Beautiful Minds: Jocelyn Bell Burnell

I have a new heroine. Her name is Jocelyn Bell Burnell and she is a very famous scientist. Not famous enough, obviously, for me to have heard of her, but then the only living scientists I have heard of are Stephen Hawking and Stephen Hawking, and as it happens Stephen Hawking (or a photograph of him, anyway) turned up in last night's fantastic TV documentary about Jocelyn Bell. Bell's work discovering the existence of pulsars paved the way for Hawkins's black hole theory to gain greater credence, basically. So Bell made Hawkins, AND SHE CAN BREAK HIM JUST AS EASILY. *DEMONIC LAUGHTER*. Oh sorry. Got distracted. It's sunny in my office, what can I say.

To return to the point, Bell was the subject of the first episode of the BBC4 series 'Beautiful Minds', profiling great scientists. As a Phd student in the 1960s, Bell first built and then scanned the results of Cambridge's Cavendish Lab's new radio telescope, a fantastically strange creation involving lost of poles in a field linked by miles and miles of wire. (It took Bell the first two years of her Phd just to assemble the thing.) The telescope produced 94 feet of readings a day, all of which had to be manually scanned by Bell, readings which were constantly being scuppered by interference from pirate radio stations, police radios and the like. But amongst all this, Bell noticed a quarter inch of slightly divergent results. She pushed and pushed for these results to be investigated, against her supervisor's insistence that it must just be more interference. Eventually she demonstrated that the "interference" was in fact a star that was sending out pulses of radiation. As her supervisor excluded her from meetings to discuss the implications - was the pulse a signal from space aliens, and what should be done about it if so? - she persisted in her work, discovered another pulsing star, and the rest is history, and physics, and Nobel prize glory! But not for her. Don't be ridiculous. It was her (male) supervisor - the one who didn't believe her findings - and her (male) head of department who were awarded the prize, something that Bell appears remarkably sanguine about.

Bell was a terrific interviewee, endearingly modest about her achievements and yet justly proud of what she had done. She was brilliantly articulate, and her face spoke as much as her words. Her eyes shone as she spoke of human beings as being made of the same stuff as the stars; her face fell into still-smarting hurt as she described her isolation as a physics undergraduate, the only girl on her course, greeted by whistles and catcalls as she walked into lectures; she was moved to tears as she remembered her school physics teacher's pride in her success. Contrast her appallingly smug supervisor, who lacked the grace to acknowledge Bell's contribution to the Nobel-prize winning work, saying that he was the captain of the ship and it didn't matter who the crew was. Bell's contemporaries remember it differently, saying that perhaps only one scientist in a hundred would have noticed and acted on the anomaly that Bell spotted.

It was a simply-made, absorbing documentary, punctuated with well-chosen archive clips of scientific films from the 1960s, and blissfully free of dramatic reconstruction. If you're in the UK, you can watch it on iPlayer here.

The Choir pt 2

Another episode of The Choir to stoke my Gareth Malone crush. This time, Gareth is adorable with kids. This is hardly fair on the poor viewing public who don't want to swoon all the way off the sofa. Next week, Gareth will be adorable surrounded by young cockney fellas in hats, and I don't think I will survive. So just as well we are discussing this now.

I found myself perusing his website, just passing by chance, you know, and I came upon the 'Contact Me' form, thus.

You'll note there's a drop down menu for 'subject'.

Your choices are: Fan mail; school workshops; teacher training; choral societies / choirs; events; presenting; personal appearance; website feedback; and other.

*So* tempted to pick 'personal appearance' and just write 'cute'...

The Choir

Anybody else watching The Choir? This is the documentary series / intelligent reality type show (I think there's a technical term for this kind of thing, if any of my TV-land readers care to supply it?) which started on BBC Two on Tuesday. I actually missed the first episode, but was alerted to it by the wonders of Twitter, and so I caught up with it on iPlayer.

Let's get something out of the way immediately: the presenter, Gareth Malone. Shall we take a look at him?



He is completely adorable. He looks about 12 (in fact: 34!?) and is by his own admission "quite posh" and never wears a two-piece suit where a three-piece suit will do, and is completely, brilliantly, unassumingly lovely and seems to have gone straight from cute chorister to cute choirmaster stopping only to take a break in "unlikely sex symbol". Unlikely unless you are me, anyway. (And half the rest of the world, suggests Google.) I mean, he's a choirmaster! With floppy hair! And he wears glasses! And given how much he has to conduct while he's working, with his hands, they are super-good at keeping his wedding ring out of shot almost all of the time. *Melt*.

OK, now let's move on.

Because aside from lovely Gareth, Gareth Malone, The Choir is also fabulous. It is exactly what the X Factor pretends to be, but isn't. It is the anti X Factor.

Here's the idea behind The Choir. In season one (which, criminally, I never saw), Gareth put together a choir in a dodgy school, with beautiful, heart-rending results. Then there was something called Boys Don't Sing. I don't know what that was. (Hey, it's not like I get paid to do this.) But in season two, or maybe three, there was this season of The Choir, in which gorgeous Gareth goes to a run-down (and very big) council estate near Watford and galvanises 200 of its residents into a community choir.

Gareth doesn't care if they can sing. He only cares that they want to sing. And the people are sort of nervous and sort of excited, and he enthuses them more and more and they do their best and they sing. SOB. I haven't been this moved since that one where they get the Birmingham teenagers to dance ballet. Oh god, I am getting tearful just thinking about it.

Anyway, gradually you get to know some of the characters in the choir, like Matty the cockney hardnut boxer who only turns up to one rehearsal but is properly proud of his community, and Dee, the beautiful, shy gospel singer who starts the episode describing being chased by teenagers shouting 'n*gger' and ends it being cheered by an entire shopping precinct for her solo in 'Higher & Higher', and pensioner Fred, with the lovely voice, whose wife has just died and who stands next to his kitchen sink saying sadly, "Everything reminds me of her. Everything," only The Choir resists the urge to drown him out in soupy music and then make him sing the Wind Beneath My Wings while Dannii Minogue weeps. Because it is not the X Factor.

It is not the X Factor. Because it's not about "talent" and it's not sentimental. It's not about pretending to celebrate the gifted while we mock the unworthy, as a scene in which a series of wobbly-voiced women audition for a solo clearly demonstrates. People are applauded - yes! - just for having the guts to try. The Choir is about real people who want something to be proud of, or just something to do, and who are willing to put a bit of effort in, with the help of a sweet chap who really does look a lot like a baby David Tennant.

In short: it's brilliant.

Episode 2 is next Tuesday, and UK-dwellers can catch up with it all on iPlayer.

A Long Hard Look in the PVR

Having persuaded my PVR to take early retirement (read: sacked it for refusing to record programmes I really wanted to see, despite still having several gigs left on the clock), and installed a shiny new one in time to for Red Riding tonight, I can now play: what do I think I want to watch, but actually don't want to watch? Or to put it another way: which programmes did I record but never bother to look at? A portrait of my own self-delusion through the medium of television awaits.

- 1 x ep of Free Agents
- Swing Time
- Richard III
- King Lear (? don't even know which production)
- Wallace and Gromit Christmas special
- Lark Rise to Candleford Christmas Special
- The Good Girl
- entire series of Paul Merton in India
- True Stories: Forbidden Lies
- 1 x ep of What To Eat Now (I know the presenter, although apparently not well enough to go the extra mile and actually watch his show)
- Hellboy
- The Long Walk to Finchley
- Imagine: Oliver Sacks (apparently I can imagine him just fine by myself)
- In The Shadow Of The Moon
- Walk The Line
- The Sweet Smell of Success
- Holes

In conclusion: I think I like movies. I think I like documentaries. I even seem to think I like comedy, a bit. But what I actually like are drama series. In the time that I've had a PVR, I've made my merry way through any number of series of Doctor Who, ER, Mad Men, The Sopranos, The Wire, Gilmore Girls, Six Feet Under, Northern Exposure, Being Human, The West Wing, Heroes etc etc, and indeed have purchased a whole new box so that I don't have to miss any more of episodes of these programmes ever ever. I have been obsessively watching Heroes when I could have been watching The Sweet Smell of Success or In The Shadow Of the Moon. What was I thinking? Seriously? It's actually quite sweet that I think I have taste, when really I have no taste at all.

Thing is, I *still* think I want to see all of those things. Just, you know, not right now. Some of them I've had for years, and despite all evidence to the contrary I genuinely appear to think that one day I'm going to watch them. I am completely delusional. Sadder than that, if any of them came onto TV when I was in, I probably would watch them, but there is something about *owning* them which makes me not bother. There is probably some kind of lesson here about why marriages go sour.

All of which means that I'll keep my old PVR in storage because I believe that the urge to see a decent Jennifer Aniston movie will overwhelm me enough to make me reconfigure my entire "home cinema" (ancient second hand television, cheapo DVD player that has subtitles switched on as default so I have to turn them off by hand, irritating me every time I watch anything, and shiny new PVR which [I hope] actually works, as yet unproven - BUT in preference to real cinema, nobody eating loudly, talking, or taking mobile phone calls, aside from me) in order to facilitate this, when being within two button's push of the same was too much effort.

Now: what are the chances of me actually watching Red Riding?

Preview: Chosen

For those in the UK, I highly recommend tonight's Channel 4 documentary 'Chosen'. I caught it earlier in the year when it was broadcast on More 4 and it is exceptional. It's a very simply made documentary, in which three men, now in middle age, talk with extraordinary honesty and articulacy about their experiences of being sexually abused at prep school. As the film tells us, 3 in 20 children are abused at UK schools, so it's an important film, as well as a desperately sad one. Please make the effort to see it, even if it sounds like a gruelling watch for a Monday night - it's rare that a film of such good quality makes it onto our screens.

The Family

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Beautiful Young Minds

While being kept awake on Saturday night by drunk, singing rugby fans, I found myself asking: why is sport important? Not why is it fun to watch, but why do we take it so seriously? The answers I came up with were pretty standard and not all that interesting: because it's the best competing with the best, the sportsmen and women are pushing themselves to incredible feats of achievement, makes your country proud etc etc. I am not remotely interested in sport but I decided that sports fans had a point, but please could they stop singing now.

However, watching Beautiful Young Minds, a documentary about young maths geniuses competing at the International Maths Olympiad, I had to ask myself, why don't we care as much about this as we do about sport? These kids are incredibly talented - in fact I've done maths and I've played football and I'd say I am more likely to represent my country at the latter than at the former, and this is from a girl who can't do a header without closing her eyes. They are pushing themselves to incredible feats of achievement. They make our country proud. But we have never heard of any of them. Name some great living mathematicians.

One answer is of course that rugby is more fun to watch than maths. Fair enough. But another is that these children are the type to be bullied and ostracised at school: overwhelmingly intelligent, cripplingly awkward and shy, a high level of autism spectrum disorders etc. One of the boys in the documentary one a silver medal at the Maths Olympiad, a goal he had been working towards his whole life, and he was too shy to go on stage to get his medal. In short, we don't like them, so we don't aspire to be like them, and we are not interested in their achievements. But why does the fact that they are not social successes mean that we can't celebrate what they can do? We certainly have no problem adoring stupid sportsmen who can barely hold a conversation.

Poignantly, the aforementioned boy who wouldn't go onto the stage was talking about how much he prefered life in China, where his "different" behaviour was explained by everyone there as just because of him being a foreigner. In China, he told us, it's considered a good thing to be intelligent, and if you are exceptional at maths that is considered cool. So why in this country are we so quick to celebrate sporting achievement and sneer at intellectual achievement? Just because it's "geeky"? Bad answer.

This blog loves maths geeks. And suspects that it wouldn't exist without them. The Woman Who Talked Too Much, officially backing the UK at the 2008 International Maths Olympiad!