Recruiting into the Geosciences
RECRUITING INTO THE GEOSCIENCES COULD WE MAKE USE OF MASS MARKET TELEVISION?
This mad idea could easily be dismissed as trivial but please bear with me.
Television, for good or ill, is still enormously influential (note the Post Office!) and I have long wondered whether we could, or should, try and harness this influence to raise awareness of the geosciences through a TV drama series.
I read somewhere that the series Ally McBeal led to an increase in law school applications and Silent Witness similarly for Pathology. Could a series based around geology/geosciences/mining/foundation engineering/climate mitigation/drilling generate a beneficial effect for our professional world?
Aside from a seemingly insatiable appetite for police or medical dramas there have, over the last 60 years, only been a handful of drama series based on a specific profession or sector. These are pretty much represented by:
The Plane Makers (later The Power Game) 1963 to 1969 - aircraft industry
The Troubleshooters 1965 to 1972 oil industry
The Brothers 1972 to 1976 - road haulage
Howards Way 1985 to 1990 - boat building
To this teenage viewer The Troubleshooters was easily the punchiest title and the best production, it was excellent telly, and it was very influential.
The impressive skill of TV writers is to make the mundane watchable by the public at large have you watched Eastenders or (!) Love Island? Fundamentally as exciting as watching paint dry. In terms of raw material geoscientists across the piece operate in an exciting world we use explosives; we travel; we fly in helicopters; we go to sea; we deal with pollution emergencies, slope failures, floods, drought, structural failures; we scale volcanoes and glaciers; we work with big yellow machinery; we use high tech research tools; we get involved in court cases, public inquiries, corporate mergers and acquisitions, boardroom battles, parliamentary processes; we work in dramatic countryside; we study the planets.
I appreciate that a mass market approach might offend some jolly serious scientific colleagues but its all about raising awareness and its the teenagers we need to get to. Surely a skilled dramatist could make use of these situations. Should we, as a profession, at least try?
