NATIONAL LIFE STORIES

‘Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum’ Life Story Interviews

Martin Redfern

Interviewed by Paul Merchant

C1672/29

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The British Library National Life Stories

Interview Summary Sheet Title Page

Ref no: C1672/29

Collection title: ‘Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum’ Life Story Interviews

Interviewee’s surname: Redfern Title: Mr

Interviewee’s forename: Martin Sex: Male

Occupation: Science writer and BBC Date and place of birth: 18th July 1954, Rochester, radio science producer Kent, UK Mother’s occupation: teacher Father’s occupation: oil industry chemist Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): 30/8/16 (track 1-2), 27/9/16 (track 3-7), 11/10/16 (track 8-11)

Location of interview: Interviewee’s home in Shorne, Kent

Name of interviewer: Paul Merchant

Type of recorder: Marantz PMD661on compact flash

Recording format : audio file 12 WAV 24 bit 48 kHz 2-channel

Total no. of tracks 11 Mono or stereo: Stereo

Total Duration: 10 hrs. 35 min. 15 sec.

Additional material:

Copyright/Clearance: OPEN

Interviewer’s comments:

Martin Redfern Page 1 C1672/29 Track 1

[Track 1]

Could you start by telling me when and where you were born?

Yes, I was born only about five or six miles from here, in Rochester, on the eighteenth of July 1954, at about ten minutes to midnight.

And as much as you can about the life of your father?

Yes. Well, his dad was a builder, I think his grandfather had a building firm in north London, but my grandfather was about the only one of, I’m not sure if it was four or five children, to reach the age of twenty- five, as a result of TB. And because he had TB himself, in spite of volunteering, he wasn’t allowed to go and fight in the trenches in the First World War, which is probably why I’m here today. For health reasons he was told he’d got to move out to the country, so he moved out to Hertfordshire and had a chicken farm during the war, I believe, and took a weekly vanload of eggs into London. So it wasn’t a particularly well-off family, but fairly comfortable. Comfortable enough for my father to be sent to Berkhamsted School, which was a public school. And from that he went up to Imperial College, London to do chemistry, but by the time he graduated it was 1941 and we were at war, but they thought that chemists were far too valuable to send to the frontline, as it were, and he should be a chemist to help the war effort. He was offered a job with ICI for, I think, it was an annual salary of £400, and was about to accept that when the Anglo-Iranian oil company, now BP, offered him £700 a year if he would go out to the Abadan refinery in Iran, which he did. And indeed, just before he died last year I recorded an interview with him and he describes the trip out there on a boat in a convoy and some of the convoy got torpedoed and he was in the fastest ship, which went on on its own off to Freetown, Sierra Leone and round the Cape and he spent Christmas 1941, I think it must have been, in Bombay and eventually arrived in Abadan and was a chemist at the refinery. But because he was a chemist they thought, oh well, you must know about explosives, so they gave him a sort of honorary military title so if Rommel got there he’d be a prisoner of war rather than a saboteur. And he wired the whole refinery, about the biggest in the world in those days, up with explosives in case the Germans got there, but they never did. And then in 1947 after the war, he’d been home on leave and got engaged and my mother went out to Iran in a tanker in 1947 and they got married in October of that year in Persia.

[03:38] Thank you. Could you do something similar for your mother?

Yes. She was daughter of one of four sisters. She was born, I think it was near Appledore on Romney Marsh, her father was a farmer there, and I think she lost a brother when he was about six months old or something. I haven’t recorded the interview with her yet, she’s still alive, at ninety-five. I’m not sure if he was older or younger, but anyway, she ended up being the only child, but when she was only one, her father ran off and left them, which was very scandalous in those days, and he went to Canada and my mother’s mother lost what little money she had going to Canada to try and find him and bring him back, and he didn’t. So my mother was Martin Redfern Page 2 C1672/29 Track 1 brought up by a single parent without very much money. Her mother was a teacher. And actually, well, she spent some of her early childhood with the family of her aunt, who had married a schoolteacher in Brazil, in Sao Paulo. And some of it in another aunt’s house in Cuckfield, which is a lovely old house in the High Street, fourteenth century house. But eventually her mother got a job in, up in Hertfordshire, near where my father was living, and actually, I’m not quite sure how the families first met, but my paternal grandfather gave my maternal grandmother a loan to help her build a house in Bovingdon in Hertfordshire. And supposedly my father used to wait for my mother after school, they were childhood sweethearts, I think. My mother did a degree in French, nominally at Queen Mary College, London, but to her joy it was evacuated to Cambridge. And then she did teacher training and tells me that when she was doing her final exam for teacher training in the Institute of Education – not sure if that was actually in Senate House or Bedford Square, anyway, up there – she had to write in the margin each time an air raid siren went off, saying ‘immediate danger’ and they would give her credit if her handwriting got a bit spidery or something. But yeah, she taught French. Then after she married, my mother, well, I became her fulltime job I think mostly, though she did a bit of supply teaching when I was a child.

[07:08] Did you have several childhood homes or just one or a small number?

When I was first on this planet we lived the other side of the Medway, in Rochester, in Horsted Way. But my father got a managerial job – they came to Kent, I should say, still working for BP, but after the Persians had kicked them out of Abadan and they were building the Isle of Grain refinery here and my father had a job there, first as a chemist and then into management – and he was involved in supervising all the shipping and which jetty which ship should come into and all sorts of emergencies and so on. And in those days there wasn’t an M2, Rochester got very congested and because he was often on call, possibly to respond to emergencies, they wanted him on this side of the Medway, on the east side of the Medway, so that he could get out there quite quickly. So they told him he’d got to move, and they were very good, they helped him with the moving costs and so on. And he looked around a lot, I know, I was four at the time, I don’t remember it very well, but I do remember one old house that they looked at in Frindsbury, where there was a bath standing on the landing not plugged into anything, I just remember that as being quite amusing. But eventually he bought the plot of land which we’re now sitting in, in Shorne. His father was horrified that he’d paid £1,000 for three-quarters of an acre of land, that was terribly expensive. And he designed the house that’s behind us and we moved there in January 1959 when I was four and a half. My parents lived there until 1999, at which point I had separated from my then wife and needed somewhere to live, they wanted somewhere smaller, they couldn’t quite face selling this house, not least getting me to clear up my childhood fossil collection housed within it, and so the only way they could get me to take responsibility for it was to sell me the house. And so I moved here in 1999 and have lived there, here, ever since, though we are thinking of selling now because the south-east is just getting too crowded and noisy and we’re thinking of moving to Wales.

[10:03] Martin Redfern Page 3 C1672/29 Track 1

Do you have any memories then of where you were living before you moved to the house that was built here, so pre-aged four memories? Apart from the bath.

Yeah. A few. They’re not very clear, they’re more picture memories rather than anything else. I can remember there was, I think it might have been an old air raid shelter, but we used it as a coal bunker, it was a sort of mound, a grassed mound with a big cherry tree under it. I’m told that they used to park my pram under it for a sleep in the day and I think I can remember lying in the pram with the cherry blossom falling down, but actually I think what I’m remembering is me aged five or six, remembering it, rather than actually the memory at the time. I can definitely remember standing with my mother at the kitchen door watching a fox go through the garden, that’s very clear. And I can remember there were a lot of flowers there, it must have been the summer. I was very amused that some of them were called red hot pokers, I remember.

What do you, when you think of the fox memory, what are you seeing?

I’m seeing, I’m standing on the left-hand side of my mother in the back door, she’s telling me to be quiet, just whispering and pointing and a fox comes across the path out from behind some flowers in the garden.

Thank you. [11:55] Now, I realise that you’re now living in the same house that you were living in as a child, but could you, nevertheless take us on a tour of it, describing your childhood home, you know, as it was at the time as far as you remember it?

This one?

Yes.

Yes. As it seemed very strange when I moved back into it as owner, to move into the bedroom, the larger bedroom that had been my parents’ bedroom. My own bedroom is, apart from even more clutter, is still roughly, underneath the clutter, as I left it to go up to university in 1972, still with my large childhood fossil collection in it. My grandfather, having worked originally as a builder, was an enthusiastic carpenter and he made me lots of trays, like drawers really, in runners for keeping my fossil collection in. He also built the brick base for the greenhouse that’s just behind us. He wasn’t a terribly accurate or neat carpenter or builder, he tended to use nails rather than screws, and so on, but [laughs] it held together. So I was, as a child I was really keen to turn my bedroom and actually what was then called the box room was later annexed by my father as a little study, but I sort of began to encroach on that and take that over and I was determined to turn it into my own childhood museum. You know, I had all sorts of things. The biggest part were rocks and fossils and minerals, but I would also collect abandoned birds’ nests and shards of Roman pottery and oh, anything, I was just always curious. I remember lying in the bed in that room after I should have put the light out, reading by Martin Redfern Page 4 C1672/29 Track 1 torchlight, probably why I have to wear glasses now, but not reading the latest comic, but reading Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia and Look and Learn and I was never much of a reader of fiction.

[14:32] Thank you. Where did you develop the idea of wanting to create a childhood museum, it being a sort of specific sort of place to want to re-create in a small room?

I think I probably first of all got it from my father, who, he was more interested in history and archaeology than in rocks and fossils, but my childhood holidays were partly around the beach, though my father would never take his shoes and socks off, but he would help me build the most fantastic sandcastles. But as well as going to the beach, we would also be visiting the castles, and so the castles were not just any old, you know, upturned bucket, but they were modelled on the Pembrokeshire castle we’d visited the day before and from a very early age I knew that the Normans tended to build square towers, but after that if it was a round tower it was probably Henry III or Edward I or somebody. And I knew all about arrow slits and crenellations and tried to produce historically accurate replicas in sand, always founded on a good rock so that the tide wouldn’t so quickly wash them away. So that was one area. And later on, actually, the interest in fossils I remember specifically when that started. Our next door neighbour then, they had a son who was a couple of years older than me and I didn’t have much in common with him, he was interested in football and things, which didn’t touch me in the slightest, and pop music. We never had pop music here. Even if we’d been watching Crackerjack on the telly and a pop group came on to play, mum would turn the sound down, oh you don’t want to hear that. So it was always Radio 3, or rather, the Third Programme that was on in the house, whereas Rodney from next door wanted pop music. We didn’t have very much in common. We played in the woods a little bit, but not much. But he turned up one day with a flint with a tiny little fossil shell that he’d found in the garden, and that was really significant to me because before that I’d been to the Natural History Museums and other museums, I’d seen fossils in museums, but I hadn’t related them as being something that an ordinary mortal could actually find. They were rare, valuable things in museums. And then I had a childhood friend, actually the daughter of one of my mother’s school friends, who lived in Ashbourne in Derbyshire, and I would go up and spend a week or so up there every summer holiday, initially with my parents but later on my own. But once when we were up there with my parents we visited, actually a prehistoric stone circle, I think it was called Arbor Low, and there was a drystone wall around a field just below it, and in that wall were lots and lots of fossil shells, carboniferous limestone. I now know that they were, the big one was called gigantoproductus. And those were the first significant fossils I’d found myself. I think I was nine or possibly ten at the time and, don’t tell the farmer, but I made my mother stuff her handbag full of these fossils out of his wall. And after that, Christine, the friend who lived in Ashbourne, and I would go fossil hunting at every opportunity up there, and later we had family holidays to Dorset and to Shropshire, which are both wonderful fossil localities and I started finding ammonites at Kimmeridge and trilobites and brachiopods in Shropshire. And before my parents knew what had hit them, holidays were being planned around quarries and I’d have a big orange crate in the boot of the car and lots of newspaper and I’d fill it with half a hundredweight of fossils each holiday.

[19:22] Martin Redfern Page 5 C1672/29 Track 1

Christine’s interest in collecting fossils, where had that come from?

She was very like me in that she was, I think her parents had brought her up to just be interested in the countryside and all things natural, and she lived in Derbyshire surrounded by carboniferous limestone and so she had built up quite a collection when I first knew her. And we used to go together to Rochester Museum, which it’s now I think just a museum of Dickens, at Eastgate Museum, but at that stage it was a typical provincial museum with a collection of fossils and minerals and stuffed birds and all sorts. And it had a lovely curator who, I don’t know how old he actually was, he seemed absolutely ancient at the time, Dr Taylor, and he would, somehow or other I managed to introduce myself to him and he would invite me into the curator’s office. And I think his own interest was actually in minerals, but I think he regarded the rocks and minerals and fossils there as basically his collection. And he would give me a few surplus fossils, which were vastly better than the ones I’d found myself, and it was all very, very exciting, so that helped. The other thing that stimulated my interest, I went to, well initially I went to Gad’s Hill, which is basically a girls’ school, but it had a mixed kindergarten. You can see it from the garden here, just down there, in Charles Dickens’ old home. I mean it was a rather old- fashioned school, I remember, but we did have nature study classes, this was age six or seven, and obviously I was very interested in that and the teacher there gave me one or two things that she’d picked up on her travels. I remember, I’ve still got a falling apart old weaver bird’s nest from Africa and a little clay tablet from a monastery in Tibet, and I think a tiger’s claw, for some reason, that she gave me. And so I was already fired up with collecting miscellaneous natural things like that when I then went to King’s School in Rochester, to the prep school there. It was called the junior school then. And they had every summer a hobbies exhibition where people would bring in their collections of cigarette cards or football coupons or stamp collection or whatever, or in my case, I took over practically a whole classroom with my collection of rocks and fossils, and also a small collection of coins that my father had helped me build up at Christmasses and birthdays. So I think that fed the museum interest. I’ve rather lost track of your question, actually.

[22:59] No, no, that’s okay. And I interrupted you, you were taking us on a tour of your childhood home here. We have your bedroom and the box room covered, but could you take us on a tour of the rest of the house, and if you in doing so, you happen to think of someone in the house doing a certain thing, so if you picture your mother doing a certain thing in a certain space, or your father, tell us about that as well.

Yeah. Well, the second biggest bedroom, I had the third biggest bedroom but it was in the back and it looked out on that oak tree, which I always loved and I also used to climb and look in at the window. And actually, while we’re still in that room I also have vivid memories, before it was full of rocks and fossils, of summer evenings when I should have been asleep, my father fitted a dark blind because I couldn’t get to sleep in the sunlight and didn’t want to, and I remember peering round this dark green roller blind watching my father mowing the lawn out here after I should have gone to sleep. But coming on to the second biggest bedroom, that’s the one where my granny, my mother’s mother, used to stay when she came. And I have very happy memories of her, she was very, very patient with me. She moved, after my parents moved here, she moved to a little bungalow in Higham, just the other side of the A226, so a short walk. And she would, like my mother is Martin Redfern Page 6 C1672/29 Track 1 now, she was a creature very much of habit and she would always come to lunch on a Wednesday and then sometimes if my father wasn’t working on a Saturday or a Sunday. But when she was coming I would wait in the woods down the lane and ambush her [laughs] and so on. But I remember that she had that bedroom when she came to stay and in her last year she moved in there when she was, I didn’t quite understand why she was so frail, I’m still not quite sure, but I think she was possibly developing Alzheimer’s or something. But she was still very patient with me and when I was little, when I was, I don’t know, six or seven, I used to bring lots of model animals and imaginary animals and we would have what I called ‘my cavern’ under the bedclothes and she was very patient, I must have driven her round the bend. [laughs] Then there’s a fourth bedroom which is where my paternal grandfather used to stay when he came. I don’t remember so much his wife, I do remember her, but when they came they had separate rooms, which I thought was a bit odd. But I think now, I think she was developing Alzheimer’s and I remember being rather shocked when they put a lock, not a lock, just a little bolt on the outside of that room, because she would go wandering in the night and I think they were worried that she’d fall downstairs, I think it was for her own safety rather than to shut her in. But she was, I thought she was a bit odd, but then I didn’t know her when she was much better. She must have died when I was about seven. But she was responsible for encouraging my father to play the piano and we have a Challen baby grand still in the sitting room here, which my father actually took delivery of when he was working in Abadan. So it’s tropicalised, which means that it can stand up to central heating without going out of tune, although it did have to have a major rebuild when it came back because they’d dropped it off the lorry. But I know when it was shipped out to Abadan it came in a huge wooden packing crate and they had an Iranian, what they called their boy, who cooked for them and, like a servant I suppose, and he begged this huge wooden crate off them when the piano had been unpacked, which his brother then used to set up as a shop in the local market. But I digress. Another memory actually of lying in my bedroom was hearing my father attempting to play Beethoven piano sonatas downstairs as I was going off to sleep, that was another happy memory. But yes, my paternal grandfather had the fourth bedroom, I suppose. He moved down to live with us in 1973 or ’74. Before that he’d lived in Suffolk, in Great Cornard, which connects on to Sudbury, in a bungalow in an old sandpit with a huge garden, I have happy memories of going up there for a week or two in the summer holidays and helping him take geranium cuttings. After his wife died, well before she died, he had a live-in help, who I think helped with his wife when she was suffering from dementia, and he kept her on, basically he didn’t know how to cook and so on, to cook for him and she was a very keen gardener and flower arranger and so on, so the garden flourished. When she died, he moved down here and I remember I was at university by this stage, at University College, London doing geology. I remember he’d got a furniture van to move down here and I think we had been up and picked a few pieces of furniture, but basically he got rid of all his nice antique furniture and filled the furniture van up with flower pots and bamboo canes for the garden, which he thought were much more important. But I remember him coming down to breakfast on his first day after moving down here and he’d sold his house – this was 1973 or 4, so for not very much – but he gave the cheque to my father and said I won’t be needing the house any more, you’d better have this. And he gave his car keys, for a little Renault 4 that he’d bought new about four years previously, to me and said I won’t be needing this any more. And so that was my first car, a little Renault 4 with the sit-up-and-beg gearstick. So he lived in that room. I remember him, he got increasingly deaf as he grew older and he had a television up there, which he had with the sound turned up louder and louder until I finally fitted a pair of headphones on a long lead so he could listen on headphones. Much to my father’s Martin Redfern Page 7 C1672/29 Track 1 consternation, he would always have on sport, particularly football, which didn’t interest my dad at all, or me. And his favourite programme, I think, was The Good Old Days, music hall, which again, didn’t really match my father’s taste in classical music. He was a sweet granddad to have, he taught me what little I know about carpentry and I remember just after we’d moved in here, so I must have been only five or six, he taught me how to mix cement, because he was building some cold frames round the side of the house. And he would let me attack him with a rolled up newspaper and try and hit him on his bald head with it, again, very patient, I was very lucky with my childhood. So that’s upstairs pretty much dealt with, apart from the cupboard over the porch halfway up the stairs, which I now use to store wine, but used to be a favourite hidey-hole when I was little. [32:02] Downstairs, well, we have a nice big sitting room, built big to accommodate the piano. Dining room, I remember my parents choosing, so I must have been four at the time, choosing the Artex patterns for the ceiling. Artex was very much the new and in thing then, not so popular now, partly because I think they mixed a little bit of asbestos in with it. But we have very fine examples of Artex. We’re doing the house up to sell and we have actually skimmed over a couple of them because some people don’t like them, but the plasterer saw the sitting room Artex and thought, oh that is the finest example he’d ever seen, and we agreed that maybe we should preserve that, so it was spared. The dining room had a pattern which was called ‘basket and flower’, I remember, which was the same pattern that I chose for my bedroom. Nice big kitchen. My mother’s one regret was that she didn’t have a, didn’t design it to include a walk-in cool larder. In my childhood I remember, because also it was the first house we’d had with central heating. Again, a great innovation at the time, not radiators, but a heat exchanger and hot air central heating. And we moved in in January 1959, I remember it was a very cold frosty morning, because I’d fallen over on our drive of our previous house and grazed my knee and in the cold it hurt a lot. And we got here and it was warm, every room was warm, that was… And we didn’t have to light a coal fire, that was novel. And the centre of it, it was oil-fired, partly because my father worked for BP and could get a discount on the kerosene fuel, partly because my mother was afraid of gas. There was gas up the road, but we never had it in this house as mum didn’t really like the idea, so it was an electric cooker. But the heating was this great stove enamel thing that they called ‘the furnace’. We’ve now just got a little boiler in a cupboard and the huge alcove where the furnace was is now a good place to keep the fridge and the wine rack. But it still had all the same kitchen fittings until I moved in in as owner in late ’99 and modernised it a bit. But I couldn’t face getting rid of all the old cupboards and I was converting what had been the garage into a utility room, so those cupboards are still in there. But of course that was a garage when I was little. My father had a second garage put on when my grandfather came down, with a view that he could keep his car in there, which he gave to me, but we never kept a car in there. Partly it was too tight a turn to get it in without scraping it and partly I was always having projects and building things and it became more a workshop and a wood store.

[35:49] What do you remember your father doing in the house apart from attempting to play Beethoven on the piano?

He was a great reader, not of fiction. I hardly ever remember him reading a novel, at least until after he retired, but he was always reading magazines, gardening books, history books. He was very keen on archaeology. Martin Redfern Page 8 C1672/29 Track 1

Through this hobbies exhibition that we had at school the person who was, the teacher who was behind that, Roy Trett, who, he was an old soldier, but he was a lovely kind man and he was at the time, I think he was Chairman of the Medway Towns Numismatic Society and because I’d brought a little coin collection, basically at that stage just early twentieth century coins that I’d found in my dad’s change, I got the idea that if you found a coin that was pre-1948, a silver coin, it was fifty per cent silver, and if you were lucky enough to find one that was pre-1921 it was sterling silver and worth more than its face value for the silver. So I filched all of those out of my dad’s change and that started the coin collection, after that it got better and we bought older coins and so on. But Roy Trett encouraged me to join the Medway Town’s Numismatic Society when I was about nine or ten. But you weren’t allowed under school rules to be out after seven at night in Rochester unless accompanied by a parent, so my dad had to come along to take me there, and he got very interested in coins. He later became himself the Chairman of the Medway Towns Numismatic Society, and because he was particularly interested in Roman history he started collecting Roman coins and built up quite a collection. We had a couple of break-ins in my childhood while we were on holidays and various early incarnations of the collection got stolen, but he persisted and there’s still a nice little collection of Roman coins I can’t bring myself to sell, because he died in January 2015. So yes, reading about Roman coins and reading magazines. He had wonderful powers of concentration and he’d be sitting there reading a book or a magazine or something and my mother would be talking on, small talk about, you know, some friend or other and how her daughter had got engaged, you know, the sort of chatter that goes on. And then she’d ask him a question, and there’d be a silence, and she’d ask it again. And he’d take his glasses off and look up and say, ‘Sorry, did you say something dear?’ And she was really infuriated at that because he’d just been so concentrating on the book he was reading. But a lot of the time, particularly in the summer, he was out in the garden. This garden, it’s three-quarters of an acre plot and because the house was a new build in 1958/59, it had been coppiced chestnut wood before that and there’s still a little bit of wood at the top and bottom, but the bit in between, basically they’d just gone up and down it with a big bulldozer with a hook at the back to snag out all the tree roots. And when we first moved in we had huge bonfires that burnt for weeks, burning up all these old roots. And he carved this garden out of nothing. I remember helping mum pick all the pebbles up off the raked earth that is now the lawn before they seeded it with grass. Buckets and buckets of pebbles. I remember this border that we’re sitting next to now with terribly overgrown rhododendrons and an acer that must be thirty foot high, I remember that newly planted, huge gaps between the plants, how on earth would that ever grow to fill the space. It’s not overhung it by ten feet in every direction and many of the plants actually have crowded each other out, so getting a bit overgrown. That Bramley apple tree, it’s the only one of the apple trees that survived of the ones that my father planted, all the other fruit trees I’ve planted since to replace ones that were dying or have blown over. But that Bramley apple tree last year, we got nearly half a ton of fruit off that. And the vegetable patch beyond it, my father grew lots and lots of vegetables. That is something I’ve continued, though not so well in this year, partly because I’ve been really busy decorating the house and partly because it was first really very wet and the slugs flourished, and now it’s really very dry and anything that did survive the slugs has died of drought. But that vegetable plot at the back has been hand-dug, father and son, for fifty-five years or more [laughs] and is very nice fertile soil. So actually, particularly on summer evenings and weekends, that’s where dad was, he would go out in the garden, do a bit of digging, mow the lawn. My mum would just do a little bit of weeding briefly, but she wasn’t so much of a gardener. My memory of her is of course always cooking. Made the most wonderful fruit pies Martin Redfern Page 9 C1672/29 Track 1 with fruit from the garden. But also I think she’s probably done The Telegraph crossword every day since 1952, roughly, and still does. I have vivid memories of hot summer days in early July where she would be glued to the television watching Wimbledon in black and white, very keen on Wimbledon, and I’d be out here in the garden sort of lazing around. You know how smells bring back memories, each year when the sweet chestnuts flower, that rather heady, sexy scent takes me straight back to Wimbledon being on and going out and climbing the trees and being too hot on a summer day.

[43:24] Could you tell me more about local landscapes that you visited? Sort of local environments that you explored? We’ve got holiday locations and the fossil collecting, but where did you go to locally?

Yes. Very often I didn’t want to go anywhere because we were so lucky, we’ve got a big garden here, next to it is Pear Tree Wood, which is four acres of woodland. It was first of all owned by the people next door on that side, when they moved and sold the house they didn’t sell the woodland. Eventually they sold the woodland to the son, Rodney, of the people on the other side of me and I think he hoped that he could build on it, and I think he put in for planning permission first for six houses, then three houses, then one house. To my considerable relief they were all refused. But I used to explore in there. A couple of years ago he agreed, at last, that he would sell it at not ridiculous development land prices and I bought half and the people at the other house there, because I couldn’t afford the whole thing, bought the other half. So I now own two acres of that woodland, which I spent a lot of my childhood in. Also, just the other side of the road that we live in is Court Wood, which is huge. I used to go exploring over there, long walks in the wood. Two doors down there was a lad called Simon who I used to play with a lot. In those days it was Man from U.N.C.L.E. on television, and so of course we were the Men from U.N.C.L.E. who were re-enacting all that. Further afield, whenever anybody came to visit we would take them to Rochester Castle, which was rather fun. As I got a little bit older and would go out on my own, well, I joined the Boy Scouts and loved going camping. That’s something my parents never did, they always took me to very nice hotels with good restaurants, for which I’m extremely grateful, but camping I learnt with other people. There was a school scout troop. But then I also got very keen on brass rubbing, again, just interested in things natural and things historical, and brass rubbing here was actually an activity you could do and bring something back to add to the museum collection. And so I rubbed my way around the brasses of Suffolk when staying with my grandfather up there. Christine from Derbyshire got very keen on brass rubbing so we went together around a lot of the local churches here, culminating with Cobham Church where there is probably the best collection of brasses in the country, of the Cobham family, the Darnley family, that owned Cobham Hall. There’s some fantastic brasses, late fourteenth and early fifteenth century. They’re full-length figures. And they charged what in pocket money terms was a lot of money to rub them, I think it might have been one pound or one pound fifty or something for half a day. So we went up there for half a day and just tried to rub as many as we can and got repetitive strain injury in wrists and so on. So yeah, so that was another one. Well, from a pretty early age, in those days, you know, you weren’t worried about safety so much, from the age of eight when I started at King’s School, I used to walk down the lane, cross the main road and catch the bus to school. So catching a bus was a fairly normal thing. I used to sometimes take a bus down, or maybe dad would give me a lift down and I’d walk back to Upnor where we could walk along the foreshore of the Medway and at Martin Redfern Page 10 C1672/29 Track 1 low tide we could pick up eighteenth century clay pipes and bits of them, probably thrown out or broken and dropped over the side by people at Chatham Dockyard the other side of the river. Again, collecting all the time. But a lot of it was just spent in this garden. I had my own little plot of garden at the bottom where I had a rockery and – of course – and grew a few flowers and a few easy vegetables like radishes and things.

[48:38] Do you remember time spent with your mother, things done with her alone, things done, places gone with her?

She didn’t drive. When I was learning, well no, before I learnt to drive, dad gave her lessons but she was too scared, she would always sort of pull to the side of the road if there was a car coming the other direction, so she never felt she was up to a standard to take a test. So if we went out it was either… sometimes in the summer dad was always very punctual with work, you know, he would be off to work at seven forty or something, so he’d get there at eight and he’d be back at four thirty or five very promptly. Not like me, when I was working would sometimes come home at nine o’clock at night or midnight or worse. So in the summer he’d get back at maybe four thirty with a bit of luck. Mum would have walked down to Gad’s Hill to pick me up from school and then I remember, probably didn’t happen every day or, you know, it was a treat, but they’d have packed up a little picnic and we’d go out to some nice place on the North Downs, Boxley or Luddesdown or somewhere like that and find a pretty spot and have a picnic tea, sometimes with a friend from school afterwards as well. But I enjoyed my own company, I didn’t feel the need to have childhood friends all that much. And similarly, my mother was very often just getting on with cooking and housework and so on, so she was around, but I would be off doing my own thing, either exploring in the woods or later sorting fossils and chipping away at them to clean them up to identify them and label them up in my bedroom. Sometimes the floor got covered with gravel, much to her horror. Because I had a little electric engraver that I would use to clean up surplus rock from fossils to expose them a bit better and that sort of thing. I used to, sometimes, to play board games, card games with my mother. Sometimes played chess. I think I was quite a bad loser though. I’m not quite sure if the reason I won quite often was because I was a bad loser and mum let me. I enjoyed that when I won. I was quite a slow developer, shall we say, I didn’t learn to walk until I was two, I didn’t learn to read till I was six, going on seven. So my mother used to read a lot to me. I remember her reading me the Narnia books. I think I learnt to read in the end on Enid Blyton, as so many did in that age. I was much more Secret Seven than Famous Five though. But then when I’d learnt to read I re-read all the Narnia books for myself and I loved fantasy books. John Masefield, Midnight Folk, I remember enjoying very much, The Box of Delights. Later when Alan Garner wrote Weirdstone of Brisingamen and the follow on books from that, those were probably my favourite books of all as a child. And his writing sort of grew up with me, they got weirder and more surreal as I got old enough to understand their weirdness and surreality – is that the word?

[52:57] Any churchgoing, as a child?

Well, King’s School, Rochester was a church school, so once there I had compulsory chapel every morning. In the junior school we would sing a hymn and say a prayer in assembly and have a little service at St Margaret’s Martin Redfern Page 11 C1672/29 Track 1

Church once a week. Once in the senior school it was Rochester Cathedral Chapel eight forty-five every morning for fifteen minutes and an hour long service on Fridays. In those days my parents didn’t go to church, I think because my father was working fulltime and really valued the weekends for getting on with the gardening. My mother’s mother was Christian Science and was fairly regular and used to take the bus down to the little Christian Science church in Rochester. I don’t remember my mother going with her, hardly at all, but she did and does – my mother, that is – read the Daily Lesson that’s sent out in the Christian Science Quarterly. My father, when he retired, I’m not quite sure how devout his beliefs were, but he loved church music and the ceremony of it, if you like. At school he had become organist, much to the disgust of the music broadcaster, Anthony Hopkins, who was a year below him and wanted to become organ scholar, but wasn’t allowed to because it would mess up his piano playing, he’d been told, and anyway, my father was the organ scholar. So when my father retired, took early retirement at fifty-seven or fifty-eight, he went up to the parish church where the organist had just resigned, and said that he’d fill in for a couple of months until they found a proper organist. He did it for thirty-three years. And when eczema in his fingers meant that he could no longer play regularly he sang in the choir, until only a year or so before he died. I remember him once sitting, he’d never talked about his beliefs at all to me as a child, but I remember once one evening, I must have… he must have still been working but I think I was still at school, but it was at the stage where he would give me a sip of his glass of wine, so I was probably fourteen or fifteen. And he’d got a, I think it was the Bach B Minor Mass on the stereo and he was just sitting there reading and sipping a glass of wine, which he did on the dot at nine o’clock every evening. And he wasn’t a great conversationalist, but he just looked up from his book and said to me, ‘D’you know the purpose of life?’ Bit taken aback by this, because he’d never talked about anything like this. So I said, ‘No’. He said, ‘It’s to glorify God’. And he went back to his book. That’s the only thing he ever talked to me about religion. [56:54] So for myself, in the junior school at King’s, the headmaster there was a bit of a born again Christian and he did the sort of, have you ever thought about taking Christ into your heart, sort of thing. And I went along with that and sort of got quite moved by it at, I suppose, age of about nine or ten and went to Bible reading group in the school with him for a term or two, and it sort of wore off. After that the compulsory chapel was as much God bothering as I felt I wanted at the time. But I was always interested, not so much in religion, but in philosophy and the underlying philosophy, but I increasingly started to rebel against formal religion, because I could see that everybody in the school service, hardly anybody was taking it seriously, it was just a thing they had to do and we’d see if we could get a good time lag going in the hymns at the back of the transept when I was in the sort of fifth form where, you know, fifteen or so, most rebellious. And once I got into the sixth form the deputy chaplain, who is a lovely man and the only one of my teachers who I’ve kept in regular contact with, David Gerrish, he took an opt-out group for people who felt they didn’t want to go to school chapel. And that sounded like a great idea, get out of chapel. And that – you could only do it once you were in the sixth form – and after the first year in the sixth form David Gerrish left, much to my disappointment. But that was probably a better dose of what I would call religion, or spirituality, than you’d ever get in the school chapel, because he talked about the philosophy of religion, he talked about comparative religion, Islam, Buddhism, Taoism, and he allowed us to steer it into whatever ‘ism’ or philosophy interested us. And at about the same time I started Martin Redfern Page 12 C1672/29 Track 1 reading Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy and got quite interested in wherever that led as well. But no, I’ve never really got formal religion.

[1:00:11] Did you have, though, any private thoughts or beliefs?

Had lots and lots of thoughts, stimulated partly by David Gerrish’s group. I should add, you know, he and I became quite close, because apart from being an ordained C of E minister, his own subject was geology and it was thanks to him that he sort of just privately for no money coaxed me through, in the lower sixth, O level geology and encouraged me to work hard at my A levels so I could get a good place at university and encouraged me to read geology there. So that’s one side of it that I’m very grateful for, but he also nurtured this interest that I’ve always had in philosophy and I suppose spirituality. So I had lots of thoughts. I’ve often wondered what I believe and the answer is, actually it was Richard Dawkins who crystallised that for me, as I was, only a few years ago I was interviewing him and he was very suspicious of me because I kept sort of pushing him on religious questions, and he rounded on me in the interview and said, ‘You’ve got religious beliefs haven’t you?’ And it’s the only time in my life I think that I’ve come up with a riposte of which I’m rather pleased, and I said, ‘No, I don’t actually think I have beliefs, I don’t think I’ve got the genes for belief, but I’m homozygous for hope’. So, you know, I’ve got a double dose of the hope gene, so, you know. I don’t think I can believe in a god because I don’t know what God is. So how can you believe in something you don’t know? I’ve, in interviews, occasionally tried to push Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, who goes to church, but who has always avoided saying whether he has religious beliefs or not. He says no, I go to church because I like the music and I like the ceremony. I thought once that in an interview, we were talking about the anthropic principle, that I’d got him in a corner, as it were, where he’d more or less admitted a belief in God, and so I asked him that question directly and his answer was, if there is a God, it is so far beyond my powers of comprehension that I cannot possibly have an opinion about it. And if the former President of the Royal Society and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge doesn’t know what God is, then it would be extremely arrogant of me to know as well. So I find it very difficult to believe in a personal one-to-one God as talked about by a lot of Christianity, but at the same time, well, I’m also very interested in the nature of consciousness and if there’s some aspect of consciousness or mind that goes beyond the physical brain, then everything is possible, then I like to think, the thing that I hope is that in some way mind or consciousness is an inherent part of the universe and we as individuals dip into a tiny share of that. That’s a bit different from what most religions would call God and I don’t know whether we keep any of our own individuality or memory. Once we die I don’t know if Martin Redfern has any existence with any meaning as Martin Redfern after death, or whether it’s, to use the Hindu analogy, it’s like a bottle of water from the Ganges, once tipped back into the Ganges it no longer has any separate existence. So if I have a religious belief now, it’s non-duality, that there is no separate God, but in the same sense that there is no separate me. So that makes a universe that I rather like, it makes a universe where consciousness and maybe love is part of the grand state of that universe, and that fits much better with the aspects of religion that I most like, which are some of the more mystical aspects that underlie many different religions. You know, I can’t believe that whatever proportion of the population that isn’t Christian is in for eternal damnation, that a child who hasn’t been baptised is damned, that we’re born in sin. You know, all that Martin Redfern Page 13 C1672/29 Track 1 side of it I don’t like and I don’t believe, but a universe that I am inherently part of and which is much greater than me and where consciousness still has some part to play, that I like. The universe doesn’t seem, although a lot of the processes in it, like natural selection and evolution of galaxies and supernova explosions and so on, yeah, Richard Dawkins is fine there, they all work and they seem by random processes to bring us about, but underlying all that there are various anthropic arguments. Why should the universe be just right to produce life like us if the ratio of the weight of the electron and the weight of the proton were just slightly different, if the gravitational force and the strong nuclear force were just slightly different, all these fundamental constants that we have no particular reason for why they should have the values they do, if they didn’t have the values they do, we wouldn’t be here. And there are only two ways out of that, either we live in a multiverse, in which there’s a vast and possibly infinite number of universes, so one’s going to turn up with the right constants of nature and of course that one is the one that will give rise to us, so it’s the one that we observe. Or, in some sense, it’s a put-up job. That brings us to the old flat earth argument, you know, the earth is supported on four elephants standing on the back of a giant turtle. What supports the turtle? As some lady said when questioned on this, oh, it’s turtles all the way down. So you don’t get out of it that way, you know, an infinite tower of turtles doesn’t do the trick. Maybe a cosmic super turtle does, which is roughly by analogy the simplistic idea of a god, maybe some separate being with super powers can hold the whole thing up and tune the fine constants and all the rest of it. But that doesn’t square with my feeling for science, or indeed my feeling for spirituality and consciousness. My preferred route is the one that the physicist John Wheeler began to develop, which also fits in with quantum theory of which he was one of the pioneers. In that, and again, I’m simplifying hugely, there are various quantum processes where you produce a pair of particles with maybe opposite polarisations, and it’s not simply that you don’t know which one is polarised one way and which one is polarised the other way, until you observe one of them, neither of them has a fixed polarisation, it’s not simply ignorance, it’s uncertainty, but it’s an uncertainty that’s in the physical reality rather than just a lack of knowledge. And so when you observe one, you affect the other. That’s been shown to be the case across a laboratory bench. If that works across a laboratory bench, why shouldn’t it work with a pair of photons produced in a different galaxy? As John Wheeler said, what is true near and here is also true far and long ago, we’re observing a galaxy as it was, you know, all those light years ago. And in a sense you’re affecting, you’re bringing galaxies into being by observing them, if you develop that argument, some might say ad absurdum, but I like it. So somehow the act of observation is integral to the very existence of the universe. Now, would that work if it was a photographic plate observing it, or if it was a cockroach observing it, or a crocodile observing it? I don’t know, but somewhere in there I think consciousness comes in, I think the universe is becoming manifest as it comes into consciousness. My friend, Paul Davies, the physicist, now at University of Arizona, has speculated that if you can bring matter into manifestation by observation across the universe, thus having in a sense backwards causation in time, could you also have backwards causation in fine tuning the constants of nature. So, is it actually, you know, is this turtle actually pulling itself up by its own bootstraps, to mix metaphors. Is the fundamental thing consciousness and it’s because of consciousness that the universe is the way it is and indeed has existence at all. I don’t say I believe that, it’s pretty far-fetched and most scientists would say I’ve gone way too far, but that’s the sort of cosmology and spirituality I hope for.

Martin Redfern Page 14 C1672/29 Track 1

[1:13:36] Thank you. Now, we know that you started the junior school having recently learnt to read and come out at the other end, well, reading geology at university, but can you sketch out the sort of intellectual journey of school? We’ll talk also about the sort of social and human side of it, but how do you get from one end to the other knowing and thinking and being interested in different things?

Oh, by blindly muddling through. [laughs] I was never the brightest, but I managed to get into the A stream, just. Sadly that meant I had to do Latin rather than biology up to O level, but at least I wasn’t so bright that I had to do Greek rather than geography. Those were the rather weird choices. Of course, in those days everything was sort of competitive in that every term or every half term you were graded and, you know somebody would come top of the form and somebody would come bottom of the form. They were, by present day standards, reasonably small classes of typically twenty-four people, boys, so no girls to distract me. And I think the highest I ever managed was fourth in something, usually I was down in the, maybe the upper teens, so I wasn’t brilliant. The times when I excelled were when a particular good teacher caught my interest, so the things that I enjoyed. I think I’ve got a reasonably good episodic memory, a memory for either events or storylines. I’ve got an absolutely hopeless semantic memory. I cannot remember out of context facts and words and things. I think I’ve also not got a terribly good ear for picking things up verbally. So as a result I was terrible at languages, and also they were pretty badly taught. I quite liked aspects of Latin because I was interested in Roman history, but I was very bad at actually learning it and I struggled with my Latin homework. I hated French, I think that was really badly taught. My mother, who’d been a French teacher herself, and you might think I would be slightly better at it as a result, but I wasn’t, got very angry once when homework was to learn the vocabulary at the back of the textbook from A to K. And then obviously the next week’s was going to be L to M, or whatever. That, well, that certainly didn’t work for me, though strangely, put me in a restaurant or with a wine list and suddenly I can speak French again, but only in the present tense and only when it interests me, ie food and wine. My parents did take me on a number of very nice holidays to France in the hope of improving my French a bit and it improved my restaurant French. I loved geography, particularly when David Gerrish was teaching it, because he would do physical geography, geomorphology, landscape and so on, and I related a lot to understanding landscape and the geology underneath that made it what it was and the processes such as river erosion and ice ages and so on that shape it, that’s always been of interest. I was lucky enough to have a holiday to Sicily once when Etna was erupting, so volcanoes have always been a passion. It’s always when my interest is caught like that that the school lessons come alive and I’m better at it. We, for O level, we were the first year to do ‘new maths’, as it was called, and I found that really rather easy and therefore I quite enjoyed that. Later on, doing physics but not maths at A level, and some aspects of physical geology at university, I was at a big disadvantage because I hadn’t done ‘old maths’ and I really struggled with calculus and difficult maths and that’s one of the reasons why I never became an academic scientist. I couldn’t believe the maths, I couldn’t believe how you can, in calculus, you can say that something that’s curved, if you take a tiny bit of it, it tends towards a straight line, so let’s call it a straight line. It sounded like a big fiddle, although I recognise that it works, I recognise the power of it, I can see that others see the beauty in maths. Sadly, I don’t, it’s missing in me. Something which I discovered that, I don’t know if I’m particularly good at, but I did enjoy, was writing. I can tell a story and when it’s telling a story I can write an essay. I even enjoyed writing very bad Martin Redfern Page 15 C1672/29 Track 1 poetry and particularly got pleased when odd poems, like a ‘Sonnet to an Ammonite’ that I wrote, got published in the school magazine. Again, it’s possibly down to teachers. We had a very nice, well various nice English teachers. There were two sides to that, there were the ones who also directed school plays and that’s somewhere where I found a passion, not – well, initially acting but I wasn’t very good at it and I wasn’t very good at learning my lines – but then I discovered stage lighting and set building and that sort of thing and I loved that, I used to do all the lighting for the school plays and the sound and did an awful lot of that, maybe I’ll come on to later, at university, which is what got me a job in the BBC as a studio manager initially. But also I enjoyed the creative writing, I think that’s from reading the Alan Garner fantasy books and so on. And I appreciated good poetry as well. At school we used to have, you know, there was the regular Friday service that was an hour long, in Rochester Cathedral and would have three hymns and a psalm and responses and the boring sermon, not always boring, but usually, and all that. But then once or twice a term they would allow us to do what we called a theme service, where they gave the design of the service over to, usually sixth formers. And we didn’t have to, though we could, hold it in the cathedral, we could hold it in the school hall. And so I did a couple of those. One was in the school hall and was basically a sequence of recorded music and poetry, I think with slides as well, and then I did another one which we did in the crypt of Rochester Cathedral, which was a bit difficult to fit the whole school in and we had projected slides and it was all about the perils of nuclear war and things, all those things that in the late sixties, early seventies, were fuelling teenage angst. But, you know, the juxtaposition of poetry and music and images, you know, I found that a sort of creative thing and I think that also fuelled the stuff I did later in theatre and possibly the creative element in writing since. [1:23:19] Where were we? You were talking academically. You see, I keep coming off the academical and on to the things that excite me, and coincidentally the things that excited me that also happened to be academic subjects I did reasonably well at. So get my attention and I’ll do alright, bore me and… But I got, I was definitely always interested in science and again, it was the extracurricular bits that interested me more than the formal teaching, so I became the chairman of the school Scientific Society and we used to have films and occasionally we would persuade the chemistry master, who was a bit of a pyromaniac, to give a lecture demonstration on explosives and that sort of thing. And he was very good at blowing things up and doing all sorts of things that health and safety wouldn’t allow nowadays. I was a bit of a rebel as well, so one year… we had a school cadet force, which I didn’t enjoy because it seemed to be the teachers I didn’t like, were little men who put them in uniform they got all officious and shouted at you and made you polish your buckles and march in step and I was a bit of a rebel in that. I remember the person who headed the cadet force on my school report once wrote, ‘Resents authority’, which was probably true, or at least his authority. But one year we mixed up nitrogen triiodide in the chemistry lab, which is that thing that you get in caps which explodes when you hit it. And we basically made a kilogram or more of that and scattered it across the school quad before the annual inspection and parade of the cadet force so that marching up and down to the sound of explosions, which was quite fun. I did various rebellious things like. We also managed to reverse the polarities of the fans in the roof of the school hall and leave a lot of flour around the edge of the thing, so that instead of sucking, they blew and they blew all this flour down in the school assembly at the end of term one year.

Who’s the ‘we’ in these stories, is this a particular group of friends that you’re remembering? Martin Redfern Page 16 C1672/29 Track 1

Yes, I suppose it was the same group of people who did the scenery and lighting and sound for school plays and so on. Because, I think partly because we knew our way around the back and we knew how to get up into the roof and reverse the polarity of the fans, we knew how to switch all the lights out while the headmaster was giving his speech, and that sort of thing.

Who’s the other teacher who you say that you’ve stayed in touch with?

David Gerrish.

David Gerrish was one and you said there’s only two that you’ve stayed in…

I think there was only the one who I’m still in touch with. There were one or two others… well, there was another one who I’ve lost touch with at the moment, who actually he was probably the rebel ringleader, although he was a teacher, he was a very wicked – no, not wicked – he was very mischievous. That was Dick Bushell, he was the biology teacher. I did biology A level, having not done it to O level, because I did Latin. And that actually, he reckoned that was an advantage because all the people who’d done it to O level had to unlearn the over-simplifications that they were given for O level. But he also took over the Scout troop. There was a French teacher who was doing it when I first joined, who always wore uniform and was into doing proper Boy Scout things like taking badges and learning knots and so on. Dick, you know, we all called him Dick to his face, and first name terms, he was much more of a rebel. We sort of, well I think we did still wear Scout uniform, but it was just a guise really of having fun. We used to go off and have ‘wide games’, as they called them, around the town, laying trails and so on, it was just glorified play. And he had been a – he wasn’t all that much older by the time we were in the sixth form than we were, you know, he was in his late twenties, low thirties – and he’d studied botany, I think, at Bangor University and while he was there he had bought a derelict old barn on Anglesey and done it up, he lived there while he was at uni but it was a holiday cottage. And we always used to go up with him at half-terms and sometimes in the summer, just a small group, the survivors of the Scout troop really, and we’d go walking in the North Wales mountains and we’d help him build an extension on his little cottage and so on. And as a result of that I learnt all sorts of useful skills, like how to wire up plug sockets and ring mains and do plumbing and we even dug a well for him, which meant that we didn’t any more have sticklebacks in the drinking water. But he was quite a rebel himself actually, so he was probably what sparked the rebelliousness. As I say, I’ve rather lost touch with him now, he moved to a different school and because he was a bit of a rebel he wasn’t the sort of person who you keep sending Christmas cards to. I think in the end he did finally marry the school matron. We did lay traps for them. I wasn’t a boarder, but there was a boarding house and the school matron lived at the top of a very long windy staircase in this boarding house and we used to, well, on one occasion at least, pile up lots of empty beer cans just outside the outward opening door at the top of these stairs so that when Dick sneaked out after a midnight assignation with matron, all these beer cans would go rattling down the stairs and wake everybody up. That was a jolly jape. [laughs] But yeah, Dick fuelled my love of the outdoors and camping, particularly, and walking in the hills. And taught me a lot about DIY. And we went to the old slate quarries at Dinorwick just after they closed and got – he had an old Land Martin Redfern Page 17 C1672/29 Track 1

Rover – we got loads of slate which we tiled his bathroom floor with and built a shower surround out of and so on. So lots of practical things like that.

[end of track 1] Martin Redfern Page 18 C1672/29 Track 2

[Track 2]

Could you tell me how – this is at school as you’re an older child at school – how you saw yourself in relation to others around you, apart from the perception of yourself as rebellious, how did you see yourself in relation to others in terms of sort of, I don’t know, shyness or intelligence or, you know, or physical qualities. So as you got to an age where you might be judging yourself in relation to those round you, what sort of judgements were you making?

Yeah, ‘cos I was an only child, indeed of two only children, I was pretty used to my own company. I didn’t think of myself at all as shy at the time, but I guess probably I was. I was certainly quite happy in my own company. I had friends, yes, but not really very close friends. I suppose later on I had some fairly close friends as a result of sort of going off camping and hillwalking and that sort of thing. I, basically I hated sport at school, I wasn’t any good at it, I couldn’t run, I found cricket intensely boring, indeed I used to slip a hand lens in my pocket and see if I could field in the long grass and then I could sort of look at beetles and flower seed heads and that sort of thing with the hand lens instead of getting on with the really boring game. Rugger terrified me, you know, it was all big muscular guys who would barge into you and hurt you and it was always wet or frosty and just unpleasant. Hockey I found slightly nicer because at least you got a stick to defend yourself with, but I wasn’t particularly good at it. Once you got up to age sixteen you were then allowed to opt for various other sports, such as fencing, which I didn’t do, and rowing. And rowing was led by David Gerrish, who had rather taken me under his wing, so I opted for that, which got me out of boring cricket and vicious rugby and cold, muddy cross-country running. I wasn’t particularly good at rowing but I was adaptable and actually he used me a bit as a sort of assistant coach because I could cox a boat and shout at the people and get them in time, or fill in on a crew if somebody was sick. But a lot of my time I spent repairing the boats, I used to take a Black & Decker drill and a few tubes of Araldite and patch up some of the older boats and fit bits and pieces on to them and so on. So I found my niche there. But again, it was pretty much as a loner, I wasn’t very much of a team player, looking back on it. I guess it was more a team job in the putting on of school plays and that sort of thing. But again, I would find my niche and get on and do it. I suppose I wasn’t particularly social. I didn’t really have girlfriends very much. I remember having a big argument with my mother because I wanted to – at what age? Probably about fifteen, I wanted to take a girl I’d met at a friend’s birthday party to the school film club. We had quite an argument about that. I did, but I think that was the only time I ever saw her. [laughs]

Why were you having an argument with your mother about that?

I think they thought I was far too young to be taking a girl out.

[04:52] I wonder whether you remember, because now we’re talking about you as an older child, even a young adult, whether you can tell us about your parents’ political outlook?

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Very staunch Conservative. And I suppose in those days and going to a public school, by default so was I then. I think I’m getting more and more Left as I get older and I suppose my values change and I see that a lot of the more right-wing things grow out of either greed or hatred, or both. So I’m probably quite leftie now. If they stood any chance of actually forming a government I’d be tempted to vote Green, or even don’t think Jeremy Corbyn is that bad a thing, but my upbringing was very definitely Conservative.

[06:07] And the argument with your mother hints at a certain kind of moral valuing of this or that, could you say more about their outlook on what was right and wrong, you know, what sorts of behaviour should be encouraged and discouraged, those kinds of questions?

Yes, I think they brought me up very much by example and by putting me in the right situation rather than sort of forcing it down my throat or anything. You know, I had a lot of freedom, I didn’t have a lot of ‘in your face’ sort of moral education, it was just the way we did things. You know, it’s like holidays were visiting beautiful landscape, maybe with fossils in it, cathedrals and churches and castles and stately homes and so on. They weren’t going to Butlin’s or lying on the beach, unless it was to find very small fossils.

[07:28] Thank you. Could you tell the story now then of the move from school to university?

Yes, I mean it was rarely, it was the… the next stage has always, in my life, has always just presented itself and I’ve just fallen into it. It was normal at my school that people would go on to university or would apply. It was thanks to David Gerrish that, I think, that I went for geology as an academic subject and aimed fairly high. He was quite keen that I should apply to Durham, because I think that’s where he did his geology. I think he was also at Kingston, but I think that was theology he did at Kingston. And he also got me to apply to Hull because that’s where the person who’d been his tutor at Durham was now the Professor. And, you know, in those days you could apply to up to five places. I think my parents were a little disappointed I didn’t apply to Cambridge. Realistically, I wouldn’t have got in, I wasn’t at that high level of brightness and achievement. And the brightest people from school practically all stayed on for another year after A levels to do Oxbridge scholarship. And as a result actually I was, I think, one of only three or four from my year who went straight on after A levels into university. In those days only seven or eight per cent of the population went to university, so that wasn’t so unusual. I had an interview at Durham. I love the city and I love the cathedral. I was put off because I’d applied to one of the colleges which had lots of, you know, nice hall of residence and so on, I’d been rejected by that and invited to interview by, I think it’s called St Cuthbert’s Society or something, but it’s the college that doesn’t have its own residential building so you’d be staying out in lodgings elsewhere. And the place that they’d suggested I stayed overnight before the interview, having come up by train, was a ghastly place with four people in a bedroom, under a railway arch, with trains thundering by and a landlady who demanded cash in advance and said that hot water was available in the bath between seven and seven fifteen, you know, that sort of person. Plus the college interviewer was really only interested if I played rugby or not. The department, I liked that, I would have enjoyed the geology department, but in the end I turned them down because I’d had a Martin Redfern Page 20 C1672/29 Track 2 really nice interview at UCL. And also I realised that UCL had a really good student theatre and I was very into doing the sound and lights for school plays and that sort of thing. And as a back-up, Leicester I think it was, offered me a minimum requirement of two E grades or something, so that was my back-up if I’d messed up my A levels, but I didn’t.

[11:44] Perhaps you could then talk about the first year at UCL?

Yeah. After having had a very, I suppose, disciplined, but not so much disciplined, but organised for me existence at school, you know, with mum making sure I’d got my school uniform on the right way round and catch the bus and so on, suddenly here I was in a place where some people didn’t even turn up to lectures, you know, ah dear. And there was no uniform. I was pretty green at, you know, in terms of being independent. I used to go up in the few years before that, I used to go up to London by train myself, by myself, to go to the Natural History Museum to look at the fossils sometimes, but you know, mum would check that I knew which tube stop to get out at and didn’t quite pin an address label inside my jacket, but getting on that way. And then suddenly here was this university with all these societies to join and so on, because I’d had as much fun with the school clubs and societies and extracurricular stuff than I had in the, with the academic subjects. And there was lots of this. And there weren’t lectures on Saturday, we always had Saturday morning school and then if we were unlucky and they were playing at home we’d have to go and watch a rugger match in the afternoon and cheer without being the slightest bit interested in it. And suddenly you had the weekends off and I didn’t know how to work a washing machine, so every fortnight for the first term I brought mum my washing home. Oh, I was very green. But I joined Stage Committee and we had, it’s now the Bloomsbury Theatre, but then it was the Collegiate Theatre and it was primarily a student theatre right through term time, basically the Student Union and Stage Committee and DramSoc decided what went on in it and it was available free of charge for our use right through term time. It was let out a bit in the vacation times, but that meant that we could earn a bit of money because outside companies would come in and they’d say oh yes, we need some people to rig lights, or work follow spots, or even work the lights, and we’ll pay them some money. So every Christmas holidays we’d have the Magic Circle Show in there, which would have a BBC film recording at the end of it. In the Easter holidays we’d have Camden Music Festival in there doing three operas in rep there and they paid good money because you had to change the sets overnight between each thing and the first time I just helped with the rigging of it. The second year I worked the lighting during the performances and in the third year they let me be the lighting designer for one of the operas, which was not normal for a student to be able to do. So I designed the lighting for Torquato Tasso by Donizetti, which was rather exciting. And we also, we did a big college opera, again, with professional soloists and so on. I think there were bequests that paid for a semi-professional orchestra and professional soloists, and a professional set designer and costume designer, but we’d do all the lighting and so on ourselves. And again, those were quite ground-breaking. My first year we did Verdi’s Stiffelio, which was fairly basic, but you know, fairly run of the mill, but not a very often performed one. It has a lovely graveyard scene, which was wonderful to light. In my second year we did the world premiere of an opera by Peter Wishart, Clytemnestra, which had a spectacular set and very… I designed the lighting for that and during the course of the opera basically it went from dawn through the really bright light of the midday sun Martin Redfern Page 21 C1672/29 Track 2 to sunset and so one moved the angle of the lighting and the colour tint of the lighting accordingly, and so on, so that was great fun. And the third year it was Weber’s Euryanthe¸ which was a bit of an epic. But we had a set designer for that who had previously worked designing sets for Doctor Who for television, so that was rather fun.

17:38] Thank you. Where did you live?

My first year I applied for hall of residence, didn’t get in, was the university accommodation bureau, said, you know, gave a list of possible places. I went to see a rather dingy flat above a pub in Islington, which would have been very noisy. It was all I knew and I thought about all I could get, and so I said okay. Phoned up a couple of days before term started to say can I come up the day before and they said, oh, we hadn’t heard back, we didn’t think you were coming, we’ve let it to somebody else. So panic phone call to student accommodation and they got me into the hall of residence that had been my first choice anyway. And that was great because it was a ten minute walk from college and it provided all the meals. In my second year – and we had a group of friends, rather stick-in-the-mud friends actually, you might say, because we would get together in each other’s rooms in the evening and listen to classical music recordings. One of the friends was mad keen on Elgar and Vaughan Williams, and that was fine because I’d been brought up with classical music all the time. I went to, in that first year, I went to more concerts than the rest of my life put together, including the last time Jacqueline du Pré did the Elgar Cello Concerto in public, which is very memorable. But because I was really into sound recording and so on and my grandfather had given me some money for passing my A levels, it meant that I had a really good reel-to-reel tape recorder and squandered some of my first year grant on an amplifier and a good pair of speakers. So after that they all came to my room for coffee and classical music because I had the best sound system. In my second year the only way I could stay on in a convenient hall of residence was by sharing a room, which I did with David Long, who was the Elgar enthusiast, and who had also rather got religion in a very conventional C of E way, he was reading chemistry and was very well behaved and would always go off to church on Sundays and keep regular times and go to all his lectures. By this stage I wasn’t there very much because I was putting on too many plays and operas in the student theatre. And in my third year, with a group of friends from Stage Committee, we rented a flat in Muswell Hill, which I continued to live in for the next couple of years after I joined the BBC.

[21:07] Could you now take us through the first year geology course and then beyond?

If I can remember any of it. [laughs] My dear father, who was very generous, in those days – oh, were it still the case – there was no talk about having to pay your own tuition fees, and indeed you got a grant for maintenance, which was means-tested and I think it was a bit less than the maximum because my dad earnt a bit more. But he not only made up the difference but went through my budget with me thinking, you know, okay, you’ll need this much for this much, and so on, and basically gave me as much as I wanted to buy books with and so on, so that was all very nice. So I bought all the right textbooks, some of them I actually even read. I Martin Redfern Page 22 C1672/29 Track 2 think I was pretty good at attending lectures in the first year, it got a bit worse as times progressed and I did more and more in the student theatre, but most of the lectures I went to right the way through, actually. It was nice because, well not… we were studying geology, for one thing, which was close to my heart, but also UCL has a course units system, so you’re not only doing geology. In the first year only fifty per cent of your courses actually need to be in your main subject. So I also did courses in molecular biology, genetics, I think I did a chemistry one, and I felt I ought to do an additional maths one because I hadn’t got maths A level and you need a bit more maths for doing the physical geography stuff. As with school, it was partly, the ones that I was best at were partly which ones were best taught and which ones grabbed my interest most. It was very different though from my experience of geology up to then, where it had been fossil collecting and identifying and sort of curiosity led, it was much more, well, academic and sometimes mathematical and theoretical and so on. Not quite so much what I was expecting, but yeah, I got through. And actually, by the end of my second year I’d clocked up enough course units to know that I would get a degree, which is probably why I did slightly too many plays and operas in my third year and only got a third, rather than a 2:1 or a first. But, never mind.

Of the lecturers in geology but also in the other subjects you mention, including molecular biology and genetics, which lecturers stand out in your memory?

Well, one who stands out is Roger Mason, who was my tutor as well, partly because he was the, at that stage, fourteen year old boy growing up in Leicestershire who had found a fossil in Charnwood Forest where all geologists said no fossils should exist, these were Precambrian rocks, and this was the fossil known as Charnia, which David Attenborough has since made a programme about and indeed interviewed Roger Mason at the site where as a fourteen year old fossil collector-cum-rock climber he found this fossil. So that was a nice touch. He’s now actually teaching English at a geology university in China. But he was a nice guy and one you got on with socially and on field trips. Then there was Eric Robinson. He was great, he was – Roger Mason was much more, although he’d found this famous fossil, he was much more into structural geology, done most of his fieldwork in Turkey and was into earthquakes and so on. Eric Robinson was much more palaeontology, which I enjoyed. But also, a sort of pet interest of his was building stones and he used to do tours of graveyards looking at the stones of the gravestones and telling everybody the history of the particular stone that they were made out of, and that sort of thing. And he was very active in the Geologists’ Association, which I joined. Those are two of the most memorable. Our Professor, Desmond Donovan, he was a very nice man, he was a palaeontologist, basically into Jurassic ammonites and things, and in fact he supervised my third year mapping project, which I did at a different time from all the rest of the year because I, well, the rest of them were doing their geological maps and socialising and working as a team in south Wales, at that particular time I was touring schools in southern England with a production of Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas, and so I did my geological mapping a bit – was it earlier or later? I think it was earlier, before that, that’s right, in north Wales to be convenient for the Professor’s holiday cottage so he could keep an eye on me, which he only did very cursorily. And it wasn’t really his area of geology and I wasn’t particularly good at it and I was particularly horrified when I discovered that my oral examination was with Janet Watson, who was a very great geologist who had pioneered the study of the really difficult geology of north-west Scotland, the Lewisian gneisses and that sort of thing, and she really knew fieldwork like no other, and I didn’t. [laughs] Desmond Donovan was also one of Martin Redfern Page 23 C1672/29 Track 2 the few people I came across who managed to fall asleep in one of his own lectures. It was… all the lights were out and he was showing a sixteen millimetre film about the sex life of sea urchins and well, they don’t have a terribly rich sex life and we all realised in one of the boring bits that he sort of hadn’t picked up the commentary afterwards and was finally woken up by the film flapping around when it ran off the end of the projector.

[28:55] How was the course gendered? What sort of proportion of the undergraduates were…

It was a fairly small year; I think we started off with sixty and a couple dropped out. And only two… two, or was it three? No, two were women. One of whom I’ve stayed good friends with and who married a colleague in the same year. Other one, Barbara, I don’t know where she’s gone now. We also had, which was rather interesting, we had a lovely guy from British Guyana, called Rudolph, who had been sent to do a geology degree by his government in Guyana, so that he could become a mining geologist. Fine, but he was also a Seventh-day Adventist and he did not believe in evolution. He didn’t believe any of these dates, he was utterly sure that the universe had been created in 4004 BC, or whatever it was, which led to some rather interesting discussions with the palaeontology lecturers.

Could you tell me about those, what you remember of those?

Well, just that… I think nowadays, I don’t think they would have been allowed to… they didn’t exactly tease him, but they… the fact that it was both his religious belief and he was the only black lad in the year, I think we were probably a little unfair to him, shall we say. I don’t think it was racist at all, but it was difficult to understand how he was doing a geology degree with firm beliefs that contradicted so much of what we were studying.

Was the fact that there were only two female undergraduates commented on in any way, perhaps by themselves, by others, however sort of obliquely or jokingly, or perhaps it was discussed directly. But was it at any point commented on?

Not in any negative way. The general feeling was that it was good that there were at least two girls doing the course, I think it was recognised that it wasn’t a terribly popular subject among the ladies, but you know, at least we had two, which is I think two up on the year before. So we felt that this was heading in the right direction, actually.

And do you remember them commenting on it or appearing to be aware of it?

Oh, obviously they were aware of it. Of the two of them, Sally, who was quite a close friend of mine as well, I suppose nowadays you would call her a feminist, but not in any particular vocal way. I think Barbara, consciously or subconsciously, sort of almost tried to look more boy-like. She always wore big boots and tramped ahead with a big rucksack on fieldtrips and so on. But now, it was… I mean it was… what was unusual Martin Redfern Page 24 C1672/29 Track 2 for me was going up to a university that had any women, having been at a school that didn’t. You know, King’s Rochester is now, I think, co-ed right the way through and not long after I left it became co-ed in the sixth form, but while I was there it was all boys, so it was quite a novelty to actually meet girls.

[33:27] What do you remember of that experience, I mean did you have close friends or relationships with girls while at UCL?

I said I was a slow developer. [laughs] Erm… yes, I… certainly I had friends who were girls. I rather, in a rather half-hearted way tried to date one or two of them, including actually Christine, who was my childhood friend and who by this stage was up in Cambridge, but it didn’t go anywhere beyond going up every few months to meet her and having a couple of kisses. And then I was quite shocked – I don’t suppose she’ll hear this – but I was quite shocked when she wrote to me saying that she’d got engaged to somebody. I’d sort of somehow felt at the back of my mind that without actually having to do anything about it that one of these days we might get married. I’m still in touch and indeed I’m godfather to her daughter. But it might not have worked out because she’s now an ordained C of E vicar and a recently retired headmistress at a primary school and lives up in Northumberland.

[35:12] And you talked about a meeting in the rooms of the halls to listen to classical music, and yours in particular, did you have any sense of what other people were doing, or in the same way that I asked you at school whether you had a sense of yourself as being like or different from those around you, did you have any sense of your particular group of friends being like or different from other students at this time in the early seventies at UCL?

Yeah, I think, you know, the general trend, then as now, was for students to be a bit leftie and revolutionary, you know. Back in the early seventies there was the Workers’ Revolutionary Party and people selling Socialist Worker and so on, and I quite enjoyed not being part of that. I joined, but wasn’t at all active in a group called PEST, which was Pressure for Economic and Social Toryism, which I suppose was an attempt at still hanging on to my Conservative upbringing but recognising that there were social issues that the Conservatives didn’t at that stage address. This was when Margaret Thatcher was Education Minister, for example! And I remember in my third year I stood for an elected Student Union post as Chairman of Arts Board, and my stand on that was that arts shouldn’t be political, that art is for art’s sake, it’s not to drive home a political, still less a revolutionary message. I lost to the guy who ran a thing called Revolutionary Slate and did communist inspired street theatre. So it wasn’t so much that I was a right-wing reactionary, more that I felt there was more to life than politics. And I think the little group that met to listen to classical music, I think we, maybe you might call it elitist or not, but maybe we thought of ourselves as… we enjoyed being a little bit different from the lot who were going down to the disco, as it were. Having said that, when I came up to UCL, it was at the same time, you know, I’d had no pop music in my upbringing at all, The Beatles had happened and I’d heard them at friends’ houses, but I didn’t have any records of them as a child, that sort of thing. When I went up to UCL, Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd, had just been issued and I got my first record deck and my first non-classical record that I bought Martin Redfern Page 25 C1672/29 Track 2 was Dark Side of the Moon and I started to get prog rock if not pop rock. And that was, so in a way there were two spheres and I rather enjoyed overlapping with both of them. There was the little group at the hall of residence, which overlapped a little bit with the department that was pretty orthodox, liked classical music and would meet for coffee at nine o’clock for a bit of Elgar. And there was the group, partly through Stage Committee and DramSoc, which was all funded by the Student Union and so on that was a little bit more left- wing and into loud music, at least good loud music through decent sound equipment, and so on. And I quite enjoyed having a foot in both camps.

Thank you. [39:42] Now, we know that you get to the end of your degree. We know your degree result and we know that throughout university you’re working on student theatre, could you then talk about the end of your degree, decisions made about what you might do, various avenues tried, that sort of thing?

Yes. A bit of me, you know, I was starting to build up my own set of sound equipment at that stage, I’d been, though not Chairman, I’d been Treasurer of Arts Board, which meant that I’d been responsible for quite a big budget for running the student theatre and the various activities with that. I had a sort of vision that I might buy an old Mercedes van and set up my own location recording equipment. I had done a little bit of freelance sound recording. My old school, for example, recording their school concerts, I went back and did that. I didn’t make any money out of it, or if I did, it was pence. So I thought I might go in that direction. A bit of me was still interested in geology, but more the public engagement side of geology rather than the academic or, heaven forbid, oil prospecting or mining side of geology. So at the back of my mind was the possibility of applying for actually an MA course that Leicester did in museum studies, as a childhood dream which still slightly persisted was the thought of becoming curator of dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum or something like that. Through the stage work I had made tentative enquiries of the London Opera Centre, which did a stage management course. And I went along for the standard third year meeting with the university careers service, thinking, you know, well I’m pretty sure I want to go into sound recording or theatre or possibly do this museums course, but let’s just see what they’ve got. And they sort of said, mm, yeah, don’t really know what to do with you, but oh, we’ve got this thing, and they gave me a bit of paper about trainee studio managers at the BBC. I thought, oh, that sounds quite interesting, a chance to play with slightly more expensive microphones than I can afford myself. And so I applied for that and got through two levels of interview. Apparently, for that intake there were 1200 applicants and they finally took twelve trainee studio managers. And so I still had this choice of London Opera Centre, Leicester – but they wanted me to get a 2:1 or above for Leicester – or the BBC. And on my, I think it was my twenty-first birthday, eighteenth of July 1975, I got my degree result, a third, that ruled out Leicester, and a job offer from the BBC. All on the same day, so that was interesting, so I took the BBC. It turns out it was the right thing.

[43:57] Did you go straight there, having received this job…

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Almost. The intake started at the end of October, so I had an even longer summer holiday, but I needed to earn a bit of money, so I actually got a job with a motor caravan hire company in Wembley, initially just checking out caravans and booking in and out, booking them in and out, but the chap who owned it was probably a bit of a shark actually and the other people working for him were none too bright and I ended up more or less managing the business for him. But he kept… he was doing his best, particularly once we got into September and they weren’t hiring out so many, he was hoping he could get away with not taxing some of them over the winter, and so he’d got all these untaxed motor caravans and nowhere off-road to park them, so he, rather than drive my little Renault 4 home, he sent me home in a different motor caravan every night. [laughs] So that was quite fun.

Thank you. [45:13] Could you describe physically the place you go to having started work at the BBC, so your place of work?

Yes, indeed, I remember it well, because in those days Radio Training was based in The Langham, what is now the Langham Hilton, but was then, you know, just across the road from Broadcasting House, slightly dilapidated with very old lifts with a very old lift operator, who took you to the floor you wanted and Radio Training was up on the fourth floor. Interestingly, many years later I went back to roughly the same room as we had our first meeting in and had most of our sessions in, I went back, it must have been in, oh, early 2000s, to interview a chap called Greg Olsen, who was a millionaire who had made his money inventing some bit of mobile phones or something, I forget exactly what, but some clever electronic gizmo, and so had just paid out twenty million dollars to have a flight to the Mir Space Station. And he was staying at the Langham Hilton and I went to interview him in his room there, which was in exactly the same place as this rather dilapidated classroom where I had my first meeting in the BBC, except now it was a very plush suite with marble-clad bathroom and so on. We had, I forget how long, I think it was about six weeks at The Langham. Lovely guy called Noel Michelli was the head of staff training at the time, and so we learnt all about telephone balance units and peak programme meters and, you know, basically how to put a programme on air. It was perfect for me because it wasn’t, you didn’t have to have the detailed knowledge that a maintenance engineer would have of how the equipment actually worked, for which you’d need maths and electronics and things I’m no good at. It was operating the equipment, so it was how to work the studios and so on. But it turned out there was also a lot of human skills required as well, because particularly with World Service you’d get producers coming in to do programmes in all sorts of different languages. You’d want to be able to put them at their ease before they went on the microphone, show them that you were a professional and you knew what you were doing and could help them make a good programme. And once you got better known by them they would entrust you with various artistic decisions about the programme, you know, you need to find a good place to fade the music, that sort of thing. So we had six weeks of just straight training at The Langham, then three months, I think it was, of on the job training at Bush House with World Service and External Services, as it was then called, all the language services, and then three months at Broadcasting House on the programmes there for Radio 4 and so on. And well, I’ve got lots of memories of both of those times, but there was a young lady, [49:37] a bit older than me, Martin Redfern Page 27 C1672/29 Track 2 who was already a studio manager, at Bush House who I rather fancied, so I opted to stay at World Service afterwards and she subsequently became my wife.

[49:53] Could you describe some of those things that are going to sound mysterious to the listener outside of broadcasting, you talked about peak programme something, for example, and a telephone balance. So could you describe some of the technical skills that you were learning, presumably in that first six weeks?

Yes. The most important thing is that the programme should all be at the right sound level, both so that it’s internally consistent so that the listener isn’t suddenly blasted by a piece of music and then struggling to hear a voice, but also so that you get the best out of the transmitter, particularly for short wave for World Service and so on, listening conditions aren’t ideal so you want to get the sound level as high as you can without it going into the red, without any risk of it actually distorting and so on. So you would always take level off anybody who was going to speak to see, you know, have they got a quiet voice, a loud voice, how loud, how far do you have to open the fader for their microphone to get them peaking to six. You measure the sound level with a little meter. A lot of commercial studios use VU meters, I think it stands for something, Voltage Unit or something, but we reckoned it stood for ‘Virtually Useless’, because they flap around all over the place and it’s hard to see what the peaks are. BBC uses a PPM, a Peak Programme Meter, which has a very rapid attack, so it’ll go up quickly, but then a slow decay, so the needle will show you what the peak sounds are. And the ideal is that it’ll stay up there at the optimum level. In the case of World Service programmes you wanted to get it up to six on a PPM, but not above six. To paraphrase what it said above Bush House, where it actually says ‘Nation Shall Speak Peace Unto Nation’, we would say, ‘Nation Shall Peak Six Unto Nation’. We always thought it was a little amusing that, rather amusing, that Radio 3 weren’t really so worried about peaking to six, you know, they would have wide dynamic range because all their listeners are listening in high quality FM, or now DAB which isn’t as good as FM, and so very often you’d get a whole movement of a work that only peaked sort of three or something, and that would be unacceptable for World Service. Telephone balance unit, that’s if you’ve got a telephone call going into your programme, you want to be able to feed the programme back to the person on the telephone so that he can hear what the interviewer is asking, but you mustn’t feed himself back so that you get howl round, it goes round in circles, or he gets a delay or an echo. So it’s just a system, in those days done with hybrid transformers, such that you send him a clean feed, another jargon term, a clean feed of everything except himself, just to keep it clean.

[53:47] What else were you learning here in these first six weeks, either technically or in terms of protocol or even artistic…

Of course the other big skill in those days was tape editing. I never knew the days when recording was done on 78rpm acetate discs, though it was only a little bit before me and some of the machines were still lying around in studios. We did everything on reel-to-reel tape, great big machines built like tanks that you stand up to to edit. And you would literally mark the tape where it coincided with the playback head, you could rock it to and fro Martin Redfern Page 28 C1672/29 Track 2 with the spools so that you could hear a sound and yes, okay, that’s the point where you cut it. You always cut at the beginning of a word, usually if there’s a breath you cut it after the breath and at the beginning of the word. But if you’re doing a lot of editing you keep a few breaths handy because sometimes you need to put a breath in to make it sound natural. If you take too many ‘ums’ out it sounds unnatural, sometimes you have to let your speaker breathe. And of course with World Service you’re editing in English, fair enough, but you’re also editing in, in those days, I think it was forty-two other languages. And sometimes the producer of the programme, who was often also the person who was in the studio recording the talk, would stand over you and tell you where, but you get a feel for what it is and usually if they’ve fluffed in a recording they’ll go back to the beginning of the sentence, so you’d recognise, even if you didn’t speak the language, the sound that was the beginning of the sentence so you could go back to it. And indeed, after a couple of years of doing that, when I was specialist SM to the Eastern Service, the Hindis and the Bengalis and the Tamils and the Burmese, would all just record the thing and as they went they would, where they fluffed they’d say, overlap, and go back to the sentence. But then they’d just give me the tape and say okay, edit that, and they would trust me that I would edit it at the right point. Occasionally they would get a bit lazy. I remember one Persian broadcaster with a dawn talk, I think it was four in the morning or something and there was just a recorded talk that was meant to follow the news to fill up the rest of the fifteen minutes. And he gave me the tape, went in, he read the news, I’d started the tape and he hadn’t put a duration on it, and he said, well I’m off now, this is more than enough to fill the rest of the programme, just find a good point and fade it to time at the end. [laughs] Even though I didn’t speak a word of the language. That wasn’t very professional of him actually, usually, obviously they’d make the tape to time or stay there and say something at the end, usually do a back announcement themselves. [57:16] We also, as World Service studio managers, did some announcements ourselves. We had to have a voice test. There was a lovely person who did voice training, called Fanny McLeod, who if you got her after lunch she would smell of gin, and sometimes she would tell you you had a bad lisp, but actually it was her hearing aid whistling. But I was graded suitable for making short opening and closing announcements only. Some people were earmarked to go on to become newsreaders and announcers in their own right, including the person who became my wife. But with ours it was just short announcements. I remember the first one I made, the first programme that I did solo was a programme in Malay, I don’t think they broadcast in that nowadays, but you had a little cubicle mic, you’d turn it on and say ‘This is the…’ what would it have been? ‘This is the Asian Service of the BBC from London. The next programme will be in Malay.’ And then you’d cue the sig tune, you know, which you do with a remote start from the tape recorder. We had one generation of very new, clever tape recorders that were rather prone to static and would start at random moments, and particularly if you walked across the carpet towards them on a frosty day, a little static spark or something would set them going at the wrong time. And there are all sorts of anecdotes of things that went wrong. You used to sit in what was called Green Continuity, which is where all the continuity announcements for World Service in English were put in and you’d do that over a night shift, and very often you’d just be cueing up a newsreader in a remote studio doing a pre-test with them and giving them the red light to read the news. Then you might play a half hour long tape and then a fifteen minute tape, and then the announcer would do an announcement and you’d play another tape, and you’d have a Greenwich time signal to put in before the next news things. And there were two different ways you could put in a Greenwich time signal. You could have it on fader, which you’d select up and Martin Redfern Page 29 C1672/29 Track 2 just open the fader for the pips, or you could have it on a key, like a switch, which just primed it. And we used to have a little competition to see if we could do alternate pips, one from the fader and one from the key. And so you’d get an operational log saying one of the pips on the 5am GTS missed due to operational error, brackets, the middle one. [laughs] And there are plenty of anecdotes like that. And the business of what do you do with a slightly drunk newsreader who comes in to read the midnight news. But usually they were very professional at actually reading the news. There was one who we had to prop up with a chair on either side of him to stop him falling off his chair, though he did read the news perfectly. And there was another one who was very prone to giggles and so on one night shift – he would come in to read the news about Britain when the world news was already on air with the person at the other microphone – and so we took all the chairs out and put in a toilet seat from a refurbished toilet that was waiting to go in next, and he had to sit on this toilet seat to read news about Britain, and prone to laughter at that.

[1:01:25] And what were you, in the next three months at Bush House, have you been talking about things that you were learning across the whole…

I was across the whole lot, but those are mostly Bush House World Service anecdotes that I’ve given you. The Broadcasting House attachment, you got less responsibility, the programmes were all much better resourced. Usually each programme would have two, if not three studio managers, so you’d have a person on the panel, the mixing desk, who was the sort of senior person, and all you would do is play in tapes and maybe discs, sound effects discs, for example, for dramas at the right moment, so you wouldn’t be doing a solo thing. And there was a range of producers you were working with, some of whom were wonderful and very encouraging, some of whom were not. I remember fairly early on doing a schools drama. I was the second SM, so I was responsible for playing in the sound effects discs, and the producer had been talking, had hardly acknowledged my existence, had been talking to the rather elderly panel SM about what discs they would need to create a particular sound effects montage, and I was meanwhile, I had the stack of discs and I was listening through on headphones to some of them and I found one that I thought would be suitable, and I said, ‘How about this one?’ and the producer looked most shocked that I should speak to him – no, her, actually. No, the producer was a man, that’s right, the panel SM was a woman. And turned round… the lady panel SM, that’s right, turned round to me, said, ‘This person is the producer, he decides what effects you play, you play them’, and turned back to the desk and didn’t speak to me again for the rest of the session. On the other hand, I was once studio managing, I was meant to be the second SM for a, it wasn’t even a studio session, it was a mixing session where they’d got narration and they wanted to add in music and sound effects and so on for a beautiful non-narrated programme, the producer was one of, I think, the greatest ever, most artistic ever radio producers, Piers Plowright, and the panel SM was sick and I was the only person there. And he said, oh well, let’s have a go, and so I was starting these things. I don’t think there were even remote starts, because there was meant to be a second SM and there wasn’t another one available, so I was working the panel and playing in the effects and I’d only been at Broadcasting House for a week or two at that stage. And we got through it and he was really encouraging and he wrote a little memo to my boss about what a good job I’d done, and so on. You know, things like that you remember. Martin Redfern Page 30 C1672/29 Track 2

Why do you say that he was one of the greatest producers, what at that time would you have seen as being great?

A lot of the most innovative radio turned out to be produced by him. Particularly, he pioneered non-narrated documentaries where you managed to tell the story just with sound effects and interviewees, you don’t hear a presenter at all. I subsequently, many years later, went on a senior production course led by him, after he’d left the BBC and when he was just doing these courses as a freelance, I suppose, but he made you think about the sound and do you actually need to speak here, can you tell the story, maybe just with sound effects, maybe not with speech at all. I think he pioneered the Between the Ears slot on Radio 3, which is a very innovative documentary slot, again, often non-narrated. He was also a very keen jazz musician and managed to weave jazz into his productions quite often too.

[end of track 2] Martin Redfern DRAFT Page 31 C1672/29 Track 3

[Track 3]

Okay, so I’ll ask a few questions on last time and then we’ll carry on from where we’d got to. One thing, could you clarify the slight but probably easily resolved contradiction between a preference for non-fiction books as a child, but your favourite books being fantasy stories?

Yes, I think the reason for that is that I’m a very slow reader, and I also like to look at the pictures. The left hemisphere isn’t all that developed. That means that last thing at night I love losing myself in some magical fantasy, and actually I think it’s possibly out of that that a spiritual component of interest has developed in a way, you know, we love the myths and so on. I liked Alan Garner, who I mentioned before, I think specifically because a lot of his stories, he built on some of the old Celtic myths and the Mabinogion and stories like that, so they were grounded in landscape, I suppose, it also ties in with the geology, a lot of these ancient magical myths are tied in with the landscape, so I liked that. But because I was a slow reader I would just, if I was lucky I’d manage a chapter last thing at night, still do, but during the day I was always interested in the world out there as it actually is and there was just so much, also magical, but real to read about, about what the world is actually like and how we find out about it – science, geology, natural history, wildlife and so on. And the inventions of science technology as well, that that indulged the same fun for magic and fantasy in a way, particularly as a child when it was all magical.

So the pattern of reading of non-fiction in the day and reading, say, a chapter of fiction in the evening is established in childhood and continued?

Yes. The only trouble is, by reading a chapter of fiction last thing at night when I’m sleepy, I tend to fall asleep over the book, which means there’s a sort of Pavlovian response now, whenever I open a book and read far I go fast asleep in it. But then later on when I was a science journalist, there were so many new scientific papers and so on to read, all my train journeys were taken up reading Nature and New Scientist for light relief and, you know, the refereed journals as well, one just had so many things to scan, not necessarily to read thoroughly, but to read the abstract and think is that important, is that going to resonate with my listeners, is that something that would make a really nice segment of a programme.

Thank you. [03:10] And could you say more about your mother’s religious beliefs? We know that, we got the sense that she didn’t talk to you about faith much, but she read the publication of…

Christian Science Sentinel and so on. Yes, I mean her mother was, I think, more, shall we say, devout Christian Science than my mum. I think the fundamental belief in that, which to some extent I share but not in a particularly religious way, is that there is nothing bad, everything is God. In Christian Science, in my very limited understanding of it, they take that on to say that there is no such thing as disease, therefore you don’t need conventional medicine, everything is good. I don’t go that far, because if you’re mummy and daddy virus, Martin Redfern DRAFT Page 32 C1672/29 Track 3 then your little baby viruses are good, the fact that they make their living by making somebody else sick, there’s nothing inherently evil in that, it’s natural selection, it’s how they make their living. And I remember when – because my mother fortunately throughout her life has been pretty healthy, she’s still alive at ninety-five, though getting rather weak – but oh, twenty years ago or so when she needed a hip replacement, she didn’t think that really she should be doing that, you know, everything’s good so there’s nothing wrong with her hip, so told her the story about the man who was shipwrecked and a lifeboat came along and said, you know, catch this line, we’ll save you. Said no, it’s alright, I trust in God, God will save me. And the helicopter came along and, catch this line, we’ll pull you up, we’ll save you. It’s alright, I trust in God, God will save me. So he drowned and arrived in heaven and said, ‘God, why didn’t you save me?’ ‘Oh, I sent a lifeboat and a helicopter, what do you expect?’ So if you have, and my preference is some sort of non-duality, something where God is, or the divine is in everything and it only isn’t if your attitude is different, then that fits with that quite nicely and I think that’s compatible in a sort of way with my mum and my gran’s beliefs in Christian Science, but I don’t take it to what to me seems ad absurdum.

Did she, though, talk to you about her beliefs or, for example, you said that she read the Narnia books to you, did she read these books to you just as fiction with no comment, or did she read them to you with associated Christian discussion or what?

She read them to me straight. There wasn’t any comment. You know, it’s pretty clear in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe what the story is based on and I’m not sure if she even actually ever said that, I think that occurred to me anyway. And whenever I’ve asked her about Christian Science, all she ever does is say read Science and Health, which I’m afraid I find pretty impenetrable. So no, we haven’t had many religious discussions in that sense.

Thank you. [07:12] And finally, could you say more about your relations with David Gerrish, because he seems really, from what you said last time, the most significant adult outside of the home in your childhood in that he developed interests in both geology and spirituality in sort of metaphysics, broadly, and you also used the phrase, ‘he took me under his wing’. So if you could sort of expand on that.

Yes. David Gerrish was probably the sort that very conventional Christians would disapprove of in that he was very prepared to find truth in Judaism and Islam and Buddhism and everything else. For him, although he’s an ordained C of E clergyman, I think for him the one God is not exclusive to Christianity. So that attracted me because I didn’t think if there is a God he’s going to leave whatever it is, four-fifths of the world’s population in damnation. He combined two sets of interests really, he was actually, he was deputy chaplain – I think he was a bit too much of a rebel to be the main chaplain, but anyway that post was held – but he was also teaching geography, and he wasn’t head of geography because he was a little bit of a rebel there in that he tended to concentrate on physical geography, on landscape and indeed on geology, which was his own original subject. He also had a bit of interest in archaeology. I think he started doing a PhD, I’m not sure that he completed it, on Martin Redfern DRAFT Page 33 C1672/29 Track 3 studying the clay in various pots from the Middle East and where it came from and that sort of thing, so combining geology and archaeology. So we had so many interests in common. He was also relatively young, so you know, I don’t know how old he was then, he must have only been about in his late twenties, early thirties, so not much older than me when I was in the sixth form, in a sense, and so it was more a friendship rather than just a master-pupil relationship and we would go off on field trips, initially just after school to the local chalk pit with a few friends, later camping for a week in Dorset or something like that, looking for fossils. And he always had so many interesting stories and observations. He was a great fan of Teilhard de Chardin, who was a Jesuit priest but also quite a, in his day, an accomplished geologist, and he got me to, not directly, but he stimulated the interest in the natural world as a spiritual place, if you like, that you could wonder at the marvels of creation without being a creationist, natural selection, natural processes are just as wonderful, in fact I think more so than some external God with a thunderbolt.

The field trips, were they school field trips or sort of additional…?

They started off sort of that way. We had a school cadet force which you had to join when you were about fourteen, which I hated because they made you polish your buckles and march up and down and salute and I just didn’t see the point of it. My last year in it I got into the Signals Corp, which was much more fun, so we could play with old valve radios left over from World War Two, and that sort of thing, and do one or two naughty transmissions on the sound channel of BBC 2 Television, as I recall. But then once you got into the sixth form you could opt out of the cadet force and if you didn’t do the CCF, you could do what they called ‘activities’ and so one of those activities on a Thursday afternoon when those who wanted to were marching up and down was to go off fossil hunting. So it was only places you could reach in the school van in an afternoon, but that’s really how it started, and then, I’m not sure if it was me with his help or him with my help, but we started a school geology club and with that one in the winter we would have a talk on a Friday evening after school and in the summer we’d get in the school van and go off and look for a few fossils, so it started that way. And then, to my great disappointment, he left when I was at the end of my lower sixth year when I’d still got a year to go, he’d, just for the fun of it really, coaxed me through O level geology, which wasn’t taught formally at the school, but that was fun to do as a little extra in the lower sixth. But then he left to go and teach at Monmouth School – was it Monmouth next? No, I think it was Bryanston in Dorset, that’s right. Yes, Bryanston, and in fact in the summer holidays after that we all – well, we all - four or five of us went down to Bryanston, camped in the grounds and went off fossil hunting every day with him in Dorset, which of course was much richer pickings in terms of palaeontology.

How did you stay in contact then once he’d moved?

There was one very significant letter actually, I’ve still got somewhere, where just before I sat my A levels he wrote to me, basically saying do your best, I know you can do it. And that letter meant a great deal to me. He knew that by stage I’d applied to read geology at university and he’d helped me by suggesting places where I might like to go and do it, and indeed I think he did a letter of introduction for me to Hull where his old tutor at Durham was now the professor. But he wrote me this letter just before my A levels, just expressing his Martin Redfern DRAFT Page 34 C1672/29 Track 3 confidence that I could get the grades needed. And I think that helped me over a hump, because I’m not the brightest, I was struggling with the maths involved in doing physics A level. Biology was pretty okay because that was descriptive and stories. Chemistry was okay, but there was an awful lot to remember. Physics was hard because I wasn’t good at the maths. But that letter, I’m sure, helped push up a grade or two and helped me get into my first choice, which by then was University College, London. But since then we’ve kept in touch at least sending Christmas cards every year, and for the last, I think it’s thirty years this year, with a group of friends, we’ve always been down for just a long weekend at least, to near Kimmeridge in Dorset where we’ll camp for a few nights and go fossil hunting, and he’s retired and lives in Weymouth now and he practically always comes and joins us at least for a morning or possibly for a day. And indeed, he came back and conducted the service of blessing on my first marriage and we have one on my second marriage and he’s agreed if he’s still standing that he’ll come along for that too.

[16:33] Thank you. Let’s go to where we were at the end of the last session and that’s that you had finished your…

Could I just do the bit about music?

Oh of course, yes, yes. There was some extra details of your childhood that you wanted to fill in.

Yes, I’ve talked about listening to music, listening to Radio 3, listening to my father playing the piano and, you know, he was, I wouldn’t say a great pianist and organist, but he was a competent one and got a lot of pleasure out of it. And my parents hoped very much that I would take to music. They started giving me, or paying for me to have piano lessons from the age of about six. I didn’t really get on with them, partly because I was lazy and didn’t want to practise, and partly I don’t think I have very much natural talent making music. That carried on when I went to King’s School for a bit, but the person teaching me there, I think his performance indicators were what grade exam he could get you through and he was trying to push me through grade exams beyond my competence and I really didn’t enjoy that and gave it up. But then there was also singing. One of the wonderful things about King’s School, Rochester was that every year there was a big choral work. Rochester Cathedral was more or less the school chapel and towards the end of the Easter term we would put on a choral work in Rochester Cathedral, they’d put up stands for all the chorus and they’d have a semi-professional orchestra and fully professional soloists, and we would do some of the old favourites like The Messiah and the Mozart Requiem, some slightly less known. I remember particularly the first one that we did when I was eight, I guess, still in the junior school, they did the Haydn Nelson Mass, and I loved that. You know, I was singing in a chorus so if I lost my way occasionally it didn’t matter too much, nobody was pointing to me and laughing. And I loved singing along with the rousing choruses and so on and every year afterwards, you know, they did some quite challenging works. They did the Kodály Missa Brevis and the Poulenc Gloria, Mozart Requiem and The Messiah, and I carried on doing that at least until I was singing alto, or possibly tenor, because my voice was on the way down. There was also, well, while I was a treble I sang in the school choir as well. The choirmaster suggested that I should have an audition to be a cathedral chorister, which my parents were quite happy about. They never made any pressure on it though, I realised latterly that if I had got a choral scholarship Martin Redfern DRAFT Page 35 C1672/29 Track 3 my fees would have been paid and it would have saved them a huge amount of money, or at least a big proportion of them would have been paid, but they didn’t put any pressure on it and I actually looked into what was involved, like going on Sundays and going for evensong every evening, and I thought that’s going to wreck my social life [laughs] and my lazy life and I said, actually I don’t want to do it. And my parents didn’t put any pressure on me. There was also a sub-set of the school choir, a madrigal choir, and we did little madrigals. It was a group of about twelve or sixteen singers, a summer concert if it was dry in the cloister of Rochester Cathedral, and that was fun. But then, when I got to be about, I suppose, thirteen or fourteen, choir practice clashed with the Scouts and I was much more interested in running off in the woods and camping and tying knots and things, so I’m afraid, my parents were a bit disappointed, but I let the making music go. But just as I’d started in the theatre playing small parts in kindergarten plays, not terribly well, and started in the music singing small parts in choral works probably not very well, with both of those I found that I loved being involved in the process of it and found a niche where I didn’t actually have to have that talent. So with the theatre I started doing the stage lighting and so on. With the music I started an interest in recording live music. So in the sixth form I was… they had a funny chap called John Ratcliffe who would come along for each of the big choral concerts, with a very limited amount of equipment I see now, but it was magical to me, and he would record these things and the Christmas carol service as well, and issue LPs of them, which of course all the willing parents and grandparents would buy and were probably a bit of an earner. When I started doing this I got much more interested and when my grandfather bought me a reel-to-reel tape recorder for passing my A levels, well that was, you know, that was a professional machine, but I needed some extra microphones and I asked this guy if he would lend me some mics. And he said, oh it’s not really worth doing it in stereo, nobody in Rochester actually has the ability to play stereo anyway, I’d just use the one microphone. [laughs] But also, in my last year – no, I think it was the lower sixth – instead of doing a choral work in Rochester Cathedral, the head of music, by then somebody called Chris Welling, had decided that he would win a few more brownie points with the kids if he did Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat. Now this was quite new then and we were, I think, the first school outside London to perform it and I was heavily involved in the sound and the lighting for that and I remember on the final performance on the Saturday two young newly graduated music students, Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber came down and Tim Rice took the part of Potiphar and Andrew Lloyd Webber played the xylophone in the recording that I have still. And that led to me doing a lot of sound recording at university and it’s, I suppose, got me the job at the BBC and since I’ve left the BBC and have done much less science broadcasting, I’ve gone back to recording live music wherever I can, and maybe I’ll talk about that a bit more later.

[end of track 3] Martin Redfern Page 36 C1672/29 Track 4

[Track 4]

We left you last time having completed your training, first at the World Service and then Broadcasting House, and then choosing to begin work at the World Service, in part you said because of romantic interest in a studio manager there, so I don’t know whether it would make sense to tell me more about her first, which you say explains why it was that bit of the BBC you…

Yeah, there were two reasons why I opted for World Service. One was that you got a lot more responsibility a lot quicker, so you would be the panel SM, the person who worked the faders, rather than the person who just stood at the back and played in the occasional tape or sound effect or something, so you got that sooner. But the other reason was that on almost my first day at Bush House I had met a young lady by the name of Bridget, then going under the name of Bridget Hall, which was the name of her first husband, and she lived in the same direction as me and on night shifts I used to drive in, we could park in the Bush House car park in those days, or indeed on the streets outside – those were the days – and I would drive in in my little Renault 4 and we’d do a night shift and then at seven in the morning or something I would, because she lived in the same direction, I would give her a lift back. And after a couple of times doing that she invited me in for breakfast and we got involved. So that was very nice. We, well, there was… we had a wonderful romance for six months or so and then she, out of the blue, in the middle of her son’s sixth birthday party – fifth birthday party – fifth birthday party, got a phone call from an old flame and after a bit of hesitation went off and married him and moved to Tasmania. That lasted six months. He turned out to have psychological problems and she basically had a very hard time of it and lost what money she had and limped back and had to, instead of her very one-off flat, and I say it was in Archway Road, it was set back from Archway Road, it had a garden, it was very… it was lovely, instead of having that, she ended up in a sixth floor council flat in Finsbury Park, which wasn’t her style at all. I remember trying to cheer it up by planting window boxes of runner beans instead of curtains. But we slowly started to get back together and after a lot of persuasion she agreed to marry me, and we got married in June 1981.

[03:25] Where was I?

Yes, could you then talk about the beginnings of starting work proper, having finished training?

Yes. It was a fairly… the training at, it was then called BBC External Services, so that included World Service, which was what we now call World Service English and in those days I think forty-two other language services, and because I enjoyed playing with wires and microphones and so on, I was very happy doing that. We’d learnt tape editing, the sort of editing that you do with a razor blade and sticky tape on quarter inch reel-to-reel tape, and you get used, even if you don’t understand the language somebody’s speaking in, you get used to the prosody of their voice, you can spot the sound when they go back to the sentence before or something, and so you can edit in another language. Sometimes the producer would be there to check you’d cut in the right place, but once they knew you they’d say okay, edit this, and just give you the tape in Hindi or something and you’d Martin Redfern Page 37 C1672/29 Track 4 take the fluffs out. So you got a lot of responsibility. Not so much live music recording, which was a pity because I enjoyed doing that, but occasionally, I remember particularly I was studio manager for the Eastern Service, specialist studio manager - so the one who helped them with all their little technical problems and so on - Eastern Service, comprising Persian, Urdu, Nepali, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil and Burmese. I think that was all of them. Oh, and Sinhala for half an hour a week. The Bengalis particularly were a very musical bunch and they would quite often get very high calibre, very famous in their part of the subcontinent, musicians coming in, possibly at very short notice, and an ordinary studio manager wasn’t really meant to record live music, that was meant to be the prerogative of a senior studio manager. And I remember having a bit of a run-in with the allocators, the people who allocated studios to programmes and studio managers to studios, because on several occasions, you know, they’d announced, we’ve got this world famous sitar player, or whatever it is, coming in this evening, can you record them. And I would try and get a studio and they’d say, oh well, you’re not really meant to be doing that, we’ll have to try and find a senior studio manager. There was one allocator who was quite officious and was absolutely determined that I should not be recording live music and there wasn’t a senior studio manager available and so they said sorry, we can’t do it and wouldn’t allocate a studio that we could do it in. A bit later in the evening that person went off shift and somebody else came in and I said look, you know, there’s nobody in, I think it was S16, which was one of the bigger music studios, can I just slip in and do it? And they said yeah, of course, you know, no problem. But where had they gone? They had, in those days, each of the language sections had a self-op, a studio that they would operate themselves that would just have probably one microphone and a table and a fader and they would go in and just record short talks or things like that, which they would then take in to the, as clips, to go into the main programme that would be put together with a studio manager, often live. And I eventually tracked this world famous sitar player down to the Bengali self-op where he was sitting cross-legged on the interview table playing into this one microphone. Actually, it didn’t sound too bad, but we went down and did a better job in the big studio. Sorry… have to edit the tape. Oh yes, yes. I think a lot of the best anecdotes come from while I was Eastern SM. The chief producer in the Tamil Service was a chap called Shankar, was a very artistically literate, very keen on Shakespeare and so on, and I remember, it was a tiny, the Tamil Service was tiny, it was basically one or two staff members and three or four freelance who just came in to do odd things. And they did Macbeth, full dramatisation of Macbeth, and this guy played the parts both of Macbeth and Banquo. [laughs] The Burmese were also very innovative in doing dramatisations of Western classics. They did The Water Babies and I had great fun recording a lot of the people separately who did the voices of the creatures underwater, and then I – in those days nobody charged by the hour for use of BBC studios and so on - so I blagged my way into the Radiophonic Workshop and spent a very happy afternoon putting these voices through various gizmos to make them sound like weird underwater animals and so on. The Burmese also did Far From the Madding Crowd, dramatised in I don’t know how many instalments. And that went down a storm because I think the sort of feudal agricultural system of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex resonated very much with the 1970s agricultural system of Burma, so they sort of understood the social issues and so on rather well.

[10:09] Now, I know that after five or six years you move into a role which is specifically concerned with science, but I wonder in this period, which is about 1975 to 1981, I think, to what extent was there, (a) a scientific content in Martin Redfern Page 38 C1672/29 Track 4 the programmes that you were involved with and (b) religious content in the programmes that you were involved in, which I assume have a very great range and diversity.

Yes. As a studio manager I wasn’t hugely involved in the content of the programme, just in bringing other people’s ideas to fruition, and of course an awful lot of that was just news and current affairs in forty-two different languages. One of the wonderful things about the BBC, at least in the seventies and eighties was that once you were in, you could then apply for what they called attachments, which were very often six-month training attachments to different departments doing other things, and some of those, because studio managing was seen as a general intake for interesting graduates who might go on to do other things, all sorts of people from Esther Rantzen upwards came in as studio managers. So the studio manager department actually had a bit of budget to carry on paying the salaries of people on various attachments, which was great for the department taking them, because they got a bit of free labour, basically, but they also would train them. And one of those regular attachments which always took a studio manager was a department called BBC Transcription Service. I don’t think it even exists now, but back then it was quite a highbrow department that took the best of BBC Radio and packaged it up for rebroadcast in wherever they could sell it or give it and, you know, they would virtually give it to a lot of low budget African broadcasters and sell it at presumably a good price to North American broadcasters and so on. A lot of what they did was music and drama, you know, the high end stuff. And actually that connects with the live music, I’ll mention a bit about that in a minute. But they also had something called Magazine Units, which were fairly timeless interviews with famous people, celebrities, really interesting people that other broadcasters could slot into their own programmes as and when they wanted. And so I got an attachment as Magazine Producer, basically listening through to all the speech output from Radio 4 and World Service, or what I thought might yield material, and snipping out really good interviews and just packaging them up in such a way that they were timeless and they could be broadcast by others. Those were all issued on LPs and every week you would issue another LP of Magazine Units, so half a dozen interviews on each side, and every fourth side was a specialist science side. So that got me… right through all this period I was still very interested in science, I was reading New Scientist, I was keeping up with the news in science. I thought at that stage that my dream job would be producing Horizons on television and I’d applied for various attachments doing that, which hadn’t been successful. Whilst doing the Magazine Units though, it made me listen all the more to the World Service science output and I started doing interviews myself and offering them to the Science Unit. And to my amazement, they not only took them, but they even paid me for them, what they called a Staff Contribution Fee. And actually the first one of those I did while I was back SM’ing and, you know, nowadays anybody who does, who offers something, you’re not likely to get paid for it, but if it’s good they’d love to have it, in those days if you’re going to get paid for it, your own personnel officer had to approve it. And one of the first ones I did was an interview about Alzheimer’s Disease actually, ahead of its time I think because it’s still an issue that’s exercising a lot of scientific minds, but I found a guy in Edinburgh who had some really interesting theories and I recorded a long interview and spent ages editing it down to something I could offer to World Service, which eventually was broadcast in Discovery. And my personnel officer, who as it happens was a Jehovah’s Witness and didn’t really approve of medical science, questioned the editor of the Science Unit, what specialist knowledge is Mr Redfern bringing to this subject that you should use him, I would have thought it would have been better to consult the Corporation doctor, showing that he’d completely Martin Redfern Page 39 C1672/29 Track 4 misunderstood what I was doing as a freelance journalist. I just throw that in for fun. Actually, there was one a bit before that which I got a tip-off from a friend at UCL who I’d been a student with, that somebody in the physics department had discovered a charmed quark, it wasn’t actually the first to be discovered, I think that was discovered at Stanford, but this was one in a bubble chamber at CERN and he’d got a paper coming up, so I was ahead of publication. I did an interview and again, I spent ages on the editing and getting it right. And I remember, I made the cardinal sin, I mean you’re here interviewing me and you will find this amusing, that although I’d been really keen as a sound engineer, I hadn’t really thought about what was involved in interviewing and I’d borrowed in those days, a Uher, a reel-to-reel portable tape recorder, with a tiny little tinny AKG microphone, and I wasn’t used to the idea, we didn’t have tie-clip mics then, I wasn’t used to the idea of holding it close to the person, and I’d put it on the table, so the sound quality was terrible. And, I was so worked up about doing this interview that I had written down all the questions I wanted to ask in advance and tried to read them, and of course the first answer he gave wasn’t quite the one that I’d expected and it included an answer to what would have been my second question, and that threw me completely. After that I at most had notes, I certainly didn’t write out questions. And actually, I love interviewing still, because it’s a chance to engage your mind with somebody else and actually listen to what they have to say and let it unfold and hopefully ask intelligent or even informed questions, but the role of the interviewer is not to know all the answers themselves. And so that was a lesson I learnt quite quickly, but the hard way. [19:04] So back at Transcription Service, I was mining out these Magazine Units and then towards the end of my attachment, it was 1979 by now and we had the Iranian oil crisis where suddenly the price of oil shot up and for the first time people started talking about what happens when the oil runs out. I don’t think they’d started talking about global warming very much then, though I did get one of the first interviews with one of the first people who warned about that, Bert Bolin at Stockholm, but that’s another story. So I thought maybe they’ll let me actually originate some interviews, still packaged interviews that could be used separately, not whole built programmes. But yes, they agreed to and when I got more and more interviews I think it ended up being six whole LPs, so about nearly three hours’ worth of audio with six interviews on each side, roughly, all about future energy sources. So it was about solar, photovoltaic solar heating, heat pumps, more efficient coal combustion, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, all the alternative, some of which have fallen by the wayside, some of which have developed far further since. But that was the first big origination I had. Then when I went back to studio managing, which I didn’t do for all that long, they would let you go on production courses and there was one that was a two-week long production course that I went on, at which you got the chance to make a feature programme. And it was just coming up to the start of International World Water Decade, one of the big UN pushes to get clean water and sanitation for all by a decade now long passed, and of course they haven’t, but it was a good intention. And so I did a feature about that and it didn’t actually, you know, this was just a training exercise, so there was no expectation that it would get broadcast, but I did actually offer it to Central Talks and Features, which is the parent department of the World Service Science Unit then, and they issued it in script form for translation, because they thought that a lot of the developing world countries that most needed the clean water and sanitation would be interested, so that was one of the first big features that I got on to World Service. I came back from Transcription Service and started putting in for producer attachments, most of them in television, ideally in science. And I think at one stage I’d added up how many attachment applications I’d Martin Redfern Page 40 C1672/29 Track 4 done and I think it was thirty-something. And I’d had four or five interviews for television science. In those days if you got the production attachment you didn’t go straight on to Horizon, that was big boys’ stuff, you got to work as an assistant producer on Tomorrow’s World. And at least for the last two or three of those interviews they said terribly sorry, you have not got it, but you’re considered also suitable, which means that if the person who did get it drops out you’d get it, but of course they didn’t. Later on, once I had joined the World Service Science Unit, I went to them and – no, in fact before I joined the World Service Science Unit – I went to them and said look, you keep saying ‘also suitable’, would you like me to come along for maybe a month, not a full six-month attachment, but how about coming along for a little while and see how we get on. They had said yes, alright, as long as somebody else pays, and I was just negotiating that when I got the permanent job in Science Unit and put it off, but maybe I’ll come back to that. So I hadn’t got into television. I got a bit desperate actually, and I applied for a local radio attachment, you know, anything for a change, particularly from night shifts. This was after Bridget had gone off and married the guy and moved to Tasmania, so I didn’t have such an incentive to do night shifts at Bush House. And it was a general local radio attachment, it wasn’t a specific one to such-and-such a station, but I got one and they said, okay, you’ve got it, would you like to go to Radio Humberside. Which is probably not a place I would have picked first off, I don’t have a huge cultural affinity for the North and I’d never been to Hull and when I did go up there I found a flat that was very damp and smelt of fish, I wasn’t hugely happy there. As a station assistant, it’s basically not much more than a studio manager, but because it’s a smaller team and there are fewer people on the ground there’s more chance to deputise, to go off and do a bit of reporting and interviewing and so on. And after I’d been up there a month or so, working on a particular programme, it was what they called their education programme, emphasised with a small ‘e’ so it was faintly educational rather than just phone-in, chat and pop songs. It was only forty-five minutes a day, at lunchtime, usually live. And I was helping on that, doing a few interviews and basically playing all the tapes in at the right moments like a studio manager, and then one day, one Monday I think, I had been down to London for the weekend, Bridget was back from Tasmania by then and we were starting to get involved again, so I headed south every weekend. And I came back at about ten in the morning or something on the Monday and went up to see what was going to be in that day’s show to see the producer-presenter of it coming out of the programme organiser’s office saying, ‘And what’s more, I’m not coming back’, and slamming the door. And a rather sheepish programme organiser emerged and said, ‘Do you want to do the show today?’ And so I ended up producing/presenting Chalk and Cheese on Radio Humberside for the next five months, which was quite fun. And they let me do whatever I wanted, which was wonderful. I remember I did a series on photography, which is rather interesting for radio. I did a series of location visits to all the geological sites in Humberside that I could find. I did a series about gardening where I visited old pensioners who had fantastic collections of fuchsias or pelargoniums or whatever. And I did a New Year special where a team from Hull University of geographers had gone off to Anak Krakatoa, which is the little island that has risen from the sea where the Krakatoa volcano had blown up a hundred years previously, and they were doing a project on how life returns to a sterilised blasted island, and that was going out for New Year so I thought okay, they’ve given me, I think it was a whole hour slot, let’s have a bit of fun on this. So I interspersed it with, I would like to say actors, but other presenters from Radio Humberside reading accounts from the explosion of Krakatoa and the effects that followed and so on and dramatised a bit of it, and that was a lot of fun. But I was quite glad when I got back to London after that. And then a chance to get an attachment in the World Service Science Unit came up. Martin Redfern Page 41 C1672/29 Track 4

[28:17] It’s interesting seeing how that has changed over the years. When I joined it, it had, there was an editor, George Short, a deputy editor, John Newell, three producers and three scriptwriters. The producers produced Discovery, Science in Action – Discovery was in depth, usually just had two interviews in it, half hour programme, two reasonably in-depth interviews, though nothing like as in depth as this one. Science in Action was more topical, would have five or six interviews in the half hour. And then the other producer produced Farming World and Nature Notebook, which, titles of which are self-explanatory. And then the three scriptwriters would each turn out a short script a day, a weekday, for translation, which were sent round, in those days, on a Banda printer, sent round as paper copies to all the forty-two language services so that whichever of them wanted to, they could use them in their own, often they had their own specialist science programmes for their part of the world. So there was a lot of tropical medicine, alternative technology, but also a lot of frontiers of Western science. One of the lessons I learnt, well, somewhat later when I went to India with the British Council training science communicators, is that actually they didn’t want to hear a huge amount about tropical medicine, they’d got lots of their own people who were jolly good at that, what they wanted to hear about were the latest space projects and astronomy and particle physics, actually all the things that were exciting me. So I used that as a good excuse. But when I joined it – oh, and they also had, I think it was five secretaries who typed up these scripts and took dictation and did what secretaries in those days did, all on good old manual typewriters. And the producers weren’t actually meant to edit tape, they had tape machines which were just meant for listening and then they would take the interviews and get a studio manager to edit them, [whispers] though actually they did do a lot of the editing themselves. [31:05] But I joined initially as a scriptwriter, which was great, because actually, you know, way back at school, I had actually quite enjoyed writing essays. I think I’ve got a knack of telling a story. I can’t spell, but that was alright because I was dictating them or somebody else was typing them up and nowadays we have spellcheckers. And I took to that, I really enjoyed… it wasn’t… science journalism now is much more topical, you know, if you don’t catch the story on the day, you’ve missed it. Then it was, I remember saying, well I’m a geologist, recently, at a recent conference, as a geologist could mean any time in the last million years. So we did try to be topical, particularly with the big stories and so on, and certainly tried to be ahead of newspapers. And of course radio could be, as long as, in those days a lot of the stories came out of press conferences, and if you went along to the press conference, wrote up the story instead of propping up the bar afterwards, you could get the story filed at three or four o’clock that afternoon and you’d be ahead of the game because it would be in the next day’s national papers. And similarly the peer reviewed science journals would send out a press release, as they still do, an embargoed press release, so they would say that in Nature coming out on Thursday, not to be broadcast before 6pm on Thursday, whatever it was, we’ve got this good story coming up. So you could stay one step ahead of the game, you could tell news editors and language producers, I’ve got this really good story for you, for your programme tomorrow. And you’d have time to interview the person, write it up properly, check it out with other people in the same field, in those days mostly on the phone. So yeah, I loved that.

[33:32] Martin Redfern Page 42 C1672/29 Track 4

Could you say something about the structure of External Services or the World Service? It had a Science Unit, what other units did it have and to give us a sense of where science fell in the sort of hierarchy or the structure of the way in which the world was broken up there?

Yes, the Science Unit was a bit of an oddity in that two completely different departments came together in it. In those days there were all the language services and there was World Service English. Central Talks and Features, which was officially the parent department of Science Unit, was there to serve the language services and basically to produce scripted programmes and scripts which they would then translate and use in their programmes. And that covered the scriptwriting in the Science Unit. But then there was also World Service English, which had a name that was almost as confusing as Central Talks and Features, it was Talks and Features, World Service. That included a lot of the current affairs programmes, mostly newsy current affairs programmes, and some of the arts programmes. And so the Science Unit was half beholden to them and half beholden to Central Talks and Features, to the language services. When I joined there was a fairly clear demarcation between the two, the producers of the English programmes didn’t by and large write scripts and the writers of scripts by and large didn’t broadcast themselves.

[35:28] After my attachment, shortly after it, six months after it, the editor of the Science Unit, George Short, retired and the deputy editor, John Newell, moved up to become editor and I owe a huge amount to him because he and I had got on extremely well during my attachment and I was his favoured candidate to replace him. Well, not to replace him as deputy editor, it was a sequence, so John Wilson, who was one of the more established writers and producers came up to be deputy editor, resulting in a vacancy for a producer, or actually a scriptwriter. And I should say that in those days, due to parity with correspondents in newsroom who were quite senior people, who also wrote scripts for translation, the unions had somehow managed to get it that the scriptwriters were classed as senior producers. So actually, when I got the job going from studio manager to scriptwriter, it was a double job, it was a big increase in money and seniority and, you know, nowadays people will spend a decade as a junior producer or even an assistant producer or a researcher before they get anywhere near that, so I was really lucky there. But John Newell was by then the editor of the Science Unit and he was a passionate science journalist. He was very hard working, he was often still in the office at eight or nine o’clock at night. He also did a lot of freelance writing, which was unheard of and a bit frowned upon at first, and I think he did quite a lot of it under a pseudonym. He wrote stuff for Central Office of Information, which also issued science scripts in English to broadcasters overseas, for broadcasting and indeed print journalism overseas. His stories would turn up in the Singapore Times and things like that, through the COI. And he also did interviews. His background was primarily writing the scripts, but he would record interviews, he would go out with his Uher and interview people and place the interviews in the English language programmes as well, so he encouraged us to cross over and drag the English language producers kicking and screaming to write up scripts as well, of some of the stories that they’d covered in their programmes. Towards the end of my attachment before I got a job with him, he helped me to, my attachment was extended a bit for a few months and I was able to produce a few editions of Science in Action while still on attachment, which was fairly unheard of and indeed, to do a Discovery special, Martin Redfern Page 43 C1672/29 Track 4 in those days Discovery was practically always two or possibly three straight interviews on probably unrelated subjects in a half hour programme. I did… this was about the time that one of the first biotechnology companies, Genentech in California, had gone public in terms of its shares and researchers who’d been paid in a few shares for doing a bit of contract research for them suddenly discovered that they were worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. You know, it was a real biotechnology boom. And so the first whole programme that I did was called Genes for Sale and it was all about the biotechnology revolution. And I got a lot of encouragement from John Newell on that and it was a subject that he was very close to and indeed went on to write books about. But he let me make this programme and have a lot of freedom doing that. So the crossover was beginning. He was also very encouraging on doing a bit of freelance writing as well and after I’d been in the Science Unit as staff for a couple of years I was doing more and more, particularly for New Scientist, but also for some of the Sunday papers, The Sunday Times had a technology section then, the Independent on Sunday had a science page. The Economist had and still has an extremely good science section, and had the advantage that they never print by-lines, so you could write for that without getting found out. But it went from, the attitude of the BBC, went from, thou shalt not write for any other organisation than the BBC to, well, alright, but don’t use the name, don’t affiliate yourself with the BBC, to when John Tusa, who was a former journalist himself, became managing director of World Service, World Service journalists were encouraged to write for other organisations and please could they use ‘of BBC World Service’ in their by-line. And actually it got to the stage, I think it was in 1984 or 85, when the editor of New Scientist did a little survey of how much various people were writing for it and the amount that I was writing came in at higher than several of their staff writers, and so they awarded me a free subscription to New Scientist which lasted for the next ten years. So that was helping a lot, because Bridget and I had just got married in 1981, we’d moved to a new house not far from here, over in the village of Hoo – H-O-O – in 1982 and we were paying off a big mortgage, so it helped a lot to be doing a bit of freelance as well. And it worked really well, I could be writing up a story for the BBC during the day, then I’d come home, order my thoughts on the train home and write up a short news piece for New Scientist that evening and I’d see it in print the next week. So we had quite a good working relationship with both organisations then and, as I say, it helped pay off the mortgage, but it also, it helped me learn by doing. I don’t think I was ever particularly taught to write, but just maybe have an innate ability to tell a story. I remember one of the first things I wrote for New Scientist they threw back at me saying, now take all the passive tenses out, so that was a lesson. And when I was writing for The Economist, the person editing the science page was, oh dear, senior moment, sorry. Well known guy whose family owned Barings Bank. Is it Barings? No. Northern Rock, sorry. Sorry, you’ll have to edit this bit.

We can recall it and put it in the summary.

Yeah. And he founded the Earth Centre in Newcastle, whatever it’s called. Oh dear. Senior moment. Anyway, he was a really good editor, you couldn’t get anything past him. If there was a place in a story that you weren’t quite sure about and you’d fudged it, he would spot that and say can you check up on that, can you be more specific on that. You don’t use phrases like ‘according to experts’. I remember a friend at Harwell had a wonderful definition of an expert, where ‘ex’ is an unknown quantity and ‘spert’ is a drip under pressure. You Martin Redfern Page 44 C1672/29 Track 4 have to be specific and either quote your source or in the rare occasion, it doesn’t happen often in science, that it’s a source who wishes to remain anonymous, you at least be as specific as you can. [45:10] But the crossover between writing scripts and doing interviews and broadcasting English programmes continued in that John Newell really pushed the links between the Science Unit and the newsroom, in that at one stage when I first came the newsroom would take the stories from the Science Correspondent, who was probably just the domestic news science correspondent, I don’t think in those days there was a World Service science correspondent, and John Newell and after him John Wilson when he became editor, they both pushed very hard for the news, both for translation and in English, to start taking dispatches from the Science Unit as ‘Science Correspondent’, so we would not only write them but we would also voice them to go into the news bulletins and programmes like Radio Newsreel. And we would be interviewed ourselves by current affairs programmes like News Hour and The World Today and so on. And actually, that was one thing that John Birt, when he was Director-General, encouraged, was the expertise of the news correspondents. And indeed, Head of News in those days was Tony Hall who is now Director-General, so that all worked. Plenty of areas where I didn’t agree with John Birt’s changes, but journalistically he gave a lot of support to specialist correspondents and as a result, by 1998 the Science Unit, the World Service Science Unit, instead of having three producers, three scriptwriters, editor, deputy editor and five secretaries, had a staff of, I think, nineteen people, none of whom were secretaries. The secretaries were by this stage radio production assistants and would help with a lot of the programme work, and the journalists, some of them were producers, some of them were senior producers, would all write scripts and broadcast and take turns to produce the programmes and instead of just the four rather formulaic programmes by then, there were a host of different programmes, there were technology, medicine, I could run through a whole list of about a dozen regular programmes, some of which I started up myself. Anthony Rendell, who has quite recently died, I read his obituary the other day, apart from anything else, he was a keen amateur astronomer. He was the editor of World Service English, so he was the head of World Service, English in the late eighties and early nineties, I think. And he was very encouraging of science programmes. And in those days the Science Unit was very much part of World Service, so Anthony Rendell and the various programme organisers for the regional departments that fathered the language services would have a meeting with Science Unit editors and producers, maybe every six months, to talk about what we thought they should be doing in terms of programming and where the big stories were and what we should be doing as special features and special series, and as a result what they would put a bit of money into to help us do. That has morphed now into the offers round, but following John Birt’s separation of the production departments from the broadcasting networks, it’s a very different relationship. Then it was very much a partnership and they would come to us, really for advice on how to do science broadcasting. And as often as, well, more often than not they would take that advice. Now it’s very much a, we’ve got to sell our ideas to them. They know the network, they know what the audience wants or they think they know what the audience wants, they will decide what to buy from us and we will have to offer what they want if they’re going to buy it. So it’s a very different relationship and I think that, given that the commissioners are by and large not specifically scientists or science enthusiasts, I think that has resulted in a considerable dumbing down, they don’t necessarily, for better or worse, get excited by the same things that I get excited by, for example, and they’re more interested in a programme that has direct Martin Redfern Page 45 C1672/29 Track 4 practical relevance rather than intellectual excitement, and more interested in a programme that’s presented by a celebrity that they’ve heard of than one that’s presented by, for example, a scientist who’s an expert in the field.

When did that change first take effect, the change you’ve described there?

I think it was really a direct result of John Birt separating, his opening up the market, if you like. I can see that there was quite a lot of wastage, lack of transparency, nobody really knew what the money was actually going on. Back in the eighties, again, when I started in Science Unit, all those World Service programmes were presented by a named presenter who had probably been presenting for years or by two or three presenters in rotation. They were all freelance, they were all bought in to present the programme, they would just come in for maybe one day to do some interviews and another day to link the programme, and then go away back to their lives as journalists in other fields or whatever. I, and this was pioneered more by John Newell than by myself, but I lapped it up enthusiastically, in those days the programmes were budgeted, tiny budgets and it was purely the cash budget. It was the budget that paid for the presenter, tea and biscuits in the studio and travel. The producer’s time, the time spent by any staff members of the BBC, the time spent in BBC studios, none of that was actually included in the budget, you just got that, that was paid for by whichever department employed those people or equipped the studios or whatever. That wasn’t very transparent, you didn’t have any idea of really what the true cost of the programmes were. I’m not sure how much this came from John Birt and how much it came from political pressure on John Birt to be more transparent, but he changed things in, it must have been early nineties, such that each department – it was total costing, it’s hit the world more widely now and indeed then – so after, well, before that John Newell and I had discovered that if you presented a few programmes yourself and you let the regular producer go off on holiday and you didn’t pay him or her, you’d get a few hundred pounds a week into the cash budget and you could then go off to some exciting universities or visit some telescopes in Hawaii or go and see some alternative technology in India or a medical project in The Gambia, or whatever, as long as you presented the programmes yourself because your time wasn’t costed, all you had to do was buy your air ticket and pay for a few cheap meals in local cafes. So I managed to get a lot of travelling in. I think I was the main beneficiary of this because John Newell was the editor and so he couldn’t get away so often, and also he didn’t particularly want to travel outside Britain, I don’t think. That changed a lot after total costing came in, because then producers’ time was costed into it as well, and indeed, overheads for the office and so on, so suddenly the budget for a half hour programme changed from £350 to £3,500 and you got some very strange anomalies, like if you borrowed a CD from Record Library you would pay a fee for borrowing that record and it would actually be cheaper to go out and buy it at the HMV shop, which we did. And, you know, when Greg Dyke came along a lot of those anomalies he got rid of and went back to just paying for Gram Library and swallowing it up in the overheads so that the actual borrowing of a CD didn’t cost anything, although the overheads went up a bit. But the effect of all that was that then the programme commissioners, as they now were, weren’t so much partners with you in broadcasting, they were trying to devise a network that they thought would appeal to the listenership, would boost listenership, they were interested in listenership figures, numbers and to some extent, audience appreciation, but not as much as numbers. And of course they were interested in cost, so if we could do a really popular programme really cheaply and it was presented by a celebrity and it had some gimmick in it that would maybe have a bit more Martin Redfern Page 46 C1672/29 Track 4 audience participation so they’d get feedback as well if it had a competition or a chance to interact with the audience. And of course a lot of that changed also with the internet coming along. [57:38] On the subject of the internet [laughs], I should tell you a little anecdote from, I think it was 1992, at which stage the Science Unit was one of the first units in World Service at least to connect to the internet. We had one PC connected with a dial-up telephone modem through a server to the internet and we thought this is going to take off, this is something really important, there ought to be a World Service website. And at the time we had somebody who had come to us on a scheme that the British Association for the Advancement of Science ran, a media fellowship, where they would invite applications for fulltime scientists to come and work in the media for, I think it was eight weeks, or possibly three months, I think it was eight weeks, usually across the summer, culminating in the British Association of Science Festival in September in whatever university campus it was held. The idea was that the scientists would then go back to their institutes with a much clearer idea of how the media work, they would pass this on to all their colleagues who would all become much better communicators and generally science communication would improve. And with a lot of the media fellows we had, that worked just brilliantly, you know, we had Andrew Coates who is now one of the really senior space scientists at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory and one of the world’s experts in the magnetic fields and plasma in between the planets, and has been involved in lots of space missions. We had David Vaughan who is now, I think, Science Director at the British Antarctic Survey, and who was then a glaciologist. We’ve had a lot of people where they’ve gone back and the process has worked. One where it didn’t work quite so well for how the British Association had intended it was Chris Westcott, who at the time was working at Harwell, the nuclear research establishment, and he, well, he was an electrochemist and had done his PhD under Martin Fleischmann and while he was here, cold fusion hit the headlines, and this was absolutely in his field and in fact he went back to Harwell and was involved in some of the tests that proved that actually it was an artefact and didn’t work, but he very much got the media buzz. And he – and we gave him a job, which defeated the object of the scheme – but he was a very able guy and we gave him a job and he recognised this need for a World Service website and did a proposal that would involve setting up a pilot site, getting a couple of networked PCs and the salaries of two people, one of whom would be him, to develop a website, it would be based in the Science Unit. And we invited John Birt to come over to the Science Unit to see the internet. And I remember we had a lot of discussion about whether we should actually show him this website that we’d found for, in the USA, it was John Birt’s Used Cars, and he was most amused by this, we did show it to him. And on the strength of that visit he funded Chris and a colleague to set up a World Service website. After that of course it broke away from the Science Unit and went big and Chris managed all that and then he went over and became Head of BBC Monitoring, from which he has recently retired, so went to high places. But the World Service website started in the Science Unit.

[end of track 4]

Martin Redfern Page 47 C1672/29 Track 5

[Track 5]

While there’s a World Service Science Unit, are there other units, for example, a religion unit or a politics unit?

Politics is a multi-tentacled beast, particularly in World Service news and current affairs, so that found its way into lots of things. Yes, there was a Religion Unit, which in those days was indeed a unit, albeit with only two or three producers and respective freelance presenters. And that over the years narrowed down till basically there was one person who was the World Service Religion Unit, with various attempts to move it to Salford. But yes, there was a Religion Unit. What other units were there? There was of course a big Sports Unit, which was more closely allied to news. There was, as I’ve already mentioned, the Central Talks and Features that wrote pieces for translation, and they had, apart from the Science Unit, they had a team of topical report writers who wrote on everything from the background to news stories to arts stories, and they also produced features and special series. They didn’t do many programmes as such, but yeah, they did some sort of arts and philosophy type, and history series. There wasn’t so much call for that. There was the big department, English by Radio, that of course did English teaching for people with English as a second language. And a lot of people learnt their English by listening to World Service and there was a time when we were encouraged to speak more slowly and clearly on World Service because a lot of the listeners would be – in English – because a lot of the listeners would have English as a second language. And that grew to do a large number of gently educational programmes. We had, in the early nineties particularly, there was a very nice set of strands of, fifteen-minute long, long series where you’d get ten or twelve programmes in a series, which were there educationally partly to teach about their content, but also to help, although they weren’t didactic English lessons, the idea was that they would help people develop their English and particularly English in those subjects, which quite often were science. We did manage to place quite a lot of programmes through the nineties in that. There was a particular series of series that I did, I started off being a lapsed geologist with the unoriginal title, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, which I think was ten episodes about whole earth geology, if you like, earth system science starting out in space as an alien might see the planet coming in programme by programme through the atmosphere, through the biosphere, the oceans, the crust, the mantle, the core. I followed that up a couple of years later with Journey to the Centre of the Universe, and that was actually one where I got, you know, it was mostly straight astronomy. And because it was, that one, twelve episodes, and if you’re presenting it yourself that means basically you can spend all the budget on travel, and so I got out to telescopes in Hawaii and Mount Palomar and The Canaries and got some fantastic travel in under that. But also the twist to that really was that eleven of the twelve programmes had gone the Copernican way, were following out, you know, starting with the earth, okay actually earth isn’t the centre of the universe, it’s not even the centre of the solar system. The sun, okay, the sun is not the centre of the universe, it’s not even the centre of the galaxy. The galaxy, okay, the galaxy’s one of hundreds of billions of galaxies, so eleven episodes were basically showing how small we were. And then the final one I brought in the anthropic cosmological principle and suggested, somewhat daringly for the early nineties, that maybe because the universe is just right for us in terms of the fundamental constants of physics, maybe we do actually in fact do have a special place in the universe, maybe consciousness, not necessarily our consciousness is central to the universe after all, so that was the surprise centre of the universe that I managed to get in in the final episode of that. I went on after that to do Journey to the Centre of the Atom, Martin Redfern Page 48 C1672/29 Track 5 so particle physics. I had hoped that I would go on after that, I had a plan to do Journey to the Centre of the Cell, which was all about cellular biology and genetics, with the idea that the final one in the inaccurately named trilogy would be Journey to the Centre of the Mind, and would come back again to consciousness and human experience. But Susan Greenfield beat me to it by calling her Royal Institution Christmas Lectures by the same title and after that we lost the slot of large numbers of fifteen-minute programmes, so I never got to make that one.

[06:31] Why did you say daringly for the early nineties when you brought in that final episode?

I was in a unit of formally trained, mostly scientifically trained scientists who had become journalists in an organisation that was pretty orthodox in terms of its science, was meant to be making programmes about conventional science and the latest discoveries therein, and science generally has been one where evidence counts for everything, it has to be objective and reproducible. There isn’t room for emotion, spirituality or even subjective experience in that science. That was a boundary I wanted to push, inasmuch as I could get away with it, because my world is not purely objective, in fact the only thing I’m sure about is the subjectiveness of the world. So I’ve always been very interested in what you might call mystical experience or spirituality and I think there should be a place for that in science. And I think even if you’re talking about purely conventional, orthodox, accepted science, particularly if you’re doing so to a popular audience, you’re not writing an academic paper, you can bring to it a sense of wonder, a sense of magic, a sense of mysticism, if you like, just about how wonderful it is, even within conventional science, but it’s also fun just to push the boundaries of conventional science. I enjoy being a sceptic among religious people and a maverick among scientific people. I think creativity is on that sort of boundary between the two.

[08:49] Is this something, is this wish to slightly extend what the Science Unit might see as being science, was that something that you could discuss with any other members of the Science Unit, is it something that you did discuss at this time with other members of the Science Unit?

Not very much with other members of the Science Unit. In those days if you did a special programme, like a one-off programme that wasn’t in one of the regular science slots, you would get assigned a studio producer who was a features producer, probably didn’t do very much except sit there in the studio and get you to re-do your lines if you aren’t clear enough and make sure that he or she – it was always a she, actually – understood the science in it, because it was meant to be for a general audience, not a specialist thing. And they, maybe because they were not scientists, they were by and large arts producers, had more of a feel for that sort of thing. But if I can give you a bit of background to that. Back when I started at World Service as a studio manager and started going out with Bridget, then Hall, she would mysteriously disappear on a Thursday evening to what she called her philosophy classes, and she didn’t tell me anything about them. When I eventually asked her more about them, she gave me two books by the Russian philosopher, Peter Ouspensky, Tertium Organum and A New Model of the Universe. They were written in the 1920s, I think, and they were scientifically a bit dated, but they Martin Redfern Page 49 C1672/29 Track 5 fired me up into thinking about the nature of reality and the nature of oneself and the possibilities of different dimensions of time, different dimensions of possibility, if you like. What we would now think of as the quantum multiverse, ideas of rebirth and recurrence, and in particular, ideas of consciousness. Ouspensky referred to what he termed ‘self-remembering’. And eventually, after reading those and asking a few more questions, she took me along to the place where she’d been doing these mysterious philosophy classes, which in those days was known as the Society for the Study of Normal Psychology. Today it’s just known as the Study Society. And that was founded by one of Ouspenky’s pupils, Dr Francis Roles. He was left by Ouspensky with the task of finding the rest of what Ouspensky had termed ‘fragments of an ancient system of knowledge’. And in 1961, I think it was, he was travelling, trying to find the source of this in India, where I guess in the sixties one travelled to find the source of things, and there was a big mela - meeting addressed by someone called Shantanand Saraswati who was the Shankaracharya of the north of India. And the first thing he said in his talk, which I think was through a translator, was the trouble with people today is that they do not remember them Selves, ‘Selves’ with a capital ‘S’. And started talking about the true Self being like an atom of the absolute or divine Self. And he was a teacher in the Advaita system of non-duality and Dr Roles went on to have an audience with him at which he said, ‘Ah, I’ve been expecting you’. I have a system of self-remembering for, what he called householders, for people who are living in the real world. In other words, not going off to become an ascetic up the mountain or joining a monastery or anything, but living active Western lifestyles. That system was basically meditation. It turned out he was the chap who had also taught the Maharishi, who came to London to teach meditation and who actually first came to the Study Society at their headquarters at Colet House. And it was through them that he booked his first big meeting about meditation in the Albert Hall. But then when he went off and bought Mentmore Towers and Rolls-Royces and things, Dr Roles said okay, that’s not actually quite the path for us, quite a few members left with him and they went off with The Beatles and all the rest of it. But the Study Society continued to teach meditation and over the next thirty years had a series of audiences with the Shankaracharya in India, where only in response to questions he gave the basis of the Advaita system of non-dual philosophy. [14:49] So I went along to an introductory meeting of that in late 1976 and learnt the meditation in 1977 and started going to weekly classes and found them a really fascinating group of people. They had some very eminent members. Dr Roles was himself a very charismatic leader, he was a medical doctor, with a great interest in science as well and interest in how proper scientific studies of psychology and of the brain helped to understand religious experience and spirituality and how practices such as meditation would enhance one’s ability to live a fulfilling, satisfying and productive life. There were lots and lots of interesting people there. There was a High Court judge, there was Dame Ninette de Valois, the founder of the Royal Ballet. There were quite a few scientists there, one in particular who I became, and still am, very great friends with, Dr Peter Fenwick, who was a neuropsychiatrist, in those days working at the Maudsley and the Institute of Psychiatry, having to be a bit careful about what he said in public about spirituality, because again, as with me in the Science Unit, it was a bit frowned upon. But he quietly got on with quite a lot of studies about brain effects in meditation, on near-death experiences. All this excited me a lot, as did a book I was reading at about that time, called Dialogues with Scientists and Sages, I think it was, by someone called Renée Weber, who I think was Rutgers University. And that was basically a series of interview transcripts with some really interesting people. And another person who Martin Redfern Page 50 C1672/29 Track 5 was at the Study Society at the time was a chap called William Anderson who was an author and a poet and was I think also at the time Publications Director for the Nuffield Educational Curriculum Trust. So, interested in science as well. And he managed to line up quite a few of these people to come and speak to the Study Society, and I thought okay, here they are, talking about things which I hadn’t been, you know, you didn’t really dare to talk about in public, but they had opened up about them. That included people like Rupert Sheldrake, David Bohm, James Lovelock, Peter Fenwick himself, various people like that. And I thought, ooh, I wonder if I could sneak some of this through on to World Service. I’m not going to get away with it in one of our regular science programmes, I’m only going to get away with it if I dress it up as an alternative viewpoint and label them slightly as mavericks, and then people might be interested in a sort of curious way rather than a, this is terrible heresy. And so I did actually two series, just four fifteen minutes each, so eight fifteen-minute interviews, which was basically just me doing linked interviews with four really interesting people under the title, Behind the Universe. So that was, I think that went, the first one of those went out in 1984 and the second in 1985, so this was pretty new in those days.

Who were the four?

The first four, there was David Bohm, physicist at Birkbeck who wrote this lovely book called Wholeness and Implicate Order. There was Rupert Sheldrake whose book, A New Science of Life, had just come out and been branded as the most suitable book for burning that the editor of Nature had read in a long time. I think in that series I did include Peter Fenwick talking about near-death experiences. And I think the first series was also Jim Lovelock, the founder of Gaia theory and Gaia hypothesis, the idea of the earth as not necessarily a conscious organism, but a self-regulating organism where basically bacteria and algae have stabilised the climate for the last few billion years, which would probably go on stabilising the climate in spite of and not because of human activity and probably regardless of human presence. I think that’s four. Oh, I also – can’t remember which was in the first or which was in the second – I also managed to get an interview with Fred Hoyle, which is something I had wanted to do for years, ever since reading his Frontiers of Astronomy when I was still at school. Of course he still held quite strongly the idea of the steady state universe as opposed to the Big Bang, but also some very interesting ideas about the possibility of life originating not on earth but in comets and of infections and flu and things being as a result of new strains of bacteria or viruses that were coming in from space. Controversial then, controversial now, but I’ve always been fascinated with these ideas, even if they’re wrong, that make people think and make people reassess their ideas. There are three more and I can’t think of them at the moment.

[21:45] Do you remember conversations that you had, presumably in the early eighties, when you were intending to do this programme and presumably had to talk to people in the Unit about your wish to make this programme along these lines? I mean who did you have to talk to or convince or persuade?

My editor, John Newell, who whilst he, I think actually he was gently religious, but in a non-overlapping sort of way with his science, he was gently encouraging but he was more encouraging of any original programme that his Unit could make, was all good for business. I don’t think he was particularly pro or anti the programmes Martin Redfern Page 51 C1672/29 Track 5 that I put forward that were out of the mainstream of science. But basically we had to sell them to the Editor, World Service English, and not being a scientist himself, but being interested in science perhaps, but not being a scientist, he didn’t have quite the dogmatic anti-religion stance of some of my colleagues. So by and large I didn’t have to talk within the Science Unit too much. If I wrote a paragraph, put it up to the Editor of World Service and he liked it and asked me to develop it, it got through. Looking back, I think the late eighties, early nineties were the best years in that sense in that most of the ideas that I came up with I managed to get to make. More recently, and that’s partly why I took early retirement, you know, I would put up ten or a dozen ideas to World Service or Radio 4, three or four of them would get shortlisted and then none of them would get accepted. I’m not sure whether that was simply because I wasn’t getting so good at putting up original ideas, I think it was more because they had more preconceived notions as to what would make a good science programme and there were more people more rigorously looking through. I felt in the eighties, in the late eighties particularly, that I was getting away with quite a lot.

[24:21] Thank you. And how was the anti-religion attitude of other people in the Science Unit manifest? I mean how did you know this is how they felt, that this was their position?

I suppose conversations over a pint of beer where they would, some of them would be sort of poking gentle fun at people like Rupert Sheldrake and the mavericks, so I’d probably tend to keep a little bit quiet then. It manifested more, more recently, you know, before I left when I was producing… well, there was one person in particular, I guess I can name him, Roland Pease, who, very nice man, very good producer, very bright, very good scientist, very anti-religion. There was a time when… Deborah Cohen, my editor, once we’d merged with the Radio 4 unit, was gently tolerant of my strange desires. I think when she was off on leave or something and Roland was deputising, I think he was more nervous of his position, for one thing, and also more anti-religion himself. There was, well, one example was Material World that I was producing at the time which tried to have very topical news stories, and Peter Fenwick had just come back from one of the, a series of conferences known as the Tucson Conferences, on consciousness. Every other year it’s in Tucson, this particular one was, I think, in Denmark. And he’d come back having heard some very interesting papers about studies of magnetic effects in the brain that somebody was suggesting brought an aspect of quantum physics into consciousness – long story there, you know, about the stuff that Roger Penrose had been working on, not quite the same thing, but he’d come to the conclusion that to solve various ‘non-computational problems’ as he put it - he was a mathematician - the only way the brain could do that would be if it tapped into some sort of quantum effect. And this was a possible explanation for that and I put up that we should have a short interview with Peter Fenwick reporting back from this conference, which he’d only just got back from. And Roland looked up the conference on the internet and saw that one of the keynote speakers was… my senior moments again. Temporarily escapes me. One of the keynote speakers was someone who’s very famous for putting forward alternative medicine and Ayurvedic medicine and things that Roland reckoned weren’t evidence based. And he thought well, if it’s a conference like this, this is going to be really dodgy and he knew that Peter Fenwick was into out of body experiences, near-death experiences and things, this is going to be… no. And it’s one of the Martin Redfern Page 52 C1672/29 Track 5 few occasions where I’ve been told to pull a programme item. Actually, very few, but that’s partly because I’ve been fairly cautious as to what I’ve put up. [28:45] Interestingly, one big series of, was it four half hours that I did, in… which year was 9/11? Anyway, it was later that same year.

2001?

Yeah, I think it must have been. It was later after that, because I remember the problems we had with security travelling a few weeks after that to the States to record interviews for it. That was basically all about science and religion, but I wasn’t able to sell it as a science programme, I made it for the Religious Unit. They loved putting science into religion. The Science Unit didn’t like me putting religion into science.

Who at that time were the people in the Religion Unit keen to put science into religion?

Actually, that was a time when the Religion Unit had suffered a bit of a cutback, they’d lost one of their regular weekly programmes on World Service and about the only person left in the Religion Unit was a very nice lady called Kristine Pommert, who actually I had known way back in the eighties when she was a secretary in the German language service at World Service and she’d been trying to get into the religious programmes and they’d asked her to make a programme suggestion. And she actually came to me saying could I help her with some people who would be good at talking about science and religion, and obviously it worked because she got the job, and this was quite a few years later that she was in effect my executive producer on this series for the Religious Unit.

[30:57] In what other ways, I mean in the sort of standard Science Unit programmes, so not ones that you’re making for yourself but in the standard programmes such as Discovery, were you bringing anything from yourself or from the Study Society into the way in which those programmes were made, however small that might be? So was a kind of pushing against set boundaries of what counts as science happening in other sort of smaller ways in the sort of general output that you were involved in?

Yes, it was. Again, one had to find some sort of reason for putting something in. Sometimes I could use as the excuse a particular conference. I remember I went privately to a conference in Olympia in Greece that was sponsored by the Brahma Kumaris Foundation, and there were a lot of very interesting scientists there and they came out with some sort of manifesto for spirituality. And I managed to put an item into Discovery about that. Another way in was if there was a new book, we sometimes would interview book authors, so that way I was able to do an interview, well, there were quite a few. There was a chap called Theo Roszak, an American who wrote a book about what you might call deep ecology, I think it was called The Song of the Earth. There was one by a chap at Amherst called Arthur Zajonc, called Catching the Light, which contained a lot of Rudolf Steiner’s ideas about light, actually, which would be in themselves considered quite flaky, but it was a lovely Martin Redfern Page 53 C1672/29 Track 5 book and that made the excuse for an interview. So ones like that. But yes, one had to find a peg for it. Peter Fenwick was quite good at tipping me off about new things in neuroscience, so I did the occasional item about, for example, about bio feedback and how meditation helped leading sports people and musicians. I got more in on one-off features which weren’t going specifically into a science slot. I did a couple about, really about the psychology of music, but again, it was psychology and spirituality of music, helped by Peter Fenwick again, but also by another person who I’d met through the Study Society, Paul Robertson, who was the, he was a brilliant violinist and founder and leader of the Medici Quartet, but also he’d studied Ouspensky and was fascinated by, again, the psychology of music, if you like. He had visiting professorships at Kingston and the Peninsular Medical School and had done lots of work both on music as therapy and music and the mind, if you like, and the effects of music on the brain. So that was another way in.

If we looked at the list of scientists interviewed for, say, Discovery, you said there tended to be sort of four scientists per episode, would we be able to identify, would you be able to identify the way in which the selection of scientists, or perhaps even the questions asked was influenced by your interest in science and spirituality?

Yes, I mean we did tend to play musical producers, so I wouldn’t be on Discovery for years and years and years. I would probably have three or four months on Discovery, then I’d have a couple of months on Science in Action, then I’d go off and make a one-off feature, then I’d be writing scripts for a couple of months, then I might go back on Discovery for a couple of months. So I think a magazine programme like that would always slightly reflect the interests of whoever happened to be producing it at the time. You know, my colleague, Stephen Hedges, was much more interested in medical science, for example, so there’d be more of that when he was producing. But, you know, I wasn’t only interested in religion and spirituality, I was also very interested in, I would say frontier science is generally what the Templeton Foundation would call the big questions, so you’d find a lot more that was not overtly connected to religion at all, but was about the big questions of cosmology, the origin of the earth, the origin of the universe, human evolution and development. Latterly I’ve become more and more interested in human development, evolutionarily and culturally, and what it is that’s made us as a species. How an interest in art, music and indeed religion have evolved, if that’s the right term, and how they relate to the development of technologies such as from stone tools to metal tools, ceramics and pottery, agriculture, all the fascinating things that genetics, both of modern populations and of ancient DNA can tell us both about the migration and development of humans, but also about the spread and domestication of crops and domesticated animals and that sort of thing. And at the other end of the big questions, the advances in, well over my career I suppose, of cosmology, understanding things like the microwave background and inflation and the Big Bang and the possibility of a multiverse and whether the universe is accelerating. Those are all questions which are straight, acceptable science questions that I could talk even to my sceptical science colleagues about, but which for me are faintly spiritual as well, because they’re just so big.

[38:52] Thank you. Could you tell me now more about the Study Society, beginning with a description of the place that you went to on the Thursdays, Colet House? So, in the past in this interview I’ve asked you to describe say, your childhood home and talk about the way in which it was populated, could you give me a tour of this meeting Martin Redfern Page 54 C1672/29 Track 5 place and then start to fill it in with who’s there and how the meetings happen, what’s being said, what’s the structure, that sort of thing?

Yeah. Colet House is a fascinating place at two levels. It’s a fascinating place as a physical building. It’s sandwiched in an unexpected place between Talgarth Road, the A4, and the Piccadilly and District Lines, literally squashed between the two at Barons Court, just east of Hammersmith. But the building itself was built by some of the, or for some of the Pre-Raphaelite painters in the 1870s, 1880s, as a studio building. So it’s got lovely big north facing windows, it’s got three very large studios. The top studio, which runs the full length of the building, is one of the largest studios in London, I believe. And you can still see the joins in the floorboards where there was a hatchway to lower huge canvases out so that they could get them down. And downstairs either side of the entrance there are big studios, though not that big, and then a whole labyrinth of rooms at the back and in the basement and so on. So it’s architecturally very interesting, historically interesting because of the painters, but also because after that it was where Legat first came to set up a ballet school and where the Royal Ballet School started, frequented by people like Diaghilev, Ninette de Valois, who was a member of the Study Society, also taught the Royal Ballet School there. And Ouspensky came there in, I think, the 1930s to give a series of lectures. I think he even lived in a flat there for a while. It was commandeered during the war by the Admiralty who had great big tanks, I think, where they floated model boats and had scenarios of battles and things in there. Then after the war it was released back and I think was used again a bit as a ballet school, and sometime in about 1956 or 1957 a group of people who had been followers of Ouspensky and who had been charged with taking his work forwards were able to find the money to buy the freehold, I think it cost £17,000, which was a lot of money then, not so much now. I know one of those was Bobby Allen, later Lord Allen, who was a Conservative MP, I think he put up quite a lot of the money. I knew him, in fact he initiated me into meditation. But at that time it was, really it was a sort of secret society almost. Ouspensky had himself worked for a while with Gurdjieff, he split from him eventually and we weren’t allowed to use the G word at Colet House for a number of years. But he had talked about this being an esoteric school, a school of the Fourth Way, where the other ways are the ways of the intellect, the ways of the ascetic, the devotional way. This was the way of the householder, the route to enlightenment for someone still living in the real world holding down a day job, having a family, and so on. And central to that was remembering the self, being aware of your true nature, trying to live in the present moment and not to harbour or express negative emotions. It was a fairly strict sort of place, I believe, then. It was softening when I came and it’s softened more since. In the 1960s when Dr Roles met up with the Shankaracharya in India and received the meditation and was empowered to teach it and also started the series of audiences on the philosophy that underlies it, it was after that that I started coming along. There were actually some other things that were also, and still are, taught there, though I haven’t actually summoned up the courage to do them. One was a system of fairly simple movements, exercises if you like, to music, which were, some of which were collected by Gurdjieff. But then also another thing which interested Ouspensky because he’d seen it in Turkey, was the Dervish, Whirling Dervish ceremony, and that had been banned by Ataturk in, was it 1925, when he took over Turkey, because I think the tekkes, the centres of it, were hotbeds of reactionary religious sentiment, which is what he was trying to get rid of. And he basically closed them all down and outlawed them, a bit like Henry VIII closing the monasteries, and they were allowed to continue only as performances for tourists. And one of the Sheikhs, one of the keepers of the tradition, had Martin Redfern Page 55 C1672/29 Track 5 somehow made contact with somebody at the Study Society, I think through a gardener of one of them or something, there was some connection like that anyway. And he came to London and started teaching the Dervish turning ceremony, and that is still taught today and it’s one of the few places where it’s practised and is preserved in as much as possible the same way as it had been taught since the days of Rumi in the thirteenth century in Turkey. I think the only difference is that women as well as men practise it there. And that is, it’s a religious ceremony but Rumi described it as a ceremony for all religions. And the idea of that is you’re coming face to face with your true nature, and there’s a point at the start where you come face to face with the Sheikh and you come face to face with the person behind you and you bow to them, and you’re bowing to their true nature and seeing your true nature in them. And then you go off and whirl and so on. I haven’t summoned up the courage to learn it myself but I think it is a very transformative experience for those who do it. [47:32] What I started doing was, well, I had a small introductory meeting and a personal interview by a wonderful lady who was then, I think, in her eighties, called Ba Fleming, whose son was a leading light there, who was a stockbroker, Michael Willis Fleming, and an introductory meeting at which again, a senior member, Alan Caiger-Smith, who was a rather well-known potter and the founder of the Aldermaston Pottery, he was talking about meditation and following that there was a little initiation ceremony which is, it’s just given to one person at a time and they promise the Shankaracharya that they give it using the same little ceremony always, which is conducted in Sanskrit. It makes it, I don’t know that the ceremony itself matters, but that there is a ceremony done in exactly the way makes it special. And you can’t really talk about or look for results in meditation, but over the forty years I’ve been doing it, and possibly because of it, I don’t know, I know that I’m a more content, less stressed, happier, more fulfilled human being. But I was also, at that stage if somebody had said, do you want to learn meditation, ooh, I’m not sure about that. What I was interested in was all the more intellectual philosophy that I’d read of Ouspensky. Turned out that wasn’t actually what I wanted so much, but I didn’t know it at the time. And I started going along, they had regular weekly group meetings; small groups of maybe fifteen to twenty people. And the introductory group was taken by Professor Dickie Guyatt, who was actually I think the Rector of the Royal College of Art, another very high-powered amazing person. And we were introduced to the underlying philosophy, both of Ouspensky, but also of Advaita and the Shankaracharya, very close similarities between the two. There were bits of dogma in there, but it was all, you can take it or leave it. What’s important is personal experience and the way that you learn is through asking questions. You don’t have a teacher who gets up there and tells you what to believe, there are no sermons. It’s ask questions, both of people who are taking the group, but also of each other and of yourself and find the answers within, but maybe illustrated by maybe readings from audiences with the Shankaracharya or bits from the writings of Ouspensky or whatever. And that appealed because it was very open, both as to nobody was telling you what to believe, but you were also finding it by looking inwards. And as I’ve grown older and been there longer, I still find that attending the newer groups are the best, because you get the freshest, most original questions.

[51:43] Could you describe the practice of meditation that you learnt?

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Yes, it’s very simple. I believe it’s the same as TM – Transcendental Meditation – where you just sit in a comfortable upright position, you can cross your legs if you like, or not if you don’t, shut your eyes and you’re given a mantra, which is just a word that doesn’t have meaning in your own language, and you just repeat that inwardly. And that basically gives the active mind something to hang on to, which helps you to stop just daydreaming and drifting and worrying about the washing up and whether you’ve got enough petrol in the car and all those little everyday cares. I think some other forms of meditation achieve the same thing by following the breathing, but this one you get away from all the physical sensations. I don’t think it’s meant to produce fireworks or mental things, it’s just meant to still the mind so that you get, if you like, rest at a deeper level than the physical. When you first do it you just do it for ten minutes, that builds up over a few weeks so that you’re doing a half hour twice a day, preferably just after you’ve got up and preferably before you start winding down for the evening and certainly before you start drinking. [laughs] I can’t say I’ve been that regular with it. I still try and do it at least once most days.

[53:47] And who else, other than the people that you’ve mentioned, were around you from the scientific community at the meetings that you went to in the seventies and eighties?

Oh, gosh. I’d really need to look back. There was one very interesting person by the name of Glen Schaefer, who I remember very well. I think he’d trained as a nuclear physicist, he was Canadian, but he had then got into what he called ecological physics and he was by then Professor of Ecological Physics at what was then the Cranfield Institute of Technology, now Cranfield University. And in his academic work he’d developed an amazing system where he could use radar to look at locusts in flight. Not just whole swarms of locusts, but individual locusts, you could see modulated on the radar reflections their wing beats. Then he’d gone even further than that to look at aphids using infrared and he’d shown how there’s not a lot of point in spraying your broad beans because there are aphids coming in from twenty kilometres up in the sky [laughs], you know, the air is full of these things. He had developed a good radar system for predicting and tracking locust swarms and predicting major outbreaks and so on. I remember doing an interview with him about that in which he was rather critical of the system currently in use in Australia where they’d just had an outbreak, I think, and we got some very angry letters from the scientists in Australia about that. So I guess that was, it seemed like really clever, good technology to me, but it was controversial because it wasn’t how they plotted locust infestations at the time. I think it’s a bit more widely accepted now. But he came to Colet House to give a talk and he had obviously got a whole load of esoteric ideas that he’d been thinking about for years and hadn’t been able to talk about, and suddenly he’d found an audience that was interested in that. And he actually came back, I think he did three talks there and each one lasted longer than the one before. I think the final one, we basically had to shut him up after three hours of talking because otherwise people would have missed their last trains home. There’s a connection subsequently that I discovered, it turns out, I didn’t know it at the time, he was a Christian Scientist as well and was very anti-Western medicine and I’m afraid as a result actually died, I think, of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which is a treatable cancer, but he wouldn’t have any treatment for it. But after that, Martin Redfern Page 57 C1672/29 Track 5 through the violinist Paul Robertson, I came to meet John Taverner, the composer, and I’ve worked on, well, one particular work of his called Towards Silence, which was stimulated after a conference at which Paul Robertson interviewed Taverner at the Scientific and Medical Network, which I had set up in fact. And the work, Towards Silence, describes the four levels of consciousness as approaching death, but also as described in the Vedanta scriptures in India, so it all linked up. But it linked up even more, because Lady Taverner, Maryanna, it turned out, is Rupert Sheldrake’s daughter - not Rupert Sheldrake, sorry - is Glen Schaefer’s daughter. And just to add another really weird coincidence to that, Paul Robertson’s mother finally died a few years ago at the age of about ninety-seven and gave her body to medical students. Maryanna Taverner was doing a medical degree and it turned out that the body that she had been studying was Paul Robertson’s mum.

[58:53] How had Bridget become involved in the group?

Joining the Study Society, the Society for Study of Normal Psychology didn’t advertise. There’s a couple of sister organisations that all teach the same meditation and have some of the same contacts in India, but they’ve gone down slightly different routes. One is called the School of Meditation and the other is the School of Economic Science. They’re slightly different and completely independent. But those two both advertise, advertise on the tubes and now of course a lot on the internet and so on as well. In those days Colet House didn’t advertise, it was thought that if it was right for you, you would find it. That basically meant that the only people who came along were people who came along at personal recommendation. I came along at Bridget’s recommendation. She came along, now she was introduced I think by Ann Brunsdon, who as it happens, was the daughter of the person who wrote The Borrowers, but that’s neither here nor there. Ann, who is a lovely friend still, was a studio manager at the BBC, as were a couple of other friends. So there was a little group of people who through word of mouth had heard about it through World Service. We were all colleagues there. There was a slightly unfortunate incident when I was courting Bridget, and I’d recently learnt the meditation, we would slip away between programme commitments, if we had a half hour gap, we would slip away to meditate at the right time of day and so on. And on one occasion we went into a studio that we knew wouldn’t be in use and we found a couple of other colleagues, well let’s say they weren’t meditating, but they were courting. So we hastily withdrew and didn’t mention their names ever to anyone, but somehow it got out that two people had been caught in a compromising position in this small studio, but unfortunately the rumour got out that it was us that had been caught there. [laughs] Nothing came of it, but it was a little reputation that, I don’t know, I don’t think it did us any harm. But yes, so that’s how I came there. But I met so many interesting people who are still very close friends there, and some of whom, does tend to have a slightly elderly population, who are no longer with us. I might mention specifically among those William Anderson. I think I mentioned him briefly before, poet and historian, and a lovely, lovely man. Written a number of books, he won a Silver Pen award for his book, Dante the Maker. He also wrote a book about the Green Man. If you’ve come across the Green Man, he’s an archetype who comes up, actually not only in Western culture, but is most strongly represented as a green man in Western culture; you see him in pub signs, you see him in May Day parades. You also see him in the form of Cernunnos the hunter back in sort of Neolithic mythology. You see him in figureheading various environmental initiatives today. He appears in medieval churches peering from carved foliage. He even Martin Redfern Page 58 C1672/29 Track 5 appears in some of the plasterwork in the Royal Society. You don’t notice him until you start looking for him. But William Anderson wrote a wonderful book about him and I managed to place on World Service a feature about that and I travelled around a number of churches and ancient groves in churchyards, and indeed to Chartres Cathedral with Bill, making that programme, which was, I would say possibly one of the most spiritual programmes I managed to make, even though it wasn’t overtly religious, but it touched very much on that and the culmination of it is in Chartres Cathedral which has so much hidden esoteric symbolism in it. And if the line running from west to east is the line of now, the present moment with at one end Christ sitting in judgement over the west door and at the east end the high altar, running from north to south in the north porch you see a Green Man giving rise to foliage which is encircling everything, giving rise at the beginning of time to creation. And in the south porch you see three Green Men as the fruits of creation, one with oak leaves for wisdom, one with vine leaves for fruitfulness, one with acanthus leaves for, I can’t quite remember what, but although this is one of the pinnacles of Christian architecture, here is this even more ancient symbolism running through it and not being in any way in conflict with it. And that again is something which appeals to me very much, that spiritual traditions need not be in conflict with each other, the same themes run through them all. How did I get there?

[1:06:01] We were talking about other scientists at the Study Society and about Bridget’s, the history of Bridget’s involvement with it, the tendency for people to come in through…

Yes. So yeah, William Anderson was one of the remarkable people who I met through that, and in fact he then, the Green Man was a book that got in his way and had to be written, he said, before he could write the book that he was thinking he was going to write, which was about creativity, both from the view of the artist, but also of the audience and how the two are part of the same thing, and he finally wrote that under the title, The Face of Glory. And as it happens, I reviewed that book for World Service, we had a little review slot that we could do. My review, he developed throat cancer and he actually died whilst my review was going out, though I hope not because of it. [laughs] But yeah, he was a leading light at the Study Society and heavily involved in it. There were a lot of very remarkable people who came to give talks and presentations there, including for example, Rupert Sheldrake, Colin Renfrew came to give a talk there, as you know, Lord Renfrew, archaeologist, fascinating man. We’ve had a lot of the people you’ve interviewed actually, Denis Alexander there. I don’t think Russell Stannard ever has, I think we missed out there. Paul Davies, he’s another person whose life has touched on mine on various occasions. I knew him first when he was a young mathematician at King’s College, London and then having failed to get a professorship at Oxford or Cambridge he became Professor of Physics at Newcastle, and I got him to present a number of programmes for me, including a couple about the nature of time, which is another thing that fascinates me. He then went off to Adelaide University and he’s someone who is a really good physicist but he’s prepared to ask the big questions and write popular books with the word ‘God’ in the title, even though they’re about good straight physics. In a slightly strange twist, after my marriage to Bridget broke up, I had a girlfriend called Pauline who I met at the BBC and whose long desire was to move to Australia and she got the chance of residency and went out to Sydney and I went out and spent some long service leave out there for a couple of months in 2001 with her. And towards the end of that time, Paul Davies, Martin Redfern Page 59 C1672/29 Track 5 who knew us both for different reasons, turned up on the doorstep saying could he have a bed for a few nights because he’d split up with his wife. And so of course we did and I went back to London thinking that I might one of these days go back out to Australia and continue the relationship with Pauline. But then a few months later she phoned up and said that actually he’d more than moved in, and they are now very happily married and living in Arizona, where he is Professor and Director of a centre he calls Beyond, which is centred on all the big questions. And she has some sort of professorship in science communication. And indeed, they’re coming to see us in a few weeks’ time, so we’re still on good terms. But that’s a little twist. But I’m fascinated, you know, I’m really interested in the same things he writes books about and I’ve been fortunate to be able to make a number of programmes with him about various aspects of that. And of course now he’s much more interested in astrobiology, which is another frontier area for the big questions, if you like, the world finally catching up with some aspects of Fred Hoyle.

[1:10:52] Did other people in the radio Science Unit or other people in BBC Radio at the time know about your membership of the Study Society and your activities in it?

Not very much, it’s not something I talked very widely about. I mean obviously there were other people at the BBC who were also members. I think generally they knew that I practised meditation, that seemed a reasonably safe thing to confess to. I didn’t really talk about the underlying philosophy with people at the BBC very much, no. Though through the Study Society and through Peter Fenwick in particular, I came to hear of another organisation, the Scientific and Medical Network, which is more closely allied to science, it doesn’t follow any particular creed or dogma or anything, but it’s, as an organisation, it’s a network of, primarily of scientists and doctors and, or at least people who have an informed interest in science and medicine, but who think that science is right, it has good answers as far as it asks the right questions, but it isn’t a complete explanation of the world, that materialism and reductionism are only going to answer materialistic or reductionist questions and that there might be more to the universe than the material, if you like. So that’s a larger organisation, it doesn’t have a premises like the Study Society, although actually its office, thanks to a bit of work on my behalf, is now based at Colet House, but that’s just a little office. What it does do is have a number of conferences, usually two or three residential conferences a year, one that has been running now for forty years, called Mystics and Scientists, just before or after Easter, depending on when Easter comes in any year, just a residential three-day conference. And that’s another place where all sorts of interesting scientists can come and put their head just gently above the parapet, as it were, and talk about spirituality and the big questions. There’s another biennial conference that tends to happen in August or September called Beyond the Brain, which, as its name suggests, investigates consciousness and experience and asks whether it is actually limited to brain function. Is it, what the people I call, ‘nothing buterers’, would say nothing but, particular neurones firing in a particular complex way, or is there something to human existence and to consciousness which is not tied exclusively to the brain. So that explores some of these difficult questions, these controversial questions. By being called the Scientific and Medical Network, that’s a name that I could use to my colleagues, even the reductionist ones. I needn’t tell them that the conference was actually called Mystics and Scientists, I could say well, I’ve been off to a Martin Redfern Page 60 C1672/29 Track 5

Scientific and Medical Network conference and we had a really interesting speaker and I’d like to interview her for Discovery, and so far, so good.

[1:15:20] When was it that you think Peter Fenwick got you involved in this group?

I think the first meeting of theirs that I went to, before I actually joined, because I was pretty impoverished in those days and they wanted a subscription and the residential conferences were quite expensive to attend, they had in those days a May Dialogue, which was just a day meeting on a Saturday, in those days I think held at Regent College, or Bedford College as it was called then, in Regent’s Park. And the first one I went to was in about 1986 or 7 and the speaker was Ilya Prigogine, the Belgian chemist, which was very interesting. Then later when I became more involved in the Study Society and William Anderson was trying to push the science input into the Study Society, they actually paid my attendance fee to attend the first Beyond the Brain meeting, which was at St John’s College, Cambridge. That must have been in 1993, I should think, maybe ’91. I know they’re odd years, so it can’t have been ’92. Nowadays at those meetings we get maybe a hundred, if we’re lucky 120 people. That first one, it was at St John’s, Cambridge and there was nothing like it at the time and so there was a huge hunger for it. I think it was a sell-out at 350 people. There were some amazing speakers and it was quite a revelation to me. I remember one of the speakers was Charlie Tart from Stanford. Willis Harman who was then the President of an organisation called the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which was a bit like the Scientific and Medical Network in the United States. Not sure if Rupert Sheldrake spoke at that. There was, Peter Fenwick was speaking on near-death experiences with Sue Blackmore, who is one of these wonderful people who, a bit like me, is very sceptical of some of the explanations of some of them but can’t help but be interested in them, nonetheless. But I just remember what a dynamic conference it was. I didn’t actually, I think I, I suppose it was about then that I did join the Network as an ordinary member, but then when Peter Fenwick stood down as chair of it, the then chair who was Chris Clarke, who you’ve interviewed, asked if I would like to come on to the board of directors of it, or what was at that stage called the Council. It was just transitioning from being a society that didn’t have limited liability, therefore as Council we’d all be personally liable if anybody sued us, into becoming a registered charity and a company limited by guarantee, which gave us a little bit of protection. So I joined at about that time, which was 2002, I remember, and I remained as a director until earlier this year, 2016.

[1:19:14] When you said that the meetings of the Medical and Scientific Network were an opportunity for scientists, certain scientists to stick their head over the parapet, is that how they discussed that experience with each other, or I mean do you have memories of scientists attending those meetings talking about it as a safe place where they could express interests in spirituality that they had to suppress in mainstream science, which is what you seem to imply by that phrase, stick your head over…

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Yes. I think that was one of the main reasons for the founding of the network actually, to give a safe space where people could discuss these ideas and, you know, without fear of losing their academic credibility and position.

And when you say that William Anderson at one point was trying to increase the scientific input into the Study Society, could you expand on that?

And I think before him Dr Roles had done that. They wanted, they felt that the sort of study of the inner nature of human beings, of consciousness, of the real self, could be informed by some of the latest advances in science. I know Dr Roles got quite excited about the work of Roger Sperry when he started talking about the hemispheres and how language and factual thinking and so on takes place in a right-handed person predominantly in the left hemisphere, whereas the right hemisphere is more to do with spatial awareness, emotional intuition, that sort of thing. I think his interest in that is that in Western society he felt that the hemispheres were a bit out of kilter, that the left hemisphere was overly dominant and hence we were much more dominated by language and intellectual thought and less by intuition and spatial awareness and emotional thoughts and so on. And what can we do to bring those two back into better balance. It’s something that’s been taken a lot further more recently in a book called The Master and His Emissary by… oh dear, I’m having these senior moments. Iain McGilchrist, who has spoken both at the Study Society and the Scientific and Medical Network, I hasten to add. He was also very interested, well, there were various books that came out which Dr Roles would speak about. In addition to the small group meetings which I’ve mentioned, which in my case I went to every Thursday, most Mondays during term time – it stuck to more or less university term times and still does – there would be what was termed a large Monday meeting, which Dr Roles himself would take and would be in the top studio, and in those days would have sixty or a hundred people at it. And he sometimes would talk about a book that he’d read that he felt would inform our work. Among those that he highlighted, there was The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra, who I don’t think has spoken at the Study Society but has spoken at the Scientific and Medical Network, indeed the first Mystics and Scientists, and at least by satellite link or Skype, is going to speak at the 2017 one, which is the anniversary meeting. Then there was one of the first popular books about near-death experiences, Life After Life by Raymond Moody, brought the idea of near-death experiences and recurrence into mainstream thought a bit, that was another one he picked up on. And Rupert Sheldrake’s New Science of Life. All things which are not necessarily to be taken at literal face value, just as I think religious scriptures aren’t necessarily to be taken at literal face value in my opinion, but which inform thought and make you think differently about things and make you start questioning some of the assumptions that we find in the textbooks.

[1:25:00] Where did you live with Bridget during the period after she returns? We’ve left this relationship with her coming back to the UK, living in a tower block and you attempting to cheer her up by planting the window boxes. But could you tell the story in as much detail as possible of the development of the relationship past that point?

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Yes. My third year at university I’d moved to a flat in Muswell Hill which I shared with three other student colleagues in stage committee. I carried on living there for the next couple of years whilst I first met Bridget, but then at about the same time as she was going off to Tasmania, my grandfather had died and left me a little bit of money and I thought just about enough to start buying my first house, so I’d started looking for flats, but had to go downmarket across the North Circular to Friern Barnet to buy a little thirties semi. And that’s where I was living when she came back and when we got married we both loved the countryside and really wanted to get out of London. We looked at one or two pretty, pretty cottages in Hertfordshire, but either they were really tiny or we couldn’t afford them, or both. So we started looking out in this direction in north Kent, which of course was my homeland, and we found what had been a pair of agricultural labourers’ cottages between the villages of Hoo and High Halstow, backing on to a council sports field, but with a bit of unadopted woodland at the back and half an acre of garden and fields just over the road and so on, so reasonably rural and with a nice big garden and a nice timbered dining room, and we bought that and moved in in 1982. And lived there really very happily for the next dozen or so years. By 1995, however, I think I was by this stage deputy editor of the World Service Science Unit. I was finding that pretty stressful, I really wanted just to produce science programmes and there was, under John Birt and others, there was, you know, a lot more managerial stuff to do, a lot more rota-ing of producers, stretching of budgets, plus we were doing a lot more topical stuff into news, so I had to be there for a nine o’clock news planning meeting every morning and often didn’t get home until after nine o’clock at night, I was getting pretty stressed. And at about that time, in fact on her birthday in March ’95, Bridget confided in me that she had fallen in love with somebody else and which had not come to anything physical, but they were speaking on the phone while I was out at work every day and exchanging haikus and what was I going to do about it. I didn’t quite feel it was my role to do something about that, but that triggered, I suppose depression. Well, my doctor diagnosed it as depression and suggested that I should have a few weeks off work as sick leave, which I did take, and we went on a holiday to distant relatives who ran a bed and breakfast in south Devon. And a couple of other friends went with us and basically Bridget and the friends would go off and do one thing, she was painting and things, and I just wanted to walk. I just walked the coast paths, I took our Alsatian dog, I realise I was probably trying to run away from something, like the present situation, and I didn’t really resolve it. We went for counselling, the BBC supported some counselling sessions, which started to delve into Bridget’s background and her difficult relationship with her father, she didn’t like going there and wanted to stop those and we started going to a different counsellor. At this stage Bridget was herself in early stages of training to be a counsellor herself and she got on well with this counsellor, but the counsellor basically seemed to be, to me, suggesting that we should split up, getting me to say that that’s what I wanted. I moved out and came here and lived with my parents for a few weeks. And then got together with Pauline, who’s since married Paul Davies, and moved in with her in Cheam and we got divorced. I made a couple of attempts early on in that to come back and it didn’t work. The relationship had gone on, Bridget was nearly twelve years older than me and it had become not a relationship between two lovers, but a relationship between a parent and a naughty child, I felt like the naughty child and I felt told to go away, so I did. And I found that very, very difficult. I mean I was helped through it by Pauline, but that was a rebound, I realise now, and we were considerably unsuited to each other, long term, not least her desire to live in a hot desert-like country. [laughs] And I felt very bad for Robin, our son, who by this stage was eleven, or twelve. I discussed with his teacher – we’d had a, Bridget and I had had a bit of an argument over his school because he’d started Martin Redfern Page 63 C1672/29 Track 5 off going to my old school, King’s School, Rochester, he was very happy in the pre-prep there, because that was just friendly playing and so on, then when he went up into the prep school, the school had obviously changed since my day when it was a very easy-going school academically with lots of chance to flourish at whatever you liked, it had become much more academically high-powered, I think, and in the prep school at the age of eight he was coming home, when we said, oh why don’t you do a painting, on a rainy day, he said, I’m no good at painting. And it turned out that at the age of eight the art teacher had said he could only draw in black and white until he’d mastered perspective. I don’t think that’s something that it’s right to tell an eight year old. He used to love singing but he’d stopped singing. Why aren’t you singing any more? Oh, I’m no good at singing. Who says that? Oh, my music teacher. You know. Bridget, I think rightly, saw red at this, demanded a chance to come and talk to his class teacher, and instead of just having the class teacher they’d lined up the headmaster and the head of studies and the class teacher, who came in late in sports shorts from the playing field and basically we were told that we were very lucky that they were prepared to educate our son because he wasn’t academically terribly bright. So, and this upset my parents a lot, because they’d wanted him to go to my old school and sing in the choir and all that. So we started looking around for something better and Bridget was very persistent at this and she found a lovely little Steiner school near Canterbury, Perry Court, which was absolutely right for Robin. We took him down there, when you go down for an interview they’re interviewing you to see if he’s right for them and you’re interviewing them to see if they’re right for him, and while you’re doing that he would join in with the class that he would be joining for that morning. And it happened that that morning they were making cement and building a brick wall, and that was completely up his street, he’s an engineer now. And it turned out that with the Steiner school the class teacher follows the same people through as they go up the school for eight years, so he really gets to know them and knows what they’ll try and get away with and how to encourage them. It’s very much done by encouragement; lots of carrots, no sticks. They don’t take any exams until it’s mock O levels or mock GCSEs. They take an extra year to get to that stage, they do a lot more art and yes, there’s the sort of caricature of painting on wet paper, which they do a lot of, but going back to what we were saying earlier, there’s a lot more right hemisphere development and that at that stage was just right for Robin. But of course a school near Canterbury when we were living this side of Rochester, that meant forty miles each way to deliver him, forty miles each way to bring him back, going by car. Or putting him on a train to Faversham and a school bus to pick him up from Faversham station. It was taxing on, well, on Bridget as well as on him, so I think that contributed to the break-up. But his class teacher who was also one of the reasons why we went for that school, was a very good teacher and also, by his own training a scientist and mathematician and aeronautical engineer and, you know, encouraged all the things that Robin was very good at, or very interested in. I asked him, when our marriage was breaking up, what should I do, how badly was it going to affect Robin, and he basically said, well if you’ve got to split up, do so now, it will upset him a lot more if you hang on together and then split up when he’s sixteen, he’ll cope with it okay at the age of twelve. I sort of slightly regarded that as permission. I was sorry that we split up. We’re on very good terms again now. Sadly, now she’s developing both Alzheimer’s, dementia and has terminal lung cancer and I don’t think has many more years for this planet. But my new wife is very patient and very supportive and, you know, we’re on good terms. Bridget comes, or certainly last year came for Christmas and I’m pleased to say that we’re still very close friends.

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[1:38:10] Could you tell me about time spent with your son, in the same way that I asked you about your memories of time spent with your father when you were a child, what memories do you have of time spent with him, as a child, I mean before he went to school and after?

Yeah. Well, of course he, like me, was an only child. I mean Bridget has a son who’s sixteen years older than him. No, not sixteen. Fourteen years older than him, and who to me is more like the younger brother I never had. That’s Jeremy, I get on with him extremely well, he has a young family of his own now and he’s Professor of Psychiatry at Cardiff University. But in practical terms Robin is an only child. Jeremy was off at boarding school by then, and then university. I am just so lucky to have a son as well-rounded and sensible as Robin. He was perfectly capable of amusing himself, he would always, you know, it was lucky that we had woods and garden and fields he would go off with the dog, he would have friends round often, much more often than I used to. Then he’d be off building treehouses and so on. He was very into Lego and particularly Technic Lego, far above the age that it said on the box. You know, age eight we’d be getting him the advanced Technic Lego suitable for twelve to fourteen. It was always quite nice to lie in a bit at the weekends and he would be up quite happily playing with his Lego and eventually sort of slip a little note under the door asking if we’d like to get up, or attempt to make us a cup of tea or something. And one morning he came in with this amazing Lego model of a ship, really good. And I sort of said, that’s really good, I didn’t see that in the instructions book. And he said, most indignantly, ‘I did not do it by extruction, I did it by brain’. So we knew at that point that he was going to go on and be an engineer. Thanks to, I think, having the gentleness at the early stages of a Steiner education, that meant that possibly slight dyslexia didn’t stand in his way significantly, he went on to get lots of A grades at GCSE, then went to a very good public school, St Edmund’s, Canterbury, to do his A levels where he got straight As. Went on to Surrey University and did engineering and mechanical engineering and got a distinction. And that was a course where, it was a four-year course, and the third year you spend in industry. And he worked for a renewable energy consultancy in Bristol for that year and in his fourth year he emailed the person who’d been his supervisor during that year, I think it literally said, ‘Have you got any good jobs going?’ and the reply came back, ‘When can you start?’ And, well, actually he was with that firm until earlier this year, he’s now – that firm’s been taken over by a big multinational – and a group of them have moved out and started up a new start-up engineering consultancy, so he’s still working on offshore windfarms, but with a small company that he has a stake in now. But that wasn’t actually quite what you asked.

No, no, that’s fine, thank you.

[end of track 5] Martin Redfern DRAFT Page 65 C1672/29 Track 6

[Track 6]

So at the moment we’re in the dining room of the old family home. You’ll notice the parquet floors of oak, which my father was particularly fond of and which got into a pretty bad state, but we’ve just been down on our hands and knees doing a lot of sanding and polishing, so they’ve come up rather nicely now. And if we go through the hallway and up the stairs, which is probably completely banned nowadays because it’s some sort of tropical hardwood, but it looks really nice. And I’m going to risk great personal embarrassment by taking you into a very untidy room, which was actually my childhood bedroom. Avoiding these boxes and large piles of recording tape, this room, which is essentially now a storeroom, doesn’t even have a bed in it because there isn’t room, partly because of all this stuff which is bought from the Bush House auction when World Service moved out of Bush House and they auctioned off a lot of the equipment, so there’s a reel-to-reel tape recorder, a rack of all sorts of interesting equipment that will play practically every known recording medium. The pair of rather nice studio speakers. But behind all these piles and boxes and so on are all these wooden trays, built by my grandfather, containing my childhood fossil collection. I haven’t really touched or even opened these drawers for about thirty-five or forty years. Just picking one at random. That I think is from the Dorset coast, from Kimmeridge, and I think it’s a small fossil lobster. I’ve outlined it in white because it’s pretty hard to see, but yeah, I think that was… or maybe a shrimp anyway. [laughs]

Is there an order?

Yes. It’s basically chronological order; I managed to expand into the room next door, so the tertiary fossils, the last sixty-five million years, is in another set of these in the next room. We start at the top of this one with the Mesozoic, with the chalk, so that one is Cretaceous brachiopods and molluscs. Above it is Cretaceous echinoderms, sea urchins. Then we get down into Jurassic and the Kimmeridgian and ammonites. Over, further on the right-hand side we get down into the Paleozoic, with trilobites from Shropshire, mostly little invertebrate fossils. I did have lots of marine reptiles here, found partly by me, but mainly by another friend and they’ve all gone off to a museum in Kimmeridge now. The ten foot long ichthyosaur and the large bits of plesiosaur have departed and gone home again. But this is the sort of chaos I’ve got to sort out if we’re ever going to move out of this house; boxes full of thirty-five millimetre coloured slides there, taken on various holidays with my parents during my teenage years. Boxes full of cassettes and digital tapes of past programmes. Up in the loft there’s another forty boxes of reel-to-reel tapes of past programmes. As you see, I have a bit of a hoarding issue.

What else in the room is recognisable from childhood?

Well, I suppose one of the things you notice is the hideous colour that I painted it in my teenage years. I think the woodwork is what they called ‘Hot Sahara’, and then there’s that rather dark yellowy-brown on that wall, that was, I think very trendy in the late sixties, early seventies. The cupboard there, all those rolled up things down there are brass rubbings, again, done in teenage years. Bits of old photographic equipment. My old diaries from the 1970s up there. Martin Redfern DRAFT Page 66 C1672/29 Track 6

The photographic equipment down here, was this used to take the photos that are those slides on the family…

Yes. I bought my first, well, my father always encouraged me in photography. I got, in fact I think it might even be sitting there in the cupboard, is it? Yes. That was his camera when he was a young lad, that is a 1920s or thirties Zeiss folding front camera. A Zeiss Icon, takes 120 size square prints. After that I bought my first single lens reflex camera while I was at school and running the school photographic club. Then for my twenty- first birthday my father paid for that one, which we got second-hand and that is an original Nikon F Photomic, which took a lot of the slides up there. I got a slightly more modern Nikon after that. Actually, that is here, that’s the F3, which is still my best film camera. Of course nowadays I take practically everything on digital, but I’ve stuck with Nikon because I’ve got all the lenses for it there, although some of those I think I’m going to sell off now because I haven’t used some of those for decades.

And we’ve got a coin collector’s album there, which pays reference to some of the things you were saying about the collecting of coins with your father.

Yes. Now the interesting coins actually aren’t in there, they’re hidden away so that if we get broken into nobody’s going to pinch them. Those are just some actually that my ninety-something year old cousin kept for me, they’re just a series of old currency pennies from about eighteen something or other to when decimal coinage came in in 1968, was it? I think I remember speaking in a school debating society and I was speaking against decimal coinage because I rather liked pounds, shillings and pence. [laughs]

What’s likely to be on these reels of tape out here?

Actually that lot, they’re ones I’m selling on eBay, they’re ones that I’ve built up over the years when reel-to- reel tape was my best source of good quality music. And so I would copy records, you know, vinyl records on to tape, because tape didn’t get scratched. So most of those are just, well, I shouldn’t confess to this, but the BBC was a convenient source of blank tape and I’ve decided now I don’t listen to music off that, I listen to it all off CD, so I should find somebody who wants those. But up in the loft there are dozens and dozens of reels of programme tapes and the interviews that went into programmes. And a lot of these box files contain either cassettes that in the days when we were using the Sony Walkman Professional for our interviews, or subsequently DAT tapes, Digital Audio Tapes, of the raw interviews that I did on my travels around the world for some of the more exciting series. I tended not so much to keep the interviews that we just did in Bush House for regular weekly programmes, we’d maybe keep a copy of the final programme, but not the original interview. Most of these are when I was doing a special feature and I’d be travelling around the States interviewing interesting astronomers and so on and they seemed worth keeping.

And they are the full interviews which were used for…

Martin Redfern DRAFT Page 67 C1672/29 Track 6

Those are the original unedited… we would record on cassette or subsequently DAT, and then copy across to reel-to-reel tape and do the editing on the reel-to-reel tape, or subsequently on the computer on digital. But the original interviews that way remain untouched.

[end of track 6]

Martin Redfern Page 68 C1672/29 Track 7

[Track 7]

About the time that you joined the Study Society, The Selfish Gene was published, and I wondered whether that was taken up in any way by the Science Unit or perhaps by you in particular?

Yes, when did that actually come out? I think that must have come out before I joined the Science Unit. I remember reading it and like so much orthodox science, it’s very good as far as it goes. For me, it doesn’t explain everything, but in as far as it goes, it’s really good and Richard Dawkins I think is a very good writer. He tells a story and he’s very good at picking a good metaphor. Most of his book titles are metaphors and they’re mostly really good metaphors, but once he’s worked through that metaphor, okay, now what?

Thank you. And you talked earlier about your first series, which was an attempt to sort of extend science, the series of…

Behind the Universe.

Behind the Universe, yes, four interviews and another four. Could you then take us on from that to cover other broadly science-religion work that you did at the BBC?

Yes. I mean it was always a little bit extracurricular, if you like. You know, my paid job was reporting on science and inasmuch as science continued to be materialist and reductionist, that’s basically what I was given to report on. As I’ve already said, I tended to, within that, to go for the big questions, hence a developing interest in cosmology, particularly, and in human origins and in neuroscience, which seemed to be the biggest frontiers. And those one could handle perfectly well in conventional science programmes without ruffling too many feathers. None of that actually involved using the G word, God, or indeed the R word, religion. In those days basically everything you did you made within the unit that you worked for. It was only a little bit later that I was able to do that four-part series with the religion department. That was simply about the dialogue between science and religion, such as there is, and a lot of the material that we used for that, we went to a conference at Harvard that was one of a series, which I think was sponsored by the Templeton Foundation in conjunction with the triple AS, American Association for the Advancement of Science. I know one of the organisers of that was Philip Clayton. After that, I’m trying to remember what we called that one. I think I didn’t like the title, that’s right, the title was given to me, which was Sacred Showdown, which wouldn’t have been my choice. [04:09] I did another one a couple of years after that about – this was just two programmes – that was unusual in that it was programmes that I was asked to make by the commissioner, rather than an idea that I’d come up with and offered. And World Service commissioning said would you make a programme about the conflict between creationism and evolution. And I thought how am I going to do that, I want to be fair, I want to give a chance to both sides, as it were, inasmuch as this is two sides, but also I’m a science journalist, I have a certain reputation in science and also actually, I am perfectly happy with the basic idea of natural selection and evolution and certainly with the idea that the earth is four point something billion years old. I’m not going to feel right about Martin Redfern Page 69 C1672/29 Track 7 giving equal time to a Young Earth creationist, for instance, and letting them say their bit unquestioned if I’m presenting it. So how else can I do it? And after a bit of thought I came up with the idea of not presenting it myself and not getting a presenter to present the whole thing, but basically giving one of the programmes as sort of presenter to a creationist, but not giving them the complete freedom just to talk to their pals, taking them through a series of interviews that would include their pals, creationists with somewhat different views from themselves and people with downright opposite views to themselves, and taking a champion of evolutionary biology and putting them through a similar sequence. It was quite clear that these debates are much more overt and indeed polarised in the USA, so we did most of the recording there. And for our creationist we took, what was his name, Henry Morris III, who was successor to his father, the first, who founded the… oh dear, Institute of Creation… anyway. And I think he wasn’t necessarily a Young Earth creationist but was very definitely a creationist, and we took him to a Darwin Day event, we took him to interview a lady in Utah who was a genetics professor but who was very religious. In the other programme we gave the microphone to Eugenie Scott, who was the head of the Center for Science Education in California, which is the organisation that has done most to battle against the teaching of creationism in US schools. And I took her, among other places, to Ken Ham’s new museum on creation in, where is it, in Kentucky isn’t it, somewhere? Where they have animatronic dinosaurs and cavemen in the same diorama, and a scale model of Noah’s Ark, and so on. And so we made them jump through these various hoops and have a chance to talk to people who were generally in agreement with them. I fell slightly foul of Richard Dawkins because he agreed to talk to Genie Scott, and then I used a clip from that interview in the other programme, which had Henry Morris introducing him. And he phoned me up at home on a Sunday morning saying how dare you put me in next to that impossible man, was a bit angry about that. And then at the end we brought the two of them together at the Grand Canyon. I like scenery in radio, you can bring it alive. And Genie Scott was pointing out, you know, that layer which is dated to however hundred million years ago and clearly evidence for windblown desert conditions and so on, and Henry Morris was saying, oh it’s the cataclysmic flood that carved this out as a demonstration of the wrath of God against the sins of mankind. And it was very gentlemanly, but I think it was quite revealing of their beliefs. And actually Henry Morris got most agitated when he was interviewing, what’s her name? Margaret Thorne, I think, at Utah, who was, who is very strongly Christian, but believes in old earth and evolution. So it was actually a theological argument that – rather than a scientific one – that became the most heated. But yeah, that was an interesting programme. [10:56] I mentioned, not on the tape, there were a couple of other, well, I did a series of discussion programmes in the early nineties, late eighties, early nineties, called A Question of Science. They were forty-five minute discussion programmes, and at least one of those centred on science and religion and I remember we managed to get Richard Dawkins and John Habgood, then Archbishop of York, together around a table. And there was one point where Richard Dawkins felt he was losing the argument and banged on the table and said, ‘But I just don’t believe this!’ To which the Archbishop said, ‘Ah, so it does come down to belief, I rest my case’. Moments like that, you know, not necessarily that I share the beliefs of the Archbishop of York, but I think that sort of theologian can be much more open-minded than the Dawkins sort of scientist. And again, I pick my theologians, you know. I would be much more religious if I could have people like Keith Ward as my theologian, you know, former Regis Professor of Divinity at Oxford and shock horror, actually a philosopher by background. And obviously a deeply religious man, but a man who’s prepared to open his mind to other Martin Redfern Page 70 C1672/29 Track 7 religions, to the possibility that his particular religion might be wrong in some respects. You know, genuinely enquiring and genuinely decent guy. How did I get him into a programme? Oh yes, I got him into a programme on the anthropic principle, which is something that I was able to do, actually largely thanks to a journalism fellowship, which I could talk about if you like.

[13:25] I’d been talking actually with Paul Davies about ways that I might be able to be more involved with some of the things that the Templeton Foundation sponsor. I’d managed to make programmes out of one or two conferences like the Harvard one I mentioned earlier, and one that I think preceded that, that took place in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington. Both of which were sponsored by Templeton. And then, I think at this stage Paul Davies was a trustee of the Foundation and had a small hand in getting approval for a scheme whereby science and/or religion journalists could take a couple of months off from their day jobs and have a fellowship to come to Cambridge for an initial two weeks where they’d be given seminars with some of the best minds in the science and religion debate. They then go off and work on their own projects for a few weeks and then come together for another week in Cambridge to share the results of those projects and have a few more talks. I was fortunate enough to be selected as one of the two Brits to join eight people from the US on the first year of that in 2005, and it was absolutely wonderful. You know, we got, well, the leaders of it included Russell Stannard and Fraser Watts and Julia Vitullo-Martin from the States, and we had some very interesting speakers that actually included Richard Dawkins, along with Simon Conway Morris, John Barrow, many, many interesting people. Charles Townes, the man who invented the laser, and who’d just won the Templeton Prize, I think, that year. And actually I became an adviser to that scheme for the subsequent years and by dint of providing the sound system and recording all the seminars I managed to get to most of them in subsequent years as well. I wasn’t able to take the time off to do all of them, and indeed my son was recording engineer for a couple of them, which I think exposed him to some very interesting talks. But the project that I chose to do in that was about the anthropic principle and the idea that the constants of physics, for which we know no real fundamental reason why they should have to have the values that they do, if they didn’t have the values that they do we wouldn’t be here to marvel at them, so are we in some way special, is the universe designed for us, or is there a multitude of universes, such that of course the one that we select to observe is the one that gives rise to us. Or is it in some way a put-up job. And following that I was able to use the material that I’d collected in that, enhanced with a little bit more for programmes for World Service, for Radio 4, and for Australian ABC Radio National.

[17:28] Could you say more about the involvement of Richard Dawkins in that scheme, including something that you mentioned off the recording, Simon Conway Morris’s input to it?

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Yes. Richard Dawkins came along as one of the guest speakers in that first year and he was clearly very interested in what was going on. I think it was at the stage where he was just at the early stages of doing a series on science and religion for Channel 4, in which basically he set out to prove that science was everything and religion was pretty next to nothing. But in doing that series I think he’d realised that he knew very little about the religion side of the debate and so he was coming along partly out of interest for that. And the talk following his, I think it was, was Simon Conway Morris, and if you want a vigorous argument get two evolutionary biologists together of slightly different views and [laughs] they will tear each other’s eyes out. But Simon Conway Morris, who is a palaeontologist and supports, as far as I know, completely the idea of natural selection and the sequence of evolution and so on, but has come to the conclusion that something like humans is an inevitable product of evolution, which is a sort of biological take on the anthropic principle in a way, and not one that Dawkins really shared, so he did some quite vigorous cross-questioning. It was meant to be questions from the journalists, but Richard Dawkins joined in with it, and indeed asked if he could come back for some of the talks in the subsequent week and, I remember, listened with interest to a talk by the mathematician John Barrow and cross-questioned him quite vigorously, again on some of the anthropic arguments particularly.

Would you remember the detail of his questioning of Simon Conway Morris or is that asking…

I ought to, and I was… some of the sessions I recorded, but because I, on that occasion I’d only gone with very limited interview equipment, I could record the talks but not the discussions and sadly I didn’t record that part of the discussion. I think it was fairly technical aspects of it, but there was a bit of heckling from the back row, put it that way.

[20:33] Thank you. If I can just follow up some things on things that you’ve recently said. Why was it then, do you think, that you were asked to produce the programme on creationism and evolution by the, did you say commissioning editor?

Yes.

When was it and why do you think it was then that…

I think that was probably because they knew I’d had the Templeton Fellowship, and so they knew that I was interested in the science-religion debate. And I imagine, well, I’m pretty sure that the science commissioner would have spoken to my editor, who was by then Deborah Cohen, we’d joined, World Service and the Radio 4 Units had merged by then, and she was well aware that I had interests in that direction.

But I wonder why, this seems to be the first time you’re asked to make a programme about something called the science-religion debate, is there a reason why by this time? So this is post-1995, why…

Post-2005. Martin Redfern Page 72 C1672/29 Track 7

Okay, okay, right. I mean did it take that long for something like a science and religion debate to be of interest to a commissioning editor, or was science and religion particularly prominent at that time in a way it hadn’t been ten years earlier or twenty years earlier?

Yes, I think so and I think science and religion was more prominent then, partly because of Richard Dawkins getting up and shouting about it so much, and also probably partly because it had come to higher prominence thanks in no small part to things sponsored by Templeton. Yeah, I think it had moved up the news agenda quite a lot and the way particularly World Service editors think, they’ve mostly come from a news and current affairs background, they’ve got these programme producing departments ready to make in-depth features, so they think okay, what have we been having in news programmes which we haven’t really been able to deal with in a four- minute segment on News Hour. There’d been a lot of discussion about how, in the news programming, even if it was just a four-minute segment, there would be a tendency for non-science producers, if they were doing something on evolution, to feel they had to get an opposite view in, and they’d get a creationist in. Or if they were doing something on climate change they’d have to get a climate change sceptic in to do… even if those views are scientifically very much in the minority or a sideline, the news and current affairs tendency – it’s not quite so bad now – but was that you’d have to have a clash, you’d have to have an argument. Whereas, you know, I wouldn’t have wanted to do that. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to do that in a four-minute news segment, because the arguments are much more nuanced than that and I’m also interested in where people of different backgrounds come together rather than simply where they differ and clash.

[24:36] Thank you. And was there any feedback from Henry Morris on his contribution to the final programme once he’d seen the edit, in the way that you had feedback from the way that Richard Dawkins’s interview was used?

Henry Morris was a complete gentleman. He brought his wife with him when we met up in the Grand Canyon and she was absolutely sweet and sent me a little card afterwards thanking me for my time and hospitality. No, they were complete gentlemen and gentlewomen. I didn’t have any specific feedback afterwards. I sent them a recording of the programme, but I didn’t hear anything specific back, certainly no angry outburst. I think we’d gone past the time then, there was a time when I think there must have been some sort of creationist organisation monitoring everything in the press, because there was a time when whenever we had something about evolution in an ordinary science programme we’d get an official complaint saying why didn’t you have something about creationism. And obviously we could answer that by saying it’s a science programme, it’s not a religion programme. I think they’d given up that tactic by then. By that stage it was the climate sceptics who were complaining every time we had something on about global warming.

Roughly when was this period when you would receive comment from creationists on science output?

That was predominantly, I would say, in the 1990s, maybe the early noughties. By the time, yeah, by the time we’d got significantly into this millennium they’d quietened down a bit on that, I think. Martin Redfern Page 73 C1672/29 Track 7

And was it from a British creationist organisation or…

The complaints always appeared to come from individuals and individuals in the UK, but they had the hallmarks of a co-ordinated campaign because they were too frequent, they came from different people each time, but they were picking up on the same things.

Thank you. [27:36] To what extent were your friends and fellow members of the Study Society following what you were doing at the BBC in terms of extending wherever you could the sort of limits of science, the sort of anti-reductive approach?

Yeah, when there was a special programme, a one-off programme or an interview with someone who they would particularly be interested in, I would tell a few people that it was coming up, they would be interested, but it was mostly, it fed mostly the other way. I would most often come across somebody who’d given a talk at the Study Society or the Scientific and Medical Network, which I would then feed into a programme. By the time it was in a programme the people who’d be most interested in those organisations would know about the person already. They’d be pleased to see that it was getting an airing on World Service, but they wouldn’t be surprised at the content.

[28:54] Thank you. And finally today, could you just expand a little more on what you said about Deborah Cohen’s tolerance of, what you said, tolerance of your strange desires, meaning I assume, your interest in these sorts of questions within BBC work?

Ah. [laughs] I think Deborah is very much a pragmatist. She was a very good editor. At first I was a bit sceptical, partly because she had been editor of the Radio 4 Science Unit, where I had been deputy editor of the World Service Science Unit. When as a result, it was the sort of end result of the John Birt revolution of separating out the production departments from the broadcasting networks, and it was actually a sensible step that we merged. Initially in that process they tried to put everything within BBC Science, including television. And that meant that we had bosses with no experience of radio, and really no experience of science news, but plenty of experience of producing wonderful TV documentaries. And they were over in White City and hardly ever actually came to us and met us. The only advantage of that relationship was that they were used to budgets with more noughts on the end and whilst they didn’t, they weren’t in a position to increase our programme budgets significantly, if there was something like a specific conference or a specific project that wasn’t directly part of a programme that we wanted to do, and if it cost a few hundred pounds, that was small change and we’d get it. But that didn’t really work. When they decided to merge the World Service and the Radio 4 Science Units, that was a lot more sense and they, for reasons of real estate, I think, they moved the Radio 4 Unit into an enlarged area where we had already been in World Service. Unfortunately they sacked my dear friend, John Wilson, who at that stage had been - or pensioned off – John Wilson, who had been the editor of the World Martin Redfern Page 74 C1672/29 Track 7

Service Unit with me as his deputy. They created, I think it was three ‘chief producers’ as they called them then, but they put in as head of the new combined Radio Science Unit, a chap called Harry Dean, who was a TV executive, with I don’t think any experience of radio, nice enough guy, but one who was used to a management system where a manager has to impose very much. He wasn’t used to dealing, I don’t think, with self-motivated journalists who would respond best to encouragement rather than being told what to do and being asked to tick all the boxes and so on. And he was appointed over the head of Deborah Cohen who’d been head of the Radio 4 Unit, and Deborah was appointed as his deputy without consultation to him, I believe. So there was considerable enmity between the two, and when we joined, when we merged, I was given all sorts of responsibilities, managerial responsibilities, and expected to follow them through in a way I wasn’t used to. I was used to scheduling who produced what, for example, for the World Service things, and if I was going to be producing a labour-intensive, difficult new series I would make sure that the regular programmes had hands who were very competent and could get on and do it without much management from me. I think partly due to a difference of opinion between Harry and Deborah, just at the turn of the millennium when I had been given a very high profile new millennium series to produce, they put someone who was virtually a trainee in charge of Science in Action, who was out of their depth, and then I got the blame when she couldn’t cope with it. And so actually, I asked to step down from being chief producer and just go back to being a – as a politician would put it – to spend more time with my programmes. And fortunately I was allowed to do that and without a drop in salary and after that I stopped worrying so much about where the Unit was going and about things I didn’t agree with and basically just tried to make the programmes I most wanted to make, or at least the ones I’d got to make, enjoy making them as much as I could. Very soon after that, once the link with television, it was clear that that wasn’t going ahead, Harry Dean left like a bat out of hell, he didn’t want to be stranded in radio, I don’t think, and Deborah became editor. And once she was queen bee again, she was, from my perspective at least, a much nicer person and someone who I started getting on with much better, and I felt she respected me and trusted me as a programme maker and I respected and trusted her as an editor. And she was very good at reading through a script or listening to inserts and multi-tasking and so on and spotting immediately the area that a programme needed tightening up on and so on, she had very good, in conventional science terms, editorial judgement. So there was a lot of respect there and I like to think she had a bit of respect for me and therefore indulged me when I wanted to head off in gently spiritual directions, as long as I didn’t get too carried away or start preaching.

Do you remember times when she tried to pull you back from something from a direction you were going off in?

Yes, one I remember on that, it wasn’t so much a science and religion thing, it was, the excuse was a meeting at the Linnean Society and there was a paper which was giving some credence to essentially Lamarckian evolution. Not exactly, I mean Lamarckian evolution has sort of come back in through the back door through epigenetics a bit, but this was a bit more full on and we’d got as far as working it up into a programme item and fixing up the interview, which would have been live. And then partly I think because she was dubious about that item and also partly because there was another topical item that she wanted to see me put in, that was one of the rare occasions where I was pulled back from something. The other one I’ve told you about, when she was away and somebody else was, a more reductionist person, was covering for her. But it didn’t usually get to the Martin Redfern Page 75 C1672/29 Track 7 stage of pulling back from something that had already been prepared. It was mostly my caution in not pushing too far.

[end of track 7]

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[Track 8]

You said last session that what you called frontier sciences used to be one way in which you could push the boundaries of science a little bit further in the BBC by concentrating on what you called frontier sciences, what then did you think that those sciences were, if you like? I know the idea of the universe comes up a lot in the sorts of programmes you do, but where did you see the frontier sciences?

For me the most exciting frontiers could be collectively given the name ‘origins’. So that could go right across all the disciplines really, from the origin of the universe, the origin of stars and galaxies, the origin of the solar system, of planet earth, the origin of life, the evolution of higher life forms, and indeed the origin of consciousness and higher thought and the cultural things that make us human. And all of those questions, up until that time, science had really been just answering the ‘what’, and sometimes the ‘how’ questions. These questions of origin also raised ‘why’ questions and that’s where they started to get, for me, faintly theological.

And do you remember the extent to which you worked specifically on evolutionary biology in programmes?

Yeah. I mean evolutionary biology would come up time and time again, partly not least through my own interest in palaeontology. Certainly in our unit, as in, I think, Western science generally, at least in Europe, it was basically a given that evolution was indeed the process that had happened and that natural selection was the best and probably correct explanation for how it happened. Issues of divine intervention didn’t really come into it, but yeah, stories about evolution were coming up all the time, and of course at every stage we were realising that it wasn’t as simple, you know, there’s the cartoon idea of something like a chimp giving rise to something like a human, for example, and of course it wasn’t like that. There’s the idea of common ancestors, for a start, but there’s also the idea that you cannot take a particular fossil and say that is the ancestral species, because the more depth that you find in any of these stories the more bushy the tree of evolution gets and the harder it is to know what is a side branch and a twig as opposed to what is the central stem. And that’s become, in the last twenty or thirty years, particularly true of human evolution, you know, practically every new skull that’s found in Africa or elsewhere puts another complication, it doesn’t quite so simply answer the question, you know, ah, this is the missing link. I think that’s a terribly misused concept of the missing link. We’re only seeing, I don’t know, a millionth of the fossil record, so obviously we’re only getting snapshots and it’s very difficult to see which gave rise to what and why and… and also the more we understand the environmental pressures as well, we realise that, you know, sub-species come and go dependent on climate change, for example, you know, Neanderthals developed big noses because that was an efficient heat exchanger for living in Ice Age Europe, for example, and other aspects of them was less suited when the Ice Age started to end.

[04:45] Thank you. Again, from last time, you said that Kristine Pommert, I think was her name, who was at one point leading the World Service Religion Unit…

Yes, Kristine with a ‘K’, German lady. Martin Redfern Page 77 C1672/29 Track 8

That she herself had an interest in science-religion relations which seemed to be separate from yours, or to have originated elsewhere. I wondered whether you knew where her interest in science and religion came from?

You’d have to ask her that, or indeed possibly my wife, who worked with the person who is now her husband when he was in Religious Broadcasting in Manchester. I met Kristine when she was a secretary in the German Service, but she was obviously very interested in religion and very keen to get a job in World Service Religion and to start producing, and she was a very bright and talented lady. And I think it probably was a particular interest of hers, in science and religion, but she was very much coming at it from the religion side. But I helped her a bit when she was trying to get her first job in World Service Religion by basically feeding her with some names of possible interviewees if she had done a science and religion series for that. She, I know, has since left the BBC, she was given a pretty tough time, first moved up to Salford and then back to World Service, but to a very cut down Religious Unit, which was basically her. And she has now left the BBC and is working for CCTVC, which stands… oh, basically it’s a Christian television and radio production company and she’s, her husband heads it up and she heads up the radio section of it and she does a regular podcast, I think it’s called ‘Things Unseen’, which is a very well-produced and interesting religion podcast.

Thank you. [07:24] More on the Study Society. I wondered what the general view of organised religion was within the Study Society, what members or what the organisation as a whole tended to say about, think about, say, organised Christian worship?

Members of the Study Society come from all sorts of different backgrounds. A lot of them are established, you know, what I’d call ordinary Church of England, there are also Jewish people there and there is a very strong Islamic strand there with the Dervish turning and people interested in the work of Rumi. And Rumi himself said, I think, I am a friend of ninety-four religions, or ninety-something religions. The Shankaracharya Shantanand Saraswati who taught the meditation and the non-duality system of philosophy, which was picked up for the Study Society, always said that the meditation was a method for all religions and it shouldn’t in any way detract from your own religion. I think a lot of the people who went there and who go there still are looking not for an isolated set of dogma of a religion, but rather – and this is certainly my case – are searching for the commonality between all or most religions, and in particular any underlying mystical or non-dual traditions. And most religions have that, you know, Islam has the Sufis, Christianity has the likes of Meister Eckhart and oh, lots and lots of Christian mystics that there have been. Judaism has the Kabbalah and Hindus have the Advaita non-dual system. There is a core of similarity in all of these. It was often, a metaphor that was often used is that there are many different paths, but they’re all paths up the same mountain. And there was a quote which I am very fond of, I think in a thing called The Philokalia, where it says imagine radiating rays from a point, each ray is the life of a person, the further out you go from the centre, the further you go away from each other. The further in towards the centre, the more you come into alignment with each other and different people with different religions are moving in and out along those radiating rays, if you like. Martin Redfern Page 78 C1672/29 Track 8

[10:54] Thank you. Would you now tell me about The Bridge journal and the newsletter which you were involved in? So if you could sort of characterise those publications and then tell me about the timing of your involvement in it.

Yes, The Bridge was approximately annual, the attempt was to bring it out in the autumn term every year so that people could buy it for their friends for Christmas. And it was… actually no, I can’t show you copies, I’ve packed them all away for moving house, but that was, what would it be, octavo-sized, small, you know, paperback book-sized little book with really nice essays and articles, plus some poetry and some pictures. A lot of the articles were drawn from talks that we’d had at Colet House, often from visiting scientists or mystics. Some of the articles were by members. I remember a lovely series of articles, we were mentioning before this interview, Alan Caiger-Smith, he was a leading light there, he wrote a lovely series of articles about the craft of the potter and how he basically reinvented lustreware firing in a wood-fired kiln and would go out and collect the right timber to fire the kiln, the sorts of things that brings him with attention into the present moment. So that publication, The Bridge, was already in existence once I started to get involved and it had been edited by William Anderson, who became a great friend of mine, who I think I’ve mentioned before. When he, well, first of all became the chairman of the organiser’s committee and didn’t have so much time to edit the journal, he passed that editorship on to me and I did it jointly with another gentleman, Peter MacGregor-Eadie, who was actually a travel writer by profession. And then sadly Bill Anderson died and we continued it for a bit. At the same time, we realised, this was really before most people had the internet and so on, this was late eighties, early nineties, that there was need for something to communicate on a more frequent basis what was going on in a particular term. Basically, The Bridge was for everyone, we placed it in Watkins bookshop and, you know, it was intended to be read by anyone interested, but we still needed something primarily for the members who came to Colet House that would have news of other members, maybe a few book reviews, which we didn’t really do in The Bridge, sadly quite a few obituaries, but primarily the programme of meetings for the coming term. And we thought that we could produce a little, just a photocopied newsletter. And I remember my then wife, Bridget and I, we took delivery of our first PC computer and within a fortnight – this was a steep learning curve – we had brought out the first edition of Contact, basically desktop publishing on it, just using very basic software, I think we just did it on Word. We got a little logo from the front and did a little editorial and so on and photocopied it in the Colet House office and at that stage gave it away, I think we gave it away free the first couple of editions. Then it went from being four pages to eight, to sixteen. We started charging 50p for it. Then I, after my first marriage split up, rather went away for a bit, and I think after a little bit of limbo it was taken up by others who started to produce it much more professionally. It was a beautiful magazine, it had colour in it, it was professionally printed, but that meant that it was starting to cost a lot of money, particularly for something that was only for a membership of about 300 people. And by the time I came back on to the management committee it was costing, it was making a loss of two or three thousand pounds a year and it had already switched from being once a term to basically once a year. And it was thought that, well, it wasn’t thought sustainable, particularly as most people were now on email and internet and we could advertise the term’s meetings and so by, you know, electronically for no money. So Contact ended, but about the same time Martin Redfern Page 79 C1672/29 Track 8 they decided – Contact was an A4 magazine style, whereas The Bridge was quarto or A5 paperback book size – so then it was suggested that we still needed an annual publication for the more timeless articles and one that could be given away as Christmas presents and sold in Watkins and whatever, and so that has now had two editions, we’re just working on the third edition of that. A lovely man called Jim Whiting has been editing them. And that is called… that’s called Being and as I say, the third edition of that, well, I’ve actually just got a two and a half thousand-word article to write for that over the next week.

Why was it called The Bridge, originally, the journal?

It was named that before my time. I think the idea was that it was to be a bridge between the world out there and the world in here, both between the inner things that went on at the Study Society and the world, but also between the inner self, if you like, and the world out there.

Why Watkins bookshop?

Simply because that was a bookshop that specialised in spiritual things, including some fairly New Age things, but also some very good solid academic spiritual publications.

[19:07] You mentioned there being about 300 members. What, very roughly, what proportion might have been scientists at any one time during your involvement?

Probably fairly low. I was only really aware of individuals, so I couldn’t tell you statistically, but I mean I know we had, and still have, a retired biology professor. It wasn’t so much that the people – and my friend, Peter Fenwick, who was for a while the chairman of it who’s a neuropsychiatrist, he brought a lot of new science in – it wasn’t so much that the members were scientists, but that they were interested in what science and new science in particular could bring to bear on understanding our inner nature and psychology. It’s simply called the Study Society now and it was always called that for short, but its full name used to be the Society for Study of Normal Psychology, so there was always a scientific interest there, albeit more geared to finding our true inner potential. But they didn’t want to call it simply ‘Psychology’ because certainly when it was named that back in the fifties, people thought of that as being, oh, psychiatric illness and so on, and basically it was a way of people, of healthy people discovering their true inner potential.

[21:05] What was the Study Society’s level and nature of interest in psychoanalysis in various ways? I ask, because I think in one of the radio programmes that you shared with me, I remember Peter Fenwick talking about Jung and collective unconscious and I wondered to what extent psychoanalysis featured in the discussions of the Study Society in your experience?

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Not very heavily, I would say, but when it did there was a lot more empathy, shall we say, towards the Jungian approach, rather than the Freudian one. One of the wonderful people who we had as a speaker on several occasions and who was also very closely involved with the Scientific and Medical Network and still is, is Anne Baring, who has a very strong Jungian background and was very keen on rediscovering the feminine. That’s one of the things that was fairly… that came up from various different directions and fairly central to what we did, was the feeling, certainly back in the eighties, say, that was as individuals and society as a whole had become rather one-sided. You’ve got the two hemispheres of the brain which, in very simplistic terms, the left hemisphere in right-handed people, which is the one that controls the right hand, is the one that deals with words and language and factual stuff and basically rather masculine stuff. The right hemisphere of the brain in right- handed people is more the emotional, the spatial, and if you like, the feminine. That came up, Dr Roles who founded the Study Society was very interested in the then very new work of Roger Sperry on hemispheres. It’s become a lot more nuanced than that since and actually one of the more recent speakers we’ve had who’ve developed that in a very thorough way is Iain McGilchrist, whose book, The Master and His Emissary, basically takes that to a new level. But then from a completely different direction, the fullest I have ever seen Colet House was when we had a talk from Father Bede Griffiths, who was a British guy who had gone out and founded a Benedictine monastery in Tamil Nadu in southern India, but was very interested in finding the links between Hindu theology and Christian theology. And I had actually visited him at his ashram in India for a couple of weeks after I’d… my first trip to India, very fortunately funded by the British Council, with Jack Meadows from Leicester University I took a series of workshops for senior science journalists in India, funded by the British Council, we did Bombay – Mumbai as it now is – we did New Delhi and we did Bangalore, and after that my wife came out and joined us and we rented a car with a driver, which is cheaper than a car without a driver, and much to the driver’s horror we went and stayed in this ashram for a week [laughs], for just over a week and ended up in Madras. But as a result of that, then when Bede Griffiths next came to the UK and we were able to persuade him to come and give a talk at the Study Society, and they invited me on to the platform to introduce him and help dialogue and field questions with him and we had about 300 people in that room. Better not tell the fire authorities of that because I think it’s only meant to take 200. But he had, in between my visiting him and him coming, he had had a stroke and he described that very much as he’d been struck by the feminine, he had suddenly realised that he’d been neglecting the feminine side of himself and that was really the central point of the talk that he gave. So that was a rather long-winded way of saying, again, from another direction that it’s balancing up the two sides of our nature which has been one of the key lines at the Study Society. I came to that from mentioning Anne Baring, and of course that is very much a theme in Jungian psychology. And since I’m recommending books, Anne Baring’s masterpiece – she’s written several excellent books – but the one that she’s, I guess will be her last book probably, it’s a monumental book called Dreams of the Cosmos. And I was fortunate enough a couple of years ago to go down to her house and spend a day videoing an interview between her and Andrew Harvey. Basically we did two hour long videos, one of which was he was asking her about her life and the other, basically he was concentrating on the book. I think those are both up on YouTube now. But again, that’s one of the wonderful connections that came about through my connections with the Study Society and the Scientific and Medical Network.

[28:26] Martin Redfern Page 81 C1672/29 Track 8

When Freud was discussed then, what was said? You said that Jungian psychology tended to be spoken of favourably compared to Freudian, why, from the Study Society’s point of view?

I’m bringing my own very naïve approach to this answer, but I think the Jungian approach is to find something deeper, something bigger, something more wonderful within our psychology. Freud’s is to explain our psychology in terms of sex and relationships and stuff like that, which seems almost to be trivialising it compared to Jung’s deepening it. I think that’s probably what it comes down to.

And as part of this search for the, or the interest in the feminine that the Study Society had, were there any voices critical of, you know, a simple lining up of left side with maleness and right side with femaleness?

I wouldn’t say necessarily critics of that, but it was recognised fairly early on that this was a rather overly simplified explanation, but like a lot of similes and metaphors, you can learn more from exploring it without necessarily saying that that is literally the mechanism, you know. I know plenty of women with a very well- developed left hemisphere. [laughs] And plenty of men who are in touch with the feminine side within them. And it’s, I’m sure, not simply explained by which areas of their brain are active. I know Peter Fenwick, who I’ve mentioned, who was very involved at the Study Society and still is, because he worked at the Institute of Psychiatry and had access to all sorts of interesting brain scanners, and in particular functional MRI, and got very interested and still is in how different areas of the brain are involved in different things. But he would be the first to agree that if you take that too far, it’s essentially, it’s been described as the new phrenology. You know, you find a little lump on the outside of the skull and you think, ah, that relates to the personality type of this or that, and once again, it’s never as simple as that. Seems to be the theme of today’s conversation, evolution is never as simple as a straight tree with a few branches, it’s a big bushy thing. Human psychology is never as simple as this bit of the brain does that and that bit of the brain does this, it’s all much more nuanced. But it’s a good starting point.

[32:08] Those you say it was a metaphor and it was used in that sense, where do you think for the Study Society the source of the idea of right being female and left being male came from, what was the… yes, what was the source of that idea?

I don’t want to over-emphasise this as being a particular thing of the Study Society, it wasn’t, but it was one of the things that came up and I think it came up out of Dr Roles’s own interest in the human brain. It came up because of thinking about what Bede Griffiths said to us. It was one of many strands. The much more central strand was the one that actually went right back to Ouspensky, whose followers founded the Society, and that was the technique he referred to as ‘self-remembering’, which is completely a gender-free process. That is being aware of yourself in everyday life and constantly asking what am I really. And that is very much the same as is described in the system of Advaita that was then developed from the Shankaracharya in India. It’s a matter of observing your true self and then constantly refining that. If you start to think, okay, who am I, what am I, am I this body? Well, I’m losing cells from this body, it’s changing, it’s growing, it’s growing old, that’s not Martin Redfern Page 82 C1672/29 Track 8 what I really am. Am I the thoughts and emotions? Well, they’re changing too, so what is it that isn’t changing? That’s not something that it’s easy to answer in words, but there was, one of my favourite lines from, translated from an answer to a question to the Shankaracharya was along the lines of, and I don’t quote verbatim, when you come out of what you are not, then you will find the birds in the trees singing to you, I am that, the stars in the sky calling out to you, I am that. You are the universe and everything. So when you come out of what you are not, it’s a process of giving up, giving up everything and in particular giving up your feeling of an independent ego and only once you’ve done that do you start getting that cornily called cosmic consciousness or feeling that you are part of something very much bigger, but the ‘I’ has to completely dissolve for that to happen. And there are a number of teachers of that now who I think have got a, understood it at a much deeper level than I have. One of them is Rupert Spira, I don’t know if you’ve come across him? He was, I knew him forty years ago at Colet House when he was coming to the same meetings as I at the Study Society. He went off to Shropshire, he was a potter, he was the son of quite an accomplished potter and artist and he set up his own pottery in Shropshire and made quite a name for himself. Not sure if he ever actually worked directly with Alan Caiger-Smith, but it was of the same sort of tradition. But at the same time he was considering the sorts of things that he’d learnt from the Study Society and made contact with a number of other teachers of non-duality, and he’s now sort of come back into that and sadly, more or less had to give up his pottery because he is in such demand to take workshops and seminars about non-duality. And he’s very much taking it forward in a way where I fear the Study Society itself is still sort of toddling along in the way it was doing it forty years ago, to some extent. He’s taking it out into the world, he’s published books. And another of the same sort of ilk is Jeff Foster. There are quite a few now. In one sense, you know, we wonder if the work of the Study Society is done, because way back in the 1960s this was something that was pretty unheard of, at least in the West, and was almost, had to be hush-hush, you know, it’s, ooh, it’s a little bit, sounds a bit cultish and dubious. It wasn’t, it wasn’t like that, it wasn’t like some of these churches where you have to give up your family and your money and so on, it was very much the way of the householder, a way of living a normal life and having a successful job and a family and so on, but at the same time finding your spiritual depth. In a sense maybe its work is done, now that there are these teachers out there and you can get so much of this stuff on the internet and there are international conferences on science and non-duality. But, well maybe its work is just changing slightly, I don’t know.

[39:23] Has the Study Society itself thought about its, or discussed its web presence? You know, the potential for it to be more well-known?

Yes. Quick answer, sore point. When I first joined in the seventies, there was a lot of tut-tutting about, you know, the School of Meditation and the School of Economic Science, which are teaching different aspects of basically the same thing, were advertising on the tube trains and so on. This was of course before the internet. There was a lot of opposition from some of the older members when we started a website. The website that you will see now, as of October 2016, is beginning to look rather outdated. The sore point is that for the last year we’ve been quietly developing a new and much more up-to-date one, which we’re still hoping will go live fairly soon. One of the interest… you know, there’s a sort of feel that all this is, there’s still a feel, particularly among Martin Redfern Page 83 C1672/29 Track 8 some of the older members, that this is a very secret thing. Back in, well, really before I came along, but maybe in the sixties and early seventies, you weren’t meant to talk about it outside of the meetings with other people. If you met somebody who you knew only from the Study Society in the street you weren’t meant to stop and say hello to them or anything. It all seems a bit strange nowadays. Where was I going with this, sorry?

I’d asked about, you know, the Study Society’s interest in its own profile, sort of.

Yes. That has… and in those days also, it was always said that there was no need to advertise if the system of knowledge was right for you, you would find it. But actually, it was only the relatives or close friends of people who were already there, of course, who did find it for that reason. That has gradually, kicking and screaming to some extent, changed. One of the big changes was having a website at all. I remember a lot of controversy when we put up on the windows of Colet House, looking out on to Talgarth Road, Centre for Non-Duality. Now at the moment we’ve got scaffolding up for some stonework restoration and we’ve got big slogans across the lower part of that inviting people to come in out of the noisy world of the A4 to find some inner peace and describing some of the things that we do there. And again, when I joined you would first of all go along to a little introductory meeting, which in my case was taken by Alan Caiger-Smith, who would tell you about meditation. Then you would have a one-to-one interview to see if you felt that the meditation was right for you, but also this person would decide if they felt that the meditation was right for you. I don’t know that people got refused it, but I think it’s possible that some people did, because it wasn’t considered to be necessarily the right thing if people had signs of psychiatric disorders, for example. And then, after you’d been meditating for a term or two, if you wanted to, you would be invited to join an introductory class talking about the philosophy behind it. And if you’d been in that class, that one was taken by Professor Richard Guyatt, who was the Rector of the Royal College of Art at the time, if you had been in that for probably two years, you might be invited to join the next level of class, which was taken by Dr Connell, who was the husband of Dame Ninette de Valois, and that took place in Dr Roles’s own study in Colet House, so that was, you know, the holy of holies. And if you’d been going to that for a year or two you might be invited as a special honour to become a member and pay a small subscription. It ain’t like that now, partly because there’s so much available out there, in terms of meditation and yoga and spiritual groups and so on, that the sort of spontaneous input has dried up. So yes, nowadays we do advertise, by and large not paid advertising because we haven’t got much money, but certainly there’s a strong web presence, and because we have a lot of footfall in Colet House, people coming through both to our own open meetings and meetings of other organisations that have rented rooms in Colet House, we try and get them to go away with a leaflet and if they’re interested, have the chance to learn the meditation or come to some of our other activities.

Has the Study Society worried about maintaining its distinctiveness from what you now say, you know, there’s a lot out there in terms of meditation and yoga? In other words, has it become necessary to really mark themselves out from a wider mass of spiritual literature and books on meditation?

My personal feeling is that it hasn’t done that enough. It’s fairly slow to get things done and I think the world has changed quicker than the Study Society has, there’s a bit of catch-up to be done there. The range of classes Martin Redfern Page 84 C1672/29 Track 8 offered there has increased in line with what people are interested in. At various times there have been… there were always the group meetings about the Advaita tradition, there was always meditation meetings, there was always the Whirling Dervish turning groups and there was most of the time movements to music of the sort originally devised by Gurdjieff and some others collected by Ouspensky. In addition to those in recent years we’ve had yoga and tai chi and qigong and Indian dance and various groups of that sort, really following on from what members are interested in and some members who have been qualified to teach such classes and who’ve liked Colet House as a venue. So it’s not exclusive now like it was in the seventies.

[47:55] And finally on the Study Society, could you tell me more about the reasons why your first wife had got involved. We know that she was introduced to it through Ann Brunsdon, but we don’t know what might have been the original sort of motivation or how Ann Brunsdon had thought that she might be someone that she might introduce the Society to. Do you know anything? Perhaps you don’t know any more about it, but do you know any more about how she came to be in it?

Erm, I don’t. I could speculate, but it’s only speculation. Bridget was always interested in philosophy and matters spiritual and they worked together at the BBC. I think Bridget had also, about the time that she joined, her first marriage had been breaking up and maybe she wanted a little more support and spiritual outlet. I don’t actually know, but I think Ann recognised a like-minded soul and invited her to come along.

[49:22] Thank you. Would you say more now about the Scientific and Medical Network? We know that you joined in 1986, I think you said last time…

Thereabouts, yes.

And we know that you have been involved in things that it’s organised, but we don’t have a very detailed account of your involvement with that group from first joining to the present. I think you were on the Council in more recent years, but what does that entail, what would you have been deciding on, you know, and so on?

Yeah, the Scientific and Medical Network was founded in, I think it was 1972 or ’73 initially, by well, primarily by George Blaker and there was… I shall have to give you the names later. One of the founders was, I think, Chancellor or Provost or whatever of Surrey University. They were fairly high-powered scientists and they were all interested, obviously interested in science, which was their profession, but they had found that science was going in a very reductionist and materialist direction. Science was populated by ‘nothing buterers’, you know, it’s nothing but… random interactions of atoms, random firing of neurones. There’s no validity in psychic phenomena, it just wasn’t something that science talked about, yet a lot of scientists were interested in it, but didn’t really dare to talk about it in their institutes and universities because the general feeling was that ooh, that was weird and spooky stuff and if you’re going to be that weird you’re not going to get your academic Martin Redfern Page 85 C1672/29 Track 8 tenure and your grants and so on. We want people who are going to analyse things down to atoms, not build them up into something spiritual. So it was really a safe haven for like-minded scientists and doctors and it grew quite rapidly, primarily by George Blaker and his friends sending personal invitations to people who they thought might be interested in joining it. And after a while David Lorimer was given the… it got sufficiently big for them to take on a paid director, which was my dear friend David Lorimer, who is still heavily involved in it. I came across it primarily through Peter Fenwick who, I’ve mentioned, knew primarily through the Study Society, but also because he was a neuropsychiatrist interested in some of the frontier studies of consciousness and near-death experiences and so on, and so I had interviewed him for some of my more daring World Service programmes. And he introduced me to the Scientific and Medical Network, and as I think I mentioned before, the first Beyond the Brain conference at St John’s in Cambridge, the Study Society actually paid my registration fee so that I could go up there and report back on some of the latest thinking in that sort of field. After that I just went to a few meetings, not many, partly because weekends were a bit precious because I had a young family by that stage and a fulltime job and also not very much money to pay the fees, but I went to a few of the day meetings in London and a couple of conferences. But then in 2002, by this stage Chris Clarke was the chairman, and he emailed me inviting me to join what was then the Council and which was in the process of transforming from being that to being the directors of a registered charity and company limited by guarantee, which meant that the directors weren’t personally liable if they got sued, assuming they hadn’t been grossly negligent - he adds. And so I said yeah, okay. That particular year the annual general meeting was happening, I think it was in Sweden, and I couldn’t actually afford to go, so I was elected in absentia. But since then I’ve discovered my niche, I think my role in all this, both in the BBC and in developing my interest in science and spirituality has really been as a facilitator. I’m not the great philosophical thinker or scientist myself, but through, I guess, having a few microphones and a bit of technical knowledge and access to BBC Radio, I’ve been able to facilitate sharing some of those ideas with a much wider audience and I rapidly found that my niche with the Scientific and Medical Network was basically providing the sound system for all their conferences. And that was lovely because it meant that I was involved in the running of it without actually needing to be up there as a high-powered thinker and scientist myself. I could grab people at the conference and get interviews with them, I could clip my little tie-clip mics on to them and sit at the high table, as it were, with them and chat about things and generally benefit from the crumbs that fell from the table. [laughs] And that’s really been, I think, the principal thing I’ve offered. The person who took over from Chris Clarke as chairman, a lovely Dutchman by the name of Bart Van Der Lugt, he set up a system of domains where each of the board members had a particular domain. It might be membership, it might be finance, it might be the programme committee that organised the meetings, it might be website, you know, all the different things you need to run a charity of that sort. And I joined the programme committee, at that stage not leading it. It was chaired by another director, Claudia Neilsen, who is a very dynamic person who gets things done, with much more determination than I could bring to the job. She’s actually a psychotherapist. When she stood down a few years ago I rather reluctantly took over chairing that programme committee, and we continued to do some good conferences and I think the audiences slightly grew. [58:11] One of the problems that it’s faced, you know, back in the early days when George Blaker was sending personal invitations out, it rapidly grew from a few hundred to a thousand or more members. Before I came on the scene Martin Redfern Page 86 C1672/29 Track 8 there was another director who really pushed the membership and got it up to about 2,000, but was a little profligate with the money at the same time and it almost went bankrupt. Since then membership has been slowly but steadily falling. I think, again, as with the Study Society, because its unique selling point when it was founded is no longer unique. There are a number of other organisations and there’s masses on the internet to feed hungry minds interested in pushing the boundaries of science. We have always, with the Scientific and Medical Network, tried to walk what has often been described as a tightrope, between sort of flaky New Age mumbo-jumbo and reductionist science, we’ve always tried to keep the science good, but just be open-minded enough to consider rather than simply dismiss out of hand personal experience, psychic phenomena, spirituality. We had endless discussions for several years over whether to use the ‘S’ word, spirituality, in the strapline. I think the ‘S’ word won out in the end, because the world is changing and that word is more acceptable now. But I found it, in my Unit at the World Service, I could tell people that I was going off to a meeting of the Scientific and Medical Network and we were studying neuroscience, for example, and that would be fine and if there was a decently scientific interview that I came back with I could probably get a placing on it. If I had said that I was going off to a meeting about spirituality and prime speaker was Rupert Sheldrake, say, they would have said, you… funny crackpot, don’t let that influence the science that we broadcast. But at the same time, I think the hardest job with the Network has been not to become just another New Age fluffy organisation, if I can use that rather dismissive term of New Age stuff, but to stay rooted in good science. We used to have two tiers of membership, one was full members, who had to be either practising scientists or at least have a science degree, or similar medical qualification. And then there were associate members who didn’t have a science degree. And in one sense that was an important distinction and kept to some extent the core rooted in reasonably good science, but actually, some of the flakiest members we had were scientists who were branching out into other areas. You know, you’d have maybe an engineer who was really into astrology or that sort of thing. So I didn’t feel that having that distinction was actually serving its purpose, plus, the associate members were getting practically all the same facilities, the Network Review, which is a lovely three times a year publication, the discounts to attend meetings, all access to the members’ circle on the website, all the benefits for a reduced membership fee. The only thing they didn’t have was the right to vote at AGMs and, you know, who cares. [laughs] So I actually was in favour of dropping the associate membership category and getting them all to pay up, which most of them actually did. But with any organisation, I think, like that, you have a core of people who are active and do things and organise things, you have an inner circle of people who come to most of the meetings and participate, and then you have a long tail-off of people who are members and aren’t quite sure why they are, or maybe just read the journal, or even don’t read the journal but feel good because they’re supporting an organisation. So we have this problem, for example, if we put the membership fee up. For years it was, I think it was £36 or something, which nowadays seems really little, and we were losing money and it hadn’t changed for ten years, so we put it up to £48, which is still very cheap. But the next year the subscription income was lower than it had been the year before because two or three hundred members who had forgotten that they were members and that they were paying on standing order, when asked to put the standing order up they thought oh, I’d forgotten I was paying that, I think it’s time for me to stand down. So each time something like that happens you lose a few members, you hope you’ll gain more members. I think it’s levelled out at around a thousand or just under. But in recent years it’s been a struggle financially because the set-up with three fat issues of the journal every year printed and indeed with editorial paid for, a fulltime administrator, Martin Redfern Page 87 C1672/29 Track 8 you can’t easily fund that with less than a thousand members. And also the big residential meetings, the first Beyond the Brain meeting was a sell-out at about 350 people, that was exceptional admittedly, but regularly 180 or so people at a residential conference. Two or three years ago we were really struggling to get a hundred, and instead of the event making four or five thousand pounds surplus, it was at risk of actually losing money, so it was not subsidising the running of the organisation. So we’ve had a bit of a sort of crisis and rethink over the last couple of years. The administrator resigned, Charla Devereux, who ran the office from her home, and we had a fairly traumatic handover. I managed to get space for the office to move into Colet House and fortunately, we were able to appoint two wonderful part-time people to take it forward, who we’re really pleased with and who are running it very efficiently now and less money slightly than it was before. So hopefully things are coming round. I realised though with chairing the programme committee that I wasn’t being maybe creative enough in thinking of new ways to run conferences. I could think of good people to speak at traditional sages on stages type conferences, but people wanted something that was more participatory that might attract younger people, that was cheaper, but yet would still have enough people to be financially viable. Plus, being newly married and thinking of moving away, further way from London. I felt that it was time now to stand down. We’d lost two or three people from the board, including Marilyn Monk, who you’re speaking to, and suddenly I found myself, instead of being the new boy on the board, being the longest serving person on the board, so I felt it was time, once the move to Colet House had been successfully negotiated to stand down, which I did at the AGM in July of this year, 2016.

Where did you stand on the debate over whether to include the word ‘spirituality’ in the strapline?

Broadly in favour. I think spirituality I found a reasonably safe word in the twenty-first century, whereas I might not have done in the twentieth. But I was very much against changing the name of the network overall though, because just calling it the Scientific and Medical Network, one, that’s an established brand, albeit only with a relatively small subset of people, but also it’s a safe name that I could use with my colleagues at the BBC and scientists could probably use with their people in their various academic departments. So I wouldn’t want to go as far as putting the ‘S’ word into the actual title, but strapline, that’s fine.

[1:09:29] And do you remember, or are you able to recall detail of discussions around this walking of the tightrope between proper science and things that are flaky, about discussions where certain members of, say, the Scientific and Medical Network thought it was okay to discuss this or that and others didn’t, so that the walking of the tightrope was being negotiated by the members?

Yes. I actually wrote an editorial in the Network Review a few years ago introducing that metaphor of the tightrope. And it resulted, I think, the next two editorials by other board members afterwards sort of picked up on that same theme. I think it’s an issue that exercised the board a lot more than it exercised the members, because I think probably the membership includes a greater proportion of, shall we say, less rigorous scientist people. We have tried very much though, to keep good science as the unique selling point in the board, so I feel that’s partly been the job of the board to keep the anchor there, to keep us balanced that side and not fall off into Martin Redfern Page 88 C1672/29 Track 8 fluffiness. [laughs] Yes… I need to read my editorial again to remember exactly what I’d said on that. I think… I don’t think you’re talking to Bernard Carr, are you?

No.

But he was, until 2015, he was the chairman for several years and I know he had a very difficult balance to create, to keep in his own life because he was – he’s retired now or emeritus, professors never retire – Professor of Maths and Astronomy at Queen Mary University of London, and though that had to deal with, you know, your typical reductionist scientist colleagues quite a lot and retain his academic respectability, but at the same time he was chairman of the Scientific and Medical Network, before that, even more horrific, he was president of the Society for Psychical Research and was and is very interested in psychic phenomena. And has actually developed a very interesting theory of other dimensions of time and so on, as a sort of possible explanation for some of them. But I digress.

I wondered whether you remembered particular kinds of phenomena that certain members of the board might want to take the Scientific and Medical Network in the direction of and others didn’t, so whether there was a kind of… although the board, as you say, had this role in keeping, anchoring it in proper science, within the board, were there different views on what constitutes proper and improper science, you know? So was there negotiation within the board about where to draw the line?

Yes. It wasn’t so much inwardly what is proper science and not, it’s what is acceptable language to describe that proper science and how firmly do we remain rooted in, quotes, proper science. Marilyn Monk was always very in favour of keeping the science content up, as actually am I. Our treasurer, Chris Lyons, was also another who was a GP at the time, now recently retired, and who stood down a couple of years ago. Actually, he stood down because he felt that we were getting not sufficient, we were compromising on the good science, which saddened me a lot because I think that’s very important. I think what we were trying to do was to go into some of these other phenomena which a reductionist scientist would regard as non-science, or possibly nonsense, but by expanding science, by taking good science into, in particular, subjective experience, so, you know, one way to do that of course, possibly the easiest way, is through psychology. Okay, if you have something like oh, apparitions and ghosts and variety of psychic phenomena, can those be understood in terms of human psychology, rather than necessarily some external spooky manifestation. That gets, you can go so far with that. The danger if you’re going down that route is you end up being a nothing buterer. I know there were very good- natured, but intense and quite at times heated discussions at some of the conferences about near-death experiences, for example, about the - I’m sure anyone listening to this will be familiar with the sort of scenario - of if somebody has, you know, most people who have a severe coronary and virtually die don’t come back to tell the tale, but a large proportion of those who do come back tell a tale that involves various, but not necessarily all the components of feeling that they’re floating outside their body looking down at the emergency room and the resuscitation, of getting drawn off possibly some loving figure helping them, some would say an angle, of maybe going down a tunnel of light towards a bright light and a feeling of great love, of maybe meeting previously dead relatives again. And obviously the ones who describe the experience of feeling some Martin Redfern Page 89 C1672/29 Track 8 feeling that they’ve got to go back, either due to unfinished business or because people back home are praying for them to come back, or whatever. And so they come back and tell their tales, but presumably there are others who, the majority, who don’t come back. Now, is that an experience that can be taken literally, that there is some aspect of us which is not tied to the body and which can be reunited with dead relatives and a feeling of love and so on, or as some others would suggest, is this a narrative put together by the dying brain in response to oxygen starvation and all that. There’s the controversial test that my friend Peter Fenwick has been involved in of putting a code word on the top of a tall cupboard in an emergency room, such that it could only be seen if you were floating at the ceiling or above. And then when people come back, asking them to describe the scene and see did they actually see this otherwise hidden word on the top. I don’t know that there have been any successful results and I know that at least one funding agency said that they would fund a study of near-death experience, but not if they did that, because that was just spooky. I don’t know what results have come from that as yet, I suspect that if you were having an amazing mystical experience and dying, the last thing you’d be thinking about would be a code word on the top of a cupboard, even if you could see it. But we shall see. Similarly, some of the studies of telepathy and psychokinesis and so on, if you do tests of trying to influence tossing a coin, that’s not really going to engage you at a deep spiritual level. So maybe that isn’t a good test. I think some of the ones that Rupert Sheldrake has devised are much more interesting. His telephone telepathy tests, for example, where you make it, you have something that you can analyse statistically so you have one of four friends who might phone you up and when the phone rings you have to say, you might say guess which person it is who’s calling, and that person has been selected randomly by a computer. So you would expect twenty-five per cent of the time to get it right if it was purely guesswork, and I think his figures, it’s forty- something per cent get it right, which is pretty impressive. If that is true, if near-death experiences really are something leaving the body, then the whole pack of materialist reductionist cards collapses. So it’s very hard to prove, particularly to the satisfaction of the sceptics, who think that even studying that is ridiculous. But if you got reproducible evidence for anything like that, then the world changes.

[1:21:37] And finally on SMN, do you remember them talking about, members of the Scientific and Medical Network, talking about a group called the Epiphany Philosophers?

Yes. I don’t remember a great deal of talk about that group when it was active, but I do know that there was a small fund that was administered through the Scientific and Medical Network called the Theory to Theoria Fund, indeed I was a trustee of that for a while, which gave out small grants to little projects to spread the word. But I don’t actually know very much about the group. I know that Rupert Sheldrake and Fraser Watts were involved. You could probably tell me more than I know.

Thank you.

[end of track 8] Martin Redfern Page 90 C1672/29 Track 9

[Track 9]

Could you give a, before I ask about particular organisations and particular projects that I know you’ve been involved in because they’re on the list of information, CV type information that you gave me, could you give a sort of, I suppose, an account of how you see the origin and development of your work in what’s now called the public understanding of science, or now isn’t called the public understanding of science, but perhaps was when you started in it. In other words, the sort of work in public understanding of science that isn’t what you were doing with the BBC anyway in making programmes, but in other sorts of work?

Yes. I mean I have been really fortunate throughout my career that I’ve been able to basically follow my curiosity and get paid for it. I’m not a great scientist, but I am passionately interested in science and my joy and my privilege has been to share that passion and share my interest and what I find out about science. The medium through which I’ve done that most of all has been radio, but in doing radio, and thanks to the work that World Service used to do in writing the science stories up for translation, I’ve found that I have a, maybe a certain ability to tell a story, and therefore to write. And so I’ve also done a lot of freelance writing, particularly in the days when I was trying to pay off a mortgage, for places like New Scientist and The Sunday Times, the Independent on Sunday, The Economist and so on. And that, together with the BBC work, took me into the wider community of science journalists, if you like. I joined the Association of British Science Writers, the ABSW, and indeed served on their committee for several years back in the late eighties, early nineties, and have more recently been one of the judges for their annual science writing awards, which back in early days I was pleased to win on three occasions myself. By moving into that community, inevitably it means that you move more into the circle of people who are working on public understanding of science, or who nowadays prefer to term it, public engagement with science. When I started, it was rather, I remember a quote from a book by Dorothy Nelkin in New York, the book was, I think, Selling Science, where she, I’m not sure if this was her or if she was quoting somebody else, but she said that the purpose of science writers is to take the fire of science like Prometheus down from the ivory towers of academia to the general public. And that was how it was seen in the 1980s, I guess. I think there’s been a much greater effort over subsequent decades to, if you like, break down those ivory towers. I’ve always believed that scientists themselves are mostly, mostly have the potential for being great communicators of their work and indeed, increasingly their funding agencies have reckoned that the scientists have a duty as part of receiving public funds, to tell the world about it. I think most of them can very well. My role in all this has more been a facilitator rather than any glorified Prometheus. I happen to like the spoken word and therefore, by interviewing them, I can just facilitate that process. But during the eighties, the world suddenly woke up to the fact that – or Britain at least – woke up to the fact that science wasn’t something rarefied that the public really didn’t need to know much about unless it got into a sort of popular novel or something, and it was something which needed active promotion and therefore COPUS was born, the Committee on the Public Understanding of Science. When I became involved in it, the chairman, the overall chairman of COPUS I think was Walter Bodmer, who was the director of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in those days, and there was a specific sub-committee of that set-up which was, I think it was jointly, between COPUS and the Royal Society, and that was chaired by Lewis Wolpert, and the purpose of that was primarily to organise some briefing meetings for science journalists on some of the big themes of the time, and those Martin Redfern Page 91 C1672/29 Track 9 meetings were held at the Royal Society and some of them were conveniently held in association with two-day discussion meetings at the Royal Society, which brought the right scientists together. So I served on that sub- committee and I also wrote briefing documents that came out of the briefing meetings that were, I think, widely circulated to journalists. I remember one particular one that I was involved in organising, which had the… had a wonderfully cumbersome title, but which I think was very descriptive, which was something along the lines of what cosmologists don’t know but are no longer afraid to ask. So that was really about the current big questions of the universe, specifically how old is the universe – this was before the study that had shown from supernova reasonably accurately that it’s, what is it, thirteen point seven billion years, when there was the issue that some people thought it couldn’t be more than about ten and a half billion years, and yet there were stars which appeared to be about fourteen billion years old, or possibly older, and all those things. It was a really exciting time, and it still is an exciting time, because there are still obviously fundamental questions to answer. They were still looking for evidence for inflation, for example. They were still looking for ripples in the microwave background. All those things that tell you about the early origins of the universe, when did galaxies first form and how. Is it bottom up or top down. Did the stars form and cluster into galaxies or did the galaxies form as clusters of gas which then formed stars. All sorts of questions like that, that was one that I got particularly engaged with and enjoyed writing up.

Do you remember any of the others?

[pause] [laughs] No. [laughs]

[08:52] Now, the meetings of the sub-committee, Lewis Wolpert is chairing it, and you’re there. Who else is there?

I believe Wendy Barnaby was another journalist on that. She was, and still is, a freelance who had done some presentation work for me at the BBC. She went on to edit the British Association magazine, Science and Public Affairs. There were other scientists. I’m trying to remember who was involved. I think I might be getting confused now because at the same time, the BBC had a Science Consultative Group, which when I attended some of its meetings - that was a wonderful thing which I don’t think exists nowadays, because I’m guessing that – I don’t know – but I’m guessing that the scientists on it were probably paid some sort of retainer and certainly their travel expenses and we used to meet in the Council Chamber of Broadcasting House, and when I was involved it was chaired by Martin Rees, before he was president of the Royal Society, but when he was already Astronomer Royal and one of the very senior people at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge. So I’m possibly confusing the people who are on that with the people who are on the COPUS committee, but there was a certain overlap. I think Walter Bodmer chaired that for a while as well, but before I was involved with it. That was quite… I used to enjoy going to those meetings because the various scientists there would comment on how they thought the BBC had covered science in the previous six months and they would often say rather rude things about television science coverage and possibly the coverage of science on news programmes, and then say that well, Radio 4 did a rather better job, but the best of the lot though, very full of praise for World Service science coverage, which of course always pleased me because that was my area and they couldn’t understand Martin Redfern Page 92 C1672/29 Track 9 why television couldn’t go into as much depth. Of course, I think they also couldn’t understand that television had to be led by pictures or live demonstrations and things. And of course in those days Tomorrow’s World was riding high in terms of viewing figures, it was getting six or eight million viewers a night, which was three or four times the number of people who were reading any particular newspaper. It was getting science to a large number of people. So there has been a tendency that the bigger the audience the more dilute the science has to be in order to appeal to them. I’m not quite sure that that’s valid. I was, I suppose, speaking from a point of privilege in that with World Service, you could do quite in-depth specialist science and still reach an audience of twenty million, because you were, if you like, narrowcasting but to a global audience. And in many cases an audience that was hungry for science, rather than an audience who had been put off science by having it forced down their throat by rather poor quality science teachers as a compulsory subject, which might have been the case in this country. I’ve rather diverged from COPUS, haven’t I?

No, no, this is wonderful. What do you remember the, in criticising television science and well, science as presented in places other than World Service, what do you remember the scientists saying, being concerned with, being worried about?

Over-simplification, making it into… being led by gimmicks, including sort of visual gimmicks and demonstrations, particularly over-simplification. With the coverage on news and particularly in those days on radio on the Today programme, where the presenter would have added some little comment that was a bit dismissive, like, you know, ‘Of course I don’t understand a word of this and I don’t expect anybody to, but…’ and then would go on and do the interview. The feeling that what they were doing was some other language. [14:26] I mean I had a – I can’t remember if I’ve talked about my time in television myself, have I? That might be something that… is this the moment to talk about that?

Yes.

I had made many applications, I thought I wanted to work on Horizon particularly, back in the late seventies, early eighties, and I had applied on several occasions for assistant producer attachments with Science and Features in television. On several occasions I had been boarded and I’d even been told that I was considered ‘also suitable’, which meant that if the person they’d offered it to turned it down I would get a chance, but I never did. After I’d joined the World Service Radio Science Unit I went back to them and said look, you know, you keep saying you’d like to have me, but maybe I could come over for a month and see if you like me. And they said yeah, okay, as long as we don’t have to pay for you. So I did and ended up getting extended and I think I spent about eleven months there and they tried to offer me a job when I’d finished, but I was actually rather glad I’d got radio to go back to. But what I found, my first day in Tomorrow’s World, because that’s where the trainee producers basically went, because it was an area where you could actually do something, you could work up one three or five-minute item without being a senior producer with loads of TV experience. So I met up with Richard Rice, who was a wonderful man, very bad time manager, but that’s another matter, he would have a queue of people wanting to talk about their scripts outside his office at nine o’clock at night. But Martin Redfern Page 93 C1672/29 Track 9 he was a lovely man and he was actually very keen to improve the level of science journalism on Tomorrow’s World, and I think that’s why we got on. But he said okay, come into this office, here’s a producer and a couple of other assistant producers who you can work with in a little team. And they were discussing something to work up for a Tomorrow’s World item in a few weeks’ time, and this was in 1986 when the European space probe, Giotto, was heading towards an encounter with Halley’s Comet. And they were saying, maybe we should do something about this space probe, Giotto, and somebody said yes, what should we do, does anybody have a phone number for NASA? So I sort of chipped in, excuse me, actually it’s not a NASA project, it’s European Space Agency and here’s the direct phone number of the principal scientist on the dust detector on the front of the space probe who happens to be at the University of Kent. They were amazed, you know, I’ve actually got his phone number, I’ve actually interviewed him in the past, amazing. I found that in those days, and this was before the internet, every week in the World Service they would put together envelopes full of copies of the scripts that we’d written for translation and sent them out internally round various other bits of the BBC. And about a dozen people in Television Science Features received sets of these scripts and they would usually be sent out, I think, on a Thursday. And on a Friday morning there would be a queue of people outside the editor of Tomorrow’s World’s office holding these scripts, saying oh, here’s a really good story, I’d like to make an item for Tomorrow’s World. And I was amazed at this, that they hadn’t been in there on the sources of the stories at the same time as we were in World Service. They used to get a copy, a physical copy of the journal Nature, couriered over from Nature when it came out on a Thursday, they didn’t know that there was a Nature press release that got sent out a week before, most of them. And things like that, things that we take for granted nowadays and we all get by email and on the internet, but they weren’t geared up as journalists, they were geared up as producers of beautiful programmes, I suppose. But then there was… so I was able to have quite an input there and make them more topical and more journalistic, and at that time Richard Rice was setting up a new This Week section in Tomorrow’s World, which was just the presenters basically presenting maybe four or five short science stories of the week that weren’t the usual, we’ve got to have a demonstration and a gadget and so on, it was just a presenter in front of a screen with minimal physical props and very soon I found myself in charge of finding the stories and writing them up for that, which was a good niche. But some of the other stories, the bigger stories with demonstrations and so on, I caricature, and this isn’t fair, but all aspects occurred at some stage or another. You would get a producer or an assistant producer coming along with an idea for a story with some good new science in it, they would take it to the editor who would say, yeah, okay, work that up into a story, discuss it with the episode producer for that week. The episode producer would say, yeah, that’s all very interesting, but we need a big spectacular demonstration, maybe you could demonstrate this aspect of the story. And then you’d work that into it and you’d show your script to a presenter who – the presenters were very professional people, in those days it was Peter Macann, Judith Hann, Maggie Philbin and Howard Stableford - very nice people and very good at what they did. They would say, mm, that’s interesting but I don’t quite… apart from Judith Hann they weren’t really scientists, so they would see the bits that needed more explanation, which was good. And so they’d say can you work in an explanation of this, maybe with a little demonstration of how that aspect of it worked. And so you’d do that. And then it would turn out to be six and a half minutes long and the programme producer would say, mm yeah, that’s very nice but it’s far too long, why don’t you cut this bit. And sometimes the bit that they would cut would be the original idea for the story and the reason that it was topical and indeed, the science in it and the purpose of it. So people on the Science Martin Redfern Page 94 C1672/29 Track 9

Consultative Group who saw it thought that oh, it’s very trivial and doesn’t have very much up-to-date science in it. In fact, it went through a process of extremely labour-intensive research and refinement and perfection and so on, but in the process too many cooks spoiled the broth. So it wasn’t that it was cobbled together badly, it was that it was over-produced, I think. [22:56] But the reason, the main reason why I decided not to stay in television, while I was there, 1987A blew up. If you’re not an astronomer you might not even know that name, but that was the closest supernova explosion to earth since the invention of the telescope three hundred and something years ago. It was a star not actually in our own galaxy, but in our neighbouring dwarf galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud, and it was very exciting because it was one that was spotted in the very early stages and which could be studied with big telescopes. And because I was across these things and got the telex agency reports and so on, which they didn’t get very much at Tomorrow’s World at the time, I knew about it within hours of Australian astronomers spotting it. It was spotted simultaneously, I think, in Australia and South Africa. And again, before email and internet, I had the phone number for the control room of the Anglo-Australian telescope and I managed to get Rob McNaught on the phone, who was one of the people who discovered it, and he happened to have photos that he’d taken on the telescope that first night and he happened to be going into Sydney the next day and he dropped the photos into the Associated Press office who agreed to transmit them to us in London. You see how cumbersome it was in those days, you know, he would have just tweeted it from his phone nowadays. And so we got the first pictures of this stellar explosion in the Northern Hemisphere in Tomorrow’s World that night, they were all over the front pages of the newspapers the next morning. I immediately, well, the next morning when I’d got the item out the way on Tomorrow’s World, went up to Robin Brightwell, who was then editor of Horizon and said look, I’m not an experienced Horizon producer, you probably won’t give me this gig, although I’d be very happy to take it if you did, but this is going to be the best Horizon on astronomy of the decade if you can get a film crew down to a Southern Hemisphere observatory – it was only visible from the Southern Hemisphere – within the next few days, because it’ll fade rapidly, you’ll get the human excitement if you get them down there. And he said, mm, interesting idea, I’ll have to think about that. Two months later he decided that it probably would be a good subject for a Horizon. By then it was far too late to get the sense of excitement, you might be able to re-create it, but it would be hard. And anyway, a film crew from, appropriately, Nova, in WGBH in Boston had already done that and Horizon ended up buying in the Nova feature and adapting it for Horizon. And I felt that if they were that unresponsive, I probably didn’t want to be there.

[end of track 9]

Martin Redfern Page 95 C1672/29 Track 10

[Track 10]

What memories do you have in particular of Lewis Wolpert as chair of the COPUS subcommittee that you were on?

Mainly visual memories. I can remember him sitting there in the middle of a long table in a committee room in the Royal Society. I remember his rather dry sense of humour and slightly mournful Eeyore-ish voice. I’m not sure to what extent he sort of engaged with it. He used to basically chair a meeting and get people to get on with doing things, but I don’t think he involved himself terribly heavily in it, shall we say.

Did you get to see anything of Walter Bodmer through working on one of the sub-committees of the bigger organisation?

Yes. I’m trying to think if he was actually at some of our meetings. I have a feeling he was, but in those days I had quite frequent dealings with him, both as an interviewee on all sorts of things and around the same time he was president of the British Association for a year. So he was very active, he kept turning up in all sorts of interesting places. And I remember being fascinated in his, because it was one of the first big geographical genetic studies of the British population and the genes and finding the Viking genes in Scottish islands and that sort of thing.

[01:57] Thank you. I wondered whether in that period where you were sort of in charge of that particular part of Tomorrow’s World where you were presenting sort of science news, whether you felt at any point on Tomorrow’s World you were able to slightly extend the sort of boundaries of what science consisted of for that show?

In a word, no. The items were pretty, well in that section, in the This Week section, it was fairly tightly constrained to new scientific breakthroughs that had been announced that week. So there really wasn’t much scope for the sort of reflection that we’re talking about here. And even in the longer items, they were mostly technology related rather than pure science and certainly not the sort of theoretical science that would… So it was quite difficult to get even the big questions within science on to something like that. No, it was pretty much a straight factual programme, that. Though I would say, one of the programmes that came out at the same time I was working in that department was a Horizon that was produced by Laurie John, about the anthropic principle. And that was quite a game changer for me, because I had seen, I think it was on the back of a huge book called The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, which had been written by John Barrow and Frank Tipler, which was quite a weighty and academic tome, but I’d been quite interested in it and I think I had done some interviews about it. But this Horizon really unpacked it and pushed it quite a long way and got into the arguments that John Wheeler had put forward, they managed to interview John Wheeler, something which I never managed to do, I was very sad I hadn’t. Indeed, I’ve mined sound clips of him out of that into other programmes. It was also, incidentally, innovative in that in those days all Horizons were made on sixteen millimetre film and this Martin Redfern Page 96 C1672/29 Track 10 was the first that had been made on videotape. And I remember sitting in the, it was Kensington House where the production offices were in those days, in Shepherd’s Bush, at a lunch table with various Horizon producers and they were all tut-tutting, saying oh, you could see the poor quality of the video, and it’ll never really catch on. And for me I felt that the only thing that showed that it wasn’t sixteen millimetre film was the sort of fancy graphics that they could do with some of the moving images and so on, that I know they had a repeated sort of linking theme where they put the outline of the Leonardo da Vinci perfect man in the sphere, and the perfect rectangle and so on, on to the cosmos and made it sort of tumble away among the stars, were some of the things you could do with video. But that was quite an eye-opener for me, that programme, and it got me thinking quite deeply about the why questions, in particular why is the universe just right for us.

So this is a programme that came out while you were working on Tomorrow’s World, but you didn’t work on?

I had nothing to do with it, sadly, but yeah, it came out while I was working in that department and yeah, it had a big impression on me.

[06:31] What did the group of scientists chaired by Martin Rees, the consultative committee, what was their view of BBC Science Television, including Horizon, what did they tend to say about that?

They were less rude about Horizon than they were about Tomorrow’s World. In those days, personally I think those were the glory days of Horizon, when they were all narrated off camera, usually by Paul Vaughan. So they weren’t celebrity led. Yes, there were lots of exciting bits of film in them, but they weren’t afraid of having a talking head explaining some complex concept for several minutes. I felt that after that it dumbed down too far, they started to bring in camera presenters, or if not in camera, the narrator would be a Hollywood actor or something. I used to rather typify, I think they signed, not long after I’d been in television, they signed a very lucrative co-production deal with the Discovery Channel. Prior to that a lot of co-productions had been with Nova in Boston and quite a few of the better Horizon producers had moved over to Boston and were producers there and they were still making fairly, shall we say, highbrow editions of Horizon. Once they had this co-production deal with the Discovery Channel, you could see how the Discovery Channel had imprinted its formula on to it. A lot of the programmes were about disasters of some sort, natural disasters, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, what have you. They had a top Hollywood actor narrating, they had some sensational graphics, and you could see how they were structured around the Discovery Channel’s commercial breaks. So you’d see the specially composed music rising in intensity, the Hollywood actor would say, ‘But there was worse to come’, and sure enough after the commercial break, [laughs] there was. So I got a bit cynical about those. I think it’s levelled off and picked up a bit after that, but it’s still… I think television still suffers from feeling that it’s got to be run by, in camera, by celebrities and it’s totally dependent on spectacular pictures, rather than being science led and story led.

[09:41] Martin Redfern Page 97 C1672/29 Track 10

Last time you said that there was a period, I think after changes made by John Birt, where those in charge of commissioning radio, science radio programmes, were themselves interested in the idea of a celebrity presenter.

Yes.

When did that happen and can you think of specific cases that affected you?

That started to happen in the late nineties. It affected me particularly after World Service and Radio 4 Science Units merged, because I think Radio 4 had very much still held on to the belief that producers shouldn’t be heard, they shouldn’t present, they certainly shouldn’t come on as expert interviewees. Whereas with World Service we were more like journalists, more like correspondents, if you like, and you’d sometimes get your correspondent to present a programme. Because they knew something about that subject and were passionately interested in it and you would certainly get your correspondent to be interviewed about a story as it was breaking if you maybe didn’t have a real scientist on the spot available in good quality and so on, sometimes the correspondent could summarise the story more clearly and more succinctly and more topically. Plus, with World Service with shrinking budgets, it saved money if we were doing the presenting ourselves. Radio 4 still had, shall we say, better funded programmes, therefore they could afford to travel around with a presenter a bit more, and once you had to sell the programme idea not just to the audience but to the commissioner, and the commissioner maybe didn’t know too much about the science, one of the ways of selling it to them was to have a presenter that they’d heard of and they knew, oh yes, he’ll be good, he’ll be popular, or she’ll be popular. I’m trying to think of specific examples of that. Well, without needing to mention specific names, I know when Andrew Caspari was commissioning for Radio 4 and then he actually moved over to commissioning for World Service, there was a little bit of a joke, but it was a little bit true as well, that if you had a BBC news correspondent who had been one of the people who he had developed when he was editor of The World Tonight as your presenter, you stood a better chance of placing the programme. And if you really thought outside the box and got some sort of celebrity… this is why we’ve got Robin Ince presenting science programmes as a well- known comedian, for example, and indeed Brian Cox.

[13:18] Yes, mentioning Brian Cox raises the question of when you think that a category of sort of celebrity scientist starts on radio and TV. I mean Brian Cox would perhaps be an example of that, but were there others while you were still in the BBC?

Yes. Yeah, Brian Cox is perhaps an extreme example because he appeals to the young ladies. I’ll tell you a little anecdote. There was a programme that we recorded at a British Association meeting about particle physics and we had, I think it was in Edinburgh, it was at the Edinburgh Science Festival, that’s right, and Quentin Cooper was presenting for me and we had a lady particle physicist, I think we had Jim Al-Khalili and we had Brian Cox, all basically celebrity scientists. And, you know, we had a good recording and lively question and answer. But at the end, three of them, including Quentin Cooper feeling a bit hurt, were sort of standing there alone whilst a queue of young ladies were queuing up to get selfies with Brian Cox. [laughs] But I digress. I Martin Redfern Page 98 C1672/29 Track 10 think actually, to some extent celebrity scientists were emerging long before Brian Cox hit the scene. For example, Paul Davies, as someone who I knew when he was a young postdoc mathematician at King’s College, London who was just very good at explaining some of the more knotty issues and frontiers of physics. He went on to be Professor at Newcastle and then moved to Adelaide and is now Arizona State University, but he was already writing in the popular media as well as being interviewed by me. He was writing quite regularly in The Guardian and he was writing popular science books. And indeed, back in the early eighties, he was daring to write popular science books with the word ‘God’ in the title, which was pretty novel then. I think he thinks that’s possibly why he never got a professorship at Oxford or Cambridge. But he would, and still is, someone who I would turn to if there was a really frontier issue in an area of physics that I know would interest him, he would be a very good interviewee. Just as Nature has its ‘News and Views’ section where a scientist in the area but not directly involved in that research puts a paper later in the magazine into a broader context for a science audience, so people like Paul Davies does that for a popular audience, I think. Sometimes it’s his own work, but very often it isn’t, but it’s something that he’s very much engaged with.

[17:03] How did you meet in the first place?

I don’t think I was quite the first person to interview Paul, I think my then editor, John Newell, had a few times and in those days he was just over the road in King’s College, London, just over the road from Bush House, and he was writing ‘News and Views’ stories then for Nature, so if there was something that he’d written about and it was a topical story, we’d get him in on Science in Action for a quick five minute interview. We soon found that he had more to say than could be fitted in a five minute interview so we’d do a longer, broader interview in Discovery, perhaps. And I think I was probably… actually, no, my friend on Radio 4, Julian Brown, I think got in first and used him to present whole half hour features and yeah, he did a lot for Radio 4 and some for me. I remember, one of the first ones that he presented for me, he was by then professor in Newcastle, and in fact he was thinking of moving to Adelaide and we wanted to put the programme together at a time when his then wife was going to go out to Adelaide to see if she thought it would be a place they could move to. And so he was left at home looking after the kids in the evening, so I drove up to Newcastle with a reel-to-reel recorder as the way to play him the clips, in the back of the car, and we wrote the script with me doing the final editing and playing him the clips in his office at University of Newcastle and then we recorded the programme at BBC North West up there.

Having worked with him for a long time and indeed been friendly with him for a long time, have you learnt from him why he in the first place wanted to get into the popularisation of science? I think you said he was a postdoc when he started doing this. So do you know why he did, as you say, perhaps risk certain things in order to do this?

I think in the early stages I don’t think he was risking anything, I think quite the opposite, I think he was deliberately or accidentally promoting Paul Davies. You know, the ‘News and Views’ pieces that he was doing in Nature, and indeed the physics articles he was doing for The Guardian and the interviews he was doing for Martin Redfern Page 99 C1672/29 Track 10 me were all in the fairly safe area. I think it was in his books that he started to push the boundaries a bit. I remember particularly, I think it was God and the New Physics, which I think he now feels wasn’t his greatest work, but it fired me up at the time. I actually read it on my honeymoon. But, you know, it had… and this was at a time when we were very interested in the frontiers of science at the Study Society as well, so when you found a respected physicist writing a book with God in the title, that got you thinking. And he always managed to do that without getting remotely theological, but just dropping in some of the ‘why’ questions among accounts of good, solid frontier physics and cosmology. Later on he branched off more into astrobiology and origins of life and human origins and so on, but… I think he, basically, he found that he could make a better living doing that than being a purely reductionist academic, you know, he I’m sure made a good income from his books, he of course won the Templeton Prize, and on the strength of that sort of thing the people who run Arizona State University were prepared to give him basically his own institute, which he called Beyond. I always remember when we went in, we came in through the back door and there was a little door right at the back, so I said, ‘So is this the back of Beyond?’ Which amused him. But he has been wonderful at collaborating with people in completely different fields there on human origins, even doing a big project on evolution and cancer, for instance, since then.

And yet you say that he suspects that having a book with God in the title may have affected certain kinds of academic opportunities?

Yes, it may have, well I can only speculate, but it may have caused some professorial review boards to think ooh, he’s a bit too populists. It’s an attitude, and it’s not simply an attitude to the ‘G’ word or the ‘S’ word. There is an attitude, or there was, which I think is dying out as old professors die, that really you should not be popularising your science. I know Heather Couper, astronomer and great friend of mine, says that when she was studying for her PhD at Oxford, she did a popular science talk in town and was apparently hauled in in front of her professor the next day who said, ‘I hear you’ve been prostituting your science’. I don’t think she ever completed the PhD and made a good career in science communication, but that back in the seventies was the attitude in some places, and I’m pleased to say, I think it’s mostly died out now.

Thank you. [24:10] Could you give an account now of your work in the teaching of science communication in as much detail as you can remember from the sort of first thing you did in that area to the present?

It’s always been a bit of a sideline, but I’ve always been very keen to encourage new talent, shall we say. I remember when I was fairly new in it, but I was a BBC producer and I would go to conferences in the States and other journalists would say, where did you do your journalism masters, and so on. I didn’t do a journalism master, we didn’t have such things in Britain in those days, and still less, specialist science ones, in those days. Actually, I think the first encouragement in that direction came through a very small group called the International Science Writers’ Association. On one of my first trips to the States, one of the places I wanted to visit and record interviews at was the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Martin Redfern Page 100 C1672/29 Track 10

Massachusetts, and their head of press and publications was one James Cornell, who became a very good friend of mine, and he was the President of the International Science Writers’ Association, encouraged me to join and then a year or two later he was organising a whole session at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which was meeting that year in Los Angeles on science reporting. And as the person he knew at the BBC he invited me to give a paper. And I thought I was just, rather like this interview, I thought I was just telling people what interested me and that they wouldn’t particularly want to hear it, but they all seemed very interested and that led to a couple of other things at the triple AS. About the same sort of time I was joining the COPUS sub-committee that we’ve mentioned, and not long after, and I think possibly partly as a result of COPUS, they started a science communication MSc course at Imperial College, London and my then editor did a bit of freelance – John Newell – did a bit of freelance teaching at that and when he retired he ran the radio aspect of that course for a while. And then one of his students, Gareth Mitchell, took it over. My approach to teaching science communication has been very much the way I learnt myself, give them a chance to do it and let them get on with it. There are those who have tried to take science communication and make it into its own arcane academic discipline, which I think completely defeats the object of it, you know, if you want to study it academically, fine, but that’s not how to teach people how to do it. The way you teach people how to do it is to give them a press conference or a microphone or a publication and say we want 600 words by three o’clock please, and the first few times they’ll probably get it wrong, and then they learn. That’s roughly how I learnt and so that’s how I’ve tried to teach. For quite a few years there was a part-time extra-mural MSc course at Birkbeck College, London, and I got involved in that regularly every year I would give two or three sessions up at the College, where I’d tell them about my work and how I did it and I would do practical sessions on how to select a story from that week’s press releases and journals and sources and so on, and I’d play them some examples of how not to do it. And then they would come together for a day at a weekend, on a Saturday, in a studio at Bush House to make their own live radio science programme. In the week or two before that I’d be mentoring some of them individually, helping them with their stories, teaching them digital editing packages and that sort of thing, so that it was not too chaotic by the time we got to the studio. And sometimes it was, but you know, you learn a lot from getting the editing done thirty seconds before you go on air and so on, we’ve all been there for real as well as in exercises. That was the main thing I did, but I occasionally in addition to that got invited to give sessions on various other journalism courses, but also to do a bit of, again, practical training for various universities and institutes. I’ve done them with Noel Sharkey and his robotics group up at Sheffield. I’ve done them for the British Antarctic Survey. And again, if I’ve got a day in one of these places I try and make it as practical as possible, I try and get them, for example, to write no more than 200 words summarising for a popular audience the central thing that they’re trying to find out or have found out in their research, you know, basically to create a story. And then on the strength of that story, with that as my briefing, I will then interview them as live and record the results and we’ll then play it back and analyse how they did and how they might have done it better and so on. So it’s very much hands-on learning it in a practical way.

Are there particular examples that you use again and again of positive and negative examples of science journalism?

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Yes. One that I use quite a lot, and I guess I could give you sound clips of some of these, as an example of how a scientist can or cannot explain a possibly complex concept. I’ve got a pair of clips with people talking about the highest energy cosmic rays and the first person says ‘Some of these cosmic rays have very high energies, they may be several GeV or possibly a TeV’. The interviewer chips in and says, ‘What’s a TeV?’ ‘Oh well, if you have two plates one centimetre apart with a charge of one volt between them, the force they experience is…’ and so on, he goes back to first principles. And then he says, ‘And so an MeV is a million of those and oh, it’s… I can’t explain it’. And then the second person says, ‘Some of these cosmic rays have energies as high as one or two TeV, that’s about the same energy as a tennis ball served at Wimbledon and travelling at a hundred miles an hour’. Now, you’ve got a layman’s understanding of the incredible energy that something the size of an atomic nucleus has.

[32:42] What’s your view of the tendency now to avoid using the phrase ‘public understanding’?

It makes it sound too didactic, as if it’s you the clever teacher trying to tell these ignorant people… it takes them back to school and an awful lot of people hated science at school. So the term nowadays is public engagement with science and that is best done on something that they feel they’ve got a stake in. So if you’re trying to… if you want them to understand better, for example, the benefits and the issues around genetically modified crops, for example. You don’t do it by preaching at them, by saying, you know, how wonderful genetically modified crops are, or indeed, how terrible genetically modified crops are. You tell them as many sides of the story as possible and you get them involved in a debate discussing the pros and cons and maybe you can feed in expert witnesses to explain some of the things that they’re getting stuck on, so they come out with a stake in that discussion rather than simply having been preached at.

You mentioned the science communication almost as a new discipline, almost like a new discipline in the humanities. Have you taken an interest, or to what extent have you taken an interest in that? There’s a journal, I think, which is called The Public Understanding of Science, for example.

Yes. Now is that the current name of the one that the British Association do? It’s been through various… There was a little rash of journals. Oh no, there is actually an academic journal of that, isn’t there? Yes, I think I even had an article in it once, because there was a seminar in Trieste on radio science specifically that I spoke at and that resulted in a special edition, I think, of that journal. It’s, you know, it’s good that it’s happening, but I think it can easily, how do I put it, get up its own backside. It can easily become a self-fulfilling… I think what you actually need to do is to get on and do it well, and I think the biggest sticking point nowadays is not the skills of the science journalists, nor even the skills of the scientist in talking about their work, it’s the preparedness of the gatekeepers of the outlets to let in-depth science on. So it’s the commissioners for radio and television, it’s the editors of the national papers, and so on, most of whom probably don’t have a background in science, or indeed a particularly passionate interest in it, and therefore they’re judging it against the latest celebrity gossip, the latest arts reviews and film blockbusters and so on, and I think in order to get past those gatekeepers, there’s an awful lot of massaging of science to, basically to get it on the page and certainly to get it Martin Redfern Page 102 C1672/29 Track 10 on the front page if it ever gets there. I think that’s the biggest problem. I’m not sure how you get round that really. Yes, there are magazines like New Scientist, there are things like Mosaic that the Wellcome Trust publish, there’s loads of stuff online, but most of that is in a sense preaching to the choir, it’s only people who already think they’re interested in science who read New Scientist. Although it was really encouraging that New Scientist Live had about 10,000 people at it in the ExCel Centre a few weekends ago, I think that’s a very encouraging sign. I think the interest is out there, but people probably aren’t prepared to spend several pounds a week to get New Scientist, but they would love more good science in their daily papers, on their radios and televisions and so on, as long as it’s good. There is one issue there, I remember with World Service we were making a big push to get more science on World Service news and there was a lot of encouragement for that and basically, I think they funded us to have, rather than two or three stories a week, two or three stories a day that we could put up. And so whereas maybe in the past we would have put up this week’s story as the launch of another mission to Mars or something, we’d also think ah, but there’s also a story about galaxy formation, there’s another story about molecular biology, and we’d feed all those up. And then at the news planning meeting, said well, I know we want more science stories, but we want more missions to Mars, we don’t want all these theoretical ones. And of course you can only report on what’s actually there. If there is only one ship leaving for Mars this week, that’s the one you have to report on. And another anecdote I would say, but it was typical of some of the news editors we were dealing with, and the fact that we were talking about the ozone hole dates it to the early nineties, I guess. That at a news planning meeting I’d mentioned, I forget which way round it was, I think I’d mentioned a greenhouse gas story that was going to be coming up in a journal in a day or two’s time, would be a really good story. And one of the news editors said, ‘But hang on, you did that story about ozone last week, I think we’ve had enough of this sort of thing’. And I think this was about the time when apartheid was just ending in South Africa, so I said, ‘Didn’t you do a story about South Africa yesterday? And you’re going to do another one today’. And they were very cross with me at that, but it rather typified the attitude, they lump it all together and think, ooh, it’s up in the atmosphere therefore we’ve done that for this week.

Thank you. [40:22] Staying on the topic of journalism, I wanted to ask another couple of questions about the Templeton Fellowships, and one is whether you have any memories of a particular journalist who I think was in that same first intake that you were in, and his name was John Horgan.

Oh yes.

The reason I’m asking about him is because he ends up at some point writing a sort of critical review of the Fellowships which goes on to the Edge website which I’ll ask about separately in a little while. But I wondered whether you have any memories of him on that first year that might help us to sort of contextualise that article, you know, the critique that he’s published?

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Yes. I remember John very well and he was great entertainment value. He was, in some of the discussions he was a little bit the naughty boy, as it were, he liked saying something that would stir things up. My take on it was that he was always doing this with a sense of intelligent fun. Sadly, his critique, when it got published, upset a lot of the organisers very much and caused quite a lot of bitterness. I don’t think he had intended that. I think it was very sad because people who I am very fond of were deeply hurt by that and I think some of the resulting discussion on the Edge website got particularly nasty at some of the people involved closely with the Templeton Foundation, and that was a shame. I think he was, to misquote Monty Python, he was not the Messiah, he was just a naughty boy. [laughs] I don’t think he intended to be personally nasty, he was just an interested atheist poking some slightly naughty comments.

Thank you. His assessment is that there were about half sceptics and half believers on that first year, is that an assessment of the situation that you’d agree with? The reason I ask is because I’m not sure how reliable he is as a witness, because I think he at one point says that Simon Conway Morris is a Catholic and this sort of thing, so I just wanted another view of the balance of the participants.

Yes. Not everybody on that actually I think declared their deep inner beliefs or lack of them. I mean he declared his atheism quite clearly, there are one or two others who were very clearly coming from a definite position of belief. I think the majority, like me, were coming from a position of interested agnosticism, shall we say, rather than either a definite belief or a definite atheism.

[43:51] Thank you. And to what extent were you then aware of the Edge and John Brockman’s role in sort of what you might call a public understanding of scientific atheism, almost?

I was aware of John Brockman because he was the literary agent for an awful lot of very successful and high- powered scientist writers who were writing some of the frontier books that I was most interested in reading, including Paul Davies, for example. He’s one of those people who, I think I’ve only met him once and then not very closely, but he’s one of those people, a bit like John Maddox when he was editor of Nature, who are deeply sceptical, if not hostile, of extending science into these slightly spooky areas, but at the same time are sufficiently fascinated to want to play with fire a bit. And I appreciate that, I think there’s nothing wrong with healthy scepticism, it’s when it turns overtly hostile and particularly when it turns personal. It’s a bit like Richard Dawkins’ website, I think, well okay, he gets very angry about what he sees as religion, but that’s not what religion is. But it gets personal and nasty with some of the bloggers who also contribute to that site. I think that’s probably the same with the Edge, I think John Brockman is a very intelligent and interested person who just happens to encourage, well, trolls.

I’m surprised in a way that you say that about John Maddox that he was, okay, sceptical, yes I’d agree with, but you said that he also had a kind of a nagging fascination with the things he was sceptical about. Was that what you were…

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Yeah, if he wasn’t fascinated by them he wouldn’t have given Fred Hoyle an editorial, he wouldn’t have published, was it Jacques Benveniste’s work on the memory of water and homeopathy, albeit he published it alongside a damning editorial about it. But if he was simply not interested and totally didn’t want to give it an airing, he wouldn’t have published it at all. He wouldn’t have reviewed Rupert Sheldrake’s book. Okay, he gave it a damning review and suggested it was the best candidate as a book for burning that he’d read for a long time, which probably helped its sales considerably. But the fact that he was prepared to engage with it at all suggests a fascination. And indeed, of course he sent a conjuror to try and expose Benveniste in his lab afterwards and, you know, that was showmanship, but it was also giving publicity to something, which if he thought it should be dead and buried he would have denied it that publicity. It gave it a lot more publicity than it otherwise would have had.

[47:53] Thank you. And could you tell me about your own strategy, if that’s the right word, or your own approach to selecting the fellows for the subsequent four years of the Fellowship.

Yes. I mean it was a very rigorous process, very thoroughly organised, particularly by Julia Vitullo-Martin in New York. We all had a chance to comment on all the candidates, but I was only involved in actually interviewing the ones in the UK, which was normally expected to be just for two successful candidates out of the ten each year. And UK tended to include the rest of the world as well. I know that the Templeton Foundation were very much looking for people who would have high impact. So they probably didn’t want somebody who was right at the end of their career, was working for a fairly obscure journal, or maybe working for television where it was very, very difficult to get your ideas placed. They wanted somebody who would be writing big stories that were widely read, ultimately particularly that would be widely read by their home audience, people from the Washington Post or The New York Times or high profile stuff there. Of course the BBC scored fairly highly there, which was good, because it got me one. But I had to be well aware of that, so somebody who was just casually interested in such things but wouldn’t actually be in a position to write or broadcast about them would be marked down. You had to, you know, it came with quite a generous bursary, so you had to make sure that you were giving it to someone who was really going to both benefit from it and use it, I think those were the main criteria. But also people who would be able to engage in informed discussion so, you know, had to be bright and outgoing people as well, probably. I think after John Horgan’s article there was a bit of nervousness about getting openly declared atheists on it, but I’m pleased to say that that wasn’t ever a criteria where people were thrown off, off shortlists and so on. There’s some rephrasing of a Groucho Marx here isn’t there, that I think… it’s the same reason why I think BBC World Service is one of the best representatives of Britain overseas, because the government doesn’t have editorial control over it. I think it’s one of the best representatives of the science and religion debate that the Templeton journalism fellowships had atheists and agnostics and maybe people from different religions as well.

[51:58] Thank you. Now, in the first interview session you mention an interview with Richard Dawkins in which he says, he turns round to you and says, you’ve got religious beliefs haven’t you? Or something like that. And I Martin Redfern Page 105 C1672/29 Track 10 didn’t know whether that was an interview with him that you’d done a fortnight ago or, you know, in 1984, and so I wonder if you could give a sort of timing of your encounters with Richard Dawkins, which would include, I assume, well yes it would include the fact that he was on the journalism fellowships, but he’s been in programmes, Sacred Showdown, for example. You’ve already mentioned the A Question of Science in which he appears, but perhaps in other contexts you’ve come across him as well. When was the first?

Yeah. I’m trying to think when the first one was. I think the Question of Science was one of the first times that I had put him in one of my programmes, as it were. I’m trying to think if there had been others. If there were others before that, it would have been from his position as a zoologist and evolutionary biologist rather than from anything to do with religion, which is probably why I don’t remember them. I remember, I must have interviewed him before this, because I felt I knew him already, but I think it was – which was the British Association meeting in Oxford? Would that have been about 198…6, perhaps? You’ll have to check which year that was. But I think it was also the anniversary of the Wilberforce-Huxley debate on Darwin and one of the high points of the BA meeting was a restaging of that in the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford with Richard Harris, the Bishop of Oxford, very nice, and I think evolution believing Christian. And Bev Halstead, who was Professor of Vertebrate Palaeontology at Reading, I think, now sadly no longer with us. And it was all done as a bit of a formal thing. Roy Jenkins I think was the Chancellor of Oxford University at the time and had come in in his full academic regalia, which he rather enjoyed, and the Bishop was in his episcopal robes and Bev Halstead was in a white suit and it was all great fun and good theatre. And the whole lot were upstaged, right in the front of the front row there were two reserved seats and just at the last minute in walked Richard Dawkins in t-shirt and shorts, and his new wife, Lalla Ward, ex-Doctor Who girl, similarly scantily attired. And walked up to the front and sat down in these reserved seats. I thought okay, we’ve got a showman here. [laughs] But you asked me about interviews with Richard.

Not necessarily interviews, just, you know, meetings with him.

Programme appearances, yeah.

So that was 1986, approximately.

Approximately, yes. I think the… it might have been a year or two later. I think the Question of Science one with Habgood that I mentioned, I think that must have been late eighties, probably ’89. After that, it was mainly programmes about science and religion that we would try and get Richard Dawkins to take part in and he was very careful which he took part in and which he didn’t. I wanted to get him in a programme with Keith Ward and he would never do that, because I think he’d been in a debate with him and he’d felt that he’d lost and Richard didn’t like losing. I think that the time he rounded on me and accused me of having religious beliefs was fairly late in the day. I think that was actually at a recording for a World Service book programme which we did with an audience in a big studio at Bush House and I think I had asked a question from the audience, I forget exactly what the question was. So I think that was probably just after we’d had the In the Beginning programme. For that programme he would not be interviewed by Henry Morris III, he would not speak to that Martin Redfern Page 106 C1672/29 Track 10 man, were his words. But he was very happy to be interviewed by Genie Scott, so was one of her witnesses. And I used a clip of that interview in the other half of the programme, which was basically presented by Henry Morris, and Richard Dawkins phoned me up at home on the Sunday it first went out, very angry that I’d put him in the same programme as ‘that man’. Yeah, he, I think he’s probably quite a sensitive soul actually, but he also gets very angry. I expect Rupert Sheldrake has told you about the time they went, came to film at Rupert Sheldrake’s house and as soon as Richard Dawkins realised that Sheldrake was only going to do it if he was allowed to explain his theories properly, he walked out. That’s my understanding of it anyway.

[59:17] Why in the late eighties, I wonder if you could take yourself back and you said last time that you put Richard Dawkins and John Habgood round the table, you managed to get them round the table in the late eighties to have this debate. Why then did you get those two round the table?

Because Richard Habgood was Archbishop of York, but I think he had trained as a biologist, hadn’t he originally? And so he was prepared to engage in that debate and Richard Dawkins was an evolutionary biologist who had criticised religion. I don’t think we were specifically, we certainly weren’t talking about alternatives to evolution, we were talking more generally about the relationship between science and religion. I’m going to have to find you that recording, aren’t I?

I wondered why it was… I would have thought that in the late eighties you could have chosen other, perhaps Richard Dawkins might have been an obvious choice at that time, but why John Habgood at that time when there might have been other candidates?

Well, partly that it was a pretty high profile series. We’d got a forty-five minute slot, which was a long slot for World Service, it was usually little over thirty minutes that you got. I think if I had known him in those days I might have gone for somebody like Keith Ward, but I don’t think at that stage he had become Regis Professor at Oxford, so having a real theologian who was actually prepared to take part in such a debate. I think actually the third person we had on that was Paul Davies, but I may be wrong, I’ll have to check.

On the same debate?

In that same programme, yes. It was one of a series looking at different aspects of sort of humanities of science, if you like.

[end of track 10]

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[Track 11]

I’d like to ask now about one programme in particular, Behind the Universe, which thanks to you I’ve listened to. And if possible, if we could have, because I suppose of the sort of double mystery here, for anyone listening, on the one hand the extent to which science itself is mysterious, but also how radio programmes are made, I wonder whether you could give a sort of detailed account of how that programme could be put together. For example, just off the recording you were talking about how the Fred Hoyle, who’s I think the first of the eight thirteen or fourteen-minute programmes, comes out of an hour and a half interview, but that interview itself has a story behind it in terms of how you get in contact with Fred and where it all happens and where it progresses, but also, before that, why those eight people, other people you might have considered, other people you contacted who said yes or said no, that sort of thing. So the final sort of artefact is the programme that you can listen to, but I’d like to know sort of everything that went into it up to the point that it comes out as eight neat sections of audio, if you see what I mean.

Yes. The hardest thing, at least now and pretty hard then, was placing it on a BBC network. Fortunately, back in the 1980s when I made that, science was the in thing and expanding and as long as you could make the programme without spending a vast amount of money, they would very often accept it. So then that was good, I don’t know how easily I could get a programme like that through now. There was, I think, at not quite the same time, a little bit later, but there was a series on television, on BBC2, produced by another friend of mine who’s involved with the Scientific and Medical Network actually, which was, I think it was called Mavericks, and that was the only way that… what’s his name? Edwards. I’m trying to say Bob Edwards, but that’s the test-tube baby guy isn’t it? I’ll get you his first name later. Produced it and at that stage there were, I think David Patterson who had come from BBC Radio 4 was commissioning some stuff for BBC2 and that’s how they managed to get it through, basically, but it was talking head interviews again and the only way they could get these controversial figures on air was by titling the programme Mavericks and sort of freak show type stuff. Wasn’t quite as bad as that with World Service. They were, certainly in those days, prepared to take thoughtful interviews with interesting people who didn’t necessarily follow the mainstream of ideas. And as I think I mentioned earlier in our conversation, it was partly inspired after reading Dialogues with Scientists and Sages by Renée Weber, partly inspired by some of the people who’d come to speak to the Study Society and the Scientific and Medical Network. Fortunately, having those magic letters on your visiting card, BBC, opens a lot of doors and throughout my career I have very, very seldom been refused an interview, apart from simple logistical problems like, he’s in Antarctica at the moment, or something like that. It’s tended only to be either because they work for a big company and the company bosses say no, or because they’re doing slightly controversial research with animals and they’re worried that the animal rights people might get them, or one or two people who were just straight difficult egos. But the vast majority of scientists are really keen to be interviewed on the BBC. Eminent partially retired ones who’ve had a bad time in the past from the press might be a little harder, which brings me on to Fred Hoyle, who, you know, fairly blunt Martin Redfern Page 108 C1672/29 Track 10

Yorkshire guy who must have been interviewed quite a few times, although not as many as you might think for someone as famous as him, I think he turned down interviews a lot and in those days we didn’t have email, his phone numbers were ex-directory, and I had to write to him because he had a house in the Lake District and I thought, ooh, that’ll be nice, it’ll be a chance to go up to the Lake District. That would have been the maximum that the travel budget would have stretched to. But actually he said he was down visiting his daughter-in-law, I think, in Oxford and I could go and interview him there. But he said, well, you can come along for ten minutes or so, I really don’t want to spend too much time with you, but I’ve long been fascinated by his work both as an astronomer and for thinking outside the box, and so he basically let me carry on, I think the interview carried on for nearly an hour and a half in the end, which of course made it harder to carve a fifteen-minute programme out of it. I always stray on the side of recording too much, nothing like as long as this interview, but if I’m going to get a ten-minute interview I will very often record half an hour, which just makes me have more work in the editing, but on the other hand it gives the opportunity for me to maybe have happy accidents to find things that I wasn’t expecting and they’re often the best bits in an interview. So yeah, in that case I… did I drive? Yes, I think I did actually drive over to Oxford and spend a couple of hours at their house on the outskirts of Oxford and a very pleasant conversation with him. It’s the only time I’ve met him in a one-to-one situation and very glad I did, because although he was wrong in many respects, the fact that he was prepared to think in unorthodox ways, I think is the sort of thing that is very refreshing in science.

And I mean, I think some of the other people in the list of eight you’ll be able to very quickly dismiss because they’re people you’ve already talked about. We know how you knew them and therefore we might think we know why they were included, but these are the eight. Could you say why the other seven are the seven that they are?

Yes, I was probably a bit self-indulgent, I interviewed people who I really wanted to interview. I had read David Bohm’s book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order and was fascinated by it. I found him quite hard work to get a popular level interview out of, but I think he warmed during the interview. I think I only recorded about half an hour with him, but that made the editing slightly easier. Glen Schaefer’s a fascinating guy, Canadian, could track locusts at twenty miles with radar, individual locusts, and that’s I think what the bulk of that programme was talking about, but he was also interested in all sorts of esoteric things which he went on to speak about at the Study Society but which he at that stage felt he couldn’t talk about on a public platform. And indeed he died not that long afterwards, so probably hasn’t. But I’ve got hours of recording of him. Peter Fenwick of course has gone on to be a close friend so it was not a question of will he talk to me, but which of the many strands of his life we would talk about. Paul Davies, rather similarly.

That’s Rupert Sheldrake.

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Oh yes, Rupert Sheldrake, well, that was pretty obvious because A New Science of Life had fairly recently come out. That was before a lot of his experiments on telepathy so it concentrated the mind a bit better on his theories of morphic fields and so on.

Had he by that point spoken at the Study Society and that might be why?

Erm… not sure if he had then, because I arranged for him to speak at the Study Society, but it might have been as a result, I’m not quite sure which egg came first. But certainly the book had come out. I think I might have heard him at a Scientific and Medical Network before that. William Anderson was slightly the odd one of the pack in that he wasn’t himself a practising scientist, though he was at the time the publications director for the Nuffield Science Curriculum Trust, but again, he was highly involved in the Study Society and a deep thinker whose ideas I felt were worthy of a wider platform. James Lovelock was, was a real joy to visit him and his mill down by the river outside Launceston on the Devon-Cornwall borders, really delightful man. Didn’t want to be pushed too far away from solid science, was a bit concerned that people were taking his Gaia hypothesis and equating it too much with a separate conscious God, or Goddess. But a fascinating conversation, with the peacocks that he had in his garden interrupting in the background occasionally. So yeah, it was, making that series was almost a sort of part-time job while I was continuing the regular regular weekly science programmes. But it was one of the really most enjoyable parts of the job.

Did any of them want to approve the final programme before it was broadcast?

I don’t think any of those did ask to do so. I think Glen Schaefer made it clear that there were some of the things that he’d talked to me about privately that he didn’t want broadcast, but no, I don’t think any of them did. And it was actually fairly rare that in any areas interviewees did, I think probably because they knew that that wasn’t something that the BBC does, you know, we try and be reasonable and honest about not misrepresenting them, but also we ask them to trust us to be reasonable and honest and not misrepresent them. Occasionally you get people who clearly don’t understand the process at all. I remember with one researcher, I forget what the subject was actually, but in those days we used to transcribe the programmes after broadcast and I sent him a copy of the transcript, you know, a few weeks after the broadcast. And a few weeks later it came back covered with red ink, saying, once you’ve made the following alterations – and this was a transcript of things he had actually said himself in his voice and we had broadcast in voice, not in print – once you have made these alterations I think it will be acceptable to broadcast. [laughs] But that was very, very rare, that was why that particular one stands out.

What category of things did Glen Schaefer not want you to include?

There were things about… he had various esoteric ideas about the significance of the pyramids, for example. He had some quite intriguing ideas about the relationship between man and nature and what Martin Redfern Page 110 C1672/29 Track 10 our role should be. He touched on them in terms of insect ecology and controlling spruce budworm moth and so on, but he had privately developed them into much more evolved sort of theological arguments, I think.

What was at risk in talking about those for him?

I think he, well, probably ridicule from his scientific colleagues, but he felt that this was something that many people would either not understand or would misinterpret and it would reflect badly on him and maybe his position.

How much pre-discussion was there with interviewees about the intentions of the programme, or even the kinds of questions you were going to ask, rehearsal of answers, that sort of thing?

I very much try not to rehearse the answers. I try and read up about what they’re likely to say, you know, read their books or read their articles or listen to things they’ve done already so that I know directions that they might go in. I will tell them in advance, probably before I get there, when I’m fixing up the interview, about the purpose or context of the programme, the interview. But I try not to get them to mentally and certainly not physically to rehearse their answers, because if they do, often the first take sounds the most spontaneous and after that they’re trying to remember the first take, so it’s not so natural sounding. If they’ve got a magic moment, a wonderful story to tell or something, it’s always the first telling of it that is most engaging. And of course also you don’t want, and they still do no matter how often you ask them not to, you don’t want them to say, well, as I was saying to you earlier before you switched the recorder on. Dot dot dot. [laughs] And the big mistake I made with the first radio interview I ever did was to write down a list of questions I wanted to ask and then stick rigorously to that question even though the answers weren’t quite the ones I was expecting. You have to, I think, think on your feet and follow how it goes and let it be a conversation. That’s the lovely thing about radio, I think, which is much nicer than television in one respect, that you are the proxy for the listener, the one listener, okay, with a bit of luck the twenty million of them, but it’s an intimate thing, people are often listening alone, they’re letting the interviewee into their living room or their bedroom or wherever and you as interviewer are their proxy there, so you need to be able to be natural and follow the conversation rather than try and script it. I’m full of admiration for some of the wonderful interviews from the 1950s where the whole interview was scripted in advance and somehow they make it sound fluent, but that restricts hugely the number of people you can do it with who can actually do that sort of performance. Most people, if you set them at their ease will have a natural conversation and that’s what a good radio interview should be.

This might be very difficult to answer because it’s a very specific question, but do you have memories about decisions made in choosing between (a) retaining your question in the interview and then the answer, as opposed to having a sort of insert, perhaps recorded, probably recorded afterwards when you might say things like, so, can Paul Davies imagine so-and-so with or without a god operating Martin Redfern Page 111 C1672/29 Track 10 behind this, and then you have Paul Davies appearing to respond to something which is a sort of insert?

Yeah. That is rather a case of… that’s set by the format of the piece that you’re doing. With something like Behind the Universe, that is billed as ‘an interview’ and it’s just you with one person. And so okay, you script the introduction because basically when you do the interview probably the first two or three questions will end up on the cutting room floor, so you need to be able to introduce the speaker and get them to the right point to answer the first question, so you might script that. I like it then to unfold as an interview with your own questions. But if you’re doing a documentary feature where maybe in a half hour programme you have six or eight different people speaking, obviously you didn’t record them in that order and you didn’t introduce each of them straight into that reply, you’re probably picking the best reply between three or four different speakers who answered a similar question and it might be twenty minutes into your interview with that particular person so you have to script links. One of the hardest things to do actually, is to write yourself or any other presenter out of the script entirely and have a non-narrated feature where interviewees either introduce themselves or need no introduction and one things follow seamlessly from another. Or even if you’ve got a presenter there, one location interview follows seamlessly from another. That’s where the amount of time that is spent on television and indeed the amount of budget that is spent on television pays off in one sense, because the programme is more or less completely scripted before you start filming it. And so you can have David Attenborough opening one sentence in Antarctica and finishing it in Hawaii and that’s all been thought through why he’s doing it and it all makes sense at the time, but of course it’s not filmed in that order. So that’s a skill, but it means writing the whole programme or the whole series in advance, and that can take some of the spontaneity out of it. I think that’s one of the reasons why I like radio so much, that you go along to an interview, you know that Fred Hoyle’s got some interesting controversial ideas about cosmology and about the origin of life and so on, you know vaguely where it might go, but you don’t know exactly what he’ll say, you don’t know what the magic moment is going to be, you don’t know what’s going to melt the heart. I’ve just done, it wasn’t a radio programme or a television programme, it was a two and a half hour long tribute to a dear friend of mine who’s recently died, but he was an academic and a musician and a violinist and we did this before an audience of about 180 people, so it was a bit like a live programme. And in between various real live human beings reading things and performing pieces of music, we had audio and/or video extracts from his life, and it was really moving to be able to craft those into a sequence to tell a story and to pick the moments that made people laugh in an affectionate way, or even cry. It’s a powerful thing to be able to share and empathise emotions.

[24:24] Thank you. Do you have any sense of their memory of, or did you have any knowledge at the time of listening figures or extent to which it was repeated, or feedback? I don’t know if there was audience feedback in any way. So in other words, some sort of quantification of the impact of the programme?

Martin Redfern Page 112 C1672/29 Track 10

There are much better figures for that sort of thing with Radio 4 than there are for World Service, for obvious reasons, it’s really difficult to survey the world. I know at the time I was deputy editor of the World Service Unit, World Service as a whole had something in the order of 150 million people would listen to something on World Service every week, but you didn’t know exactly what that something was. Occasionally they would do audience survey projects in particular countries and regions and you’d get a clearer feel for how many people were listening to which programme, and indeed, what they thought of it and you could extrapolate from that to get the feeling that a programme like Science in Action probably had a regular weekly audience of somewhere between ten and twenty million people, which was pretty good for a radio programme and an order of magnitude bigger than you’d get for a Radio 4 programme, for example. There were various surveys, and again, I’m going back to the 1990s now, when I was specifically involved in World Service at a sort of more managerial level. But surveys of what people most wanted to hear around the world tended obviously on World Service to put news first, but after that, probably before, interestingly, before politics and sport and arts and music and religion, would come science and technology and medicine as the headline things after news that people most appreciated and most wanted to hear. And of course we used those responses quite vigorously with our commissioners to get them to boost the amount we were able to do. With Radio 4, the tendency, and again I generalise, but the tendency has been for the audiences to be relatively small but highly appreciative. So the RI, the Reaction Index, has been high typically. The figures have not been outstanding. For a nine in the evening programme it might be 400,000. For a nine in the morning programme or a 16.30 in the afternoon programme, it might be eight or 900,000. I doubt that, it seldom tops a million. But, you know, a reasonable proportion of the Radio 4 audience, and they love it.

So, do you, if you had to sort of judge or guess for this particular programme, the number of listeners is likely to have been…

For Behind the Universe?

Yes.

Yes, that, as with most World Service programmes, well in those days there was a single World Service English stream worldwide, so each programme would get about three airings so that it came up at a reasonable time of day in each region of the world. Nowadays there are more complicated divisions, such that there are separate streams for different parts of the world and it looks as if from the schedules that each programme comes up five or six times, but that’s in different parts of the world separated out, so it’s probably not much different. So between those I would imagine that they, in those days, they were probably getting a good ten or twelve million.

[29:11] Do you know why, can you remember why Behind the Universe was the title for this programme? Martin Redfern Page 113 C1672/29 Track 10

I was trying to find a title that wouldn’t be denigrating to the interviewees, so I didn’t want to call it ‘Mavericks’, but which would be acceptable for the commissioners. So I didn’t want to call it ‘Revolutionary Theories’ or something. And I think at about that time I’d been watching a comedy programme on television after the Beyond the Fringe Cambridge Review things, I think Peter Cook and Dudley Moore did a series satirically called Behind the Fridge and I think that that was what inspired me to think of Behind the Universe.

[30:19] Thank you. And you say that you think it might be difficult to place such a programme now. What in particular would be difficult about any attempt to place a programme like this on radio now?

Its content is a bit controversial, it’s a one-to-one interview without any gimmicks, it’s an interview done by an unknown producer, not a celebrity. I think all those would go against it now. There aren’t so many programme slots now, certainly on World Service. I might stand slightly more chance placing something like that on Radio 4 if I had a celebrity presenter or at least a known broadcaster presenter, simply because the fifteen-minute slots on World Service have mostly vanished. A lot of the management of World Service is carried out by people with a background in news and current affairs and – he says rather cynically – I think they’re trying to extend the news and current affairs empire. There are those who would like the whole of World Service to be one long rolling news and current affairs channel and they don’t see why you couldn’t slot a what here was an hour and a half interview cut down to fifteen minutes, they might give it five minutes in a current affairs programme. But of course, oh, it’s not topical, therefore, well, we won’t run it. So that’s sort of why it might not happen today. But of course the other thing that has changed is that we now have the internet and we now have people, anybody with a rudimentary computer knowledge and a half decent recorder can podcast. They can record an interview and stick it up there. They might not be able to get an interview, well, Fred Hoyle is dead, but the equivalent of Fred Hoyle if you haven’t got those magic BBC initials, it might be harder to get the interview. But if they can get the interview, and some enterprising people get some interviews with some pretty high-powered people, anybody can put it up, so what does that leave for the BBC to do that’s different that stands out. As I’ve said, I think the one-to-one interview is a very special privilege to be able to do and you have an obligation to the listener who’s letting you into their private space, to represent them. I think that sort of interview is maybe under-valued by the BBC now. I think even trying to do it with a producer and a presenter when it’s all the things where I’ve produced with another presenter, you know, I’ve got a lot of respect and admiration for the presenters, they’ve got lovely voices and very often engage very nicely with the interview, but it’s the producer who has the idea for the programme and has the feel for how it should go and often that feel is a feel rather than something that can be expressed clearly in a brief to the presenter in advance. And I think if you’ve got an interviewee with a presenter and a producer sitting there second guessing, where the presenter’s second-guessing the producer, you don’t necessarily get the same magic moments and intimate interview that you get with a one-to-one. Martin Redfern Page 114 C1672/29 Track 10

[34:37] Did that make you wary about the use in the other two programmes that you kindly shared with me, Sacred Showdown and the programme In the Beginning, where you’re not… you’re there making the programme but you’re not present in the programme, you’ve engaged other presenters. In the In the Beginning one you have the creationist and the evolutionary biologist and in Sacred Showdown I forget the…

Corinne Podger.

Yes, is presenting. Was that something you were wary of… I suppose another way of asking that is why alter this format for those programmes?

Yes, the, I mean I enjoyed working with Corinne very much and she’s a good friend. I didn’t actually have choice on that one, she was given to me as the presenter, partly because she was a person who was, actually had a job in the Science Unit at that stage but was on an attachment to World Service Religion, and I think that was part of the idea of the collaboration between the Units. So yeah, I didn’t have a choice in that but she did a good job, but maybe didn’t get, maybe turned out a bit differently from if I had been doing it entirely myself. Maybe it was better, I shouldn’t judge. The In the Beginning, that was actually my choice not to have, certainly not to present it myself, because I felt that I could not be a neutral presenter because I just cannot believe Young Earth creationism, for example. And so I shouldn’t have gone in and criticised them or I wouldn’t be an unbiased journalist, but similarly I shouldn’t go in and give them equal support because it doesn’t make scientific sense. So I anguished a long time about how we were going to do this, could we find a presenter who could be fair and dispassionate, and I think we made the right choice in the end not to have a presenter as such, but to basically have Eugenie Scott going through a number of interviews in the first programme and Henry Morris going through a number of interviews in the second and then meeting up together. So, if you like, each were presenting their own programme, although I was dictating who they should interview, and then they came together at the end so there was no other presenter there and no journalist who could be blamed by evolutionary biologists or by creationists for being biased. I think in the end that worked, but that was quite hard work to set up and so on. I was, actually a rare luxury on radio programmes, I was blessed with a researcher on that who did a lot of spadework on that. And indeed spent a long time setting up a different person to be the creationist presenter who then pulled out at rather last minute.

Who was that?

I’ve forgotten his name. From a place in Chicago, a theological college in Illinois. I’d have to look back at my notes to remember it. Martin Redfern Page 115 C1672/29 Track 10

Do you remember the reason for pulling out at the last minute?

[pause] I’m not sure if the reason was explicit. I think the reason given was logistics in terms of going to places for various interviews, but I think the real reason was that they realised that this was a potentially controversial programme and that they didn’t want to nail their creationist colours that firmly to the wall.

When you had this difficult decision about how you were going to cope with this problem of not wanting to put a journalist potentially in a position of having to treat science and creationism equally, who were you talking to about that decision? Who helped you, if at all, in that decision, talked it through with you?

Yes. Now who was our commissioner for World Service then? I think it was probably Tony Phillips, who I’d worked with on the Reith Lectures a few years earlier and who had come across as World Service science commissioner under Gwyneth Williams when she was head of World Service in English. Most of the actual sort of down-to-earth conversations about it though were between me, the researcher working on it, and Deborah Cohen, my editor.

And did you also have difficult decisions, do you remember having difficult decisions in the editing stage?

There are always difficult decisions in the editing stage, most of them are as a result of having too much good material and how do you squeeze it into the time without losing the magic moments and without being unfair. I suppose the clip of Richard Dawkins that he phoned me up angrily about that put in the programme with Henry Morris was a slightly difficult decision, but I very much felt I needed somebody to counter something which Henry Morris had stated. I felt I needed it to get a bit of balanced back, just a factual thing. I forget exactly what the factual point was, but… So no, it’s, the way I make a radio programme the editing is always quite time-consuming. It’s a little bit like a bullfighter goes round sort of prodding the bull from various directions and softening it up before actually making the final strike. You have to get your head round all the interviews, identify which are the best bits, which are the bits that you can’t really use, which are the bits which are really key to telling the story, who of overlapping interviews tells those bits best. And, you know, I may have said before, that there are really two schools of radio production. One is the one like television where you more or less script it in advance and go and record what you want, which involves knowing your subject very well, doesn’t waste much time on the editing and recording, but may miss out on surprises and spontaneity. Or there’s the approach that I tend to, which I liken to Michelangelo as an artist, where he gets a block of marble and discovers the statue within the marble. So I will get a big, big block of interview material and discover the best feature within that. It’s slightly more complicated when you’re trying to do a pair of features balancing different viewpoints, because you’ve got to be fair Martin Redfern Page 116 C1672/29 Track 10 as well as artistic. But for me the editing goes through various iterations where I’m first just distilling the best bits from one interview and then I’m putting them all into a possible order, and then I’m recognising which of the overlapping bits is better than others and where I’ve got that order slightly wrong, and so on. And then I’m probably still left with something that’s twice as long as it can be for the slot and so then there’s the most painful process of cutting it down and cutting it down. But that’s why a programme like that takes two weeks rather than two days to make.

[44:30] Thank you. Could I ask now a question about the, I suppose the ‘worldness’ of the World Service. In other words, what was distinctive about science, about the content of science programmes that were going to be broadcast to a world audience compared to the content of science programmes broadcast just for the sort of home Radio 4 audience? And a link question would be the extent to which it was necessary to have experience yourself of the places where the recordings would be broadcast?

Yeah, that’s a very good question and one which exercised us a lot. To some extent one has to be all things to all people. There is basically, although there’s regional streams in terms of the scheduling, the programmes, you’re making a programme for the whole world. When I first came to World Service or a bit before that, a large proportion of the audience were British ex-pats who wanted to listen to Just a Minute and maybe The Archers [laughs] and get a taste of home. And then there was another big group of people who were in maybe Iron Curtain countries in the Cold War or under oppressive regimes who were desperate for unbiased news. But over my career in World Service a lot of that changed. There was… then there were the audiences in the Developing World and again, there were different groups, or possibly the same group but with different interests and motivations. There was a strong feeling, particularly during the 1980s, that there was need to make lots and lots of programmes about appropriate technology, tropical agriculture, tropical medicine, sorts of things that were directly relevant to Africa particularly and South Asia and South-East Asia, and so on. And again, early on when travel was expensive and quite difficult, a lot of that was done by just going up to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and interviewing people there and catching people when they came to conferences and so on. I felt very strongly that you had to – the scenery is important in radio and you can’t just talk at people, you need to see where they’re coming from, and I love travelling. So I pushed quite hard to release enough budget to go to Africa and India and all over the place to report projects on the ground. And I think reporting specific projects was often more valid in terms of appropriate healthcare and technology and so on than reporting the very upstream theoretical inventions that might have been being done in the West in research institutes. We had one programme that was made in our unit and I only produced it as sort of holiday relief when the guy was away, but we had Farming World, which had won a UN prize and was very, very successful – sadly it got axed. But that used to report very largely using a network of freelance reporters, some of them either based in developing countries or who were travelling around the world, possibly for other purposes as well, so we didn’t have to pay all their fares and so on, people who were out working on FAO projects and that sort of thing. And then you would report on a very specific successful project, maybe something done Martin Redfern Page 117 C1672/29 Track 10 in Thailand, and you’d broadcast it to Africa and you’d get people writing in from Africa, that’s really interesting, that could fit with a bit of adaptation our particular issues in Nigeria or something. And, you know, prior to the internet enquiries were all letters received, and so there were lots and lots of them and they were often asking for contact details of people with successful projects in a different part of the world. And so I think that that did a great deal of good in terms of communicating development issues and so on. The other thing that Farming World did, which I think was very clever, they realised that most of the farmers in the developing world probably wouldn’t be listening to the radio, and certainly wouldn’t be listening to World Service in English for a farming programme. But the people who would be listening were the agricultural extension officers, the people working with NGOs, and they’re the people who if you can get the story through to them will link up with the farmers. So it became a sort of second degree contact. We tried to do the same with medicine in Health Matters, and as much as possible we tried, partly by not using freelance presenters, to do a bit of travelling ourselves and release the money to spend travelling the world, which was great. But the other side of it was that just because they are in a developing country doesn’t mean to say that they’re not interested in the frontiers of cosmology and space missions and so on. I found that very much travelling in India, that they were really hungry to hear about the latest space missions and hear about the latest particle physics and, you know, were prepared to engage in some very complex basic science to get that understanding. Because they hadn’t had it forced down them at school this was all exciting and new.

When you say they were hungry, who was it that you were meeting who were giving you the impression that this was what they wanted to listen to?

To be honest, it was probably a sub-set of the audience, it was mostly people who were already scientists or at least students. I remember doing a science communication course at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, that was a course with about a dozen people who were practising scientists and journalists and that was fine, but while I was there they got me to do a talk to students and faculty about how we broadcast science on World Service. And the lecture room was absolutely packed and somebody came up afterwards and said he was a young, I think biochemistry undergraduate, and he recorded Discovery on his little cassette recorder every week and actually transcribed interesting interviews off it and circulated them round his friends in the department. Now with the internet I guess that’s not necessary because there’s so much more stuff that’s freely available, but you know, they couldn’t afford, at least personal subscriptions to the journals, and here was all the latest science presented in a digestible form. They couldn’t get enough of it.

[53:16] Did you also go to Islamic countries in a similar research mode?

In those days for some reason, not so much. It was later on with a couple of projects in association with the British Council that I did more of that. There was the Darwin Now project which culminated in a big conference in the wonderful library in Alexandria. And in that they had brought in literally Martin Redfern Page 118 C1672/29 Track 10 coachloads of students and, high school students from around Egypt who all sat in neat lines not saying very much and with their translation headphones on, but were obviously really interested in what was going on, and I interviewed a few of them. And then following on from that there was a series called Belief in Dialogue for which I went to a small conference that had been organised in Jordan and then a bigger one that took place in Sharjah, at the American University in Sharjah, and that was looking at the nature of belief and the relationship between science and Islam. And both of those, the Darwin Now and the Belief in Dialogue, we had events for World Service at them which were recorded as discussions in front of an audience with questions from the floor and a panel of experts on the stage. And we managed to get hour long programmes from both of those which again was a significant amount of airtime for World Service.

[55:33] And, for example, the Belief in Dialogue events, what did you discover there about whether there is or is anything specific about Islamic science, for example, which is sometimes debated?

I didn’t know as much about the history of Islamic science as I would have liked to and it was wonderful to discover what a rich heritage it had, particularly in the early Middle Ages, as it were, you know, a thousand or more years ago when Western Europe was going through a dark age when the civilisations of Greece and Rome had fallen and Islamic scientists were not only keeping alive the work of the Greek philosophers, but were also developing a remarkably sophisticated philosophy and mathematics which really carried back to the West, forms the basis of modern science today. So there’s that very rich heritage. What was perhaps a bit surprising was the extent to which it doesn’t seem to have continued today in terms of basic science. There are wonderful efforts going on in terms of technology and increasingly agricultural technology and biotechnology. But basic science seems to have been left behind a little bit and I do wonder to what extent that is as a result of belief or misconception.

[57:48] Thank you. And could you now take us up to the present in two ways, one is by talking about particular things that you have done since formal retirement from the BBC, and also if you could, as far as you would like to, tell us about the origins and development of your current relationship?

Yes. Well, that follows on rather neatly from the meeting in Sharjah, because at a preparatory meeting to that in Cambridge a young lady popped her head out of a room during a coffee break and asked us all to be a bit quiet because she was recording an interview. I didn’t think very much more of it, but did notice her. She was working with the Open University, helping with the same project with the British Council, and we met again in Dubai where we were staying for the meeting in next door Sharjah. Her name was Justine Dwight and I think it was about midday on midsummer’s day, on the hottest day of the year in one of the hottest countries of the year, I suggested we might like to go for a walk. It didn’t last long because it was really hot, and so it was iced tea in the bar very soon Martin Redfern Page 119 C1672/29 Track 10 afterwards. And after we got back home, to my surprise she accepted my invitation to come to a summer party here and a few subsequent invitations to go out to the theatre, and we are now very happily married. We got married in May of this year, 2016. So that’s, that’s the best news. I was… I’ve never been short of something to do. I’ve never in my life, I don’t think, been bored, so in many ways I was looking forward to retirement. I was imagining that it was going to be full of continuing to make wonderful radio programmes, but maybe ones that I wanted to make rather than without the infill of ones, which I enjoyed making very much, don’t get me wrong, but the regular weekly programmes which were the bread and butter of the Radio Science Unit, I just wanted to make the lovely features. And I also wanted to clear some of the clutter you’ve seen in my room upstairs, to go back and play with my childhood fossil collection, to run through and digitise a lot of the reel-to-reel tapes of programmes that I’d done before and work on various other projects. I was able to put in a lot more time than I had previously in my role as a trustee of the Study Society and of the Scientific and Medical Network. With some of those I’m not a natural manager and I think some of my efforts were possibly wasted in internal politics, and so on, and that’s partly why I’ve stood down from both of those now. I am still a trustee of the Music Mind Spirit Trust. That’s not a particularly onerous task, but that was set up by my late friend, Paul Robertson and his wife Chika, and still hopes to do a lot of good work with young musicians particularly and using music as an aid to training for leadership. I have not made anything like the number of programmes I expected to make, partly because I’m just very, very happy at home with my new wife, partly because we’ve got a nice big garden here, partly because we’re getting the house ready to sell and move to an even bigger garden, which will keep me even busier. We’ve managed to buy a couple of acres of coppiced chestnut woodland next to the house and last year I went on a roundwood timber framing course and I’m very keen to put that craft into action and build myself a little cruck frame workshop, or actually quite a big cruck frame workshop. Whether it’s going to be here or in our new home I’m still not quite sure. We put quite a lot of effort, not long after I retired, into putting together a big application to the Templeton Foundation to, basically to make the mega series of programmes that I’ve always wanted to make about origins, right the way through from the universe to consciousness and higher thought, and use that as a platform for dialogue and training around the world, using my wife’s skills in distance learning with the Open University. That went through a couple of iterations and it got shortlisted and they said they liked it very much, but they didn’t fund it. They did say we should go back and rethink it. The amount of effort it took to produce it rather knocked the wind out of my sails and I didn’t really want to go through all that again. There is another application to them which is in train at the moment through the Scientific and Medical Network, primarily led by David Lorimer, which might involve me in doing some nice interviews if it gets accepted. I had very much thought about starting my own podcast, but I’m a journalist, I need a deadline. [laughs] It’s one of those things I would like to get round to, but unless it’s actually printed in the Radio Times that it will go out at nine o’clock next week or whatever, I think oh well, I won’t start that until I’ve, dot, dot, dot. So I haven’t done it. Every year since I’ve made one particular programmes for World Service, which is great fun, to a guaranteed audience of about forty-five people, which is a midwinter greetings programme for people overwintering at British bases in Antarctica. One of the high points of my journalistic career was a month in Antarctica with the British Antarctic Martin Redfern Page 120 C1672/29 Track 10

Survey, reporting on climate change and other research down there and ever since I’ve had a strong affection for the ice and the people who work in it. And so it’s fun to do that. I also have this plan to write a book, well I have plans to write various books, but the one I most want to write – I’ve written several books but they’ve been, in a sense, other people’s books in that they’ve been to publishers’ formulae. So I did the unoriginal title, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, which was basically a write- up of the ten-part series I did on geology for World Service. I’ve done the Kingfisher Book of the Earth and the Kingfisher Book of Space, I’ve done The Earth: A Very Short Introduction, and Planet Earth, Fifty Ideas you Really Need to Know, and various entries for encyclopaedias and things like that. But I would like to write a real book before I die and I’ve been talking closely to an archaeologist friend of mine who, he’s a prehistoric archaeologist. He’s not prehistoric but his archaeology is. John Gowlett at Liverpool University who’s become a good friend, who happens to have excavated a site in Kenya which is arguably the first evidence for the human use of fire. And indeed I was able to go out there with him and make a World Service programme about it many years ago. And I or we are still keen to write a book about the archaeology of fire, intermingled with the archaeology and the sort of forensic archaeology; was this fire lit deliberately, or was it a lightning strike, or was it an accidental bush fire. Intermingled with that, the mythology of fire, of which there is plenty, and also the psychology of fire, what it means to sit around a hearth, a campfire or whatever, and to what extent nowadays have we lost that because we shut fire up in a white box in the utility room powered by the gas main and don’t actually see a naked flame so often. It’s why I love having a log fire on a winter’s evening here. So that’s some of the plans.

[end of track 11] [end of recording]