Usually I hate learning and enriching my mind and stuff but Brian Cox's boyish good looks and gentle Northern burr have successfully warmed me to the delights of Newton's Laws of Motion.
Oh, Professor Brian Cox, those boyish good looks, huge brain and constant smiling through graphics of nebulas, make me want to bathe in those beautiful pools of yours you call eyes. You are the Carl Sagan of my generation, except I don’t want to gently stroke Sagan’s floppy hair while Googling Lancashire cottages where we could raise our two children, Nucleon and Plato in…and I imagine that’s probably quite hard to do to Sagan now anyway.
This week my future husband was taking on the subject of Gravity. It opened with him floating about in a Vomit Comet, giggling like a girl in feather knickers while introducing the programme. All the while the sparkle in his eyes as he lolls around in zero gravity conjures up images of a mini-Cox fist-pumping the air as a kid, having finally understood Newton’s laws of motion.
Having not previously been aware of Cox’s undeniable sexual magnetism I’m annoyed that I’ve avoided watching Wonders Of The Universe on the premise that I hate learning and enriching my mind. Avoided it in favour of watching TV that makes my brain piss out of my ear. See, this is how I missed Human Planet first time round and ended up sitting cross legged in front of iPlayer watching the series in its entirety shouting, “THERE ARE SEA UNICORNS? AND SPIDERS AS BIG AS DINNER PLATES?” This is another BBC offering that shows TV can have a place in my life outside of makeover shows and being fuel for my Jeremy Clarkson homicide fantasies.
I would have welcomed something like this at school before I discovered boys, Mayfair Menthols and snarling misanthropy.
While a few online trolls have chimed in that Cox’s gentle style of presenting, pretty visuals and audience friendly metaphors patronise and dumb it down for viewers I’d have to disagree and add that the average viewer probably needs the dumbing down. The BBC has always been the top dog of big graphics factual programmes and I would have welcomed something like this at school before I discovered boys, Mayfair Menthols and snarling misanthropy. Science is one of those subjects I can’t compute without diagrams and someone holding my hand through an explanation rather than a long, rambling dialogue. Only Attenborough has perfected the ramble and after years of sugar and five-second-Internet-clips-of-animals-sneezing induced attention deficit disorder, even that can have me tapping my foot. So, personally, I welcomed the visual impact of it. There are an obscene amount of shots throughout the series of Cox holding various sized rocks or smiling in front of rolling icey/ sandy/ tropical landscapes or building a sandcastle…but so what. I still had no clue what he was talking about after an hour, but the thing is I would watch it again because it was engaging visually, easy to follow and digest and I want to bear his children.
So, you can either lament that Wonders Of The Universe overly simplifies stuff that only chimps who can’t wipe their own arse wouldn’t understand or you can accept that most people aren’t very bright and are going to need a softly spoken Northerner to talk them through the basics of particle physics.
Click here for more stories about TV & Film
Click here to follow Sabotage Times on Twitter
Click here to follow Sabotage Times on Facebook
