The Day the Universe Changed

Now, I like history documentaries. And I like science documentaries. But which is better?

There's no need for them to fight, Harry Hill-style, because even better than either are History of Science Documentaries. These include such classic TV shows as The Ascent of Man (1973) and Cosmos (both Carl Sagan's original 1980 series and the more recent version with Neil deGrasse Tyson from 2014), as well as shorter, arguably lesser efforts from the likes of Brian Cox and Jim Al-Khalili.

It's no surprise that most of these, at least the ones I know of here in the UK, were made by the BBC. Another such example from the BBC is one that I only became aware of quite recently, called The Day the Universe Changed.

This was a 10-part series from 1985 presented by James Burke. Burke had a long history of presenting science TV programmes before this, including Tomorrow's World and even the BBC's coverage of the first moon landing.

The format of The Day the Universe Changed is very similar to that of Cosmos, combining what is essentially a televised lecture delivered by the presenter to the viewers with filmed reenactments of the historical events described. Indeed the style, and even the film quality, of the reenactment scenes look very similar to that of Carl Sagan's series from only a few years before.

However, this series puts its own spin on things in two ways. Firstly, each episode is focused around a single discovery or advancement in science at some point in history, with sections on what things were like before the discovery, the circumstances surrounding the advance being made, the people involved, and then the consequences and how they are felt even by us today. The episodes are set in roughly chronological order, starting with the development of the first universities in the Middle Ages, then the discovery of perspective that led into the Renaissance, then the invention of printing, and so on.

The second thing that makes this series stand out is the presenter himself. As well as presenting from a series of unusual and exotic locations that help illustrate his point for him, Burke has an eccentric style of delivery that always keeps things interesting, and is consistently witty if not laugh-out-loud hilarious in his turns of phrase. The best documentary presenters are those who can make complex subjects accessible and entertaining, and Burke certainly manages that. Perhaps the closest resemblance is not Sagan or Bronowski, but rather Terry Jones.

The series has one main drawback, which a lot of older TV documentaries suffer from, which is in how dated some of its attitudes are. The focus on the science of "Western" civilisation (meaning Western Europe, the USA, and their allies against the Soviet Union in the Cold War) is not intrinsically bad - it is simply a question of the scope of the series, and while it is unlikely that it would be made that way today (compare the original 1969 Civilisation with the 2018 Civilisations) this series is as of its time as any other.

But even with that in mind The Day the Universe Changed goes further than it needs to, with Burke presenting some sections from the deck and control room of a US Navy Destroyer, bringing the Cold War conflict into his narrative where it really doesn't need to be, and laying it out in us-versus-them, right-versus-wrong terms that seem very strange (in a TV history of science documentary, I mean) to us from the point of view of 30 years after the Cold War ended.

I think James Burke would see the irony in this, since his central point - that gives the series its name - is that the people of the past saw things in a different way to how we see things in the present, as illustrated by a surprisingly graphic sequence of the trial and burning of a witch in episode 10. Between those times "the universe changed" because our understanding of it changed. And between 1985 and 2021 it has clearly changed again.