The realisation that the second episode of ‘Wonders of the Solar System’ was on tonight sent me scurrying to the iPlayer to watch (belatedly - I’m a slow watcher but I will get there) the first. And staggering stuff it is too.
Prof Brian Cox (an opportunity missed, I feel, not to have the show co-presented by his namesake in his role as the original Hannibal Lecter) is clearly a TV natural, and far too young to be a Prof of anything, let alone clever stuff like planets and galaxies. It turns out, from extensive research, that he once played keyboards in D:Ream, which I’m not sure qualifies him for anything much, but during that period he obviously put his copious spare time in between learning keyboard parts to good use.
Anyway, regardless of extra-curricular skills, he communicates his love of his subject with an engaging naturalness that I found utterly...well, engaging and natural. Unsurprisingly for a programme about the sun, we were treated to an eclipse (from the Ganges, where these things are a bit more regular than on the Thames, and the audience significantly more excitable about the whole process). Slightly more surprisingly (to this scientific ignoramus) we also got the Aurora Borealis (from just a tad further North). Both scenes offered copious opportunities for the presenter either to lose it big time like a normal-bloke (“omigod that’s just so amazingly cool!! Wow. Wow!!! The sun...is...disappearing..behind...there it is!!! It’s gone!!! Oh wow. That’s amazing!!”), or to stand unmoved while reeling off science (“Unfortunately we are unable to witness the auroral kilometric radiation except from outer space, because of ionospheric absorption. And there it is. A fine sight”). Prof Brian, eschewing both options, maintained the perfect balance. He was clearly moved by it all, but kept his sangfroid enough to tell us what was going on (Making It All Understandable, or MIAU), even lending his 3-D specs to a slightly bewildered local who clearly hadn’t been to see Avatar yet, and who was wondering why this bloke who looked slightly like Neil Morrissey wanted to lend them to him.
There were facts and figures galore. Not sure if I can remember them all, but bear with me. The core of the sun is really really hot. And the solar wind is hot too, but not when it gets here because there’s a magnet in the way. Oh, and the sun is old, too. Like really old. And it’s going to die some time. But not yet. And when it does it’s going to eat us up and go orange.
I learned a lot.
Loads of magnificent camera work of the sun and the planets (very clever of them to get the cameras out to Saturn at all, if you ask me), and mildly-irritating-but-not-so-much-so-that-you-wanted-to-turn-it-off solar-system-documentary music were the hallmarks of all the programmes of this type that you think you’ve seen but probably haven’t. And, to my delight, some of the usual reference points were used. Voyager I is the size of a double-decker bus, the accepted unit in the world of Explaining Stuff To Unknowledgeable People (ESTUP). Disappointingly, the other ESTUP units were ignored - football pitches, once a staple of this genre, seem to have fallen into abeyance in recent years, and there was a golden opportunity, sadly passed up, to represent the altitude of the observatory-up-a-mountain-in-Chile in terms of Nelson’s Columns.
But of course there were a lot of millions and billions, which is inevitable in a programme whose base unit of distance is 93 million miles (see, I can remember some of it). Bit of a shame he didn’t say gazillion at any stage though.
But imagine my unbridled joy when Prof Brian, explaining how the sun’s gravitational pull extends far beyond the edge of the solar system, got a box of jelly beans out (yes!) and used them to demonstrate (with a zippo representing the sun - yes! yes!!) first where the earth is (green jelly bean - 1cm), then Saturn and Jupiter (pink and yellow jelly beans - some more cms), then Pluto (which he disparagingly referred to as ‘the former planet’ - even more cms). And then the coup de grace - into the car he got (yes!!!) and away he drove.
Even I got the point. Space is really really big. When 1cm = 93m miles, and you have to get into a car to demonstrate anything, that - to me anyway - is perfect MIAU/ESTUP TV.
Thanks Brian. Loved you in Troy.