Dara plays the waiting game for poignant interview
DARA O’BRIAIN MEETS STEPHEN HAWKING BBC1, 11.35pm
IT wasn’t, Dara O’Briain concedes, his finest hour as a broadcaster.
The first time he met Prof Stephen Hawking for this interview, he asked him an informal question, then crouched down in front of him, waiting for him to write an answer on his speech synthesizer. But, of course, it takes Hawking about a minute to write each word, and roughly 10 minutes for a sentence, via tiny movements of his cheek muscle. O’Briain later recalled, ruefully, his awkward stance in front of the professor, and his attempts to fill the silence with “silly small talk”.
Still, to his credit, O’Briain has included a flavour of that clumsy moment in this excellent interview, “since it is presumably how a lot of people act the first time they meet Stephen Hawking”. The interviews, he added, were probably the most unorthodox he has ever done – the questions all had to be submitted in advance, to give Hawking time to consider his replies. But the professor was “incredibly open and revealing”.
He’s right. Between Hawking’s intellect and his achievements and his illness (the progressive neurodegenerative disease ALS), it can be hard to glimpse the real man.
But tonight he talks freely about lots of things: on what he misses most (not being able to swim), on Eddie Redmayne (who won an Oscar for his portrayal of him in the film, The Theory of Everything), on loneliness, on using black holes for time travel. He muses about love (“Women are a mystery to me. That’s the fun”) and about assisted suicide.
There are funny moments, too, as when Redmayne recalls Hawking’s son, Tim, saying they used to use his wheelchair as a go-kart, and put swear-words into his voice machine and pressing Play.
There are poignant moments, too. Hawking’s daughter Lucy had her heart broken by a little incident in the film, when her father, as played by Redmayne, comes out of a reverie while giving a lecture, walks to where a pen has fallen, and picks it up and returns it to its owner. Lucy has never seen her father walk. “When I watched that,” she says, “I wanted it to go on for ever.”