My mate Fay's just been on telly

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

My mate Fay's just been on telly

sure, it wasn't quite the ascent of man, but as a means of getting people interested in science and showing the kids the connections between all the things in the world, and the role of scientific development in history they surely can't be matched.

[Wyatt Earp]

My mate Fay's just been on telly

Sure, although the complainers had a point. Burke's grasp of the actual science was pretty shaky. Indeed, you could argue, if you were being harsh, that Connections helped start the "human interest" rot in science programming.

I mean, I'm not sure it does much good getting ver kids interested in a tellified version of science that bears no relation to science.

But Christ, compared to almost anything these days it was Reithian as fuck. Anything on telly, that is: that Melvyn Bragg thing on the radio still does the business.

[Andy C]

My mate Fay's just been on telly

When morris dancing at a village fete I visited the bookstall and picked up a copy of The Pinball Effect by James Burke. It's sort of a development of the "Connections" idea and by Jehosophat it's bloody awful. Several hundred pages of post hoc ergo propter hoc of misunderstood and misrepresented science, of inability to understand the difference between coincidence and causation, and of trivia inflated to sensational importance. Some develompents were even supposedly caused by things that happened years later, a notion that might find favour with Rupert Sheldrake, I suppose, but not me.

Bragg's In Our Time is excellent. He's the autodidact's champion in almost everything he addresses.