At the beginning of 2015, Rich Ross, the new president of Discovery, one of the leading global producers of factual television of the last 30 years or so, responded to concerns about the direction the channel, and factual television more generally, has taken over the last few years (Walker 2015). The channel had recently come under criticism for a natural history programme entitled Eaten Alive (2014) which was promoted on the claim that its presenter, in a specially designed suit so he would survive, would allow himself to be swallowed by a giant snake. Although the programme didn’t quite deliver on this claim, criticism was widespread, not just because of the specifics of this programme’s apparent quest for sensationalism over animal welfare and biological science but because it was seen as representative of a particular attitude within contemporary factual channels (Palmer and Lawrence 2014). A persistent criticism in recent years has been that factual channels have moved ever further away from the serious presentation of science documentary, in favour of a shift towards factual entertainment, hybrid formats of programme that combine elements of documentary with elements from other genres, including game shows and soap operas, and programmes dominated by dramatised reenactments, visual effects and computer-generated imagery (CGI) (Brunsdon et al. 2001; Kilborn 2003; Beattie 2004; Campbell 2009; Beck et al. 2012). Despite Ross’ assertions that such programmes may have run their course (Walker 2015), the predominance of these formats across a range of factual channels has generated criticism for some time. Scientist David Schiffman argued for instance:

It’s not just Discovery. If you turn on the History Channel, there’s a good chance it’ll be a show about aliens helping Hitler. The Learning Channel shows Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. It suggests there’s nothing real that people care about enough to watch, and that’s just not true. Look at the success of Blue Planet and Planet Earth; they’re some of the most highly viewed nature documentaries in history and there’s no people in them, just amazing animals doing cool things. It’s not hard to get it right and also make it entertaining—the BBC does it all the time. (in Walker 2015)

Here Comes Honey Boo Boo (2012–2014) was a controversial docu-soap focused around the family of a toddler pageant show performer, shown on TLC (originally The Learning Channel), and cancelled after it emerged the girl’s mother was involved with a convicted sex offender. Far from unusual in US factual channel output in the 2010s, criticism of such programmes often takes this approach of comparing them to the output of the global leader in public service factual programming, the BBC. This is despite similar concerns over the shift in British television from documentary to factual entertainment having emerged as well (Kilborn 2003; Byrne 2007), and concerns that pressures for audience-grabbing imagery have generated controversy over factual production practices even at the BBC (Singh 2011).

Another key criticism of the rise of factual entertainment has been the propensity for a shift not only in presenting scientific topics in ever more entertainment-oriented formats but in how factual producers have increasingly devoted resources and schedule space to pseudoscience and outright fiction. Referring in particular to the prevalence of programmes about ghosts on factual channels, for instance, Hale asserts:

The viewer who is so inclined can spend the day in a certain band of the cable- television spectrum, switching from a paranormal show on A&E to a documentary about Hitler on the History Channel to a killer-asteroid report on Discovery to a talk show on Fox News, in a feedback loop that will reinforce any number of received notions about history, fate, conspiracy, the ruling caste and how the world is going to hell in a handbasket. (2009: 26)

Further controversies have emerged surrounding archaeology programmes based on, at best, questionable evidence (Evans 2012), and mock documentaries not sufficiently signalled as such, notably the Animal Planet Mermaids (2012) programmes which one critic described as illustrating the ‘rotting carcass of science TV’ (Switek 2012). The nature of contemporary science documentary and factual entertainment television in this context of perceptions of dramatic decline and decay is the focus of this book. Before explaining the aims, approach taken and structure of the book, it is important to trace out some of the key stages in the development of science documentary on television and to identify, in particular, the emergence and characteristics of contemporary factual entertainment.

The historical development of science in film and television documentary has been rather neglected until relatively recently (Boon 2008; LaFollette 2013), rather surprising given the long history of the relationship between science and film. Science documentary does not, of course, begin with the origins of television; indeed in one historical account of the evolution of scientific films it is suggested that television science documentaries are in some senses a ‘conclusion of long historical processes’ (Boon 2008: 2, original emphasis) as many of the structures, styles and tropes of science documentary were developed prior to the television era. An in-depth discussion of that historical development is not possible here, but it is important to mark out some of the key features that take science documentary from the early days of film through to the modern era of multi-platform factual entertainment.

The emergence of cinematography was heavily contextualised by notions of possible scientific applications, as evidenced by Eadweard Muybridge’s experiments with photography that captured horses in motion amongst other things, and the same was true of early photography in relation to astronomy (see Chaps. 2 and 3). Soon after the Lumière brothers’ first films were shown in 1895, a number of scientists, especially medical scientists, started using film as a tool for research and education (Boon 2008: 8). Some sciences featured regularly in early films, from newsreels capturing Howard Carter’s excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb in the early 1920s to popular science-themed film series such as Secrets of Nature (1922–1933) which utilised techniques such as micro-cinematography and time-lapse footage to show the cells and movements of plants (Boon 2008: 29). In the 1920s and 1930s the term ‘documentary’ emerged, and again aspects of scientific disciplines were apparent, such as the ethnographic approach of Flaherty’s seminal Nanook of the North (1922). The 1930s saw many early documentaries commissioned by corporations and government bodies, such as Paul Rotha’s Contact (1933) for Imperial Airways and the films produced by John Grierson for the British Empire Marketing Board and then the General Post Office, all themed around the promotion of ‘technological modernity’ (Boon 2008: 36).

By the time television appeared then, the relationship between film and science was already really quite sophisticated, and many of the techniques that would later come to be typical of science documentary and factual entertainment actually have their roots in techniques developed in documentary and non-fiction films, for instance, the use of dramatised sequences and animation. Early television technology, both in terms of production (the predominant need for live content) and reception (the small, nine-inch screens) initially limited the capacity of science documentarians to innovate in terms of visual styles and forms. One consequence of technological limitation in British science television, for instance, was for a tendency to use close-ups on in-studio presenters, which further led to embedding the stylistic trope of the science presenter as television personality into the television science format. As Boon notes ‘in the longer term […] it was the personality issue—linked to factors of immediacy and ‘intimacy’—that became significant in non-fiction broadcasting’ (2008: 193). For example, the success of the popular early 1950s’ programme Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? (1952–1959), essentially a game show where a panel of experts were presented with a previously unseen object and made informed guesses as to its nature, made stars of participants Glyn Daniel and Mortimer Wheeler. It’s worth noting how the rise of the personality in television science wasn’t particularly related to the type of broadcasting system in place, as it occurred in both the public service context of the BBC in Britain and the fully commercial system of the USA, where television in the 1940s and 1950s was seen by many scientific organisations as means for publicity (and perhaps funding as a result) (LaFollette 2013: 12). In the USA, scientists who braved early television also achieved celebrity status, for instance, figures such as astronomer Roy K. Marshall who hosted The Nature of Things (1948–1953) on NBC (LaFollette 2013: 11). The importance of personality wasn’t intrinsically linked to scientists, however. PR officer for the Johns Hopkins University, Lynn Poole, for instance, became ‘an instant star’ when appearing on the Johns Hopkins Science Review (1948–1995) (LaFollette 2013: 12). In Britain, Patrick Moore, although only an amateur astronomer, became a television celebrity through hosting the BBC magazine programme The Sky at Night, beginning in 1957 and continuing until his death in 2012 (setting a record for presenting a continuing series in the process). David Attenborough, on the other hand, though a Cambridge graduate of natural sciences, began his career at the BBC in 1952 having barely watched any television or given the nature of television much thought (Attenborough 2002: 11). Initially a producer, of Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? amongst other things, he finally appeared in front of the camera in the series Zoo Quest in 1954 (which ran until 1963).

Whilst studio-based material was relatively primitive in some senses, filmed material for science programmes was also produced in the 1950s; moreover, as in the case of Zoo Quest, getting resources to make films for broadcast in Britain wasn’t easy (Attenborough 2002: 34). Although experienced documentary filmmakers did work with the BBC—Paul Rotha, for instance, was briefly Head of Documentaries between 1953 and 1955 (Boon 2008: 203)—it took time for filmed material to feature more frequently as part of BBC output. Documentary film was still a viable and prominent outlet in the 1950s, as shown by the award-winning successes of the film of Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki (1950) expedition and The Silent World (1956), which made Jacques Cousteau a star. Cousteau also worked on television series in the 1950s, but didn’t shift fully to television until The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau premiered in 1968 (LaFollette 2013: 90). Filmed science documentaries, aside from the appeal of location footage, often involved the use of more sophisticated techniques than were available on the ‘show and tell’ formats of studio-based television programmes like Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? (see Boon 2008 for a discussion). In the USA, where productions were financed in ways allowing significant resources to be used for television films, famous Hollywood figures became involved in the production of television science programmes. Walt Disney, for instance, established the Disneyland ‘science factual’ (LaFollette 2002: 54) anthology series beginning in 1954 (running till 1990), combining live-action sequences with animation in programmes about a variety of science topics, including space exploration. Celebrated director Frank Capra was involved in the production of four science films in the Bell Television Series (1956–1962) that also had high production values and complex combinations of techniques, including dramatised sequences, animation and poetically composed scripts around the expositional material offered by scientists and presenters. Both the Disney and Bell programmes were filmed in colour as well, and the co...