Charlotte Lydia Riley
British people of a certain age have a shared cultural memory of the Open University. A lecturer—usually a man— appears on television dressed in an alarming outfit, standing in front of a chalkboard or behind a demonstration table, talking earnestly to the camera about particle physics, or the Reformation, or the Upper Volta rivers. This programme might have been glimpsed whilst someone was up in the middle of the night feeding a baby, or stumbling in from the pub, or perhaps by a small child looking for entertainment early on a Saturday morning and finding only education.