Dr Hannah Critchlow picks Professor Colin Blakemore

Great Lives

BBC

History, Documentary, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.2 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 13 January 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

Professor Colin Blakemore was a famous communicator of science, the youngest ever Reith lecturer on the BBC. He was also targeted by members of the animal rights movement, which sent bombs and letters lined with razor blades to his home address. Born in 1944 and brought up in Coventry, Colin Blakemore was committed to brain research and the connection between vision and early development of the brain. Nominating him is the author and neuroscientist Dr Hannah Critchlow, who knew him before he died in 2022.

The programme includes contributions from his friends and colleagues, including Professor Barbara Sahakian and David Nutt; plus moving archive of his daughter, Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and reports from the animal rights campaigners who protested outside his Oxford house.

Dr Hannah Critchlow is the author of Joined Up Thinking and The Science of Fate. She's based at Cambridge University.

Presented by Matthew Parris and produced for BBC Studios Audio by Miles Warde

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Traitors is back and so is that mysterious cloaked figure with the familiar fringe.
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0:18.5	What a faithful.
0:19.7	We'll unpack betrayals and spill scandalous secrets
0:22.3	with celeb guests, traitors' legends,
0:25.0	and murdered and banished players.
0:27.1	The Traitors Uncloat.
0:28.4	Watch on EyePlayer, listen for more on BBC Sounds.
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0:34.7	and you're in the UK,
0:36.6	more episodes are available now. First, on BBC
0:39.5	Sounds. BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts. Almost 50 years ago, back in 1976, a young man came on the radio
0:51.4	to explain the thinking behind a series of lectures called
0:54.7	the Mechanics of the Mind. His name was Colin Blakemore, and he was just 32 years old,
1:02.4	then the youngest person ever to give the Reith lectures on Radio 4. He believed in talking
1:09.0	about science to the public, so let's listen to this mustachioed young man in 1976,
1:15.6	explaining exactly what his first lecture would be about.
1:19.6	It's about the function of the brain, and from that point of view,
	...

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