61) and Pathfinders to Venus (1961). See Mark Bould, “Science Fiction Television in the United Kingdom”, 213.
- 67.
The production was beset with problems from the outset, scripts were dropped, technical issues abounded and the first episode had to be re-recorded to soften the characterisation of the Doctor. “An Unearthly Child”, Doctor Who, written by Anthony Coburn, November 23, 1963, BBC Television, available online: https://archive.org/details/doctorwhoanunearthlychildepisode1incolor_202003 (last accessed 21/06/2021); James Chapman, ‘Fifty Years in the TARDIS: The Historical Moments of Doctor Who’, Critical Studies in Television 9:1 (2014): 44–47; and Lindy A. Orthia, ‘Antirationalist Critique or Fifth Column of Scientism? Challenges from Doctor Who to the Mad Scientist Trope’, Public Understanding of Science 20:4 (2011): 525
- 68.
Chapman, 44.
- 69.
TARDIS stands for “Time and Relative Dimension in Space”, while other TARDISes can take on different forms, due to a broken circuit the Doctor’s is always, the now iconic, blue police phone box.
- 70.
The first season was composed of eight serials, written by six different authors. Serials ranged in length from two to seven episodes.
- 71.
Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint, The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction (Routledge, 2011), 31–32.
- 72.
Like the Doctor, the protagonist in Wells’ The Time Machine is known simply as the Time Traveller. John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado, Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text (St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 121–127, http://archive.org/details/doctorwhounfoldi00tull.
- 73.
“An Unearthly Child”, 21:50; “The Cave of Skulls”, Doctor Who, written by Anthony Coburn, November 30, 1963, BBC Television. For more on the stereotypical depiction of early hominids and Neanderthals, including their representation in H. G. Wells’ Outline of History (1920), see Amanda Rees and Charlotte Sleigh, Human (Reaktion Books, 2020), 54–67.
- 74.
The most extensive lifting from H. G. Wells in Doctor Who appeared in the 1985 serial Timelash, in which Wells himself featured, encountering various phenomena supposed to have inspired his novels, and in which, in a nod to Dr Moreau, the arch antagonist was a humanoid-animal hybrid. Glen McCoy, Dr Who: Timelash (W. H. Allen); and “Timelash” Doctor Who in Vision, Issue 83, March 1999.
- 75.
Chapman, ‘Fifty Years in the TARDIS’, 47.
- 76.
Written by screenwriter Terry Nation, who would go on to create seminal BBC SFTV series Survivors (1975–77) and Blake’s 7 (1978–81), the second serial introduced the now ubiquitous aliens the Daleks, with their sinister order to “Exterminate!” an echo of the cry “Finished” shouted offstage by the robots in Čapek’s R.U.R. Johnston, ‘Experimental Moments’, 261; and the Doctor Who Guide online, https://guide.doctorwhonews.net/info.php?detail=ratings&type=date&order=asc (last accessed 18/06/21), where interested readers can find viewing figures for all episodes of the series.
- 77.
Jeremy Bentham, “Innes Lloyd Interview”, Doctor Who Magazine, Winter Special, 11–13; and Chapman, ‘Fifty Years in the TARDIS’, 48–50; Michael Seely, The Quest for Pedler: The Life and Ideas of Dr Kit Pedler (Miwk Publishing, 2014), 65–69. For more on the differing importance of accuracy and plausibility in science fiction, and the authenticity and authority that scientific advisors can bring to a project see: Kirby, Lab Coats in Hollywood.
- 78.
Tomorrow’s World, presented by Raymond Baxter, December 9, 1965, BBC One; Seely, The Quest for Pedler, 64.
- 79.
Seely, 69–75.
- 80.
The final episode of season four, serial one “The Smugglers” drew an audience of 4.4 million, “The Tenth Planet” incrementally built on this figure, with the episodes three and four achieving respectively 7.6 and 7.5 million viewers.
- 81.
See: John Davy, “Ways of improving ‘spare-part surgery’”, The Observer, July 7, 1963; Micahel Woodruff, “Surgical transplantation in theory and practice”, New Scientist, October 3, 1963, 12–13; Alex Comfort, “Modified Men”, New Scientist, August 19, 1965, 456–7.
- 82.
Pedler saw communication as a central part of scientists’ role and regularly featured in popular media outlets discussing the specifics of his own research, reviewing popular science books, and musing on more general themes about the potential of medical research to improve the human condition. See: Cyril Dunn, “Doctor who creates Who” The Observer, February 5, 1967, 23; Kit Pedler, “Views of Perception”, The Guardian, September 20, 1968, 8; Timothy Johnson, “Exploring the Jungle of the Eye”, London Illustrated News, October 8, 1966, 12–13; and Kit Pedler, “Babies,” (Letters) Daily Mail, March 3, 1970, 4.
- 83.
A causal loop is a theoretical idea that if someone could travel back in time they may interact in a series of events which ultimately leads to them in the future, causing a closed loop where the origin of the sequence of actions cannot be determined. Sometimes referred to as the bootstrap paradox in reference to the time-travel novella By His Bootstraps by Robert A. Heinlein first published in 1941. Jonathan Holmes, “Doctor Who: what is the Bootstrap Paradox?” Radio Times, October 10, 2015.
- 84.
For more on this trope and it use in science fiction see, “Hitler’s Time Travel Exemption Act”, TV Tropes Wiki, https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HitlersTimeTravelExemptionAct (last accessed 20/03/21).
- 85.
Courtland Lewis and Paula J. Smithka, Doctor Who and Philosophy: Bigger on the Inside (Open Court Publishing, 2010), 180–183.
- 86.
Jonathan Dennis, “Scenes from the class struggle in Gabriel Chase: Darwinism, Social Darwinism, and Religion” in Ghost Light, The Black Archive, 6 (Obverse Books, 2016), 70–99. The effect of time traveller’s actions on the course of history continues to be a regular theme of SFTV, for a recent example see The Umbrella Academy (Netflix, 2019–2020) based on the comic book series of the same name. For a literary account that explores the concept of divergent evolutionary pathways, see Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos (1985), which explores the future evolution of humans after a global catastrophe leaves only an isolated group of fertile humans on the fictional Galápagos island of Santa Rosalia.
- 87.
David Layton, The Humanism of Doctor Who: A Critical Study in Science Fiction and Philosophy (McFarland, 2014), 2.
- 88.
For mystical serials, see “Kinda” (1982) and “Snakedance” (1983). While in several serials the Doctors’ decisions are couched in terms of rational decision-making, perhaps the most clearly secular rationalist plotline can be found in the pilot for a Dr Who spin-off K-9 and Company (1981), in which science and technology are portrayed as good, and nature and ritual as bad.
- 89.
Chapman, ‘Fifty Years in the TARDIS’, 50.
- 90.
Beginning with New Zealand and Australia in 1964 and 1965 respectively, by the mid-1970s the series was shown on PBS stations in the US and Canada, and to date has regularly aired in an estimated 50 countries. In 2013, a 50th anniversary special set a world record, when it was simulcast and watched in 94 countries. Robert Booth, “Doctor Who one of biggest shows in the world, says BBC following ‘simulcast’”, The Guardian, November 24, 2013.
- 91.
“The Moonbase”, Doctor Who, written by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis (uncredited), February to March 1967, BBC One; “The Tomb of the Cybermen”, Doctor Who, written by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis, September 1967, BBC One; and “The Wheel in Space”, Doctor Who, story by Kit Pedler, written by David Whitaker, April to June 1968, BBC One.
- 92.
Pedler appeared on the BBC panel debate show Talkback in September 1967 to defend the more violent aspects of the serial. The BBC then used Pedler’s commentary, along with that of his co-panellist the social psychologist Dr Hilde Himmelweit to produce a report, which convinced Australian broadcaster ABC not to drop the last episode of the serial when they aired it in the summer of 1968. Seely, The Quest for Pedler, 114–119.
- 93.
“Of Ombudsmen and Cybermats”, My Life in Science, presented by Elizabeth Gard and David Wilson, June 5, 1969, BBC Radio Three.
- 94.
In the opening episode, the scientist Dr John Ridge (Simon Oates) introduced the new team member, Dr Toby Wren (Robert Powell) to the department’s analogue digital hybrid computer, known as Doomwatch . However, as the series proceeds it becomes clear that Doomwatch is a nickname given to the government agency as a whole. Doomwatch , “The Plastic Eaters.” Series 1: Episode 1. Produced by Terence Dudley. Written by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis. BBC 1, February 9, 1970 (Simply Media/BBC – DVD, 2015): 03:50-04:10.
- 95.
Mark Wilson, ‘Doomwatch and the Environment in Britain, 1970–c.1974’, Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique. French Journal of British Studies 23, no. XXIII–3 (2018), https://doi.org/10.4000/rfcb.2621.
- 96.
Seely, The Quest for Pedler, 145–150.
- 97.
Wilson, ‘Doomwatch and the Environment in Britain, 1970–c.1974’.
- 98.
Environmental issues became increasingly important to Pedler throughout the 1970s, and by the end of the decade he had altered his lifestyle significantly in an attempt to cause the least disturbance and harm to other life forms, and was an advocate of James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis. See Kit Pedler, The Quest for Gaia: A Book of Changes, (Souvenir Press, 1979).
- 99.
The majority of episodes—10/13 in season one, 10/13 in season two and 9/12 in season three—have either a primary or secondary plotline focused on some aspect of human interference with natural processes or the natural environment. It should be noted that, after being marginalised in the process of writing and producing season two, Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis did not contribute to season three of Doomwatch , leaving the show after disagreements mounted with producer, Terence Dudley about the centrality of science to the stories and a shift to a more conservative dramatic focus for the series. See Seely, The Quest for Pedler, 184–191.
- 100.
Pedler often wrote letters to newspapers commenting on uncritical coverage of scientific issues. For examples, see a letter on unnecessary animal experimentation by scientists (Kit Pedler, “Letters: These cruel scientists go too far”, Daily Mail, August 24, 1970, 2), and a letter on his concerns with experiments developing test-tube babies (Kit Pedler, “Babies”, Daily Mail, March 3, 1970, 4).
- 101.
Simone Turchetti, ‘Looking for the Bad Teachers: The Radical Science Movement and Its Transnational History’, in Science Studies during the Cold War and Beyond: Paradigms Defected, ed. Elena Aronova and Simone Turchetti, Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology (Palgrave Macmillan US, 2016), 77–101, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55943-2_4.
- 102.
For example, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, founded in 1957, who’s first President was the philosopher Bertrand Russell, the physicist Joseph Rotblat was on the initial executive committee, and biologists Julian Huxley and Conrad Waddington were among a large number of public intellectuals who supported the organisation in its early years. Christopher P. Driver, The Disarmers: A Study in Protest (Hodder and Stoughton, 1964), 42–45.
- 103.
Jon Agar, ‘What Happened in the Sixties?’, The British Journal for the History of Science 41:4 (2008): 567–600; David Kaye (1986), The Life and Times of BSSRS, http://www.bssrs.org/services (last accessed 14/06/21).
- 104.
Kaye, The Life and Times of BSSRS, 11–12 and Appendix 5, “BSSRS Constitution”
- 105.
Fuller Watson, The Social Impact of Modern Biology (Routledge, 1971).
- 106.
See Jonathan Rosenhead, “The BSSRS: three years on”, New Scientist, April 20, 1972, 134–136.
- 107.
Peter Elphick, “Social Responsibility in Science: New I.C. Society”, Felix: Imperial College Union, 2. Available online: https://f001.backblazeb2.com/file/felixonlinearchive/issues/pdfs/felix_303.pdf (last accessed 18/09/2020); and Graham Chedd, “Doomwatcher incarnate”, New Scientist and Science Journal, March 18, 1971, 622–624.
- 108.
Pedler was regularly listed among those who had supported and advised the magazine in editions from its launch in 1972–1975, and in 1976 he contributed the article: Kit Pedler, “Peoples Habitat: Special Feature”, Undercurrent, 16 (June-Jul 1976), 23, https://undercurrents1972.wordpress.com/2013/02/09/uc16-june-july-1976/ (last accessed 21/06/2021).
- 109.
Seely, The Quest for Pedler, 212–215; Chedd, “Doomwatcher incarnate”, 622–624; and Raymond Gardner, “Prophets of Doom”, The Guardian, December 13, 1973, 11.
- 110.
Daily Mail Reporter, “TV’s crystal ball one step ahead of reality”, Daily Mail, March 13, 1970, 12.
- 111.
Doomwatch, “Tomorrow, the Rat”. Series 1: Episode 4. Written and produced by Terence Dudley. BBC 1, March 2, 1970 (Simply Media/BBC – DVD, 2015): 39:50-39:55. All BBC copyright content reproduced courtesy of the British Broadcasting Corporation. All rights reserved.
- 112.
Ibid: 21:40.
- 113.
Doomwatch. “The Hair Trigger.” Series 3: Episode 6. Directed by Quentin Lawrence. Written by Brian Hayles. BBC 1, July 10, 1972 (Simply Media/BBC – DVD, 2015).
- 114.
For more on eugenics in science fiction see David A. Kirby, “The Devil in Our DNA: A Brief History of Eugenics in Science Fiction Films,” Literature and Medicine 26:1 (2007): 83–108, https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2008.0006. For more on mad-scientist narratives and tropes, see Spencer R. Weart, The Rise of Nuclear Fear (Harvard University Press, 2012), 32–54.
- 115.
Doomwatch, “Tomorrow, the Rat”. Series 1: Episode 4. Written and produced by Terence Dudley. BBC 1, March 2, 1970 (Simply Media/BBC – DVD, 2015): 36:50. All BBC copyright content reproduced courtesy of the British Broadcasting Corporation. All rights reserved.
- 116.
For two examples from many, which explore in-depth some of the intertwined histories of ethical and religious contestations of evolution, see: Peter J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea (University of California Press, 1989); and Gowan Dawson, Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
- 117.
For more on the history of the Intelligent Design movement in the USA see: Tom Kaden, Creationism and Anti-Creationism in the United States: A Sociology of Conflict (Springer, 2018).
- 118.
For more on the most common representations of scientists in fiction see: Petra Pansegrau, “Stereotypes and Images of Scientists in Fiction Films” in Peter Weingart and Bernd Huppauf (Eds), Science Images and Popular Images of the Sciences (Routledge, 2012), 257–266.
- 119.
“500th Programme”, Tomorrow’s World, March 16, 1978, BBC One, 00:40-00:50. As originally featured on the BBC Archive online in 2018, see: https://web.archive.org/web/20190529173410/http://www.bbc.co.uk:80/archive/tomorrowsworld/. For more clips of Tomorrow’s World from the late 1960s to the 1980s, see: https://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/tomorrows-world/zrkpwty (last accessed 21/06/2021). All BBC copyright content reproduced courtesy of the British Broadcasting Corporation. All rights reserved.
- 120.
For an introduction to the concept of media reinforcement and cumulative effects of media consumption see: Michael D. Slater, ‘Reinforcing Spirals: The Mutual Influence of Media Selectivity and Media Effects and Their Impact on Individual Behavior and Social Identity’, Communication Theory 17:3 (2007): 281–303, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2007.00296.x.
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Hall, A. (2021). Imagining Evolution: Drama and Science Fiction. In: Evolution on British Television and Radio. Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83043-4_5
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