SCIENCE ICON
Nearly forty years ago Tomorrow’s World unleashed a cordless experimental cutting-edge gadget called the mobile phone. Little did Maggie Philbin realise how the invention would come to dominate our lives – although she admits the technology revealed on the BBC science show was a tad more basic back then.
“Even when we had the first mobile phone, the first truly hand-held mobile, we could only talk on it for 30 minutes, and it cost about £3,000,” she recalls.
“No video, pics, GPS. I didn’t imagine not only that one day I would have one, but that everyone would have one!”
Maggie, 63, fronted the BBC show for seven years from 1983 before it was axed in 2003 after a 40-year run.
She says the job of unveiling to the nation how our future lives would look was a “huge privilege”.
“They say when astronauts come back from space they spend the rest of their lives looking longingly at the moon,” she says. “Working on Tomorrow’s World is a bit like that.
“Everyone who worked on the programme feels the same way.
“You just want to be back there having opportunities to hold ground-breaking technology, meet the people who have studied for years to make it possible.”
That explains why she is thrilled to return to our screens today in a live one-off special of the programme on BBC Four.
Maggie is back with former co-presenter Howard Stableford for the 90-minute extravaganza.
Instead of introducing us to gizmos like fax machines and sat-navs, she’ll be testing out a new generation of science advances such as driverless cars.
And she is raring to get back in the “driving seat”...
Impeccably polite and cheery to a fault, she’s still the Maggie fans will remember from a TV and radio career that spans five decades. Although she turns serious when she sets the record straight on a myth about Tomorrow’s World involving CDs and jam.
“I want to vindicate us – it was not us who said you could spread jam on a CD,” she explains.
Maggie refers to the allegation the show once boasted compact discs were so invincible you could treat them like toast.
HMAGGIE PHILBIN ON MYTH OF HER SHOW
er love of science began at a young age but wasn’t nurtured at her Leicester convent school, simply because she was a girl. “I wanted to be a vet for a long time, but chemistry was my undoing,” she recalls. “No one had mentioned the words engineering or technology to me, so I did a hand-brake turn and did arts subjects. But I never lost that interest.”
She studied English and Drama at Manchester University. Then in 1978 she applied for a presenting job on iconic kids’ TV show Multi-Coloured Swap Shop alongside Keith Chegwin, John Craven and Noel Edmonds.
She and Cheggers married in 1982.
They had a daughter, Rose, but divorced in 1993. Keith spoke of his alcoholism during their relationship but they stayed friends. She never remarried. When Keith died of lung disease, almost a year ago, Maggie released a poignant public statement.
She says Rose, 30, was able to spend six weeks with her dad before he died. The pair will remember him on the anniversary “in our own quiet way”.
“Even now it’s still very hard to take in,” she says. “It is just very, very hard to believe, he was an incredible character and a very generous person.”
Aptly, her daughter, who lives in San Francisco, works in technology. Maggie’s
It certainly was not us who said you could spread jam on a CD