National Science and Engineering Week in 2008 was the most successful ever, with well over 3500 events and over one million participants. Wendy Barnaby looks back over some of the highlights.

Probing for laughs

Marcus Brigstocke sugared the pill of climate change

Climate change isn’t exactly a load of laughs, as comedian Marcus Brigstocke is well aware. But National Science and Engineering Week (NSEW) saw him performing at the Nuffield Theatre, Southampton, trying to get over his message that global warming is, as he told me afterwards, ‘the greatest threat mankind has ever faced’.

Not that he actually put it like that during the performance.

‘I’ve found in my touring shows that the bit about climate change turns people off,’ he said. ‘There are those that don’t think it’s happening; those that do but don’t think they’re doing enough (and that’s me); and then those that do but who are so worried about it that they don’t come to something like this because they’d have to leave their teepee. Talking to people and trying to inspire change and a sense of personal responsibility – there’s not that many laughs in it.’

Strategy

Brigstocke’s audience contained mainly scientists under 35. His strategy was to soften them up with a comic tour of his usual targets: anti-Europeans, the Daily Mail and the Iraq war. He then told them how, last autumn, he travelled to the Arctic with the Cape Farewell expedition1 organised by the

National Oceanography Centre at the University of Southampton. The trip was to see the damage done by climate change and record a TV show about his personal experiences: some dropping of probes to check salinity and temperature, and constant sea-sickness.

‘When I talk about the trip I talk about how badly I coped,’ he explained. ‘Everyone laughs – and then I say, “But look, this is why I went.” It’s a balancing act: make them laugh and while they’re laughing, whack whatever science you can under their chair. If you do too much finger-wagging, everyone just goes, “Oh, whatever”.’ 

Provocative

He told the audience that, if they didn’t think climate change was our fault, they should read more, and recommended the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. ‘I aim to be rude and provocative and annoy people,’ he said. ‘I hope if you insult people like that they’ll be irritated and think what an arrogant p---k that man is – but it’s the kind of insult that, if someone said it to me, [would make me] read more.’

He wants people to take responsibility for reducing their carbon footprint. ‘That said’, he adds, ‘there’s much too much responsibility put at the door of the average punter, while the government fails to force business to take up its share of the responsibility.’

If laughs are anything to go by, he judged his audience well. This was an audience worth targeting: scientists whose work could help characterise the threat and show us how we can do something about it.

References

1. See www.capefarewell.com 

Wendy Barnaby, Editor