Guest Blog: Stu Harris on directing the CHRISTMAS LECTURES with Carl Sagan

When I was asked to direct the 1977 CHRISTMAS LECTURES^®  with Carl Sagan for the BBC, neither Prof. Sagan, nor the Ri, were new to me. I'd worked extensively with Carl (together with my colleagues Karl Sabbagh and Jenny Hughes) in 1976 in connection with the Viking spacecraft landings on Mars. We created a 90-minute show called Is Anybody There? developing Carl's favourite topic, the question of extraterrestrial intelligence and how to contact it.

As for the Ri, I'd also directed the 1976 CHRISTMAS LECTURES^® which Ri Director George Porter (sorry, SIR George Porter) had delivered himself. We'd also run through at least one series of Controversy, a science debate show taped in the famous lecture theatre. 

Back in 1976 we'd assembled some excellent material for Is Anybody There? but the concept was over-complex and the night we attempted to put it on air was somewhat disastrous – as good an example of the perils of multi-point failure as you'd ever see (but that's another story).

However, that previous experience meant that we were all quite comfortable and collegiate with each other as Carl arrived in London to rehearse. He'd just recently separated from his second wife, Linda, and brought with him his former student Ann Druyan (image below). He married Ann three years later but her status at the time was strictly "fancy woman" and I think that was the first occasion when he outed her as more than just a colleague.

I remember Carl was a little nervous about how his brazen behaviour might go down in "polite London society". I advised him that as long as he didn't draw attention to it, nobody else would have the nerve to, and as far as I know I was correct.

I was really glad that the Ri Channel gave me the chance to see those recordings again. I thought we did pretty well – Carl was a model of clarity and charm, all our demos worked (largely thanks to the legendary Bill Coates, RI demonstrator) and we ran all the shows to time in spite of having very limited opportunity to edit the raw tapes. I don't know how it's done these days, but back then I directed our four cameras from a mobile control room parked right out there in Albemarle Street. I did my own vision mixing – there literally wasn't room for an additional person to fulfil that role. I liked that setup, actually, it suited me.

We all had a chuckle when, in the last lecture, Carl went through the process of building the 3-D formaldehyde molecule based on a supposed binary message from ET (image below).

That demo was actually created for Is Anybody There? and for that show James Burke built the molecule in a BBC studio. Carl liked it and we decided to revive it since we still had the props. The chuckle was occasioned by him saying rather pointedly that "The BBC made some errors in the code." It was an in-joke, since my researcher Jenny Hughes actually had made a sequence error but we'd all agreed to pretend that it was deliberate – after all, a message from ET hundreds of light years away would probably not be received with perfection. 

I'll end this memoir with a quirky personal note. In Lecture Two, when the audience volunteers come out to create the amino acid chain, the nerdy kid saying "Glycine" in a strong North London accent is my daughter Justine, born the same week as the Apollo 11 Moon landing.

Today a 43 year old Justine is a well known voice-over artist without a trace of the London accent. You've probably heard her voice announcing bargains in Marks & Spencer.