Clouding our judgment
SCHWARZENEGGER and Reagan ditched the screen for the Senate, and in the Forties, British brief Leo Genn won cases by day and played lawyers on the London stage at night. I’m surprised more actors don’t go into politics and the law, since the job involves speaking passionately, persuading people and getting very well paid for it.
But sometimes the finest of thespian voices cannot flog the goods. HORIZON: JUPITER REVEALED (BBC2) revealed an important law of the TV universe. It goes like this: Horizon programmes are really good when they’re about brains, diets and wonder drugs.
When they’re about black holes, quantum particles and frozen planets, they’re as impenetrable as the gas clouds of Jupiter. The latter are not as impenetrable as they once were, thanks to Nasa’s 2011 Juno mission whose findings were discussed at length last night.
From a certain distance Jupiter looks fascinating, all those weird multi-coloured swirls and that great big bad-tempered red dot. It’s small wonder the Romans believed the planet was a god.
It might be closer to God of the Old Testament, a swirling stormy cloud so powerful you’d drop down dead if you saw it. Everything about the planet is extreme, from its size to its magnetic forces to the incredible pressures deep inside.
They made a stab at explaining the first of those attributes, using pebbles, rocks and then quarryloads of rubble to demonstrate the planet’s size compared to others.
The rest of it, being not that TV-friendly due to extreme radiation, temperature and so on, was less easy to demonstrate. Actor Toby Jones did his best to talk it up, calling the swirls a “majestic cloak” and saying everything as if he was doing Hamlet’s soliloquy but the dramatic tone showed up the very undramatic contents.
At one point, after a long buildup in the laser labs of the National Ignition Facility in California, there was a sharp click. Some 160 laser beams had been fired at a microgram of hydrogen.
The results were then shown as a graph on a laptop, demonstrating how hydrogen turns into metal at high pressures. “This metal isn’t solid…” rumbled Toby, before a pause. “It’s a liquid.”
Only a drum roll would have made it seem less ridiculous and we learnt another rule of TV science: if something can only be shown on a graph, it’s not worth showing at all.
In the Sanskrit language, a swami is a master and teacher, someone who has learnt to control body and soul through yoga and entered a monastery to share that learning with others.
The Mr Swami in THE FOREIGN DOCTORS ARE COMING (C4) looked like a bloke who enjoyed life’s pleasures but as a guide for the foreign doctors seeking a GMC licence to practise in the UK, he was true to his name.
Mr Swami’s Manchester-based course wasn’t about anatomy or head trauma, his pupils were all qualified medics in their home countries.
It was about doctoring here, where expectations are high and respect is often low. It made for an odd mix, culture-clash scenarios alternating with what often seemed like lessons in basic human good manners.
You wondered sometimes if Mr Swami wasn’t so much preparing those overseas, and invariably young doctors for Britain, as finishing off the job their mums and dads should have done back home.