Magaluf? No, it’s planet Mercury, and Prof Brian is in his element!

Professor Brian Cox has missed his calling. He would have made a smashing estate agent. Like a smooth-faced salesman on The Planets (BBC2), he led us through some of earth’s most spectacular vistas, from vast forests to the Grand Canyon, before warning us at the end that we might have to consider downsizing in the future.

not to Venus, which he described with a grimace as a hellish desert, a colourless landscape devoid of atmosphere that stretched grey to the horizon — like a soviet housing scheme in a heatwave.

and he couldn’t recommend Mercury either, which was once a lovely place until it got knocked badly off course . . . the solar system’s equivalent of Magaluf.

no, Prof Brian had his eye on a little pad a bit further out, not terribly chic at the moment but guaranteed to be very popular in about 5.5 billion years. Titan, one of the moons of saturn, will be just the ticket when our sun becomes a red giant.

He used computer graphics to create a sort of artist’s impression, with rivers of liquid methane and mountains of ice that will, when the vacuum of space starts to boil, become a handy supply of fresh drinking water.

it all looked so magical that, if a premium rate number had popped

up at the end of the hour, i might have bought a timeshare.

There were no other contributors, no talking heads until the last five minutes when a couple of space engineers talked us through the technical difficulties of landing a probe on a distant planet.

apart from this coda, the whole show belonged to Prof Brian.

That meant it was all astroscience, with no interest in the part played by the planets in culture over the past couple of thousand years — no references to the Greek gods, for instance, nor excursions into sci-fi.

The prof couldn’t care less about how film-makers or novelists have imagined voyages to Mars and Venus, much less their speculations about alien invaders.

The whole documentary, the first in a five- part series featuring Brian’s trademark blend of astronomy and physics, was drenched in dreamy synthesiser music.

it sounded like wind chimes trembling in the breeze from muffled underground explosions.

But even more relaxing was the prof’s gentle voice, like alan Bennett reading The Wind in The Willows after a couple of Valiums.

He’s perfect for the character of Moly — thrilled with everything and always ready for a bit of an adventure, such as sitting on the edge of a quarry or drifting in a canoe on a lake, while describing the wonders of science. once, when explaining how Mercury was bombarded by asteroids in ‘multiple delicate collisions’, he wiggled his fingers and scrunched his eyes like a child trying to convey just how delicious jelly is.

The trouble with describing delicious tastes with words is that too often a fabulous flavour is transformed into a mess of jargon. That’s the big drawback of Beat The Chef (C4), a new cookery game show that pits an enthusiastic amateur against a seasoned professional.

Using the same ingredients and equipment, the rivals are challenged to produce their own take on popular restaurant dishes, such as fried prawns or posh burgers. Their attempts are then judged by food critics.

so far, all we’ve learned is that soundbites aren’t as flavoursome as real bites, and that the panel of experts need to be much more imaginative with their descriptions.

it’s no good telling us who has won, if we can’t understand what’s fantastic about the dish.