Come on Nasa nerds! Show me a snap of aliens drinking a pint

Super Telescope: Mission To The Edge Of The Universe ★★☆☆☆ Our Great Yorkshire Life ★★★☆☆

The most rampant egos on the planet all want to be rocket scientists. And it’s not just billionaire bigheads such as Richard Branson, elon Musk or Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.

Nasa is stuffed with people who are thrilled by the idea of firing metal missiles into the sky. They paraded on Super Telescope: Mission To The Edge Of The Universe (BBC2), gasping and smirking with self-important excitement.

They weren’t sending anything to the ‘edge of the universe’, of course. None of them, if challenged, would even be able to say truthfully what that means, or where the edge is, or what lies beyond it.

What they were actually doing was putting a telescope in orbit beyond the moon, to look at the furthest stars. This has been done before — the new kit is just an upgrade. Nasa’s bragging nerds don’t like to admit this, so they have to proclaim that this telescope will be able to show us the beginnings of time.

It won’t, obviously: it will just produce photographs of blobs and speckles, and the rest of us who aren’t interstellar astronomers will have to pretend we understand (or care) when they say this light is 13.7 billion years old.

One especially hyperbolic scientist

claimed the James Webb Telescope (JWT) will be able to study life on other planets, detecting not only water but plant and pollution generated by other lifeforms.

That conjures a picture of satellite pictures showing aliens creating smog clouds with their flying cars and drinking pints of radioactive lager in extra-terrestrial pubs.

It’s blithering nonsense, of course. What’s especially frustrating about these BBC2 space documentaries is that no one ever challenges the wild boasts and self-aggrandising fantasies of these tech maniacs.

There’s no balance. Are they so allergic to criticism that they cannot face simple questions such as: is it really worth £8 billion to take photographs of previously invisible galaxies, if they just look like blurred pixels?

When none of their statements are challenged, we are left listening to an hour of increasingly pompous waffle. Apparently, the JWT is like ‘the hubble telescope on steroids’ and launching it was as complex as the Apollo missions that put man on the moon.

All of this was illustrated with computer graphics of exploding stars and spinning galaxies, which I rather think were borrowed from Prof Brian Cox’s past extravaganzas.

There were a few stop-motion sequences of engineers unfurling immense foil covers — about as interesting as watching the Wimbledon roof creak open. The first pictures beamed back showed, you won’t be surprised to hear, blurred blobs and speckles. That’s £8 billion well spent and no mistake.

If you really want to splash some extravagant cash, though, visit the Turkish baths in harrogate. Telly vet Peter Wright went, with his wife Lin, on Our Great

Yorkshire Life (C5), and was

tickled to learn these magnificent Moorish steam rooms were once strictly for the super-rich.

A ticket to the baths, when they opened in the 1890s, was half a week’s wages for a working man. Peter, who is semi-retired, couldn’t stop chuckling at the thought he was on ‘a hot date’ with his missus. ‘Tell you what,’ he said as he emerged, ‘that was surprisingly exhilarating.’

Still on their date, Peter and Lin visited the gardens at harlow Carr and then tucked in to scones at Bettys Cafe Tea Rooms. If this whole format has been dreamed up to give them a nice day out, there’s nothing wrong with that.