Mass media and public understandings of nature in interwar Britain

Abstract

This dissertation explores British non-fiction films and radio broadcasts about the natural world from the 1920s to the 1930s. During the years between the First and Second World Wars, natural history films and radio programmes flooded into Britain’s cinemas and its airwaves, at a moment when the relationship between humans and the natural world was undergoing a profound transformation. Meanwhile, new methods of conveying knowledge like film and radio were hailed as potential solutions to the needs of an expanding system of formal education. My dissertation responds to a key historical question that unites historians of science, the media, modern Britain, and its environments: how were people’s experiences of the natural world shaped by the types of information that they consumed? The dissertation is divided into two sections. The first three chapters look at natural history films, while the remaining two examine BBC broadcasts. I argue that mass media science in this period was characterised by ‘intermediality’, with ideas and individuals flowing freely across multiple formats. By exploring the production, circulation, and consumption of different forms of mass media, I also argue that ideas about the natural world were ‘co-produced’ by a wide range of historical actors and processes: mainstream cinema culture, educational philosophies, scientists, teachers, filmmakers, radio producers, animals, plants, and chemicals all shaped the depiction of nature on screen and on air. Paying close attention to film and radio audiences, in particular child audiences, I show how the popularisation of natural history and biology came to be defined by the appeal to people’s ‘everyday’ experience.