In an interview for M Magazine, we asked him about his work and what he thinks about our university.
What is your relationship with Masaryk University? What do you think about it?
I greatly appreciate this award and I am grateful for it. The way I see Masaryk University is mainly in reference specific people – scientists who have earned respect through their achievements, their behaviour and their results. I associate Masaryk University not only with its many faculties, but also with the CEITEC research centre, which is an important partner for us. Experts from the centre often appear on our programmes and help us, for example, with visualisations of proteins and viruses. CEITEC is a great example of how universities can work together to achieve international recognition.
Do you follow the development of Czech universities?
To a certain extent, we have to follow what is going on so that we know what topics they can contribute to our programme. However, we don’t keep track of every detail; we tend to follow individual teams and topics related to them.
You received the Silver Medal for your contributions to the popularisation of science. What are your goals in this regard?
What my colleagues and I want is to give people food for thought. It is not possible to explain everything in our science programmes, and that is not our ambition. Our goal is to get viewers and people in general to think about the topics we bring up and to talk about them. For me, this is much more important than TV ratings. What we leave behind is what is truly important. For example, we don’t film our interviews with Holocaust survivors in a studio, but in a neutral setting so that people can watch them in ten, twenty or thirty years’ time, when the eyewitnesses are no longer with us, but we must not forget what they’ve been through. Not because it was so terrible, but because it was worse than we can even imagine today. Things like these are valuable to me and give meaning to my work.
Doing interviews with Holocaust survivors or filming in Auschwitz are obviously very difficult topics. How did viewers react to this?
We filmed in Auschwitz on the 80th anniversary of this extermination camp’s liberation. We ended up broadcasting three and a half hours of material that we collected there, and we waited for the response this topic would elicit after being part of the evening news – whether people would want to watch things about the suffering of Holocaust survivors at half past seven on a Saturday evening. And I have to say that the viewing figures for all the programmes from Auschwitz did not change during the broadcast, no one switched channels. For me, that’s very good news about the society we live in.
Do you think it will remain so in the current situation, with conflicts flaring up around the world?
I am afraid that it will get worse. If only because of how difficult it is nowadays to capture people’s attention, to keep society informed about what is true. Unfortunately, we all have to put more and more energy into getting to the essentials and verified information, because there are more and more people trying to flood the space with a lot of nonsense and lies and thus drown out what really matters. This is because the more energy a person has to expend to find out what is really going on, the sooner they become exhausted and disillusioned, and then they just sit on the sofa and remain passive. This suits a number of manipulators, and that is what we are up against.
You are doing this by popularising science and talking about important social issues. However, this wasn’t what you originally set out to do when you started studying international trade. Where did your interest in science come from?
It was the question “why” – I always asked why and how things worked, and my parents and my canoeing coach had the patience to explain to me why, what and how things happen. For me, science means trying to understand these “hows” and “whys” of everything around us and about us.
So why did you study international business?
I was interested in how the world is connected. I went to study economics because at the time I was planning to go into business. However, I soon got involved with the media and quickly realised that I enjoyed constantly learning, discovering and acquiring new information. That’s why I added media studies as my academic minor, so that I could show the representatives of the media where I wanted to work that I was interested in the field. I ended up getting into television thanks to a field trip to the Hyde Park ČT24 programme.
You became a presenter and then the face of the Hyde Park Civilizace programme, which focuses on science and contemporary society. This autumn, you will be starting your 15th season.
That’s right, and I’m thrilled about that. Hyde Park Civilizace is actually quite unique in the world! When I tell professors from Oxford, Cambridge or the Weizmann Institute that in Czechia we get 55 minutes of prime time TV devoted purely to science, they don’t believe me. When I add that we have a science editorial team that covers 200 scientific topics a month and that we broadcast around five to six hours of scientific content a week, they say it’s not possible. But it’s true, and many of our respondents envy us.
So how is this even possible?
It is because we are a public service broadcaster and also because we have enlightened leaders who are committed to giving us the freedom to bring science to Czech Television’s broadcasting practically every day (we literally have science on air every day).
Fifteen years is a long time. How has Hyde Park Civilizace changed over that period?
We have gone into greater depth and increased our breadth. We started with a format where viewers sent questions to our guests via social media or web. But gradually, viewers began to appreciate how well prepared I was for the interviews, and we found that they enjoy it when we go into greater detail on a given topic. Viewers usually don’t have the time to do extensive research that would allow them to ask in-depth questions – and we can’t expect them to – so we no longer rely on questions from viewers.
What else is different today?
We started with Czech scientists, of course, but gradually we made our way onto the world stage – we have filmed 45 interviews with Nobel Prize winners, not counting those with the prize for economics. We film in English, and so far we have had our one TV interview with a person not on the Earth. And what we are very proud of is that we now have twelve interviews with Holocaust survivors, which are of enormous value for society.
What does your preparation for an interview look like and how long does it take?
I must emphasise that this is a team effort. Pavlína Sedlářová, the editor who does the basic research for our interviews, plays a key role. She typically goes through 600 to 800 pages of material for each episode, with the most being around 2,000 pages, and produces an executive summary of dozens of pages containing various information, data and statements. I then conduct further research to find out how the person in question responds to questions and which types of questions suit them. In the case of foreign scientists, I also study the terminology and technical terms, including how they pronounce them. However, I don’t prepare specific questions for the programme ahead of time; I only have about five. For me, the structure is more important and I prepare it very carefully so that viewers don’t get lost in the interview. We have a week for all this, and on top of that, we have to work on reports and science editors’ contributions to events and continuous broadcasting.
Your programme is very popular. How can scientists get on it?
My answer to that is that we always invite Nobel Prize winners and Holocaust survivors to appear on the programme. But we are, of course, open to all suggestions. We certainly don’t mind if representatives of universities and scientists themselves get in touch, and I would like to emphasise that even if they don’t get an invitation to Hyde Park Civilizace, their topic may still appear on the programme. Never in history has there been more airtime reserved for science and scientists than right now. We are constantly looking for people who do interesting work, who have been communicating it to the public for a long time, and who may be interesting to the general public. We are looking for people who can comment on various events from the perspective of their field. And when they get on the air, they can reach hundreds of thousands of people, not only in this way, but also on other platforms that our science editorial team has access to.
Given your criteria, the question arises as to whether there are any Nobel Prize candidates in the Czech Republic right now…
Of course there are, and there are quite a few of them. For example, I would mention biochemist Martin Jínek, who participated in the development of the CRISPR method for genome editing, or biologist Jiří Friml, who discovered the role of the auxin hormone in plant growth, and there are certainly many other experts with great potential. But here, too, Czech science must be able to promote itself.
Speaking of guests, if there were no time or space constraints, who would you like to interview?
I’ve already said somewhere that it would be Stephen Hawking, and I still hope to interview David Attenborough. If I went further back in time, the obvious choice would be Albert Einstein. And I would really like to talk to Milada Horáková.
Wouldn’t you like to take a trip to the future?
I would definitely like to travel to the future if I could. But I would come back, because I think we are very lucky to be living in this time and in this part of the world. I hope we appreciate it enough to try to preserve the current state of our society.