Practicing the Art of Science Programming

Without the budget of a “National Geographic” special or a “Nature” series, it isn’t easy to produce science programs interesting enough to engage a national audience, even one that normally tunes to public television.

Undaunted--and on a relative shoe string--the University of California system has come with a new series called “An Open Window,” showcasing research at each of the nine University of California branches in a half-hour magazine format.

Beginning Monday at 1 p.m., the first two of five episodes will air on the Discovery cable channel. The others will run at various times through Sept. 20.

UC Irvine contributed two segments. The first, on the effect political candidates’ appearances have on how people vote, will be shown Sept. 11 at 1 p.m. and again Sept. 11 at 9 a.m. The second, on laser surgery for pets, will be shown Sept. 18 at 1 and again Sept. 20 at 9 a.m.

A second series of five episodes is in production and awaiting an air date from the commercial cable system, which reaches an estimated 43 million households.

“Open Window” grew out of a weekly cable program of the same name, developed by the Television Service of UC Berkeley, aimed at explaining the university’s research to surrounding communities in the Bay Area.

“The emphasis is on practical applications,” Robert Cremer, one of the show’s founders, said in a telephone interview. “Things that have the potential for affecting people’s lives.”

After a lengthy series of meetings, Cremer said, public affairs people from the various UC campuses decided to try to “reach a national audience in a cost-effective way” with a single, systemwide program. Since “no one campus can produce enough quality programming,” Cremer said, each branch--plus the Lawrence Livermore Lab--would take responsibility for 1-3 segments in the pilot series, sometimes collaborating with such outside institutions as NASA and Caltech. Each segment would last 3 to 6 minutes.

Public affairs departments at the UC branches, faced with producing the segments on a budget of $2,000-$3,000, had no choice but to make extensive use of university resources and to be innovative.

For example, Colleen Bentley-Adler, associate director communications at UC Irvine, wanted to do the segment on the use of laser surgery on pets at the university’s Beckman Laser Institute.

Rather than a straight report explaining the surgery and the institute’s plans for the world’s first laser veterinary hospital, using someone from the university as an unseen narrator, Bentley-Adler tried to think in television terms.

Lassie!

With the help of Palladium Entertainment, which controls rights to the original “Lassie” television series, she found an episode in which Lassie was injured (not difficult, she said, “Lassie was always getting hurt”) and needed specialized surgery that could be performed, says Lassie’s vet gravely, only by “a research veterinarian connected with the state college.”

Bentley-Adler also contacted the Screen Actors Guild, which put her in touch with actress June Lockhart, one of several moms on the series, and hired Lockhart to host the segment. Bentley-Adler wrote and directed the 4-minute tape, which was shot and edited by UCI’s media services department with post production done by an outside company.

With the 40-second “Lassie” clip setting things up, and Lockhart narrating, the piece neatly segues from Lassie to lasers. The new technology is demonstrated on a poodle with a cancerous tumor on its hind leg, severe enough that, without the surgery, the dog would have had to be put to sleep. The result: good TV and a healthy plug for the university.

At least two more segments from UCI are planned for the second series, Bentley-Adler said.

A typical half hour in the first series is made up of five segments, knit together by introductions by anchors Teri Bond Michael of UCLA and Paul Pfotenhauer of UC Davis, both of whom worked in television before joining their schools’ public affairs departments. The pair opens each half hour on a different campus, offering introductions to each segment from that campus along with running descriptions of the UC branch.

Cremer, who produces the series, calls these “the last vestige of the university public affairs perspective umbilical” and he hopes they will be eliminated once each campus in the system gets a turn.

Cremer’s original goal was to place the series on PBS (where most of those associated with the project assumed it would end up), but with the exception of a few smaller stations in California, he found that officials were wary of material put together by public affairs departments.

Cremer said this was a valid concern and he did everything he could to keep the puffery to a minimum. Writers from various campuses attended a seminar instructing them in how to make their material “informational rather than promotional,” he said.

Despite his efforts, the PBS network turned the series down. Ultimately, Cremer turned to the all-documentary Discovery Channel.

“We took a look at it and found it a very credible piece of TV,” said Greg Moyer, Discovery’s senior vice president for programming. “It explored a worthwhile area of topics in science and technology (and we decided) it would probably work for us.”

Moyer did say that, in order for the series to break into prime time, “we might have slightly tougher editorial standards,” as well as even more stringent requirements for technical quality.

Cremer’s dream is to make the series truly national, with a regular time slot and with state university systems around the country contributing enough segments to air a new program each week.

As far as Discovery is concerned, that is a viable goal.

Moyer said “there is a lot of demand for science and technology programming from a wide variety of advertisers, and not just from those marketing scientific products like computers.

“The more ecumenical it becomes, the more attractive it would be to a network such as ours, which would not want to become captive of any one institution,” Moyer said.