Saturday, December 16, 2006
This morning, while you were asleep, the Open University broadcast its very last TV programme.
BBC TWO Saturday 16 December 2006
05:30 A103 Art: A Question of Style - Neoclassicism and Romanticism
Examining paintings by Louis David and Caspar Friedrich to discover what the labels 'Classical' and 'Romantic' mean in art.
Back in the old days of television, you may remember, men with unfeasibly large sideburns and corduroy jackets would appear on our screens lecturing about sculpture, anthropomorphisms and partial differential equations. They weren't really lecturing us, of course, they were passing on information to eager Open University students scattered all across the country. The "University of the Air" started broadcasting in 1971 with programmes filmed in the historic studios at Alexandra Palace (from which the world's first television broadcast had been made 35 years earlier). There weren't so many hours of 'proper' programmes back then, so the rest of us ended up watching much of the OU's academic output by default. Sunday mornings on BBC2, for example, were always full of bearded discourse and earnest documentaries. These had to be repeated during the week, because video recorders weren't yet commonplace, and so ended up slotted around the schedules (between the test card) at what now seem like unlikely times. Weekday mornings over breakfast, early evening after getting home from school... it's no wonder we remember these programmes so well.
Here, for example, are all the programmes on daytime BBC television on a typical Friday in 1981. Doesn't this take you back?
BBC1
Friday 11 September 1981
6.40 - 7.55am Open University
6.40 Partial Differential Equations.
7.05 Rhondda 3: A Question of Identity
7.30 North Sea Oil: Taxation
7.55 Closedown
12.30pm News After Noon (& regional news)
1.00 Closedown
1.45 Chigley
2.00 Closedown
3.45 Ymryson Cwm Defaid (sheepdog trials)
4.20 Play School (with Chloe Ashcroft)
4.45 The Space Sentinels
5.05 Rentaghost
5.35 Roobarb
5.40 Evening News (with Richard Baker)
6.00 Nationwide | BBC2
Friday 11 September 1981
6.40 - 7.55am Open University
6.40 The Curious History of Norethindrone
7.05 Maths: Homeomorphisms
7.30 Maths Across the Curriculum
7.55 Closedown
11.00 Play School
11.25 Trades Union Congress 1981
12.30 Closedown
1.45 Racing From Goodwood
3.45 Closedown
4.50 - 6.55pm Open University
4.50 A Many-Splendoured Thing?
5.15 Making Light Work Out of It
5.40 The Other Tradition
6.05 Living with Death
6.30 Tunnels and Tunneling
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25 years later the OU's students now receive all their video coursework materials either on DVD or online. The computer has become the new medium of communication and learning, so the old TV broadcasts are no longer required. I guess that's only fair, but I'm sorry to see these academic nuggets disappear. In my youth I learnt a lot from OU programmes I wasn't really supposed to be watching. And today's bored teenagers will never get the chance to accidentally discover group theory or Wittgenstein over their cornflakes, as explained by a style-free professor in a wide-lapelled shirt and kipper tie. Their loss.
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