As an actor I have a natural affinity for anecdotes. They are the lifeblood of a profession that has no formal structure or method and in which large amounts of time are idled away waiting for burly men to move very heavy pieces of lighting equipment. In short, they are a brave attempt to find some handholds on the slippery edifice of make-believe and every actor’s inching progress up the Eiger of series television is made all that more sure-footed for hearing them.
Michael Caine, it is often told, always wears bedroom slippers during takes. You see? Invaluable. Not only have you learnt an important lesson — comfort before everything — and gained an exquisite connection with an otherwise unattainable star, you now have the added bonus of unexpected light moments in the denouement of The Dark Knight whenever he is shot above the knee.
As a scientist, however, anecdotes drive me mad. Adding water does not make medicines more potent, so a feelgood story about how a “12C succussion” or a 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times dilution of milkthistle cured your yoga teacher’s anxiety is really not going to do it for me. Equally, the fact that it was cold for the time of year in Norwich last Christmas is not going to unseat my belief in global warming, and the fact that you won the church raffle when Venus was in Scorpio is not going to get me on board with astrology.
Anecdotalists: these stories do not prove anything. For that, you need statistics. It may be hard to get big laughs with a Poisson distribution but at least you know you stand firm on the bedrock of scientific truth.
Yet I have an anecdote to tell and it is curiously relevant to this month’s magazine. In these pages you will learn that we humans are curiously ill-adapted to handle tropical heat, having evolved our main cooling system — sweat — in the dry heat of the African savannah and then exported it to other latitudes. I’m currently filming a detective series for the BBC that is set in the Caribbean, and we’ve been on location in Guadeloupe, in the Lesser Antilles.
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The production company got a very good deal on the hotel and I think I know why: this is the hot season, and each day the midday temperature climbs by another half a degree, like a stone-faced poker player raising the stakes. Last week it was 38C in the shade. Oh, and I forgot to mention something. Back in London we all thought it would be very funny if my character, in his uncompromisingly British way, insisted on wearing a wool suit.
I think it was when my hands went numb that I realised I might have overdone it a bit. Then my legs went and I turned the colour of limestone and stopped sweating altogether, which was frankly a relief because, as you will have learnt from Frances Ashcroft’s lucid article, sweat cools you only when it can evaporate, and we were all half-soaked from the humidity as it was.
In the space of 20 minutes I had a temperature of 41C and was lying in an ambulance ranting, weeping and raving in a way that I haven’t done since I auditioned for drama school. And the really strange thing was that somewhere, that tiny part of the brain that stays detached, sober and alert no matter how drunk or delirious you get was telling me what a fascinating physiological experience this was, and that when it was over I really should look up heatstroke in a medical textbook.
I recognise that one middle-aged actor having a whitey on the set of a procedural drama at 11 degrees latitude is not, in itself, a reason to re-think our approach to climate change. For that we need a statistically significant number of whodunnits on some sort of global grid system, with standardised wool suits and genetically profiled thespians, just in case I’m a real wendy and am blowing the whole thing massively out of proportion.
But it has given me a whole new respect for hot climates that seems all the more significant given the way the planet is ever so slowly heading. And, as one Guadeloupian most eloquently put it: when it’s cold, you can put on a jacket. When it’s hot, you’ve got a whole new problem.