Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Melvyn Bragg discusses climate change. In 1999 the weather gave the planet’s occupants a terrible beating: 16,000 people lost their lives as a result of storms. Some 15 million people were left homeless and 10,000 died when the world’s worst cyclone swept across eastern India. Hurricane Floyd wreaked 4.3 billion pounds worth of damage in the United States, Typhoon Bart hit Japan and Typhoon York hit Hong Kong and Macau. Western Europe is unused to hurricane force winds, but since Christmas 80 people have died in France as a result of storms. And in Venezuela floods and mud slides are continuing to cause devastation on a massive scale.The climate has become political but is the science, supposedly underpinning apocalyptic and apposite millennial claims of doom, really water-tight? It might seem that the effects of global warming are already upon us, but are they - and if so how can we really hope to stop them? With Sir John Houghton, Co-Chair of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change - the United Nations’ global warming science committee; George Monbiot, environmentalist, journalist and Visiting Professor, Department of Philosophy, Bristol University.

6 Jan 200027min

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of mankind’s attempt to understand the nature of time. At the end of the 19th century, H.G.Wells imagined travelling through time in The Time Machine; “The palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness; the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous colour like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch in space”. When he was writing we thought time was unbending and universal and counted out by Newton’s clock. A hundred years later we have had Einstein and relativity, quantum theory, and atomic clocks, but in the third millennium, is mankind any closer to understanding what time really is? What, in short, do we know about time itself? A Greek philosopher thought that time was a figment of the imagination and there are contemporary physicists who go a long way to agreeing with him. Newton’s views on time were bent by Einstein. The ancient skills of astronomy once ruled the known world and skill in time usage could be said to be enthroned as a master craft in our day. “But at my back I always hear time’s winged chariot hurrying near and yonder all before us lie deserts of vast eternity” - Marvel wrote that of love, but it could be our epigraph for time. With Dr Neil Johnson, theoretical physicist at the Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford University and Royal Institution Christmas Lecturer 1999 on the subject of Time; Lee Smolin, cosmologist and Professor of Physics, Pennsylvania State University.

30 Dec 199928min

Melvyn Bragg examines the purpose and effects of prayer. Why do people pray? What did prayer ever do, the cry goes up, for those millions upon millions of non-combatants, civilians, children, innocents, whose lives have been ended by a savage variety of brutality? Do we pray for the benefit of God or for our own sake? Is it a “good Christian weapon” as Martin Luther defined it and as Mahatma Gandhi put it “the most potent instrument of action”; or is prayer simply the most essential form of self analysis? Or was Ovid right to see prayer as a way of changing the mind of God, when he wrote in The Art of Love, “Even the Gods are moved by the voice of entreaty”. People have prayed since the dawn of language - but why, and has it done us any good?With Professor Russell Stannard, physicist, religious writer and author of The God Experiment; Andrew Samuels, Jungian analyst and Professor of Analytical Psychology, University of Essex.

23 Dec 199928min

Melvyn Bragg examines the technological advances and ethics of modern medicine. On an average working day about three quarters of a million of us go to the doctor’s. About a hundred thousand are visited by nurses and other health professionals. Then there are the three hundred thousand that go to the dentist. Health is a central preoccupation. It is also big business, saving life, lengthening life and even promising a stab at eternal life. Yet while some technology is Space Age, the morality is often not far away from the Stone Age. Who decides who lives or dies? Insurance firms, for instance, want genetic information - should they have it? Stem cell research - hailed by many as an extraordinary advance - now runs into conflict with those who do not want the human embryo to be, as they see it, abused. In the 16th century Francis Bacon told us in his Advancement of Learning “Medicine is a science which hath been more professed than laboured, and yet more laboured than advanced: the labour having been, in my judgement, rather in a circle than in a progression”. Well, after a century that has brought us penicillin, the discovery of DNA, heart transplants and key-hole surgery, have we finally escaped the loop? Or does our ethical application of what we can technologically achieve mean we are marching in Bacon’s circle still? With Barry Jackson, consultant surgeon and President of the Royal College of Surgeons of England; Professor Sheila McLean, Director of the Institute of Law and Ethics in Medicine, Glasgow University.

16 Dec 199927min

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss childhood. The 20th Century was proclaimed the Century of the Child. It has been much else but in the western world the position, the possibilities, the meaning and the story of childhood have been changed, for many, monumentally. Children join the workforce much later, they are born into smaller, usually more affluent families than a hundred years ago, they tend to spend their parents’ money rather than contributing to the family coffers, they are handed over to the school for what used to be called the best years of their lives. Children have been involved in a spectacular journey in the last hundred years. St Paul wrote to the Corinthians: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: But when I became a man, I put away childish things”. But is it really as simple as that, can one always make such a clear distinction between childhood and being an adult, and is such a division even desirable?For most of this century - in the Western World - childhood has been another country with different laws and separate truths, it is something we either feel we missed or somewhere to which we long to return. Has it always been such a cherished state and do our endless machinations to keep childhood special actually help the individual? With Christina Hardyment, social historian and author of The Future of the Family; Dr Theodore Zeldin, Senior Fellow, St Anthony’s College, Oxford and author of An Intimate History of Humanity.

9 Dec 199928min

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of the ancient genre of tragedy and examines whether we have a psychological need for it, either as catharsis or Schadenfreude. You could be forgiven for thinking that in our century, of all centuries, the notion of the death of a tragedy would be comical. But there is a view that in its broad theatrical sense, tragedy, as defined by Aristotle and accepted to the time of Racine, has indeed lost its place and power as a form. Aristotle in his poetics held that tragedy figured men and women, often greater than ourselves, heroic, whose fall excited sensations of pity and fear which purged the emotions in the spectator, provoking a catharsis. And Chaucer defined it as a story “of hym that stood in greet prosperitee/And is yfallen from heigh degree/Into myserie, and endeth wretchedly”. Tragedy has been redefined many times and in many ages, but does it have a place in our own time? Or is the genre “dead for a ducat”. Not in life - the twentieth century is a monument to tragedy - but in art.With Professor George Steiner, critic, Extraordinary Fellow, Churchill College, Cambridge and author of The Death of Tragedy; Professor Catherine Belsey, Chair of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, University of Cardiff and author of The Subject of Tragedy.

2 Dec 199928min

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the problems of consciousness, one of the greatest mysteries facing science and philosophy today. The frustrations, the stubborn facts and the curiosities of today’s thinkers, philosophers, physicists and psychologists, demonstrate the elusiveness, and the utter impenetrability of consciousness. Can we explain our perception of colour, smell or what it is like to be in love in purely physical terms? Can memory, conviction and reason be explained primarily in terms of neural firing sequences in the brain? Three centuries ago Descartes famously believed that the problem was best solved by being ignored. Was he right? Could it be that the human mind is just not built to understand its own basis?With Ted Honderich, philosopher and former Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic, University College, London; Sir Roger Penrose eminent physicist, mathematician and author of The Large, The Small, and the Human Mind.

25 Nov 199927min

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss progress. As man has grown in years and knowledge, has he also progressed in terms of happiness and a true understanding of the human condition? It was the Enlightenment which gave birth to the idea of the possibility of progress. The biblical account of time which had held sway until the eighteenth century was replaced by a conceit which put Man, not God, at the centre of the story of progress. But do we still believe in that story? Have we reached the end of history and the culmination of man’s evolution? Was the Argentinean writer Jorge Louis Borges right when he said “We have stopped believing in progress. What progress that is!”. Can our moral progress keep up with our material progress, be sober in a technologically inebriated world, be in any way more than a fig leaf covering the untameable old Adam whose tragedy - more Greek than Christian - has made and marred this century? Is there such a thing at all as moral progress, or have Darwin and Freud between them cut it out of the conceit of homo sapiens? With Anthony O’Hear, Professor of Philosophy, University of Bradford; Adam Phillips, psychoanalyst and author of Darwin’s Worms.

18 Nov 199928min