TV and radio

Matthew Sweet returns to BBC Radio 4 with 'The Philosopher's Arms', a very special pub where moral dilemmas, philosophical ideas and the real world meet for a chat and a drink. More

In another OU-BBC collaboration Matthew discovers how our lives connect to some of the trickiest philosophical problems ever conceived. Free will, exploitation, sex, sexism, blame and shame are just some of the topics to be mulled over in this latest series.

Check the broadcast times on the BBC Radio 4 website.

The series starts on Tuesday, 30 July 2013.

Posted on 25 July 2013.

So, what happens when an OU volcanologist is invited out to India to join the filming of a major new BBC series? Find out...

Dr Mike Widdowson, volcanologist at the OU’s Department of Environment, Earth and Ecosystems, joined the filming of BBC TWO series The Story of the Continents in October, which will be aired on domestic UK TV in March-April next year (2013).

Mike’s no stranger to the camera as in 2010, he fronted-up an episode of the Canadian TV series ‘The odyssey of the continents’ which was filmed on location in India, and in the OU’s world-class rock-dating laboratories.

'It was really good to catch up with Iain again'
He said: “This latest filming trip was a bit of a whirlwind excursion lasting only five days. Together with the assistant cameraman Claudio Cadman, I arrived in Mumbai late on the Sunday evening. The remainder of the team, including assistant producers, sound and camera crew had already been out filming in and around the city. By Wednesday evening we had completed everything, and we all flew back home on the Thursday.”

Mike met up with the team, together with the BBC presenter Iain Stewart, very early on Monday morning when they then set off for the spectacular scenery of the Western Ghats hills, some four hours’ drive from Mumbai.

Iain Stewart is well known to many who watch the BBC Earth Science programmes – he has presented TV programmes such as Making Scotland’s Landscape, Men of Rock, and How to Grow a Planet, as well as Volcano Live.

Mike said: “It was really good to catch up with Iain again – we had met in Glasgow on a number of occasions a few years back over beers and a curry – at the time I was jointly supervising a PhD student at Glasgow University.”

Mike and Iain were in India to shoot a piece about the Deccan flood basalt eruptions which is based on Mike’s research there.

“I've been researching the ancient volcanic landscape of western India for over 25 years now, and we have made many key findings through my detailed fieldwork, and the efforts of my PhD students, as well as through our analytical work at The Open University,” he added.

'Massive eruptions, toxic gases, and the struggle of life'
“We’ve unearthed a fascinating story of massive eruptions, toxic gases, and the struggle of life at ‘Deccan ground zero’. What we have discovered is that the effect of these eruptions are likely to have been a major contributory factor to the mass extinction event 65 million years ago - most famous for the demise of the dinosaurs. We aimed to get this idea across in this BBC TV episode – we argue that a combination of Deccan volcanism and a meteorite impact in Mexico was the 'double blow' that killed off many species on the lands and in the oceans at the end-Cretaceous.”
 
The programme will form part of the Australaisa episode of a five-part BBC series. Iain has done 'the talk to camera narrative' based on Mike’s work on the Deccan – “And very good he is, too!” said Mike. At the same time, Mike was filmed 'interview style', and his footage will be used for a parallel series which will go out to BBC worldwide.

'Rat-catchers of Mumbai'
Mike added: “We had four very hectic days filming – it has been hard work with umpteen takes for the various pieces, but always good fun throughout. In fact, we arrived at one locality – the ancient Bhuddist caves of Karla and Bhaja which were cut by hand 2,000 years ago into the Deccan rock - only to find there was a major religious Hindu festival taking place. It was amazingly colourful, with offerings of food being burned on a huge pyre. We filmed in among all the smoke and crowds!”.

The final days of filming were in Mumbai, after which Iain and the crew took a midnight jaunt to film the rat-catchers of Mumbai – but to find out why, you’ll have to watch the TV programme next spring!

 

Pictured is Dr Mike Widdowson with cameraman Claudio Cadman.


 

As the popular four-part series of Town, presented by Nicholas Crane, is released on DVD, Platform talks to the OU’s Dr Gerry Mooney, academic advisor to the programme. A staff tutor in Social Sciences and a senior lecturer for The Open University in Scotland, Dr Gerry Mooney was one of two academic advisors looking at some of the key social sciences issues of today, including community, sustainability, inequality, diversity and power, as Town was filmed. Using stunning aerials and enhanced 3D graphics, Nicholas Crane explores four iconic British towns: Scarborough, Ludlow, Perth and Totnes…

What does an academic advisor do on a television programme?

All Open University and BBC co-productions have at least one academic advisor on the team. Our role is to help incorporate the most up to date issues and academic debates into the filming, so that the final programme is as relevant as possible. We also help to set the specific things addressed in the programme into a wider context, through the extra content we help develop for the OU’s OpenLearn website and, for Towns, the free booklet.

What do the OpenLearn resources add to the series?

OpenLearn is the OU’s free-to-access website which offers topical and interactive content, from expert blogs, to videos and games, often linked to OU/BBC programmes. The centrepiece of our Town content on OpenLearn is the interactive game My Town, Your Town, Whose Town? It lets you step into the shoes of a community leader and see what kind of decisions work - and which ones don’t.

As you play you can gather feedback from residents on all the issues, including a new shopping centre, closing a factory, library cuts, new roads and social housing. Then once you’ve made your decision, you can see what the impact is and how similar decisions have worked in real life towns.

Open University tutors have also written special essays on each town, but they’ve also expanded the reach of the series with essays on five extra locations: Paisley in West Central Scotland, Newry in Northern Ireland, Athlone in the centre of Ireland, Wrexham, the largest town in North Wales, and Corby in Northamptonshire. It gives us a chance to explore other kinds of towns, such as declining or ex-industrial towns, looking at questions of employment, diversity and migration.

Which of the programmes were you involved in?

I was involved with shooting for two of the four towns, Perth and Scarborough. At Perth I spent a day with the team at the recycling plant at Glenfarg, looking at how refuse for a large town is sorted and disposed of. Recycling needs to be cleverly managed to make the best use of resources. The plant carefully predicts the amount of waste a town the size of Perth is likely to produce, so that it is sustainable in the long term.

In Scarborough we visited one of the few remaining bus manufacturers. Scarborough is a very small town but it can still support small scale manufacturers. When we think of Scarborough we mostly think of holidays by the sea, bucket and spade in hand, but there’s a thriving industry below the surface.

Which town do you have the greatest personal connection with?

I was born, studied in and still live in Paisley. While it does merge in part with Glasgow, its much larger neighbour, Paisley has a clear identity of its own. The name is most commonly associated with the well known fabric pattern, seen on shirts everywhere in the 1970s, but Paisley’s economic heyday as a textiles centre has gone.

It is still Scotland’s largest town, but like many other towns it faces major issues about unemployment, poverty and other social problems. It is also a town that has undergone significant change. It was a large textile town and while many of the mills have been demolished, some have been converted into flats, but we still need to generate more employment, especially good quality employment opportunities. The Paisley area has a rich cultural tradition, not least in relation to music, film and theatre – it has produced some well known artists, including David Tennant, John Byrne, Gerard Butler, Paulo Nutini and the late Gerry Rafferty.

So how are towns looking to the future?

There’s no ‘one size fits all’ solution.Taking Paisley as an example, it has many things in common with other ex-industrial towns, but also unique assets. In different ways their unique pasts and geographical locations are being used to help shape their future developments.

Of course, any plans for the future are also shaped by the wider society in which they’re located: towns are important to many more people than just their immediate residents – they’re products of a much wider constituency. In turn, they’re an important part of the British landscape and serve huge communities around them.

What are some of the biggest issues facing towns at the moment?

One of the themes which came up again and again as we filmed each town was sustainability: environmental, economic and social. In different ways each town was trying to imagine a sustainable future. Ludlow, for example, maintained a focus on local farmers and local producers with its large farmers’ market, and Totnes is addressing economic and environmental concerns through its status as a ‘transition town’. However, sustainability is also about wider social issues too, how to make all residents of a town feel they are part of it and able to contribute to shaping its future direction.

On a personal level, if you could pick one town to explore further, which would it be?

I would say Paisley, as I live there, but I would also like to explore Corby. A large percentage of the population in Corby are the descendents of families who moved from the West of Scotland. When the steel industry was declining in West Central Scotland during the 1920s and 30s, whole families moved to the then booming steel town of Corby in search of work. Although the steel industry has since fallen away, these families brought their unique accents and other Scottish ‘ways of life’ with them. We usually think of migration as being a large scale event across continents, but Corby shows how local cultures can be transported across a few hundred miles.
 

Town with Nicholas Crane is available now on DVD from OU Worldwide and you can win a copy by entering the Platform competition, which closes on 13 january 2012.

Pictured above is the OU's Gerry Mooney with TV presenter Nicholas Crane, and a copy of the DVD front cover