The Wonder of Brian Cox

by Ben Falk

  Indeed, 2.4 million people downloaded the Stargazing Live Star Guide, making it the most downloaded BBC resource of all time and so it was perhaps a no-brainer for the Corporation to revisit the idea less than a year later in a bid to emulate 2011’s audience, which peaked at 4 million viewers per night and ended up being seen by more than 10 million people.

  ‘The Brian Cox Effect is massive,’ O’Briain told the Radio Times, just before the show was broadcast on 16 January 2012, again the first of three episodes. ‘People may witter on about Brian’s hair and his dreamy eyes – and he does, of course, have them – but the viewers who are simply swooning over him tend to miss the fact that his programmes are fantastic. Brian has found an audience hungry for something that has substance to it – his programmes have tremendous heft.’

  He went on to explain what he hoped people would get out of the new show. ‘If they discover one thing that nestles in their head, that would be brilliant,’ he said. ‘People assume that a lot the things on TV are faked these days but what made the last series for me was that everything was absolutely genuine. In the opening moments of the show, I said to the astronomer at Jodrell Bank, “What have we got?” and he replied, “We’ve got Jupiter.” There was a beat and as I looked through his telescope, I thought, “Jeez, we really have got Jupiter. That’s amazing!” That was a genuine wow moment. The planet was actually there, clearly visible through the telescope – it was not filmed in a zoo in Holland!’

  Second time around, the show was just as expansive with events up and down the UK, from Scunthorpe (where 20 amateur astronomy enthusiasts collected and pitched their ’scopes in a bid to capture Jupiter and Venus) to a BBC Big Screen in Londonderry, which connected with the Faulkes Telescope project in Hawaii. Even the Mayor of Derry, Alderman Maurice Devenney, said: ‘I am a big fan of the BBC’s Stargazing Live programmes.’ A special musical project was attempted, with young people from three major cities working together at Jodrell Bank Observatory alongside a BBC orchestra to take sounds downloaded from the Lovell Telescope and turn them into songs.

  Cox was joined by the man who had impersonated him – Jon Culshaw – as well as one of his heroes, Eugene Cernan, the last man to walk on the surface of the moon. The manner in which Cox conducted that interview (‘in awe’ might be the best way to describe it) demonstrated just how pivotal space travel, and particularly the moon landings, had been to his own development. ‘I could have talked to Captain Cernan forever,’ he said. ‘I’ve got his phone number now, I’m going to ring him back.’

  Meanwhile, two regular guys found themselves at the centre of a excited media storm after they appeared to discover a new planet. Chris Holmes from Peterborough and Lee Threapleton were two of the many volunteers asked by the show to study reams of data on the Planethunters.org website, a page which looks after data collected from NASA’s Kepler Telescope. After finding a planet that was around the same size as Neptune, Holmes admitted to the BBC: ‘I’ve never had a telescope. I’ve had a passing interest in where things are in the sky, but never had any more knowledge about it than that. Being involved in a project like this and actually being the one to find something is a very exciting position.’

  The planet was dubbed ‘Threapleton-Holmes B’ by Cox, who went on to say, ‘I think it is genuinely exciting. Fun aside, normal people have found a planet, something none of us could do 20 years ago. I think it’s a remarkable thing.’

  Stargazing Live 2012 was another hit. Audiences of all ages found themselves drawn into the interactivity of the programmes, enjoying the chance to put questions directly to Cox in the spin-off show, Stargazing Live: Back to Earth, in which he joined celebrities like Andy Nyman and John Bishop, as well as fellow scientists Tim O’Brien from Jodrell Bank and space medicine expert Kevin Fong. Cox loved working on this since it tapped into the same sense of wonderment that he himself had experienced as a young boy looking up at the stars. He also got to present a different side of himself on screen. As co-host, he wasn’t just a pundit but engaged the guests and addressed the camera, much as he had a decade before during Network of the World.

  Once again, he bantered with his employer, revealing that he had to sign a Health & Safety form in case the team discovered aliens during the live show after he had fired radio waves through Exoplanet Kepler 22-b. ‘The BBC had to look through its editorial guidelines and see what its instructions were if we did discover aliens,’ he joked. Looking back on the experience, he hoped the one thing that people would take away from the show was the inkling to join or set up their own astronomy society. If his sway over television audiences was anything to go by then it wouldn’t have been surprising if 100 didn’t spring up five minutes after the end credits.

  Yet perhaps the most tangible consequence of Cox’s influence through his television programmes and public profile is something the media latched on to with glee. ‘I have heard people call it the Brian Cox Effect,’ says Professor Paddy Regan, a physicist at the University of Surrey. ‘That may be true. When I was a kid, I would have had no idea how to [become a professional scientist]. So, having [him] on TV probably helps open people’s eyes to that.’

  In August 2011, when school leavers around Britain received their A-level results, there were some interesting statistics. Exam board Edexcel saw physics entries rise by 6.1 per cent in 2011, biology entries rose by 7.2 per cent, while maths and further maths increased by 7.4 per cent, as did chemistry 9.2 per cent). Previously, cultural phenomena such as forensic cop show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation have been credited with upswings in interests, but was Cox and his series really the catalyst for this apparent surge? ‘It could be the Brian Cox Effect,’ said Ziggy Liaquat, managing director of Edexcel, while Joe Winters from the Institute of Physics observed, ‘While we don’t have any hard evidence to show that Brian Cox is the main reason for the resurgence in the popularity of physics, anecdotally we’re confident that Brian has been a major driver of increasing interest levels in the subject.’

  Cox’s belief is that peer-reviewed consensus is the one way to determine whether is a theory is correct but there are others who are not so sure. Imran Khan is the director of the Campaign for Science and Engineering in the UK (CaSE). ‘There’s a yes and no answer to this,’ he says. ‘I’ll give you the “no” part first. A lot of the reason [why] people have been talking about the Brian Cox Effect is we have seen an uptake in the number of people studying science, maths and engineering at GCSE, A-levels and university over the past few years. And of course at the same time, we’ve had this fantastic series from Brian Cox. People are sensing an excitement around what he’s communicating and thinking, well, surely that’s got to be part of the reason why we’re seeing this uptake in the number of people studying these subjects?’

  In Khan’s eyes, though, it’s a matter of timing. ‘The thing you’ve got to realise,’ he adds, ‘is we’re seeing an uptake in people taking A-level and degrees in science and maths, and in order to do that, they had to take the right GCSEs and A-levels going back three or four years, so the groundwork which has enabled the uptake we’re seeing now had to have started about four or five years ago. And indeed the people we see who work in the sector, say at the Institute of Physics at the National Science Learning Centres, they’ve been working really hard for the past four or five years to lay that groundwork.’

  That said, the jump – particularly in a niche subject like astronomy, which has climbed 40 per cent in the number of people wanting to take it at university – must have come from somewhere. There was even a story of sales of telescopes at John Lewis increasing by 50 per cent following Wonders of the Solar System. ‘It’s difficult to see how you can get a jump in just one year without there being some kind of particular effect. And I do wonder whether Brian had something to do with that and his programmes,’ says Khan. ‘Generally, the fact that people have been laying this groundwork in terms of making sure schools have the right number of physics teachers and making sure the students know what
these subjects get you, it’s quite likely that having someone who’s seen as charismatic can influence people’s decisions about whether they want to take advantage of these opportunities.’

  While fans of Cox will never admit his ubiquitous presence could be in any way negative, there are some who though fans of his work, suggest attributing a change in young people’s attitudes to science to just one person might be perceived as dangerous. Khan argues it’s because the other institutions and government departments striving for this are not given due credit. Professor John Dainton from the University of Liverpool, who worked with Cox when the latter was an undergraduate and often goes out to drum up support for future science undergraduates in schools, offers another potential pitfall: lack of ability.

  ‘For the last two or three years, it’s been very clear that the only thing 13-, 14-, 15-year-olds know about science is that they like Brian Cox. They always ask you, “Do you know Brian Cox?” and when you say you know Brian Cox, they say, “How do you know Brian Cox?” So I say, “Well, he was a post-graduate student working alongside me.” And they say, “Ooh, aah, fantastic!”’ he explains. ‘All the things that he’s done have made science cool, as they would say. The applications for hard-nosed physical science (which is a bloody difficult career) are going up. People are saying it’s sexy to do it. Whether they survive when they ultimately get to university and take on such a course has yet to be seen, but we can see we’re getting bright people coming through, wanting to do physics degrees and mathematical physics degrees and astronomy because someone at the age of 13 – when they were 13, it was Brian Cox – said to them it’s cool.

  ‘But then sometimes there’s a bit of a reaction because it’s a long, hard grind. It’s like becoming a doctor: you’ve got to work at it and there are no shortcuts and that in a way is sometimes a bit of a shock to people. It’s a damn hard undergraduate degree. Whether they’re aware of that when they come into the subject one doesn’t know, but at least they’re coming into the subject much more than they did.’

  CaSE’s Imran Khan, while not entirely convinced of the so-called ‘Brian Cox Effect’, is happy to propagate it as a theory – with caveats, though. ‘I don’t think it’s detrimental,’ he says. ‘The key thing is the stuff that he does is fantastic and it’s a great way to raise the profile of so many things we’re interested in. In terms of research funding, he talks about why it’s important for the UK to be supporting science and engineering. In terms of people studying it, these are the same aims we have. We’re totally aligned there. The question isn’t doing down to what Brian’s doing because we want more of it, we just need to make sure the media and government realise that as well as that, you need all these other factors in play as well. [But] if it gets young people excited in what science and engineering can offer, then so much the better. It’s a really exciting time to be a young scientist – there is a buzz. Going back hundreds of years, science and engineering have formed a really important part of what the UK stands for and if we’re starting to regain an appreciation of that, so much the better.’

  But he does wish for one particular difference: a female Brian Cox clone. ‘Physics is one of the areas and engineering is another where we still have a big gender imbalance so one of the things people have mentioned to me is [that] it’s great we have Brian Cox, but where is Bri-ONY Cox? We need a female champion of science as well.’

  Still, Cox himself was proud of his contribution, whatever the scale. ‘I’ve heard that admissions into physics are going up at universities,’ he said, ‘so if that’s true and I played a little part in it, then brilliant!’

  CHAPTER 10

  THE FUTURE

  The continued success of every show that Professor Brian Cox puts his name to makes him a rare television beast – a guaranteed hit machine. That’s unlikely to change with Wonders of Life, the third in his epic series about the most important aspects of our cosmos and how they connect to each other. In March 2011, he expressed a desire to eschew the grand mechanisms of the television series to do a televised public lecture – ‘Just me in front of a blackboard about the Theory of Relativity or black holes for an hour.’ He almost achieved this in Night of the Stars, though the BBC insisted on a celebrity audience rather than a group of average science enthusiasts.

  It seems unlikely that he will deviate all that much from his tried-and-tested formula for Wonders of Life, which began filming towards the end of August 2011. Described by the production team as a show that is ‘looking at the physics that underpins life on earth’, he spent three weeks filming in Mexico, arriving during a huge rainstorm. They shot in the Karst Caves in the Yucatán, on the famed Copper Canyon Railway and at a lake outside Creel, home to a microbe whose progenitor was one of the complex life forms that helped to change the world. Cox was up to his old tricks, testing out the polarity of water using a tin can and photographing pond skaters, while the team tweeted about practising other experiments for the programme and returning home with a car boot full of heavy metals and jump leads.

  The second episode precipitated a trip to the Philippines, where they filmed in the mountains of northern Luzon. Cox also visited the island nation of Palau, where he travelled to the legendary jellyfish lake to explore the interaction between jellyfish and the internal symbiotic algae. This required him to visit the Brighton Dive Centre before filming, where he qualified as a scuba diver and once the sequence was in the can, he and his cameraman were able to improvise a scene at one of Palau’s nearby reefs.

  It’s safe to say fans of the show will not be disappointed by its scale, even if Cox joked about how he used to scale mountains in a helicopter as he was pictured riding up a trail on a donkey. As one of the BBC’s star presenters, however, the relaxed attitude from the network in the previous series now meant Cox and his team were left to do as they wanted. And it was just the way he liked it. ‘The BBC gives producers like me an immense amount of artistic freedom,’ he told C21 Media. ‘I see virtually no top-down interference in the programme-making process. There’s guidance, almost always constructive, but basically if I, my director and my exec producer agree on something, we do it; that freedom is very valuable as documentaries authored by professional scientists are the most enlightening and emotionally impactful.

  ‘That’s the great success of the BBC – it has this artistic freedom to push boundaries and take commercial risks because they’re not commercial risks. If I thought these kinds of documentaries were in decline, I’d be concerned. I don’t see any other format that engages people as I was with Cosmos and James Burke’s Connections, where you can develop an idea over six, seven, eight weeks. There are some ideas that you just can’t do in one hour and it would be a tragedy if people stopped making these series. For the BBC, as a public broadcaster it would be a dereliction of duty.’

  Time will tell whether they’ll allow him to include the Lady Gaga song he wanted on the soundtrack, though.

  But was Cox still able to call himself a professional scientist as opposed to a full-time science presenter? Of course his eminent research history speaks for itself, as do the honours bestowed on him by the Royal Society and others. American universities offered him jobs and the opportunity to take his expertise to the United States, but with his family and his focus in the UK, he turned them down. However, his hectic broadcast schedule made it increasingly hard to do the ‘day job’. ‘I’m really lucky because I’ve got this diverse scientific career now,’ he said. ‘I started very much in research, absolutely focused in research, but it’s kind of broadened out into a lot of public talks, making television programmes for the BBC, which has allowed me to travel around the world, meeting lots of interesting people. Also, meeting a lot of politicians and really arguing the case for universities and for science, which I think is so self-evident you shouldn’t have to argue it, but you do.’

  As far back as mid-2010, he found himself unable to answer the phone in his university office – whose walls are covered in pictures of
the LHC – because of all the fans ringing for a quick chat. Similarly, his email inbox – its address easy to locate on the internet – was unmanageable. ‘He’s quite rigorous about not replying to his academic email if it’s not related to academic stuff,’ says former colleague Chiara Bellati. ‘You do need to write to him via his agent. With things developing for him, he’s being very rigorous about not using that email for anything other than his physics.’ Instead, Cox took great joy in coming up with funny out of office messages to annoy his detractors. One read: ‘Professor Cox cannot respond to you because he is currently evolving’. He still interacted with both fans and critics too (and often the latter) because he wasn’t able to contain himself. When a writer called Roy Stemman posted on his Paranormal Review blog that he was disappointed with a Cox tweet about the non-existence of ghosts, calling him a ‘nobber’ for implying all those who believed in ghosts were wrong, Cox was quick to retort, describing the article as ‘a pile of shit’.

  While many students may have applied to Manchester knowing that he was an academic there, logistics meant his presence was minimal, though. ‘You never see Brian Cox around because he’s always off doing stuff,’ says one student. ‘Obviously he has to put his research on hold because of the fact he’s off promoting physics in the media, which is fair enough because it needs to be done. And it works obviously. But you don’t see as much of him doing research or giving lectures.’ Despite his absences, he continued to be a strong public advocate for tertiary education. ‘They’re important because they take kids and move them out of their home town, mix them up with ideas and other people and a bigger world,’ he told The Sunday Times.