'In Our Time' offers such promise but rarely delivers.
The discussion on Alchemy (22.2.5) being a case in point.
The programme's two major faults are ethnocentricity and snobbery.
Ethnocentric because it rarely ventures east of Suez; snobbishness because it hardly ever steps outside the academy. Hence in a discussion on Alchemy there is no mention of its probable origin in South Asian philosophy of the body, 'Ayurvedic' medicine and the important discipline of plant alchemy.
Intellectual snobbery means that the views of expert 'practitioners' are rarely if ever heard - even when it becomes obvious that the so-called experts don't really have a very good grasp of the topic - or worse have merely jumped on a bandwagon set in motion by independent scholars.
Melvin Bragg, I'm a fan of the show but does it have to be this way?
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