Selling an immortal soul. Expensive

In the two weeks since I wrote my previous column, I have worked on three different popular science programs on three channels in three capitals. This is probably a record.

As a result, I found myself working and living in Moscow. This is a necessary measure: there are no longer popular science programs in St. Petersburg, and the Kyiv program does not have money for my move. I don’t like being a freelancer and I’m not good at it: without a gaggle of nervous colleagues discussing the life of the program in my ear, I lack emotional involvement, i.e. pleasure from work.

All three programs are good: they don’t lie to the viewer on purpose and relatively rarely lie unintentionally (this is a necessary and sufficient condition for me not to be ashamed of working there). The difference between them is that in the first of them you could say any words on the air (even “DNA”, even “mitochondrion”), in the second you had to stop yourself on the word DNA, and in the third you couldn’t say a single incomprehensible word. Rating and salary (adjusted for city) are inversely proportional to the number of smart words in the script.

I love and know how to popularize for my own people: tell about science to those who turned on the TV for this very reason. My task for the coming year is to learn how to popularize for those who are not interested in it, to smuggle scientific knowledge under the sauce of fashion and home economics (optional - in another wing of Ostankino - I could smuggle them under the sauce of genetic freaks, but this is less in line with my natural inclinations). Learn to think about the rating second by second (“here we are talking about an orange - won’t the audience who prefers apples switch?”), learn not to stick your head out of the format, learn to reduce any knowledge to a three-second applied “scientists have proven/disproved that apple/orange is healthy/ harmful,” emphasize what is necessary, and mercilessly remove what is unnecessary.

After ten years of such a life, I could make my own popular science program, similar to “Progress” - with thymidine kinase of the herpes virus, endothelial phosphodiesterase, mutant coreceptor CCR5 and other wonderful words that we calmly pronounced on the air (I don’t understand now, how the canal withstood this monstrous phenomenon for three whole years). But it’s unlikely that after I learn how to engage in rating popularization, I will want to open such a program. It is impossible to defeat a dragon without becoming a dragon.

The choice is really very difficult. There are two options. You can tell 10 thousand people (of which one and a half will understand: TV pictures are generally poorly digested) how HIV replicates. Or you can tell two million people (of which one and a half will believe) that HIV actually exists and is not an invention of pharmaceutical companies. The first one is certainly much more interesting. But the second is more important, because people who don’t believe in HIV die from it quite quickly, refusing therapy (Yandex knows many examples).

This is how I calm myself down. TV channels, of course, have a different logic: a smart program costs a million and brings in one and a half through TV advertising. A primitive one costs half a million and brings in ten through advertising.

Just business. Nothing personal.