Hazlehurst

The professor of forensic science at the The University of Glasgow has black bobbed hair and, as you would expect, dresses conservatively with a dark-coloured skirt that covers her knees as she sits down. She tells me she jogs three or four miles every day before starting work.

            ‘Precision,’ I say, mimicking one of her well-known telly phrases. ‘Is it three, or four miles?’  

            A prim smile shows that she is indulging me in my little joke. Whether it’s three or four miles, at sixty-years old, with her clear skin and the direct way she looks at people, she cuts an impressive figure and appears at least a decade younger.  But she is a controversial figure, the focus of much media debate – and ridicule.

            I ask her about this.

            ‘Obviously,’ she says, everyone likes to be liked, but they don’t have a right to be liked. Hence the popularity of newspapers and television in particular.  People are so desperate to appear on television and seek approval they will say or do almost anything. I’m just not that foolish.’

            The focus on television is warranted because Ann Hazlehurst has been appearing in our newspapers and on our television warning us about, ironically, the dangers of watching too much television. She talks about neural patterns of reinforcement and brain plasticity. Her work has allowed her document what she sees as a trend. The average brain size is shrinking – when in fact with the complexity of the modern world it should be expanding. She links this directly with adult’s addiction to  shows such as Coronation Street and the The Generation Game, with viewing figures regularly over ten million and sometimes hitting twenty million, but she suggests the critical period is childhood with children plonked in front of the telly watching Watch With Mother, instead of interacting with their mother and peers.  

            ‘Do you watch much television?’ she asks me.

            ‘No,’ I said. ‘I prefer the company of Charles Dickens.’ An answer that seems to pacify her somewhat.

            ‘Television,’ she says, ‘is a very real threat to our wellbeing. I’ve reviewed the literature and a very small proportion of it can be described as positive. We come from hunter-gatherers, not couch-potatoes. We have the worst of both worlds. People that show an addiction to television are more aggressive and less empathetic than their cohorts.’

            Critics of her Daily Mail column have lampooned her and accused her scaremongering and being alarmist in order to sell her book: How Television Is Making Us Stupid! Stupid!

            Her answer has been to emphasise ‘a sluggish mind in a sluggish body’ and in a way like Mary Whitehouse, she claims to act as a bulwark against the television tide.

            ‘Mary Whitehouse is not radical enough,’ says Hazlehurst.  ‘She regards public nudity as the problem, but she’s looking from the wrong end of the lenses. I’ve studied the classics and English Literature. So I think I can safely say Yahooism is contagious. Stone-throwers in Northern Ireland to cinema-goers in Soho all wait for the camera to turn up before they act. Television not only indoctrinates them in how to behave, but when to behave.’

            What, I ask her, about accusations from critics like K J Daker that she is simply adding to the cacophony of media noise?

            ‘Balyhoo,’ she says to such censure. ‘It’s simply sexism. If one is to champion the link between autistic traits and a lack of parenting skills, as I have, then one has, in a sense as a mother an innate understanding of the process. But if I assert the common-sense link between television viewing and behaviour then I’m treated as a simple little woman that would be better shutting up. I’m a scientist trying to impart new ideas. I won’t be censored. I won’t be shut-up.

            I quite believe her. Science in large part isn’t about proving things right, but disproving hypotheses. What if you’re wrong? I ask her.

            ‘What if I’m right?’ she replies, with a tight-lipped smile as the cameraman zooms in to take a final shot of her.