November, 2007, The Daily Telegraph

Launch Article

By Steve Jones
Professor of genetics at
University College London

Last Saturday, at the Sheffield International Documentary Festival, I was struck by the unexpected thought that a word can be worth a thousand pictures. The Wellcome Trust – Europe’s largest medical charity – is interested in promoting the public face of science, so has poured a few handfuls of brass into sponsoring the steel town’s new incarnation as a digital village. My job was to join a conversation (or an "appreciative enquiry workshop") between scientists and film-makers, and to sit on a panel that put the people who commission such programmes into contact with those who make, or grace, them. For a hack who writes about science, rather than taking pictures of it, it was an interesting and even salutary experience.

There was much talk of whether to interview those doing the work or to use a presenter, and of whether scientists harm their careers by taking part in such programmes. Should they be allowed to see a film’s rough cut, or told at what stage – dream or reality – the project is at? After the phone-in scandals, how much can one cheat? (I hid the fact that I once hit snail shells with a hammer for an Open University film on the habits of thrushes.) And those terrible facts, facts, facts: today’s viewers, we were told, hate such uncomfortable objects, so they must be sugar-coated, or suitably disguised, before a film can be made.

Worst of all is the job of persuading the boss that the show will be simple enough to bring in enough people. The audience is, as a result, often assumed to be 10 years old. You can discuss economics or Arsenal on TV with no problems, because the viewers are thought to know the basics. But for science it’s "proteins, the building blocks of life", or "the electron, which spins around the nucleus". And the idea that the folks in white coats simply might not know the answer is as alien as the idea that the same could ever be true of politicians.

As the Sheffield audience filed out, I began to realise how much easier the author’s job is compared to that of a film-maker. Literature is so different to film that writers can learn real lessons from the agonies of those in the documentary world.

Unlike the people who deal in images, those of us working on the page have a real sense of liberty. Nobody buys a science book unless they have some interest in the subject, which removes the need to cringe before a fat controller for permission to sneak in facts. No reason, either, to spend years failing to find the new David Attenborough or inventing some new format in a desperate attempt to decorate the deadly dull. Instead, the aspiring science writer has only to tell the story as plainly and as clearly as he or she can and, with luck, crack a few jokes on the way.

The warnings to scribblers from those who make films are many. First, never mention a scientist’s name unless he is dead or has a Nobel Prize (which means more or less the same thing) and never, ever interview those who do the research, for although a question-and-answer session boosts the word count it kills the story. Avoid at all costs imagined dialogue – the scientific Walter Raleigh in doublet and hose – for the curse of the drama-doc is even more deadly in print than in pictures. Better still, an author does not need to spend metaphorical millions on long tracking shocks of some spectacular location, for a single name – Galapagos, or Aberystwyth – paints the full picture for an audience which has already visited the place a thousand times on television. Honesty is also easier, for when does a writer need to lie?

Getting a book commissioned can be a problem, but even that is relatively straightforward. A brilliant televisual idea – let’s make a blockbusting drama about string theory! – is not enough: to get an advance, an author needs a proper outline and, usually, a draft chapter. If the plot will not fly, then the draft will not get written, and everyone can go back to bed rather than spending months trying to breathe life into a dead duck. And publishers are also more forgiving than commissioning editors, on the simple grounds that less money is lost on a failed book than a failed documentary, and they do not to line up purveyors of pork pies or portable phones to pay for the programme.

Yes, you aspiring writers and competition entrants, count yourselves lucky. Oh, and a word of warning: most of all, never try to make science fun. It isn’t, in spite of all the gurning faces on television who pretend that it might be.

Steve Jones is professor of genetics at University College London