Sir Patrick Moore: A great and bad man
I was an awkward kid, and some of my best friends were books. Books, as I’ve said before, are incredibly important for children. They tell us about our world and other worlds, worlds past and worlds yet to come. One of my favourite books was an encyclopaedia of space, edited by Patrick Moore. It was big and glossy and stuffed to the gills with facts and pictures. I wanted to know everything, I hid under the duvet with a torch late at night just devouring it. Proud relatives would show me off to friends – “tell Kerry what the farthest planet from the Sun is?” Of course I knew (Neptune, at the time). I knew everything, as long as it was in one of my treasured books. Each new fact was as precious to my ten-year-old self as a nugget of gold, or a slice of arctic roll.
Lots of things have changed since then. Some of the facts I took pride in learning have been overturned - Pluto is no longer a planet, because of pedantic morons trying to convince themselves that a naming scheme for different-sized lumps of rock isn’t entirely arbitrary in the first place. But until now, Patrick Moore and the Sky at Night remained an unchanging constant: The Bohr radius, the Planck length, the Patrick Moore. Now, as E.J. Thribb will doubtless observe, there is no more Moore. It’s hard not to feel a bit sad about that.
For many, Moore was a hero. Fifteen years ago I would have agreed, and certainly Moore has inspired generations of people to lift their thoughts to the stars; but few heroes bear close scrutiny, and Moore bears less scrutiny than most. “Never meet your heroes,” the old saying goes, and I’ve found it to be generally true, albeit more because of my personality quirks than theirs. I first met Professor Brian Cox in a pub in Holborn, and became immediately transfixed by how smooth his face was. “I can’t believe how smooth your face is,” were my first words to him, and I suspect he’s assumed I’m an idiot ever since. A brief introduction to Robin Ince a few years ago consisted of me saying “Hi, I’m Martin, I do a blog” and shuffling awkwardly away again. I’m a lot shitter in person.
These were people I wanted to meet though. I never met Patrick Moore, and I’m glad I didn’t, because my all accounts he was not a very pleasant man. Phil “Bad Astronomer” Plait publicly boycotted Moore’s show in 2007 after he made deeply misogynistic comments in an interview for the Radio Times. He suggested women had ruined television in general, and some of his favourite shows in particular: "I used to watch Doctor Who and Star Trek, but they went PC - making women commanders, that kind of thing. I stopped watching."
It’s interesting how keen people have been to whitewash comments like these at the outbursts of a quirky old eccentric. At the time, the BBC quoted one of their own spokespeople, who “described Sir Patrick as being one of TV's best-loved figures and said his "forthright" views were "what we all love about him".” On Twitter, various people have suggested that he was simply ‘old-fashioned’, and that ultimately we should focus on the excellent work he did for science outreach. There are three problems with this ‘loveable eccentric’ narrative.
The first is that Moore’s bigotry went far beyond a few crass comments about Star Trek. His 2003 autobiography set out some interesting thoughts about homosexuals and AIDS. He infamously referred to immigrants as ‘parasites’, declaring that he would “send them all back to where they came from.” Of Germans he believed that “the only good Kraut is a dead Kraut.” With a political career that included chairmanship of the United Country Party, Moore was out there whichever generation’s standards you choose to judge him by.
(continued)
Such a larger than life figure deserves a second autopsy. This thread is it.
