Attenborough on the trail of missing Christmas lectures
SIR DAVID ATTENBOROUGH is leading a campaign to recover 31 missing episodes of the first science show ever broadcast on television in the UK.
People throughout the country are being urged to rummage through their attics and dust down old videos to find the missing episodes of the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, which were broadcast on the BBC for decades.
Among the missing episodes are those of a lecture series delivered by Sir David himself, entitled The Language of Animals, in which badly behaved animals he was using to demonstrate scientific theories embarrassed the broadcaster live on air.
The Royal Institution has staged Christmas lectures since 1825, making them the world’s longest-running series of scientific lectures. In 1936 they formed the subject of the first science programme broadcast on the BBC.
The original recordings are believed to have been “wiped” by the BBC. However, experts at the corporation and the Royal Institution believe home-made recordings may have been made. Sarah Hayes, the BBC’S head of archives, said: “I don’t think the importance of finding these broadcasts, to make them available again for new generations, can be overstated.
“They are to science what the missing Doctor Who episodes found a few
‘They are to science what the missing Doctor Who episodes found a few years ago are to science fiction’
years ago are to science fiction.”
Among the other missing lectures are those delivered by George Porter, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist, Eric Laithwaite and John Napier.
Prof Gail Cardew, the Royal Institution’s director of science and education, said: “It would be wonderful to complete the archive and make each broadcast from a golden age of television available again for new generations, and out there somewhere, somebody will be able to help us do that.”