Storyville: The Farthest, Voyager's Interstellar Journey: A pleasing new trend in science
THERE are two types of science programme on the BBC and a massive gap between them. On the one side, all the programmes about humans.
Biology, psychology, neurology, psychiatry, evolution, big subjects colliding in the simple human form and, perhaps just because we’re human too, instantly absorbing.
On the other side, and a million light years away, space, the gas giants, dark matter, curved time and quantum particles. While the one subject pulls us in, the other one sends us spinning out into infinity.
To put it another way, it’s often a bit boring.
The Farthest: Voyager’s Interstellar Journey – Storyville (BBC4) marked a pleasing new trend in science programming, not just about space but about the people who explore it.
The array of talking heads on last night’s programme were weathered and silver-haired.
TRAILER- Great Canal Journeys - Sunday 8pm - Channel 4
They’d given their lives to one mission, which began in 1977 with the launch of the two Voyager probes.
Many of them now chuckled at the audacity of the original plan. Using the sort of tech we now carry around with us on our mobiles, they launched a pair of craft that would never come back home but would beam back images from the outer edges of our solar system.
While there was a lot of laughter in the story, other strong emotions bubbled up too and once again provided a welcome, human touch amid the stars.
One of the engineers cried as he described the moment of launch, when these creatures he’d lavished so much care on would leave and never return.
There was a touch of bitterness too over the way the media fussed about the “Golden Records” put on the craft to give aliens a glimpse of what Earth was all about.
While everyone went on about Chuck Berry songs going off into space, the massive leap in engineering genius went, to some degree, overlooked.
When you’re navigating something so huge you need some anchor points and the senior NASA types provided them perfectly.
We weren’t just shown the first images of Jupiter; we were told by living, breathing people what it meant to have made them possible.
Same for the day in August 2012 when Voyager 1 went “interstellar”, leaving our solar system for good.
Imagine what it must feel like to have created the first man-made object in outer space, to have created something that will travel in space forever.
We don’t have to imagine because they told us. While orbiting the wonders of space, this splendid film never forgot the wonders of men and women either.
Similarly wonderful, Great Canal Journeys (C4) returned, with married boat-lovers Prunella Scales and Timothy West travelling Portugal’s Douro river.
“Slow TV” at its purest can be a bit silly. Who really wants to watch an hour of knitting, after all? Other shows, like this one, are slow in spirit but manage to pack in some action.
This, in last night’s instalment, was no more taxing than a bit of port sipping and sunset watching in the company of two people who enjoy life as much as they clearly enjoy each other.
It’s not a programme with a mission or an agenda but nonetheless it quietly voices an important message about dementia.
Prunella might have trouble with her memory but she has no trouble enjoying her journeys. Experiences are valuable, even if you can’t remember them.