Wonders of the Universe
Sunday, BBC Two
Telly is a ceaseless manufacturer of new concerns. Try as we might not to sweat the small stuff, who is not fretful at the rumours that Martha Kearney is about to quit The World at One for Channel 4 News? And once Kate Humble had laid out the facts the other week on The Spice Trail, can we really go on pretending that the Mexican vanilla pod is not facing extinction? Now along comes Brian Cox on Wonders of the Universe with a whole new worry.
Cox’s smile suggests that the whole of existence is a cosmic joke whose punchline he will not rest from explaining until we find it as hilarious as he does. But his story is far from reassuring. There is, apparently, a giant red star out there called Betelgeuse, pronounced like the Tim Burton movie, and it is growing — by 15 per cent in the past ten years. It could turn supernova “at any moment”, and by “any moment” Cox meant any moment in the next million years “or tomorrow”. This would leave a noticeable hole in the constellation of Orion and place an object as bright as the Moon in our sky. Cox didn’t actually spell out what this would mean for life on Earth or sat-nav, but, as Phoebe Buffay said on Friends when she pulled out three eyelashes, it can’t be good.
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You have to hand it to Cox, though. He gave us a chemistry lesson yesterday and it took me 30 minutes before I remembered that I hated chemistry lessons. Or perhaps you have to hand it to his producer-director Michael Lachmann, who, for a periodic-table-heavy sequence, planted Cox in a deserted jail in Rio de Janeiro and had him spray chemical symbols on its walls, then blew the joint up, supernova-style. But the big marvel was when Cox poured a glass of red wine and greedily pored over a spectrometry graph. As he pointed out, television does not normally do graphs (at least not since the Open University went off air). But it was just so interesting. Distracted, I took out a small wager with myself that the ex-pop star’s star show would end with Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock, with its lyric “We are stardust”. Instead, with deeply unreassuring irony, he went for the Beatles’ Across the Universe, with its line “Nothing’s gonna change my world”.
Waking the Dead
Sunday, BBC One
I feel more confident predicting that the next TV star to turn supernova will not be Eva Birthistle. The poor thing has just joined the doomed cast of the ninth and last series of Waking the Dead as the troubled cop Sarah Cavendish. Burdened with the flashbacks, she needs to be put back together again by Trevor Eve’s Boyd, having fallen from a very high wall. With riotous bad taste, Ed Whitmore’s script last night made light of childhood cancer by joining it to a tale of a couple who dress up like Grant Wood’s American Gothic couple to scare kiddies. My ears pricked up, and eyes flickered open, however, when the uncompulsive OCD sufferer Sarah noted that Boyd was nearing retirement. I urge you, after all, to be of good cheer.