Like the Dalai Lama on Ecstasy, Brian Cox just can’t stop smiling
Never mind how snowflakes and honeycombs are formed. The great mystery in Forces Of Nature (BBC1) is how Professor Brian Cox grows younger every year.
Since we last saw him, looking about as old as the graduates he teaches at Manchester University, he has regressed. At 48, he could pass for a teenager, with his thick, floppy hair and gangling limbs.
His moptop hairstyle is often lazily called a Beatles cut, but really it’s more a Blue Peter, reminiscent of the young John Noakes. If Prof Brian were to mutter, ‘Get down, Shep!’ the effect would be uncanny.
His teeth are so white that, when he’s out at night, he dazzles oncoming traffic. And those gnashers are constantly on display, because Prof Brian never stops grinning.
Throughout this episode, the first of four explaining how the essential laws of physics shape the everyday world, he had a blissful, floaty smile.
Prof Brian’s devotion to science has a religious intensity, and the brightness of his smile proves it. He looks like the Dalai Lama on ecstasy.
But it can’t be science that keeps him so young, otherwise Albert einstein would have looked like a Cub Scout all his life. equally, it’s impossible to imagine a man as cerebral as the Prof wastes his time on vanities such as tints and fillers, or that he sleeps in a vat of moisturiser.
The truth may be more sinister. Oscar Wilde’s impossibly youthful debauchee, Dorian Gray, kept a portrait in his attic that aged on his behalf. Perhaps in a cobwebbed recess of Prof Brian’s laboratory, there’s a balding, shrivelled homunculus that records the real ravages of time that are hidden from his face.
If you could ignore this macabre spectre, Forces Of Nature was an absorbing and beautiful programme. It didn’t attempt to explain anything too complex: we learned how ice crystals form and why bees build hexagonal grids in their hives.
But it did it with a slow and druggy cascade of gorgeous high-definition images. Children slithered laughing through the snowdrifts in a Norwegian village and blew soap bubbles that froze in the Arctic air.
Spanish townsfolk in coloured shirts scrambled to form human pyramids that tumbled in slow motion. Nepalese elders swung above dizzying heights on fraying ropes as they collected wild honey.
The pictures kept echoing. Again and again we watched the dreamlike formation of snowflakes. And the Prof kept repeating the explanations, saying the same thing in a succession of ways, as he waved his hands and drew equations in the air, and smiled, and smiled.
There was also a dreamlike quality to Brief Encounters (ITv), the Ann Summers lingerie drama. It wasn’t an erotic dream — this tale of X-rated Tupperware parties in eighties Sheffield was about as sexy as a nylon nightie from C&A.
But the impeccably vintage props and decor gave the story a hallucinatory vividness, as forgotten shopfronts, billboards, pub lounges and fitted kitchens were lovingly recreated. even the telly in the corner of the sitting room was a rental, as they always were.
In a lovely touch, lonely butcher’s wife Pauline (Penelope Wilton) tore out a page from her women’s magazine, with a tea cosy pattern in the shape of a macramé owl. It could only be 1982 . . .
The realism was largely wasted by the storyline, a predictable tale of women’s lib in the suburbs. Pauline’s cleaner Steph (Sophie rundle) talked her into hosting a ladies’ night with sex toys for sale. At first, Pauline wasn’t sure — ‘I am open-minded. Just not that openminded’ — but soon came round.
Her neighbour, who was posh, declared herself shocked and outraged. Her hairdresser, who was dead common, thought it a right laugh. Her husband, who was speechless, quickly discovered it was a bit of a turn-on.
Meanwhile, Steph’s useless, jobless husband was asserting his masculinity by having it away with his best mate’s wife.
The whole business, with its ensemble of mostly female characters and its air of a saucy Women’s Institute, echoed the wartime series Home Fires. except that buzzing sound was not doodlebugs, but vibrators.