Dons not clowns: Isaiah Berlin challenges Richard Cawston’s edit of the educator

This paper examines controversy concerning the televising of the documentary This Is the BBC (1959) and situates the dispute in a wider cultural context of media criticism of Oxford University in particular, and academic educators more generally, in the period 1956–1960. Technological change, increased television ownership and a growing interest in the irreverent portrayal of educators in popular culture all need to be considered when examining what the philosopher and historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin and the filmmaker Richard Cawston considered to be at stake when they squabbled over the right to use a few seconds of film footage of Berlin. Berlin objected to his voice and moving image being edited to present him not as a don but as a clown. The article also addresses the ongoing silences that become apparent when the montage is broken down frame by frame and the visual rhetoric is translated into written argument.