But the big news of the week in health news was the tragic death of Michael Mosley.
Shelby Traynor: Yes, he died at 67 and we’ve been asked by a lot of people to talk about him and his work. And lots of people assume that you knew him.
Norman Swan: I didn’t really actually know him. I met Michael Mosley many years ago when we were young doctors trying to make it in the media. He’d just joined the BBC and we had lunch in the BBC canteen, and never saw each other again. But for some reason I remember that meeting really well, but here in the ABC we’ve actually got somebody who knew him really well, and that’s Dr Penny Palmer, who’s now executive producer of Catalyst and TV Science. I spoke to her earlier today.
Penny Palmer: I remember early on when I met Michael, which was in 2004, I was an assistant producer and Michael was my executive producer. This was on a series called Secrets of the Sexes. So Michael was my EP, but he also was the development EP at BBC Science at the time, and what his role was in that was to take new ideas to the channel and say, ‘Let us make this great new show because it’s brilliant, here are the reasons why.’ But because he did such a good job at kind of selling programs to the channel, they said to him, why don’t you have a go at being in front of the camera and see how you go. And so actually his first ever on-screen thing was Secrets of the Sexes. And he ran the scientific dating agency that we had constructed for this show. I was just re-watching it this morning, and he listens well, he was interested in people. He was able then to help them summarise what they were thinking really clearly. You know, like even then you could see it coming through. And I know it was a couple of years later, and when he got his first kind of proper series at the BBC, but you could just see that he was a great science communicator at the time.
Norman Swan: I only met him once, and we were both young doctors trying to make it in the media. And he’d just joined Horizon, he’d just joined as a trainee producer, and he was this kind of young, awkward, but unfailingly polite…I mean, it’s interesting that I remember that meeting, but he had that kind…if you come from Scotland you have that sort of view of English public-school boys who’ve been to Oxford, that nothing was impossible in life. Was he like that?
Penny Palmer: Definitely. I think he was always looking for what we can do to make this thing better than it’s ever been before, he was always on that side of conversations. He was always looking for how we could make the audience respond in a better way. How could we make this bigger than we did? And I remember him being really bouncy and positive about everything.
Norman Swan: Sometimes, when you’re bright and bouncy, there’s something dark underneath.
Penny Palmer: Very true, very true.
Norman Swan: Was that true of Michael?
Penny Palmer: Not in my experience. Michael, as well as being bright and bouncy, could also be very awkward in personal conversations. He sometimes didn’t know what to talk to you about unless it was about science. He wasn’t so good at the small talk and the chit chat.
Norman Swan: People think of him now because you’ve got all these decades out there as a TV doctor, and David Attenborough is the same, people think David Attenborough is a naturalist. David Attenborough is not a naturalist, he’s just very good communicator about science and the natural world, and he’s been a broadcaster all his life. And in fact that’s what Michael was, he was a very well trained TV broadcaster and producer.
Penny Palmer: He was a storyteller. His storytelling was excellent. He knew how to get…you know, he wasn’t one of those people that needed lots of briefing about how to get from A to B. He understood how to take a story…when you go meet someone for the first time and you need to navigate through that conversation in order to get to an end point, he just knew naturally how to do that. He was always very empathetic when he was meeting people and he got the bits out of them that he needed to make the story work.
I wasn’t on location, but a scene that I remember really well from one of his programs is when he went to South America to meet a family of people who celebrated having six digits on their hands. And they weren’t ashamed of it, they were very proud of it. And he dealt with that in a way that I was really impressed with, because it wasn’t like…it would have been very easy to slightly make fun of those kinds of people, and he absolutely didn’t. He understood why it was important to the story, he allowed them to be open about it and to be proud of it, and to not try and negate that in any way.
Norman Swan: You must have been shocked.
Penny Palmer: Yeah. I mean, aren’t we all.
Norman Swan: I’m amazed. I mean, just everybody wants to talk about it.
Penny Palmer: Yeah, it shows you just how broad a relevance he had. You know, he talked about things that matter to all of us. He talked about sleep, he talked about diet, he talked about the things that we care about in everyday life to make ourselves have happier days. And I think with Michael, the thing that he did first, and perhaps moved away from in the end, is he didn’t just say it, he wasn’t a lecturing kind of presenter, he did it. So when he suggested that, you know, you try standing on one foot, that’s one of his recent things, he actually did it to see what the effect was. And so that kind of self-experimentation thing set him apart from many other people, because he wasn’t just telling you the results of a paper, he was showing you why it worked. And I think that that resonated really well with the audience.
Norman Swan: And for you, what’s his legacy for you, not for us, for you?
Penny Palmer: I found him very inspiring in the sense that I wanted to be more like him. I wanted to better story-tell like he did. I’ll tell you a little anecdote about a time in the office at the BBC which just shows what kind of person I think Michael was. So one of our junior staff members had some kind of heart event and collapsed on the floor. And it was Michael who came over and did compressions and saved this woman’s life before the ambulance arrived, no hesitation, no holds barred, just straight in there, get to work. It was how he lived everything, his ideas around science, his embracing of life. I think even Sue recently, his wife, has spoken this week about how he liked to explore and liked to go and do new things, but he seemed to throw himself into life, and I think that’s a thing we can all take away from it, but that’s what I remember him as being, as somebody who I looked up to and would like to be more like.
Norman Swan: Penny, thank you.
Penny Palmer: You’re welcome.
Norman Swan: So that’s Dr Penny Palmer, who’s executive producer of Catalyst and TV Science here at the ABC.
Shelby Traynor: You’re listening to the Health Report on RN.