The scientist who can make 60 minutes seem like an eternity

There’S an hour of your life you won’t get back. Nobel prize-winner Sir Paul Nurse promised to reveal a few secrets of immortality in How To Live Longer: The Big Think (BBC4) — but the title, like much of the science he served up, was misleading flummery.

If you’d come for practical information, you were in the wrong place. Not a word of advice about living longer, just a succession of boffins injecting baby brain cells into rats and chopping lumps of DNA out of fruit flies.

These experiments were great successes, enthused the presenter, though when the techniques were tried on people, it seemed the patients generally died.

This show didn’t have much sympathy for the unlucky subjects, either rat or human. It was a hymn of praise to the men with high foreheads and receding hairlines, peering into microscopes as they clicked their ballpoint pens.

Their failures were unimportant: what mattered were the great things they would soon achieve. A third of babies born today, Sir Paul proclaimed, will live to be 100.

Not one speck of evidence was supplied for this grandiose statement, but let’s face it — none of us will be around long enough to find out if he’s right. Our Nobel prizewinner was using the same trick as a fairground palm reader, who tells your fortune and scarpers.

From the filler shots in this show, it’s plain what scientists like Sir Paul really think of the rest of us. They were typical of so many science documentaries: anonymous crowds walking in slow motion on a shopping street, just a mass of bodies and blurred faces.

The camera pulls back and we see the Visionary Scientist, staring above the heads of the crowd, seeing something they cannot. A half-smile plays on his lips. he is not part of the herd — he is a superior being.

Among white-coated technicians singled out for applause was a team from something called the Francis Crick Institute, who were experimenting on human embryos up to a week old.

By a remarkable coincidence, though not one acknowledged by the documentary, the director of the Francis Crick Institute is...go on, have a guess. It’s Nobel prizewinner Sir Paul Nurse.

While the scientists were busy dissecting lab rats and frogs, 22-year-old Sameer, a gay Muslim from Birmingham, was on the look-out for an ‘otter’ on First Dates (C4).

And why not? romantic wildlife documentaries have been all the rage this week, what with Chris Packham’s feature on that good-looking gorilla in Kyoto Zoo who gets proposals of marriage from lovesick Japanese girls.

But Sameer wasn’t pining for Tarka. An otter, he explained, is ‘a toned, slim, young man with lots of body hair’.

Sure enough, when his new boyfriend turned up, he ordered the fish.

how anyone gets served a meal at the First Dates restaurant is a mystery, because the waiters do nothing but linger at the tables, eavesdropping, before gathering in huddles to gossip and flirt.

Manager Fred Sirieix doesn’t notice they are doing nothing, because he’s flitting through the room offering gems of romantic wisdom in his Sacha Distel accent. ‘Tell err yoo like err,’ he growled at one nervous patron, Will.

‘I’ll trust you,’ stammered the young man, ‘because you’re French.’ There’s naivety for you.

On the other table, Sameer didn’t need any extra encouragement. he looked as if he had one thing on his mind. Lock up your otters.