Arts people, and I very much include myself, get bewildered by science. I try to listen to Radio 4’s The Life Scientific, but am often lost, while even Melvyn Bragg not long ago admitted to me that he at times struggles with science topics on his stellar In Our Time.
To help remedy this, on 23 September Radio 4 kicks off a 20-part series, The Art of Innovation, exploring and, it’s hoped, breaking down barriers between the arts and science, with an accompanying exhibition at London’s Science Museum and a book.
Telling the story is Ian Blatchford, an art historian, who now runs the national Science Museum Group, and Dr Tilly Blyth, its head of collections. They say that this division didn’t really exist in the 18th and 19th centuries, with a split only emerging in the 20th century. It was spelled out, famously, 60 years ago in The Two Cultures, a lecture by CP Snow, who was both a scientist and novelist. He argued that the separation of these cultures had caused great harm.
The radio series begins with Joseph Wright, who was at the heart of the debate between science and religion, and whose painting A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery (1766) is in the exhibition. Another episode looks at steam power through a loaned model of the engine in Turner’s celebrated Rain, Steam and Speed. There are Hockney photos to accompany the evolution of the Polaroid and a 1922 Lowry to illustrate a discussion of manufacturing. Blyth travels to Ironbridge for the programme to examine how this crucible for the Industrial Revolution inspired art.
“I also want to achieve at the Science Museum, in terms of understanding, what Nick Serota did for contemporary art with Tate Modern,” Blatchford tells me.
Last year, the Science Museum had more than 3 million visitors. During August, I witnessed it heaving with overseas tourists, buoyed by a weak pound, and British families on school hols. I would guesstimate that well over half the visitors to our leading museums and galleries are now from abroad, delighted at free entry. While I remain absolutely in favour of that principle, might some form of charging be introduced – maybe for groups of foreign tourists – to help our hard-hit national museums, whose government funding has been dipping over many years?
The death of playwright Peter Nichols, announced last Monday, had a particular resonance for me. Many, many years ago, I interviewed him for the Bristol University newspaper. He had become famous for A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, based loosely on his own experience with his disabled daughter, and for his Georgy Girl screenplay. It was my first ever interview, and it led to a job on the Bristol Evening Post. So thank you, Peter Nichols, who also wrote the brilliant Privates on Parade and The National Health, a superb black comedy and a much more insightful exploration of the state of the NHS than Alan Bennett’s Allelujah! last year.
Sadly, most of his later plays went unproduced. Good, however, that a revival of Joe Egg, planned before his death, opens at London’s Trafalgar Studios on Saturday.
