Meet television’s new shining star
The fresh face of BBC science, Tim Gregory tells Peter Stanford how he went from student to spaceman
Everybody’s current favourite TV scientist, the physicist and former pop star, Professor Brian Cox, is instantly recognisable on the airwaves for his poetic commentaries on the cosmos, littered with “amazing” and “beautiful” words of wonder. As I sit talking to the fresh new face of BBC science, cosmochemist Tim Gregory, the echo of Cox is unmissable: the same vocabulary, the same contagious, rhapsodic enthusiasm, even the same Northern vowels…
“Hold on,” Gregory interrupts as I start going through the list, “I’m from the east of the Pennines, and he’s from the west.” Like Cox, he is good-looking, albeit in a slightly geekier way, and his shaggy postlockdown haircut is probably even more mid-nineties Oasis than Cox’s locks. “Sure, there are similarities,” he concedes, serious. “And he definitely played a part in my teenage years in encouraging me when I was at a really rough high school [in Dewsbury] where being into science was not cool.”
In 2017, that encouragement would lead a then 24-year-old Gregory, who was doing a PHD at Bristol, to apply to a call-out for volunteers on a forthcoming BBC Two series,
Astronauts: Do You Have What it Takes? he had seen on Twitter.
He was one of a dozen chosen from thousands of applicants, showing deft skill in on-screen tests from escaping an underwater capsule to surviving a zero-gravity flight; coming second did not earn him the top prize of a seat on the new mission to Mars, but one of the producers saw his potential and advised him to get an agent, which he did. The extra-curricular jobs have been coming in ever since. Twice he
has fronted The Sky at Night, walking in Patrick Moore’s august footsteps, one of the youngest to do so.
During lockdown, he has been presenting the science sections on the BBC’S Bitesize revision series for schoolchildren, and now his first book is coming out – on meteorites.
Whole scientific papers are written on what exactly a meteorite is, he explains, including some by him – his day job is as a research scientist at the British Geological Survey, based in Nottingham – “but for all intents and purposes a meteorite is a rock that falls to Earth from outer space”. In his book he tells their story in the same down-toearth way he uses to engage with a camera and an audience.
“If you think of the Earth’s history as a story book and you leaf through the pages, there’s a limit to how far back in time you can go using the rocks of the Earth, because Earth is still an active planet and its rocks are continually being unmade and remade into new rocks. So, if you want to go back past this limit, you need a rock that comes from space – a meteorite.”
There are 60,000 of these lumps of space rock that have so far been found on Earth. They are, he says, a treasure trove of knowledge. “One of the amazing things we have learnt from meteorites is that they can take you far enough back in time to when all the different threads of the history of the planets converge in the origins of the solar system about 4.6billion years ago. The only way we can understand what was happening in those formative years is by using meteorites.”
Gregory discovered his passion for rocks early, at four or five, turning over stones on the beach during holidays to the Yorkshire coast with his mum, Janet, a secretary in a local NHS hospital, who brought him and his younger sister up single-handed.
“I really, truly believe that we humans have an innate fascination with rocks… There isn’t a child alive who doesn’t like picking up a rock and turning it, seeing what it’s all about.”
It’s a fascination that requires no expertise, either: there are more than 100 meteor showers each year, ranging from light (around half a dozen meteors per hour) to “epic”, where more than 100 fall within the same time frame – which can be seen with the naked eye. Telescopes help little, Gregory explains, as meteors do not occupy a fixed point in the sky: “The only things one needs to enjoy a celestial light show is a clear view of a cloudless sky, patience, and a warm coat,” he writes. They are easiest to spot between midnight and dawn as in this window, “meteoroids slam into the atmosphere head on, and so appear much brighter”.
Gregory’s knowledge started out a little more rudimentary in nature, of course, beginning with his own rock collection stored in his bedroom cabinet. “I laid out my rocks and fossils in it, and labelled them with numbers and wrote things about them all in a notebook,” he remembers.
His working-class background was not one that typically leads to Phds, he points out. He has been using his newfound profile to appeal for more to be done to encourage the “forgotten demographic” of white, working-class boys – second to last, surveys show, in the social backgrounds most likely to access a university education. In the wake of the A-level results fallout, that gap may yet widen still.
Gregory attributes navigating these barriers to his mum, who “really did give me the best start in life. It was simple things like having a kitchen table where we could get out our books at night and do our homework. That was something many of my friends growing up didn’t have.”
And then there were the evenings around the TV watching astronomy series Stargazing. Its regular host since 2011, Dara Ó Briain, has this week criticised the BBC’S decision not to make any more of the shows, while at the same time commissioning podcasts by reality stars discussing conspiracy theories.
“I don’t know enough about it,” says Gregory diplomatically of what he refers to as Ó Briain’s “minor spat”, but adds: “I will say that Stargazing was a special annual event in the Gregory household. My mum and I would look forward to watching it together each year.”
Most beachcombing youngsters eventually put away their rock collections, he jokes, and those who don’t become geologists. But not Gregory: his first degree in geology landed him a 10-week internship at Nasa’s Johnson Space Centre. “The amazing thing about meteorites is that they combine two of the great circles of science – the science of rocks and the science of space – in this really beautiful and insightful way.”
Though most of them fall to Earth from asteroids in outer space, recent research has identified that a small number in collections worldwide have come from Mars and the Moon – destinations he sees as “something to dream about, and maybe even aim towards, but not pin any hopes on”.
He is more focused on repairing the damage done to this planet instead.
“Climate change is a huge challenge, but it is not beyond our wit to solve,” he says confidently. “We went from barely being able to get a rocket off the ground to landing people on the Moon and bringing them back in less than 10 years.” There’s that Cox-like infectious optimism again.
Meteorite: The Stones from Outer Space That Made Our World by Tim Gregory is published by John Murray on Aug 20 priced £16.99
‘We had a table where we could do our homework. Most of my friends didn’t’