Question: Who comes up with the ideas on the Christmas Lectures?

Joe Myerscough answered on 12 Jan 2015:

I’m the Series Producer on the lectures so I’m going to say me. All me. I came up with everything. Apart from the bits you didn’t like, which Danielle came up with.

The lectures are a huge team effort. The theme of the lectures tends to come out of discussions between the Royal Institution, the BBC and Windfall Films (the production company who film them) and that’s where the idea of doing a series about hacking and making came from.

We then invite lecturers from across the country to tell us what they would talk about if we asked them to give the lectures. The scale and ambition of Danielle’s ideas made her stand out from the crowd, so most of the initial ideas came from her.

But as you go along things change. There are several people at the RI feeding in ideas, and several people at Windfall coming up with ideas to. Some ideas come from Danielle’s research and colleagues at her university, other ideas come from cool things we’ve seen on YouTube!

But the best ideas come from working as a team. For example, Danielle wanted to be able to reach out and touch somebody at a distance, which led me to ask whether we could combine this with a hologram which led to one of my researchers telling us about the electronic lollypops which meant we could share taste as well.

So the short answer is everyone!