My Father, the Bomb and Me, BBC Four

But in My Father, the Bomb and Me, Lisa Jardine – eldest daughter of emigré Polish polymath Jacob Bronowski, who created and presented 1973’s aforesaid Ascent of Man – hacked some chips off the old block with an unusually thoughtful film about her relationship with her father, and how she’d had to readjust her ideas about him in the light of discoveries she made early last year. Rummaging around in Bronowski père’s formerly secret cupboard at the family home in California, where her mother had continued to live after his death in 1974, she came across his copious diaries as well as secret documents detailing his work on the Allied strategic bombing campaigns of World War Two.

Jardine, herself a professional historian, had always viewed her father as a brilliant scientist, humanist and broadcaster, confident that “science and human values go hand in hand” and would continue to march together into an ever-brighter future. She was knocked sideways by revelations that his wartime work had consisted of making sophisticated calculations about how the RAF, then later the US Air Force in the Far East, should deliver its bombs to cause the most catastrophic damage to buildings, railways and factories. His first-class degree and doctorate in mathematics from Jesus College, Cambridge had been applied to calculating such factors as blast, scatter, bomb penetration and numbers of casualties.

Jardine didn’t go into detail about exactly how all this advanced mathematical thinking had been translated into practice, though it’s no secret that the RAF adopted the tactic of bombing cities because hitting anything smaller was virtually impossible until very late in the war (especially at night). Perhaps much of Bronowski’s work remained largely theoretical. But his daughter struggled to cope with the notion that this super-boffin who made a groundbreaking TV series about the history of scientific imagination had, as it were, loaned himself out to the dark side.

But had he really? Jardine was also perturbed at how Bronowski’s diaries were curiously lacking in expressions of horror when recording his fact-finding visit to Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the war, but when he made radio broadcasts about America’s atom bomb tests in 1946, they were crammed with vivid and harrowing descriptions of what he’d seen.

Bronowski had a chance to answer his daughter’s yet-unvoiced questions in an interview with Michael Parkinson to promote The Ascent of Man. Parkinson cut to the chase with a question about “moral responsibility”, and whether scientists are “really interested in human beings, or is it just ideas that they’re bothered about?” Bronowski, after a long pause, outlined the moral dilemmas that had been thrown up in wartime: “Many scientists were faced with a very simple and brutal question which is: do I feel about the civilisation in which I work strongly enough to do anything to resist the Nazi threat to make a bomb first? And we all felt yes about that.”

As a Polish Jew whose family was slaughtered in Auschwitz, Bronowski may not have shared his daughter’s qualms about pulverising the cities of the Third Reich from the air, and you did feel she was applying more hindsight than insight to the case. Yet what had upset her remained infuriatingly ill-defined - was it moral disapproval of bombing civilians, the fact that Bronowski didn't show remorse, or that he had had a secret life he never discussed with her? (Lisa Jardine, pictured right)

Perhaps it was simply that his experience of war could never be fully comprehended by a younger generation. It was Bronowski’s visit to Poland’s most hideous concentration camp that delivered one of the most devastating sequences in The Ascent of Man, when he knelt down and scooped up a handful of human ashes from the camp’s drainage pond, into which the Auschwitz crematoria had emptied their remains.

His point was that it wasn’t science that dehumanised people, but arrogance and ignorance. “I owe it to the many members of my family who died here to stand here as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.”

I’m sure Ms Jardine won’t mind me saying that what I took away from this film most of all was the urge to go and watch The Ascent of Man.

• Watch My Father, the Bomb and Me on BBC iPlayer
• Find The Ascent of Man on Amazon