Start the Week

07/02/2011

Andrew Marr talks to the British film-maker Mike Figgis about directing Donizetti's most psychologically profound opera, Lucrezia Borgia. Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell looks to the end of the world as the Mayans believed it, to discuss the communication of science. The businesswoman Margaret Heffernan asks how and why individuals and society as a whole choose to turn a blind eye to the uncomfortable truth. And society is also under the spotlight from the historian Edward Higgs, who champions the on-going importance of the census.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

Duration:: 42m
Broadcast on:: 07 Feb 2011
Audio Format:: other

Thank you for downloading the Start the Week podcast from BBC Radio 4. For more information, go to bbc.co.uk/radio4. Hello, we are stupider than we need to be. We are guilty of willful blindness in our private and our professional lives, preferring the familiar, the known, and the comfortable with insidious effects, so says the writer Margaret Heffernan. And there are those who believe we're blinding ourselves to nothing less dramatic than the end of the world, which according to theories swirling around the internet is scheduled to happen on December the 12th next year. The astrophysicist, Jocelyn Bell Bernal, is here to reassure the nervous. Later on, we're going to be talking about another date, one with a much higher degree of certainty attached to it, March the 27th, when we have the latest and, quite possibly, the last census. Historian Edward Higgs has studied two centuries of hard stats and awkward questions. First though, a new opera production that's had some critics tearing out their hair. The latest in the English national operas experiments in taking film directors onto their stage, Mike Figgis has directed Lucrecia Borgia. Donitzetti's opera about one of the most notorious women in European history. And Mike, we can't really talk about the opera without starting by talking about Lucrecia herself, because when you say the name, a lot of people just have the word, "Oh yes, poison" in their heads, but her story is a lot odder and darker than that. It's odder and darker, and the more research I did into the period and the Borgias, and particularly her, the more I felt that she was somewhat maligned. And, in fact, was rather a remarkable woman, once she escaped from the confines of her father, the Pope and her brother, Cesare. She became rather a fine politician, and a woman who healed many rifts between family members was tolerant of the Jews, very, very rare thing at the time. It was a great friend to artists and musicians. Rather, I would have thought an iconic woman, and yet the reputation that she carries with her, and it's really largely to do with the period when starting when she was 13, her first marriage. She was married three times by the time she was, I think, 20 or 21. All marriages arranged by the father and the brother. With whom, there were rumors that she'd had incestuous relationships? Yes, they were quite possibly true. I mean, one of the great things about the opera, and the fun that I had, was that we were talking about this earlier about the difference between known fact and speculation. As far as the Borgias were concerned, there were thousands of speculations, but one of the main ones being that she was incestuous, she involved with her father, the Pope and her brother. In fact, quite possibly, the child who then becomes the central figure in Donizetti's opera may have been fathered by her father, a sort of Chinatown situation. Quite a family. The story of the opera is really the mutual search of her for her natural son, who's been taken from her at birth, and his search for his mother. Yes. That's the opera. In fact, a fiction, you know. Rich Donizetti himself knicked, as it were, in the 1830s. He did. And it was sued, I think, and changed various things in the opera. It's not necessarily an obvious story for Donizetti, because, you know, his musical style is a little bit more up-tempo and upbeat, in many cases, than the story he's telling here. Now, the thing that's got all the critics going is that you put in a series of films about her backstory. In other words, you took the view that to understand Lucretia, you needed to know what had happened to her first. Well, there are a couple of challenges. One is that Belkanto, Donizetti, this style of opera, is very, very, people always say "dumpty dumpties". It could be that your entire family have been wiped out in a terrible accident. It will always start with "bumchacha", "bumchacha". In a major key, you know, everything sounds like a sort of fortune in the park, really. And that was a little difficult at first, and so I sort of had to get my chops around that. Then the story is operatic in the sense, there is a moment where I'm in character, Janaro wakes up on a park bench, sees his mum. She's old enough to be his mum, although very youthful, Claire Rutter are playing the part. And within, I would say, three and a half minutes, he's singing "yes, okay, I love you". You know, it's a bit of a challenge, but I loved the story, and I loved the background, and I thought, I came into the opera with absolutely no intention of using any film at all, because I wanted to do an opera. Then I was urged by many people to say, "Well, why not if the film can somehow add something, another dimension?" And I thought, the more I read about Lucretia herself, I thought, actually, she deserves a little bit more substance. And so I did, at a very late stage, with a tiny amount of budget. He said hurriedly, because some people have said, "All the money must have gone on the films, haven't they?" Well, you know, we don't have time to talk about new technology, but in fact, the film was shot on a stills camera. I know exactly the camera, one of the tiny little ones, that's very far. But Kennedy said, which is possibly, in my opinion, one of the major breakthroughs in cinematic technology in the last 100 years, actually, I couldn't believe the quality of what is now possible on a tiny camera. A crew of about three people, the costumes were made on the day from pieces of silicon things on the actors in Italy. And I think I shot four scenes that just give some kind of back history to the young Lucretia, totally being dominated by her brother and her father. And quite a lot of... I mean, most of the critics loathed it. I mean, it has to be said. And I've been sort of assaulted by people over the last few years, give figures a really hard time. I was so, so cross about this. And I've been trying to work out because the singing, everyone says, "Oh, the singing's really good." And there's not a great deal of complaint about the actual opera on stage. And I've been trying... I think it, and I put it to you, that it's because the films are so vivid. The characters are so sort of sultry, sexy, pouting in your face and all the rest of it, that there's a big jump, there's a disjuncture when you go back onto the opera stage, and particularly if you go to the opera a lot, they find it very, very hard to take. Poor things. I feel terribly sorry for a lot of the critics. I mean, I've had a lifetime of working in experimental theatres, cinema, and nothing changes, you know. Do you think opera approaches? Do you think opera critics and opera lovers are particularly precious about their art a little bit? It's like it's a secret club, and you're either in the club or you're not. And they'll tolerate the most outrageous bending of rules, but somehow within the club. And it does seem to have offended them. And I never cease to be amazed by people's reactions because this is 2011. I mean, this is not 1949. Now, I was amazed. I mean, the staging is, I think, very, very authentic and actually very much an homage to the period of Donazetti, the 1830s. And I always took the notion that here's a story set in the 15th century that was turned into an opera in the 19th century, and we're now in the 21st. And therefore, there are three stages. And film is very much our contemporary proscenium. And actually, it's quite a smart framing or series of frames for the opera, I think. And so you would presumably like people to be coming out of the opera, talking about Lucretia and what's the secret of Lucretia, as much as talking about the cholera, or the range of voices, or whatever people normally come out of opera is talking about. I'd like to give them a great experience. I'd like to give them a really great evening out. And after the opening night, there was two worlds. I had a lot of people coming and saying, somebody said, that's the best evening I've ever ever had at an opera. And I'm going to tell all my friends to come and see it. And everyone said, wow, this is a great, great show. And this is going to be such a big success. And I sort of said, I'm... Wait. Wait till all the reviews come up, because I'm never convinced about that. What did the rest of us make about this, Margaret? Well, I'm always interested, because I've worked in lots of different disciplines. I was really interested that you've worked in so many different areas. And I guess I wondered, you know, an artist's work always gives them away. You know, there were always themes running through it. And I guess I wondered, what for you is the connection between your film work and Lucrezia Ward? So what brings those together in your head? Well, film, as I say, I see as a kind of a modern frame, but at the same time, I think film conveniently works as memory. And just as a little anecdote, when I first started making films, it was on stage. So actually, I had done operatic sort of work before, where I would use a live opera singer on stage. I would have a film projected and try and create a kind of sort of organic piece that by the end of it, people weren't really sure what they'd seen on film or what they'd seen on stage. So for me, film, I agree with what Andrew said, which is that one of the problems with film is it hits you in the face. It really does. It goes in through the eye, and it hits the brain in a way that nothing else does. And it's bright, and it's colourful, and so on. And always one tries to find that balance between what a small person on stage can do and what a huge close-up can do on a big screen. And that always will be a challenge. But I still think it's, for me, I've seen a lot of work through the '80s, experimental work using film and video and live performance. And to me, it was very exciting, one enhanced the other. And it's a sort of, let's say, a journey that I will continue going. We were talking last week in the programme about, with Susan Hiller, who's got this big show of her art work in the Tate, which includes famously some extraordinary work of film. So it is the, it's... Jocelyn Belbinell, what did you make of this? Well, I enjoyed it hugely. I listened to quite a lot of classical music, opera, perhaps least, because you have to suspend belief so much in opera. You know, the guy has a dagger in his chest and sings an aria for 20 minutes before he collapses on the stage. As a scientist, you're worried about this. No, but there is a limit to how much suspension of belief I can take. And what struck me particularly during the performance I was at was, at the end of each major aria, the audience applauded. Conventional operatic setup. But that applause, again, breaks the flow, suspends things. And I could well see that that kind of audience would not take to the film interludes, which I was very grateful for, because I thought having the back story actually helped a lot. I do accept that, as you say, the film goes straight in your eyes and to somewhere in the brain that nowhere else reaches. But actually, you also had the set as, if I call it high definition, which matched quite well with the film, as well as some wonderful witty bits like the Last Supper. So I can see the mixed reviews from the critics. There's the conventional opera lovers who are horrified. And there's the people who perhaps aren't quite in that club, as you put it, who maybe are really enjoying the new experience. Edward, you said. How far did you actually think you had to give a back story? I mean, if didn't you do that consciously? I'm just thinking, if Donna Zettie's opera was shown put on in Italy in the 1830s, everybody would have known about the Cricia Borgia. So do you think you can ever actually recapture the original performance? No, but what you can do, which is interesting, is for example, this isn't high opera. It's not sort of Wagner. It is very, very, you know, I think it's upmarket abba of the time with great, great songs and then very quick plot points in between and just go with it mainly because you love the idea of a live performance and a spectacle. So at one point in the opera, I create a tiny little stage on stage to sort of say, this is probably about the size and the look of it that it would have had in the 1830s and one could enjoy that. But I felt, you know, let's say I have an ego, you know, what's my job then? I once actually directed the sopranos and turned up and said, I asked somebody, what actually does the director do on the sopranos? Everybody knows what they're doing except the director. And I felt the same in the opera. They're all going to sing. Well, I'm going to stop them waving their arms around and keep them still and try and get a sort of, let's say, a more studied physical presence on stage. But I would like to contribute a little bit more to that. And as I said, I did my research. I thought, wow, what an amazing character. La Cretio Borgia, fantastic character, abused, but managed to get out of the abuse and become a good person, an interesting person, died in childbirth. You know, a major, major iconic female figure that somehow is just known as, you know, the bitch from hell and the poison, I think unfairly. Why not inform an audience, an intelligent audience in London in one of the cultural capitals of the world? Let's go somewhere. And you've got a lot of willful blindness back, which takes us on to Margaret Heffman or not. But you certainly, certainly the question of suspending disbelief connects to Margaret Heffman's book, which is a sort of survey of the phenomenon of willful blindness right the way through from kind of quite small day-to-day activities through to the activities of corporations and government and so on. Margaret, some of the evidence that's been accumulated by social researchers in your book just completely had my jaw on the floor. For instance, the connection between the first letter of your name and products you buy, or indeed your birthday and people that you're more or less likely to be sympathetic to. Right, so part of willful blindness starts with our brain's preference for what's familiar and what's familiar to us is us. So we tend to marry people who look a lot like us, talk a lot like us, or about the same height, about the same hair color, about the same eye color, about the same background. Peter likes Pepsi, Carol will drink Coke. Dentists are overrepresented with the first name D. This is just astonishing, I can be amazed by this. So we're very attracted to the things that we know. So even if you ask people for no reason at all, choose any letters from the alphabet, they'll almost always choose their own initials. This is what we call a bias, it means we like things that make us feel good about ourselves and what makes us feel good about ourselves is us. And just one other example of this, because I love them so much, tell us about the Rasputin. So if you tell people that they share a birthday with Rasputin, their view of him will be modified, they'll start to think that actually perhaps he wasn't such a mad monk after all. Because now there's a connection, we think better of him. So we like things that make us feel comfortable and what makes us feel comfortable is what's familiar and what's familiar is us. So that's one source of willful blindness. Another source of willful blindness is love. Our love of ideas or individuals really gives meaning to our life and we will defend that meaning against tons of evidence. You're a good example. I'm Speer, the architect. It's at some level, loved Hitler. I mean, Hitler was a father figure for him when he was a young man and a very vulnerable man and he couldn't quite see beyond the father figure. That's exactly right. And Speer talks about Hitler in purple prose of romance, really. And what was clear is that Speer loved Hitler, but also Hitler had an idea of Speer, which was Speer's idealized sense of himself. And so he had to believe in Hitler in order to believe in himself. And if people think that's a rather abstruse or abnormal example, presumably in almost every organization and in families, there are people fixated or admiring or loving of bosses or lieutenants or spouses or children. And for that reason, can't see the obvious flaws and the faults. That's right. And I mean, any marriage guidance council will tell you that, you know, when your adultery is discovered, what the wounded spouse feels is, oh, they're all those hints all along and I never saw them. Why did I never see them? I never saw them because I didn't want to see them because I couldn't afford to see them because I desperately wanted for the hints and not to be true. Classic willful blindness. Yes. And there's some other, as it were, more technologically relevant examples right now because we are all now told that we can we can multitask. We can be on the mobile phone. We can be checking our laptop or our iPad. We can be doing all sorts of things at the same time. And in a sense, we just got cleverer. Our brains are able to cope with much more. And you would argue this is absolutely untrue. It's an urban myth, really. The fact is the brain has very hard limits. There's a certain limit to how much we can take in, and therefore we have to edit. We have to load balance. And so what you find is if you're driving your car and talking on the phone, there's too much information and some of it gets left out, which is why it's deemed to be mentally as incapacitated as if you were over the alcohol limit. The same is true if you miss a night's sleep, which is if you look at the cognitive performance of people after missing a night's sleep, it is worse than if they were over the limit, which explains a lot about a lot of the deals that are done in the city, mergers and acquisitions and some very, very bad decisions, indeed, which is simply everybody's too tired. You remember looking at Gordon Brown during the banking crisis. You need to worry about this because these are people whose brains aren't functioning. So there is a macho culture in business and certainly in politics, in parliamentary politics, which says the longer the hours, the more exhausted you are, the more impressive you are. Yes. And in fact, the more exhausted you are, the longer the hours that you do, what goes first is critical thinking. Most of your brain energy and glucose is going to the effort of staying awake, and what you're losing is the capacity to discriminate. And that's why tiredness is always, always implicated in major industrial accidents like BP's explosion at Texas City. You have a lot of people who've been working long hours for too long without decent sleep. And we have this notion that our brain has infinite capacity. It really doesn't. One other example, which I can't resist, are willful blinders, which is what you call money blindness. Now, this can be many things, including an excessive reverence for people who have large amounts of money and an assumption that they've got money because their decisions have been better, which perhaps it's an illusion we've broken with a little bit over the last couple of years. But there's a very good example that you use about childcare, showing that it's much more to do with daily life than I've suggested. Right. So there's a famous experiment where a childcare center had difficulty with parents being late for pickup. And they thought, we're sick of hearing all the apologies. What we'll do is we'll impose a fine that will make the parents behave better. In fact, the fine became a price. The parents felt, well, now we can pay for being late. We will. The really important thing about this experiment is once the daycare center realized, well, this doesn't work, we'll go back the way we were. They couldn't do it. Once money had entered into the relationship, it blinded the parents to the moral nature of the relationship and they couldn't go back. And in my opinion, this is why the big society won't work. We've just come out of a phase in which there was a price tag on everything. And now we want to go back and resume these moral relationships, which have been fundamentally shattered. Money blinds us to our relationship to each other, because it appears to offer us the ultimate freedom which is buying an array in anything. An neat arithmetical ticket. That's right. And therefore, of course, you get a measurement, which I think is a phase we're living through now, where everything is measured by money, and we are blinded to the moral, social, ethical consequences of who we are and what we owe to whom. How important do the rest of us think willful blindness is, and Jocelyn? What resonated for me, and it's a subject I'm quite passionate about, so I mustn't go on too long, is what you were saying about the recruitment of women, and the very graphic example that I've heard elsewhere about the recruitment of women to orchestras. Once candidates for places in orchestras started playing behind a screen, suddenly the number of women in orchestras went up. Right. And orchestras run by men, tended to recruit men, and they always maintain it because they were better players. Of course, they wanted the best players when you put them behind screens, and you're only listening to the sound, it changes the decision. What's extraordinary is the Vienna fell, still has not hired a single Asian musician. They still insist that somehow Asians can't produce the right Germanic sound, though I suspect your mom might disagree with them. Do they do their auditions behind a screen? Can they genuinely tell the difference? Well, it's interesting because, I mean, they have started hiring a lot more women. If willful blindness runs right the way through society, and we haven't even talked about some of the big corporate examples that you use, is there any cure for it? Is there any way of understanding that? Well, I think this is really important because the book also looks at people who have managed in very difficult circumstances, not to be blind. And what's so important, and I think inspiring about those people, is they don't have fabulous IQs. They're not in elite groups. There's nothing, you know, remarkable about them. What's fantastic is they're very ordinary. What unites them is they see through the eyes of the disempowered, so they see different things. They ask hard questions. They connect dots. They do what Hannah Arendt calls thinking without banisters. But I think what's inspiring about them is that because they're ordinary, what they say to us is we could do that too. If we understand what makes us blind, and we understand how to see more, it's something we all could do. So standing back, constantly standing back and looking at ourselves as it were, and give us a good example of somebody who broke through willful blindness. So a classic example of this fantastic woman in Montana, whose job was to check electricity meters. And she kept saying that every house she went into, there was a 50-ish guy who was at home early retired on oxygen. And she thought, there's something going on here. How come all these guys are at home on oxygen tanks in their mid-50s? It took her 25 years, but she proved the entire town had been poisoned with asbestos. Nobody wanted her to ask those questions. The information wasn't available, but you know, she wasn't a scientist. She wasn't an environmentalist. She wasn't a doctor. She just kept thinking, this doesn't make sense. And she had the moral courage not to be dissuaded. Now you talked then about joining the dots. But there are, of course, lots of examples of people who join the wrong dots or join dots in the wrong order. And we're going to come on to that now with Jocelyn Bell. Bernelle, you are an astrophysicist, and you're going to be giving the Faraday Lecture at the Royal Society. And you're going to be talking about the end of the world, which is going to take place on the 21st of December, 2012. That is according to the people who are obsessed by the Mayan calendar, which runs out at that point. But it's not just that, let's talk about the Mayans first of all. It is true that the Mayan calendar runs out then, isn't it? The Mayan calendar reaches the end of a cycle. Right, which is not the same thing. Which is not the same thing. Our calendar reached the end of a cycle on the 31st of December each year. Okay, and we have centenaries and millennia as well, bigger ones. This is one of the bigger ones, every 5,000 years. Right. So it's a bit of Mayan maths, rather than the forecast or a prophecy of any kind. Yes, there's a little bit of astronomical background in that the Earth's rotation axis moves around in a circle, cones. And that cone takes about 26,000 years. And the Mayans decided to divide that into five chunks. Curiously, the Mayans, the ancient Sumerians, the Babylonians, all knew about this 26,000-year cycle, which I find quite amazing. They must have been very good astronomers. And they gave different amounts of significance to it. And as I said, the Mayans divided this into five sets, this cycle. And we're coming up to the end of one of their five chunks in December next year. And so is that connected to all the planets being an alignment at all? Because that's another thing that's swirling around the internet. There's a lot swirling around the internet to do with the end of the world. It's fascinating. The Mayans predicted the end of the world. You then have to say, how is it going to be accomplished? What's going to happen? And planet alignment is one of them, and things crashing into the Earth, and big solar storms, and earthquakes, and typhoons. And the missing planet, the hidden... Tell us about the hidden planet that's been kept from us all. Yeah. Well, this was apparently seen by the ancient Sumerians. It's called Nibiru. And it's a very long period planet, which means it's a very long way out, about seven times the distance of Pluto. Now, in Sumerian times, they didn't have telescopes, so they've seen this with the naked eye, albeit in darker skies than we have. With the naked eye, we can't see the planet Uranus, the planet Neptune, the planet Pluto, let alone something seven times the distance of Pluto. So it must be very, very big, very bright this thing, if you're suddenly going to be able to see it at that distance. For some reason, this planet has moved in, and it's now hiding behind the sun. We're sitting around a round table. Andrew happens to be absolutely opposite me. Imagine there's the sun in the middle, and as I move around the table, you move around the opposite side. So I never see you. You're hitting... I'm playing a strange game with your hustling here. Yeah. Yeah. Now, in fact, you're 50 times bigger than the sun, so you kind of frame the sun. That's just my ego. That's just the head. Yeah. That's good. And on the 21st of December, you're going to come zooming round and crash into the earth for no apparent physical reason. Apparently, NASA and the governments know about all this, and they're keeping it secret. paranoia is part of all this. We've we've we've we've bust their game in the last couple of minutes, but no, no reason doesn't reach show sorts of places, you know. What's interesting, I mean, so it's just to be absolutely clear for all those listening, of all those theories about the imminent end of the earth and the earth's going to change on its axis and rotate in an even direction, there is no scientific evidence for any of this, as far as you're concerned. Absolutely. No. And what's interesting about all these theories is they start with a little bit of correct science. Yeah, there probably will be more solar storms around 2012, 2013, but not that many more. And then they build on this and they turn it into something scary. We've seen the same thing with some of the climate deniers, starting with a grain of good science, build on it, turn it into something scary. And with climate deniers, you can see that there could be a motive. Well, you say scary because presumably part of the motive there is to remove fear because we are, you know, the climate change thesis can be as scary as anything you like. And it's the sense that perhaps it's not going to be so bad, it maybe motivates people there. You mean it's all going to end in a year and a bit, and therefore it'll all be okay? No, I was thinking of the climate change argument, or the climate change deniers, so-called, their motive may be to, as it were, remove scales, that they were going to make things scarier, but actually might be the other way. Yes, the climate deniers would assert that actually climate change isn't happening. Because there is clearly something in the human psyche which likes or is attracted to the notion of collapse, devastation, doom, the end of time. There's all the religious groups, but throughout time, lots of religious groups have said time is about to end. Yes, there's a whole string of these doomsday's. You know, every five or 10 years, we have another one up over the horizon. Clearly it sells. Is it a sort of transferred version of the, you know, the human struggle to comprehend the idea of individual death? That could be part of it. I can see two reasons for it. Either life is so hellish that the thought that there is an end is actually a relief, or the opposite. God's going to come, carry us off the rapture. It's going to be wonderful. And oh, incidentally, it's happening in our generation. We're a special generation. Oh, and we're special because we know that we are going to be carried off into heaven by God. So there's adding significance and meaning to life as well. And that produces the sort of closed intellectual system which appears in your book, Margaret, in terms of willful blindness. Yes. Well, I mean, in my book, I talk about Marian Keats, is this amazing woman here who prophesies the end of the world. And the good people are going to be taken off in flying saucers, and a particular day and time. And of course, on that day, at time, when the saucers don't arrive, there's a huge conflict between faith and reality. And the way that Marian Keats and her followers dealt with this was to take a deep breath and say, it hasn't happened because our faith has saved us. This is where the theory of cognitive dissonance comes from. And what's so frightening about this is that this confirmation makes their faith greater. And as a scientist for you, this must be unbelievably frustrating. I think you have to accept, particularly if you're somebody using to communicating science, that there are human attitudes that even rational thinking won't penetrate. Right. You know, David Hume reason doesn't address passions. That's part of human nature and glory for that. The problem is sometimes too many people are similar thinking get together and it kind of resonates. Mike figures. What do you think? What's the root problem here? Why are these theories so common? And what could we do to address that? I mean, what are we doing wrong as a culture that allows the, I mean, global warming is an issue. It's also an economic issue. So it's not so popular in that sense, you know, the irony seems so obvious. But, you know, if these things are so obvious, why aren't we doing something about it? Why are people still believing this absolute? Why are we so stupid? Why was it stupid? Well, we may be not typical. I think part of the issue is indeed poor communication of science, poor science teaching, so that people will believe this fantastic science that is built on a small negative truth. There is an issue there, but I don't think that's the only thing. We won't solve the world that way. I think it is partly human nature. I think some of it is profit motive. If you look on Amazon, you find there are 44,000 books for sale about the end of the world in 2012. Wow. Yeah, prophecy profits people. Well, that varies in a astonishing statistic. We're going to talk finally about statistics, perhaps in a more mundane, but sometimes equally interesting way. Edward Higgs, Professor Edward Higgs, you're the director of the Center for Historical Census and Survey Research at Essex. And the census is almost upon us when it's coming next month, more reliably than the end of the world. The 21st of March, it will be here. We will all fill in lots and lots of forms. And before we go onto the history of the census, this could possibly be the last one, couldn't it? Well, every time we've had a census in the past 20, 30 years, they've said exactly the same, and it doesn't happen. The main problem is there's tons and tons of information out there. But the problem is making sure that everybody's unique individual. How do you know that, oh, I'd rather Bryn Jones in Cardiff one month is the same as Bryn Jones in another address next month? The only way you can do that is if you have a common identifier, that means a national registration system, which is the census, which of course is the ID card system. And we've rejected that. So you can't relate all these people. So the census actually turns out to be probably the easiest way of doing it. And it emerged from a sort of panic about population and national destiny going right back in 1801. 1801, first census, war with France, blockade. You needed to know the number of people on the land producing food. But 1801, they also looked at the number of births and deaths, marriages and deaths of the previous 100 years. So what they're probably trying to get at is whether the population's rising or falling. They had no idea what the population is. And this is of particular concern because Malthus has recently warned that a rising population will lead to famine. Essay population, which I think is 1796-98. But there'd been a long debate throughout the whole of the 18th century about whether the population was rising or falling. If you're in government, it's good governance. Population must be rising. If it's your night out of power, it must be falling. It's pretty astonishing to think that the government had no idea at that point how many people were living in the country. When you go right, we're right the way back to doomsday book after all the Normans did their former census or super census, I suppose. And then the rather long gap. Well, the doomsday book doesn't actually, isn't actually a census of people. It's a census of land and just people just get included in. Every so often there's arguments that they will have some sort of census, but it never really happens until this particular period. And it requires the state, and this is true in 1801, and in the Victorian period, and it's true again, that it requires the state to be assertive, inquisitive, and to actually knock on doors in a way that a lot of British people have always found difficult. Well, in some ways we have far less surveillance today than we did in the early modern village when you had to pull all overseers, seeing if you're keeping poor relatives in your house and the local constables coming around, and you've got the church courts finding out whether your wife's scolding you or not, or you have the right religion and all that stuff. This sort of surveillance isn't new. It's a little thatched panopticon. Exactly, exactly. But what's happened is now it's become centralized as the central state has taken over from the local state. But nonetheless, certainly during the Victorian period, the Edwardian period, there's a lot of worry about the census and the inquisitive nature, and people are quite offended by being asked about how many people were in their house and so on, and famously the suffragettes had a sort of political objection to it, and they refused tried not to be there for census night. Yes, well, they all clubbed together and went after someone's house, and when the enumerator knocked on the door they refused to answer. But some of them filled out their census forms and said, you know, there's a column at the end which was disabilities and they wrote in women, because they didn't have the vote. And the number of questions keeps increasing, doesn't it, because it was about eight, I think, a century ago. It was about eight throughout most of the 19th century. They had to keep it very simple because they didn't have any mechanical means of actually analyzing oldest data. Then they get sorts of computers in the early 20th century, and then they can start expanding the number of questions they asked. And of course, questions like, are you an imbecile or an idiot? I can't really do what the exact question was, but some famously offensive questions were stuck in. The last column on disabilities you have to be whether you're blind, deaf and dumb, or an idiot, an imbecile or a lunatic. Probably. And feeble-minded later on. Fable-minded. Well, whether that's a column that's terribly well filled in is a matter of some dispute. And is this going to be useful information that we're going to be accumulating as a country next month? Well, lots of people use it. Not just state, but also private organizations. If a supermarket wants to set up a supermarket in a particular area, they want to need to know the social makeup of that area. How many people in their 20s, how many babies, how many, etc. Exactly, exactly. So they know what lines of goods are put in the shop. So it's not just a state. So we should all fill it in. We shouldn't revolt against it. And we say no. That's just an offence anyway. It's an offence. But we provide lots of information to everybody on a daily basis. People spew out information on Facebook on the like. So why not? It's far more. You'd be surprised what they thought of. Margaret. Well, I mean, I love censuses and all that sort of data, because then you can find patterns and no data, no patterns. But, you know, the economist Paul Krugman made this really interesting observation. He built his economic models and put in all the information that fit and left out the stuff they didn't. And he said later in his career, realized the stuff they didn't fit was actually the most important. In a census, in a way, as a model, you're asking some questions and not asking others. So how do you decide what gets into the model and what doesn't? Well, these days, it's a question of negotiation between different departments. In the 19th century, it was very much left up to the people who took the census, which was the General Register Office. And the questions they asked depended upon their particular outlook on the world. What they were really interested in was disease. So what they're looking at is the way in which you create dense populations in the cities, because that's a number of people living per room and that kind of thing. Well, just the number of people were actually in a particular area, because the more people you have in the area, the more you have the prime cause of disease, which is an excrement. And you can't do epidemiology without a census where they came in. I'm interested in the questions that they've sometimes asked and then dropped. I can remember in the previous census being asked where your father was born. I think that was the gist of the question. And this was at my father was born in Dublin. And this was at the time of the troubles in Northern Ireland. And I was actually very uncomfortable giving that information. That's gone, but are there any religions come in, isn't it, in a big way? Yeah, yeah. So lots of people can describe themselves as Jedi Knights, of course. But well, lots of questions come in, lots of questions go out. A hundred years ago, in 1911, census, a big question was of course marital fertility. How many children were born to the family? And that's all to do with eugenics. So you can map the obsessions of the time through the census questions. Well, we have come to the end of our time for asking or indeed answering questions. Thank you to all my guests today. Mike figures his production of Lucrizio Borgia is on the ENO in London. You can also see it on SkyArts and in selected cinemas later this month. Margaret Heffman's Willful Blindness is out now. Jocelyn Bell-Burnell will be giving the Faraday Lecture the end of the world in 2012 with the question mark attached I hasten to add at the Royal Society on Thursday. And Edward Higgs will be talking about the history of the census at the British Library on March the 14th next week. David Attenborough, Andrew Motion, David Shields and Sheila Hancock. But for now thank you and goodbye.

Producer: Katy Hickman.