Ach, very sad. Like Paxman on University Challenge, he was clearly finding it harder and harder towards the end. I hope he's alright, it'd be a tough one to let go of, I can't imagine a better show to present.
Brilliant series, can't recommend highly enough to anyone who's not encountered it.
His genuine interest in such a vast range of topics and his ability to keep experts away from rabbit holes made the show exceptional. He will be sorely missed
Sad news. 'In Our Time' episodes are actually timeless, I am frequently amazed by the quality of episodes from over twenty years ago.
Frankly, I believe that instead of finding a new presenter, the BBC could be retire the whole series and its legend. Let the new presenter start a new series, even if the set-up remains the same (including having further discussions with a cup of tea after the radio time limit has ended)
Highly recommended. "In our time" is incredibly informative, and we're so lucky to live in an era where we can enjoy the endless recordings of this show!
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.
One of my favorites was the one on the evolution of crocodiles [1].
Aside from being surprisingly fascinating, I thought the guests were excellent. IOT's academics can sometimes be bone dry (sometimes not a problem if the subject matter is good, but sometimes it can sink the episode), and in this episode all three guests were both energetic and articulate, and there was some good banter.
British working-class hero, though he'd probably prefer I say English.
I'm still working through the back catalogue, been at it for years, I've listened to every episode from the start until about mid 2012. I'll finish it eventually!
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 annoying loud chime that just blows out the speakers if I have the volume turned up to understand a guest that's speaking in a more soft voice.
People might also enjoy "This Cultural Life" https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0010fl4
More than 100 episodes already with some of the world's leading artists and creatives.
Just wanted to say thanks. I burned through a few episodes this weekend on a trip and found them all quite interesting and thought provoking. The Allende and Nick Cave episodes were particular hits in our car.
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.
Its odd that when places like HN or Reddit ask for favourite podcasts the amazing resources of BBC radio (that precede all modern internet podcasts and the best of which still wipe the floor with most of them) are often forgotten.
In Our Time represents the best of the form, and the BBC, and that's significantly down to the excellence of Bragg.
I'm British and live in the UK so BBC is a big part of my radio listening anyway, but I agree, the quality both in terms of content and recording quality is largely miles ahead of most podcasts.
Excluding things like political things which wouldn't land the same to international listeners, my favourites are:
The Kitchen Cabinet
You're Dead To Me
Crowdscience
Inside Science
Just a Minute
The Unbelievable Truth
Nature Table
Take Four Books
Witness History
Last Word
Gardener's Question Time
A Good Read (I wrote a blog post a while ago about scraping the books using LLMs to extract from the text of the descriptions: https://rpep.dev/posts/a-good-read-extracting-books-with-llm...)
At the end of each podcast there's the outro when they ask if Melvyn and his guests would like tea of coffee.
This keeps throwing me back to the bit at the end of episodes of Bod, when the Frog conductor is asked which flavour milk shake he'd like.
Once having itemised all of the contents of Thunderbird 4's pods over time, I have had an inkling to use some Machine learning system to gather the drinks options from each In Our Time.
This has been my go to podcast for bedtime or when I can’t sleep… the broad topics, depth of discussion and tone are all fantastic… the ONLY thing that bugs me is the volume of guests microphones not being equalized, so you get some guests on the same episode being so much quieter than others
I hate to say this out loud but I keep going back to some particular episodes to help me nod off when insomnia grips. I'm not sure I know how the episode on the gold standard ends and I must have listened to it more than 10 timss.
Although I am often critical of modern day BBC output, or indeed all "mainstream Tee-Vee" output, this is among their best work. Exposure to higher culture trains the mind to think abstractly, to appreciate beauty, and to orient life toward something greater than just existing.
Sad news - I hope it continues and they manage to get someone who keeps the quality high. As others have pointed out, the thing that makes In Our Time great is it assumes the people listening are interested in learning something without pointless fluff.
I was watching the first episode of the new-ish BBC TV series Human last night and, although there was some interesting information in there, it was unbearably slow and overwrought - 20 minutes of interesting content stretched out to 60 minutes by overly dramatic speech and pointless visual interstitials with soaring music. Such a stark contrast in terms of information density if you watch the original big BBC documentary series like Life On Earth or Civilisation.
Melvyn Bragg would always rush the experts, pressuring them to get to the point asap. I found him a bit off-putting and even rude at times, but it was what made made the show unique and never stagnant.
42 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 66.4 ms ] threadBrilliant series, can't recommend highly enough to anyone who's not encountered it.
Frankly, I believe that instead of finding a new presenter, the BBC could be retire the whole series and its legend. Let the new presenter start a new series, even if the set-up remains the same (including having further discussions with a cup of tea after the radio time limit has ended)
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
Aside from being surprisingly fascinating, I thought the guests were excellent. IOT's academics can sometimes be bone dry (sometimes not a problem if the subject matter is good, but sometimes it can sink the episode), and in this episode all three guests were both energetic and articulate, and there was some good banter.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000zmhf
I'm still working through the back catalogue, been at it for years, I've listened to every episode from the start until about mid 2012. I'll finish it eventually!
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 annoying loud chime that just blows out the speakers if I have the volume turned up to understand a guest that's speaking in a more soft voice.
https://www.bbcselect.com/select-more/bbc-podcasts/
I believe it's currently Apple-exclusive, but if you enjoy BBC content, it's worth it.
People might also enjoy "This Cultural Life" https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0010fl4 More than 100 episodes already with some of the world's leading artists and creatives.
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
In Our Time represents the best of the form, and the BBC, and that's significantly down to the excellence of Bragg.
The archive (you may need a VPN outside the UK):
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qykl/episodes/player
Some curated lists:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2Dw1c7rxs6DmyK0pMR...
Excluding things like political things which wouldn't land the same to international listeners, my favourites are:
The Kitchen Cabinet You're Dead To Me Crowdscience Inside Science Just a Minute The Unbelievable Truth Nature Table Take Four Books Witness History Last Word Gardener's Question Time A Good Read (I wrote a blog post a while ago about scraping the books using LLMs to extract from the text of the descriptions: https://rpep.dev/posts/a-good-read-extracting-books-with-llm...)
At the end of each podcast there's the outro when they ask if Melvyn and his guests would like tea of coffee.
This keeps throwing me back to the bit at the end of episodes of Bod, when the Frog conductor is asked which flavour milk shake he'd like.
Once having itemised all of the contents of Thunderbird 4's pods over time, I have had an inkling to use some Machine learning system to gather the drinks options from each In Our Time.
Water has cropped up?
Perhaps I place too close attention to it.
My weekly dose of highbrow-ness from the UK:
1. In Our Time
2. University Challenge
I highly recommend the back catalog In Our Time if you want some good brain fodder on an amazingly wide range of subjects.
I was watching the first episode of the new-ish BBC TV series Human last night and, although there was some interesting information in there, it was unbearably slow and overwrought - 20 minutes of interesting content stretched out to 60 minutes by overly dramatic speech and pointless visual interstitials with soaring music. Such a stark contrast in terms of information density if you watch the original big BBC documentary series like Life On Earth or Civilisation.