Some time in the early fifties I picked up a battered book which had been left behind by someone in the flat where I was living. It was called Suns, Myths and Men. As an historian, I had little knowledge of astronomy, but I had not been reading the book for more than a few minutes when I felt sure that here was an ideal subject for television. The subject was extremely interesting in itself, all sorts of exciting developments were going on, it was particularly suitable for visual illustration on television, and in the widest possible sense it involved the whole framework in which man lived his life.
It took me some time and effort to persuade the BBC programme chiefs to agree about this. The resultant programmes had some good television in them. Unfortunately the chief per¬former, though a distinguished astronomer and an experienced lecturer, was not really at home in front of a television camera.
It has always seemed to me that television is above all a means of communication to a mass audience. That does not mean it should debase subjects or avoid difficult or so-called minority ones. But it is not like a book, where you can re-read a difficult sentence. Nor can it ever replace books as permanent sources of wisdom or knowledge. On the other hand, the combination of immediacy, personality and illustration can impart information more vividly to a wide audience than any book or magazine, provided always that this essential clarity and simplicity is kept.
I knew enough after that first series to want to try again. Having built a working model of scaffolding and elastic to illustrate the expanding universe theory, I had confirmed the visual possibilities of the subject. I had also learnt the hard way that it needed a very particular type of person in front of the camera. That problem was solved by a happy coincidence. I was doing a programme on Flying Saucers with Desmond Leslie. We needed an astronomer who did not believe in them to argue the case. I was not too happy when Desmond suggested someone, because that did not seem the ideal way to line up a good argument. However, Desmond had already been in touch with Adamski, the man who claimed to have been aboard a Flying Saucer from Venus and now promised to arrange for one to appear during the transmission over the camera we had put up on the roof of Lime Grove studios to observe it, and such enthusiasm for the pro¬gramme seemed to deserve a less suspicious reaction on my part. So I agreed to meet the astronomer he suggested. It was Patrick Moore, author of the battered book Suns, Myths and Men. From the moment I saw his subsequent performance, The Sky at Night became more or less inevitable.
I found that Patrick also shared with me another important feeling about astronomy. Every television producer has somewhere a hidden sense of guilt that however good and amusing and interesting his programmes are, he is still involved in a one-sided activity. The more people watch, the more people he has stopped doing something other than just passively watching. And surely, passive non-active non-creative leisure is one of the great failings of modern society.
Over the years I have tried to ease my conscience by doing programmes which, while acceptable and enjoyable as ordinary programmes, would also, one hoped, as a side effect encourage people to go and do things afterwards. With archaeology, to go and look at Stonehenge or go on a dig. With astronomy, to get a telescope or just look at the sky observantly. Patrick entirely agreed, and this go-and-look element has always been an essential part of The Sky at Night.
Of course we had a lot to learn. I remember very sharply the nervousness with which, after the first programme, I went to our Departmental Meeting, the weekly occasion when one is sub¬jected to the uninhibited and knowledgeable criticisms of one's colleagues. One particularly distinguished and articulate pro¬ducer, now incidentally one of Patrick's warmest admirers, launched a tremendous attack on the programme, the conception, the handling, the speaker, everything about it. 'This is just the sort of thing we should not do,' he ended. I won the exchange, quite involuntarily, because all I could think of in reply to this tirade, which seemed to have gone on for minutes, was 'I don't agree', and the meeting collapsed into laughter!
We were fortunate in the people who helped to give The Sky at Night its particular character. We asked John Carter, the gramo¬phone librarian of BBC Television who has contributed to so many productions by his imaginative suggestions of music, to look out for a good recognizable tune which had a feeling of ‘the music of the spheres about it. He came up with a marvellous choice, from Sibelius' Pelleas et Melisande suite, called 'At the Castle Gate', a piece of music which one person told me gave him the feeling of the wind of space rushing past every time he heard it. Only recently it was called the best of all television signature tunes, and such has been the demand that a special recording of it has been put on sale by one of the big gramophone companies.
Nancy Thomas, subsequently of Monitor and one of the most skilled directors in the Talks field, was responsible for choosing the set, an enlargement of a planisphere, or map of the heavens, which still remains after seven years one of the most satisfactory single sets in television.
Then there was that mysterious establishment down the Gold- hawk Road where Till, a black Alsatian the size of a pony, presided over several cellars full of assorted pieces of cardboard, and Alfred Wurmser, a charming ex-Viennese polymath, with the help of Skat, an invaluable Dane, produced the elaborate and edifying animated diagrams which have so important a part in making our programme subjects understandable.
Also over the years we have developed a very satisfactory association with Paddy Cullen and David Hardy, who at the briefest telephone call turn out explanatory drawings and imaginary astronomical scenes, some of which you can see in this book.
One must also mention the dancing girls. We claim happily to be the only serious scientific programme on television which regularly employs chorus girls. In particular, one former Silhouette has become a very experienced Sky at Night performer. We dress them in black and put them against black backgrounds, holding white models. With a twiddle of the electronic knobs, unhappily say some, the girls vanish from the screen, leaving only the models visible, over which one then has complete control of movement in three dimensions in a manner impossible for any mechanical device, and much more graceful.
But of course the things that were of most help of all to us were the events themselves. When we started The Sky at Night, 'space- satellite' was a private word of a few backroom experts. Who would have guessed when we launched the programme that before long we would be doing scripts about Sputniks, showing pictures of the back of the Moon, analyzing close-up signals from the surface of Venus, and wondering whether the next landing on the Moon would be soft or hard?
One difficulty we never had was lack of subject matter. We put spectroscopes on a television camera, or a microscope to show viewers how bacteria were standing up to conditions they might experience on Mars. We demonstrated revolving binary systems by means of models, and created lunar sunrises and sunsets over models of craters. We set cameras circling on turntables while they looked at a fixed light, to demonstrate the apparent motions of stars, and we had the co-operation of hundreds of viewers in finding out how many of the Pleiades can be seen with the naked eye. We had telephone calls into the studio from Moscow and the USA reporting on latest developments, and we fed in signals from Jodrell Bank.
We even survived when Patrick, demonstrating the tempera¬ture of lunar night by hammering an egg which had been dipped in liquid air, mistimed the dipping, so that the egg exploded under the hammer-blow and scattered debris all over the studio. He also, in one programme, swallowed a large fly. It flew into his mouth, and, as he said afterwards, he really had no choice. If you look at the right moment of the telerecording, you can just see a momentary gleam of horror in his eye, followed by a faint gulp.
Above all, we persevered with the direct televising of the night sky itself. The Moon had been put on the screen in the early days from a window in Alexandra Palace. By putting a lightweight vidicon camera on to George Hole's great 24-inch telescope in his garden at Patcham, we progressed to really big close-ups of the lunar surface, and then on to the first direct televising of Venus and Saturn. Of course, this sort of activity has its difficulties. Some people may remember the fiftieth Sky at Night, which we did live from George Hole's garden, linked to other cameras attached to a big telescope at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh. Though the weather was clear both before the programme and immediately afterwards, with magnificent pictures coming in through the tele-scope, during the transmission itself we were totally clouded out. It is a tribute to Patrick and George as performers that this was still a very popular and enjoyable episode!
By contrast, we were extremely lucky with the total eclipse of the Sun in 1961. We had put forward the suggestion that we should use the Eurovision link to switch to three lots of television cameras ahead of totality as the Moon's shadow raced across Europe at hundreds of miles an hour, to enable people to do what no one had ever done before in the history of the world: see the same eclipse three times over. The idea was accepted by the Eurovision planning committee, and The Sky at Night team was put in charge of a television operation which stretched from Selsey Bill via France and Italy to Jugoslavia, and was seen throughout Europe and the British Isles. Though totality was due shortly after 8 am on a February morning, we had the amazing luck of clear skies right the way down the track. Even Patrick, doing one of his most brilliant broadcasts ever from the top of a Jugoslav mountain deep in snow, had the satisfaction of seeing the clouds clear away just in time to reveal a glorious diamond-ring effect as totality ended.
But perhaps even more thrilling, from a purely technical point of view, was the time when we brought the moons of Jupiter on to the television screen. Those four little blobs moving in their straight line across the screen, only a few thousands of miles in diameter, over three hundred and fifty million miles away, we claim to represent easily the longest-distance television broadcast ever, making the range of Eurovision or Telstar seem puny by comparison.
We also had one amazing and quite unforeseen piece of luck. The first pictures of the back of the Moon, never before seen by human eye, were something that we, above all other television programmes, were obsessively interested in. By some incredible and fantastic coincidence, the Russians decided to release those taken by Lunik III on an evening when The Sky at Might was on the air, and a little over an hour before we started. As soon as we heard that they were coming down the wire from Moscow to the Associated Press office in Fleet Street, we had a car and an assis¬tant waiting there. All day we had been fretting over the probable timetable of release, and now the tension started to get really fierce. By the time the programme started, there was still no sign of them. I had kept a camera lined up on the door into the studio, and with six minutes to go, there, suddenly on the screen was my assistant triumphantly waving the historic photograph, hardly dry yet, above his head. So we were the first to show the back of the Moon to people in this country, before the News, ITN, the papers, anyone. As there is a BBC News every three hours every evening of the year, and we went on the air for a quarter of an hour once every four weeks, the odds against this happening, and our excitement, can be appreciated!
We have been lucky too in the people who have appeared with Patrick on the programme. Colin Ronan, Henry Brinton, Frank Hyde, Hugh Butler and Howard Miles are some of the faithful supporters and excellent performers whom we have always been able to rely on. We have had, too, the pleasure and honour of welcoming to the programme such distinguished astronomers as the late Sir Harold Spencer Jones, former Astronomer Royal; Professor Sir Bernard Lovell; Professor Alia Masevich, Vice- President of the USSR Academy of Sciences; and Dr Harlow Shapley, Director Emeritus of the Harvard College Observatory and perhaps the greatest of living astronomers.
Above all there has been Patrick himself. As a performer, his chief virtues are great clarity of exposition, an extremely quick and encyclopaedic mind, no nerves whatever, and quite extra-ordinary enthusiasm. He also appears to have that very valuable device, from the point of view of a television producer - a clock built into his head!
He has his faults too. His worst is his insatiable urge to get going during a rehearsal. Even in the best organized and longest running programmes, there are bound to be pauses during the first run-through. But dare to stop Patrick! At once the studio is shaken by such fearful groans that one would think he had been attacked by some sudden violent galactic lumbago.
The quality I admire most in him has perhaps no direct relation to television. It is his complete disinterest in himself. One has seen, alas, other television stars on whom the transient fame of the screen has not had too happy an effect. Not so with Patrick. Material reward, publicity, recognition concern him not at all. When the Edinburgh Astronomical Society awarded him the Lorimer Gold Medal, which has been awarded only four times and whose holders included Sir James Jeans and Sir Arthur Eddington, he refused point-blank to allow this to be mentioned before the subsequent programme. He is quite unaware that he is, in the words of our Director of Television, the best television performer who has never won a television award. I could write more about his wartime RAF service and his work for Scouts and for handicapped children, but I have already risked an association I value very highly by saying so much.
The chapters that follow are not designed specifically to illumine the main lines of astronomy. This has been done by other books, including Patrick's. The great advantage of a long-running topical programme such as The Sky at Night is its ability to range all over the place, digging out odd controversies, forgotten pieces of astronomical history, and small but significant side-issues, as well as the great cosmological arguments. Even if the pages of this book lack that wagging eyebrow to ram home their conclu¬sions, I am sure they will reflect the quality Patrick Moore has made familiar to very many viewers over the years in The Sky at Night.
Paul Johnstone
