WE DID not quite get what was promised. The latest science
blockbuster from BBC2, Wonders Of Life, written and
presented by the ever more engaging Professor Brian Cox, made a
virtue out of its prime Lord's Day evening slot by kicking off its
first episode with a religious phenomenon - the Day of the Dead
observances on a remote hilltop in the Philippines.
It treated the faith that lies behind such observance with great
respect, and set itself the task of responding to questions that
are as much theological as scientific. What is life? How did life
begin? What is the difference between life and death?
Unfortunately, having posed them, Cox presented us with a glorious
if simplified account of the current scientific understanding of
these vital issues, but never quite related the purely rationalist
to the religious understanding.
The first two episodes have been wonderfully compelling,
presenting the basic laws of thermodynamics, and how the human ear
and eye can be traced back through the fossils of our ancestors to
origins perhaps one billion years ago. This development, he
insists, is undirected. There is no "mystical or magical"
explanation possible. But there is some logical inconsistency here,
because, elsewhere, he personifies evolution, and reifies the
process as though it, rather than the Deity, is in charge; but that
is a common scientific error.
The failure is, though, that he does not engage with the kind of
religious faith that celebrates the wonders that science reveals to
us and finds them compatible with belief in a creator God who does
not micromanage the process like some engineer, but sustains the
cosmos through active and costly love. Cox explains that the energy
in the universe is constant - there is the same amount today as
there was at the Big Bang - but, with each of its constant
transformations, it becomes more disordered.
This brought to my mind the climax of Jonathan Meades:
The joy of Essex (BBC4, Tuesday of last week), which
presented haunting images of everything returning to the primordial
ooze. Meades is one of the weirdest presenters on TV today:
sardonic, provocative - almost a self-parody. He is primarily an
architectural critic, and yet his message was as much social as
aesthetic. His greatest approbation was reserved for those
buildings most despised by designers: the flotsam and jetsam of
overgrown chalets and decaying boathouses, scattered
higgledy-piggledy on the encroaching sea's margin, a truly
democratic and vernacular creation.
Howard Goodall's Story of Music (BBC2, Saturdays) is
another series of rare distinction. Goodall is the cheeky chappy of
music documentarians, offering unexpected juxtapositions of the
highest art music and pop and folk. It all uses the same
conventions and patterns, he says, and they were all invented by a
genius who worked out a new way to order sound into meaningful
patterns of communication.
He promises us no jargon, but cannot avoiding talking about keys
and intervals. And, movingly, at times he acknowledges the
overwhelming glory of, for example, Bach and Handel. In the end,
some things are better and more important than others - and, of
course, church music is central to his story.