Skip to main content

I'm ready for my closeup, Ms DeMille

A couple of days ago a film crew descended on my house to record an interview on quantum theory.

Well, if I'm honest (I was talking about storytelling yesterday) it was two students with a video camera.

And in practice, both these statements are deceptive. The first sounds all professional, slick and well prepared. The second sounds haphazard and amateurish. I must admit, when Jane Weavis from Royal Holloway in London got in touch about doing the interview for her Physics and Science Communication course I was a touch doubtful. But hey, she was prepared to come all the way out to sunny Swindon (I'm not sure if she realized quite how far it was), so surely I could spare a half hour, however uninspiring it might turn out to be.

Jane turned up with a media studies mate in tow as camera person, we got set up and, I have to say it was one of the slickest and best prepared interviews I've done. So often with a professional broadcaster they haven't really got a clue what my book or the subject is about. They've read the press release and picked out a couple of juicy points. (When I did Global Warming Survival Kit, for example, every single one asked me about eating worms.) But their questions are often shallow and near-irrelevent. There are exceptions like our local man, Mark O'Donnell, but they aren't too common. However, for this interview, the questions were well structured, clearly founded on knowledge, and interesting.

Admittedly there were a couple of challenges. When we started the interview, the camera wouldn't switch on and both members of the team had an anxious minute or two fiddling with menus and muttering. And a fly decided to take residence behind the window blind alongside me - until it was dextrously caught and removed by our ace reporter. However, I've seen both BBC and commercial people struggle with technical problems too.

All in all, a very positive experience. It's just a pity that the resultant masterpiece won't be airing outside a course assessment.

Comments

  1. What fun. And how flattering! Really! Oh, to have someone ask me what i think about something...anything...:-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm always interested in what you think, Sue!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...

Murder by Candlelight - Ed. Cecily Gayford ***

Nothing seems to suit Christmas reading better than either ghost stories or Christmas-set novels. For some this means a fluffy romance in the snow, but for those of us with darker preferences, it's hard to beat a good Christmas murder. An annual event for me over the last few years has been getting the excellent series of classic murderous Christmas short stories pulled together by Cecily Gayford, starting with the 2016 Murder under the Christmas Tree . This featured seasonal output from the likes of Margery Allingham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellis Peters and Dorothy L. Sayers, laced with a few more modern authors such as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, in some shiny Christmassy twisty tales. I actually thought while purchasing this year's addition 'Surely she is going to run out of classic stories soon' - and sadly, to a degree, Gayford has. The first half of Murder by Candlelight is up to the usual standard with some good seasonal tales from the likes of Catherine Aird, Car...

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor...