Royal Institution Christmas Lectures

Extraordinary voice over at the conclusion of tonight's second (of three) lecture given by Professor Alice Roberts on BBC Four appealing on behalf of the Royal Institution (not the BBC) for any privately held recordings of previous lectures.

The list of missing lectures is on the Royal Institution's Website and I reproduce this here, it's unlikely due to the age that any conventionally held private recordings exist, so we are looking at holdings sourced, probably slightly nefariously (as indeed most of this type of material is) by previous broadcast techs.

The missing lectures
The 31 missing CHRISTMAS LECTURES are made up of 5 complete series of 6 lectures each, plus a single episode of Sir David Attenborough’s much loved 1973 series on ‘The language of animals’:

1966 – Engineer in wonderland – Eric Laithwaite
1967 – The intelligent eye – Richard Gregory
1969 – Time machines – George Porter
1970 – Monkeys without tails: a giraffe’s eye view of man – John Napier
1971 – Sounds of music: The science of tones and tunes – Charles Taylor
1973 – The language of animals (1 episode) – Sir David Attenborough

http://www.rigb.org/christmas-lectures/missing-lectures

My late father said that the Laithwaite Christmas lectures were one the most inspirational things he ever saw on TV

They were! I can remember him demonstrating his magnetic levitation motors for which he became quite famous.

Yes, the linear motor. He was also a hero of my physics teacher

Unfortunately he was also something of pseudoscience peddler, as he was convinced there was something anti-gravitational about gryoscopes (even claiming that a spinning gyroscope weighs less in his Christmas lecture). Although he later backtracked on that, he was still convinced that gryoscopes could be harnessed for reactionless propulsion and wasted many years on it.

Imagine how many discoveries wouldn’t have been made if people hadn’t believed in something and “wasted many years” researching them.

Yes, but there's thinking outside the box and then there's misunderstanding basic things like torque.

Its a shame really the lectures are buried away on BBC Four. Think it was as recently as 1999 I think it was when they were as high profile as BBC Two, though Genome suggests after a 1936 airing it wasn't seen again on the BBC until 1949 and after 1951 until 1969 (though I'm going to presume this is because Genome is incomplete as we know it was aired in 1966). The times given suggest it used to air in the middle of January as well!

The television broadcasts have moved around a lot in recent years.

After being on BBC 2 for over 30 years, they were shown on Channel 4 from 2000-2004, then on Channel 5 from 2005-2008, then More4 in 2009, and BBC Four since 2010.

The listings are there, it's just the exact wording in the Radio Times billings has varied slightly over the years. This is the listing for the first of the 1966 programmes: https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/4d6b3df07efc42d48e1014118fdd19ba

Seems a very strange fit for Channel 5 really!

True but ticks a good number of boxes...