I’ve got to be honest; I’m getting a little fed up
constantly being told by seemingly everyone and their granny just how
‘fascinating’ Professor Brian Cox is in his ‘revelatory’ new series ‘The
Wonders Of The Solar System.’ Now don’t get me wrong I’ve got nothing against
the man personally, or even the show he presents in particular. I’ve watched it
a couple of times actually and found it to be informative and enjoyable enough,
probably thanks in no small part to its perfectly engaging, likeable and
awright-to- look-at-if-you-like-that-sort-of-thing-I-suppose host. My problem
is more with the bizarre notion which seems to be doing the rounds that what
this floppy haired pin up is telling us is somehow groundbreaking, earth
shattering news. It’s really not.
Look, the irony of all this is that I’m not even especially
interested in our solar system or the possibilities of space travel or any of
that lark. Truth be told it’s all a bit over my head (*BA-BOOM-BOOM-TISH*
Thanks very much, I’ll be here all blog, don’t forget to tip your waitress) and
anyway as far as I’m concerned, people on earth obsessing about other planets
thousands of light-years away is a bit like staring out the window at a mansion
miles off in the distance while the fire alarm goes off in your flat and
bailiffs slowly remove its contents. However despite this genuine lack of
interest, even I know that Brain Cox is not exactly taking us into new
intergalactic territory here.
The reality is, scientists – good old fashioned, supremely
intelligent, socially awkward, terrible jumper wearing, no significant other
having, untelegenic scientists – have been telling us this stuff for decades.
Literally decades. They’ve spent all that time closeted away in laboratories
and observatories, peering through telescopes for weeks at a time, hunched over
pages of incomprehensible data hour after hour or continuously comparing minute
fragments of anonymous rock. Testing and re-testing, analysing and re-analysing
– all this hard work precisely so they could bring us ‘The Wonders of the Solar
System’ a full generation before the current programme of the same name. Did we
care? Did we buggery. But you put all that painstakingly compiled knowledge in
the former synthpop keyboard playing hands of the BBC’s own scientific
D:reamboat and within a few weeks everybody in the country is Stephen bloody
Hawking. You can’t tell me that doesn’t put the scientific community’s
collective noble gas at a peep just a wee bit.
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| All the girlies say he's pretty fly for alumni. |
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How do I know this then, if I’m so completely uninterested
by the whole subject you may ask? No really, you may, go on...Well, it’s true,
I couldn’t give a monkey’s, but for a while there a good few years ago now,
another thing I couldn’t do was sleep. At all. So it was during a period of
temporary insomnia that I stumbled upon ‘The Sky at Night’ a programme shown in
the wee small hours of the morning and presented by respected amateur
astronomer Sir Patrick Moore. Here, I thought, was viewing so delightfully dull
that it might just be a potential cure for my condition. Unfortunately it
wasn’t and I ended up accidentally learning something. Exactly the same
something which I heard Prof. Cox explain to me again just a few weeks ago.
They’re basically the same show. Why then has Sir Moore – a knight of the realm
no less – spent all those years in the deepest darkest corners of the TV
schedules, preaching to both his loyal audience, while Prof. Cox – a nineties
dance act’s ex-keyboardist no less – lands straight in a prime time slot and
grabs everyone’s attention. It can’t ALL be about image, surely? We can’t have
reached a point in our existence where we’re so driven by celebrity culture
that we’ll only pay attention to someone if they used to be in a band and are
easy on the eye?
But what else can it be? Like I say ‘The Sky at Night’ and
‘The Wonders of the Solar System’ present pretty much the same information,
just in different ways. “The Sky at Night” never had fancy computer graphics or
aerial helicopter shots; all it had was the sky (you guessed it) at night. Come
to think of it, the slightest wisp of a cloud appearing over the stars and they
didn’t even have that. Far as I could tell Sir Pat’s budget barely stretched to
a chair for him and his guest (who although usually an immense intellect and
highly respected professional in their field, more often than not had chat
which made the Radio 4 shipping forecast sound like James Brown at his
performing peak.) If somebody so much as pulled out a graph you knew it was
gonna be a racy one.
There was none of this idea you get in ‘The Wonders of the
Solar System’ of filming locations which are apparently ‘the closest thing on
earth to the surface of other planets.’ Aye, pull the other one Cox. “Venus has
a surface temperature of 467 degrees. Much, much hotter than this Hawaiian
beach I’m on at the moment, there’s simply no way these bikini clad lovelies
could exist long enough to serve me drinks or rub my shoulders on Venus.”
“Neptune has a temperature of -225 degrees that’s considerably colder than this
five star alpine ski resort. There’s no chance I could survive long enough to
ski down the slopes of Neptune like this...” “Many of the planets in our solar
system have a volatile liquid surface, this Jacuzzi I’m in is as close as we
can ever hope to get to that on earth.” Sure it is Brain, sure it is.
Having said that...I mean fair play to him; there’s no
denying Brian Cox is making this astrophysics guff much more palatable for us.
He’s the celebrity cheese on the slightly stale dry bread that is science. Who
knows, that might be the way forward – a recent study supposedly showed that
Britain’s education system had slipped from 4th worldwide to 14th when it came
to science – so perhaps it’s the responsibility of more boffins to embrace
popular culture, get us all interested, for the good of the nation. There can
be little doubt more people would be aware that Stephen Hawking was the first man
to combine general relativity with quantum theory to predict that black holes
should emit radiation and evaporate, if he’d had a roll-on part in ‘Hollyoaks’
say. Likewise more people could identify Antony Hewish as the man who led the
research group which discovered the first pulsar, if he’d dated Courtney Love
for a couple of months. Conceivably we might all know that Bart Van Bok
suggested that small dark globules of interstellar gas and dusk are collapsing
to form new stars if he’d been a member of G-Unit (admittedly this man is in
fact dead, but what the hell, never did Tupac or Biggie’s career any harm) And
maybe, just maybe, more people would tune in to dear old Sir Patrick Moore if
his body was covered in tattoos a la David Beckham. The fact that I had to
Google ‘astrophysicists’ to find these first three men and their achievements
should only go further to proving this point.
Na. You know what? Na. Forget that last bit. Screw the good
of the nation. I don’t want my scientists in the public eye, on chat shows,
mixing with celebrities; I want them indoors, researching things and
discovering stuff. Complicated stuff, stuff that I couldn’t even begin to
comprehend, because that’s what that’s what they do, it’s what they’re good at
and it’s why I love them. Never mind image or fashion, proper scientists should
be too busy to go for a decent haircut, let alone to Lady Gaga’s after show
party or whatever. A good man or woman of science should never be found in a
copy of ‘Heat’ (unless it’s some massive textbook on the intricacies of
thermodynamics – whatever that is.) Equally when it comes to learning about the
solar system, personally I’d prefer to hear it from someone who can’t
demonstrate exactly how bright the sun is simply by flashing their Hollywood
smile. Sure Patrick Moore’s getting on a bit, he isn’t ‘cool’ and he doesn’t
have the friendly easy-going presenting style of his predecessor, but you know
what, A lifetime of presenting ‘The Sky at Night’ will do that to you. Let’s
see how chirpy and enthusiastic Brian is after staying up to look at stars all
night every night for fifty three years. Bottom line, if I want to know how to
give my hair that just washed sheen all day long; I’ll ask Professor Brian Cox.
If I want to know the average lifecycle of one of Jupiter’s moons (or where to
find the Blue Switch Palace in Super Mario Bros) I’ll ask Sir Patrick Moore.
So my business proposal to open a nail bar exclusively for men, which employs only ex-convicts, called 'Hard As Nailz' has thus far been met with mixed reviews. I genuinely don’t see why, makes sense to me. Prisoners after all have a long historical tradition of being handy with files, only this time instead wasting their energy on futile escape attempts behind iron bars, they’ll be cleansing, shaping and buffing behind nail bars, all the while learning a trade for a guaranteed job on the outside and (hopefully) being rehabilitated. Also by employing some of the larger, scarier, tattooier* (hopefully) reformed criminals, it would eliminate the stigma which for too long has gone hand in soft hand with the taboo world of male grooming. The idea that it is somehow solely the persuit of the spineless, effeminate, sorry excuse for a man would be long gone. Trust me, no male would dare step through the door of ‘Hard As Nailz’ unless he has limitless courage in his heart and at least £14.00 in his pocket (that’s actually very reasonable, I checked.) Yup, it'll be a pretty nail biting experience alright, which when you think about it, actually works out pretty well. You and your member of staff could also have a game of that favourite penitentiary pastime (no not that one) Five Finger Fillet while your hands on he counter just to really man it up bit. 
