Cox and Ó Briain moon over science behind space
You can’t move for the moon at the moment, it being half a century since Neil Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind. It was with some inevitability that Brian Cox and Dara Ó Briain would head along to the celebrations. From the Kennedy Space Centre, the Stan and Ollie of space programming presented Stargazing:
Moon Landing Special (BBC Two). When it comes to enthusiasm for the stratosphere, with these two the sky’s the limit. Ó Briain specialises in rocket-propelled cheerleading while wide-eyed Cox thrusts his hands in his pockets as if to assist gravity in keeping him just about grounded.
There was a lot to get excited about in Cape Canaveral, in the shape of supersize hardware and top-of-ther ange simulation gizmos. With fanfares and admiring gushes we were introduced to the Starliner, the Atlas 5 rocket, the Argos – not the retail outlet, but an active response gravity offload system. There was so much roadtesting, in essence this was Top Gear goes to infinity and beyond.
The audience, one tends to suppose, may well have been predominantly male, but the programme laudably hedged against that possibility by laying on interviews with astronaut
Sunita Williams and planetary scientist Dr Elizabeth Turtle, while team regular Dr Hannah Fry flew to Houston to drive a big buggy while pregnant. This was no boys’ own zone.
Technically the title was a misnomer. The feature-length, magazine-format yomp around the past and future of space travel apportioned sections to Mars and Saturn’s moon Titan. But our moon was the star turn, and the big interview was with Charlie Duke, who was the only voice Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin could hear when they landed on the moon and three years later went there himself. He drolly advised that Apollo 11 had less computing power than a mobile phone. Next time we go to the moon, we’ll take 3D printers to fashion everything we need from locally sourced rock.
You finished this primer slack-jawed in awe at the mindboggling ingenuity of man. And yet astronauts are still superstitious enough to urinate on the wheel of the vehicle that ferries them to the launchpad. They didn’t say what female astronauts do. Something’s been niggling away at me about Dark Money (BBC One). The pay cheques in Hollywood can be big, but no child star making their acting debut gets paid enough to buy a north London mansion with a vast gleaming kitchen and an indoor pool. No one, however, seems to have questioned the Mensah family’s sudden access to wealth, and only in this third episode did the sordid truth seep out.
This was the episode the script also began to address the oddity that Manny Mensah (Babou Ceesay) has managed, almost frictionlessly, to have sons simultaneously by two different women. The plot needs Tyrone (Tut Nyuot) to be there in order to give Isaac someone to josh with, then be cruelly rejected by. But everything else about Sam (Jill Halfpenny) suggests a woman who wouldn’t tolerate such an insult to her marriage.
There are other nagging instances of clumsiness. The script arbitrarily arranges for arguments to flare up or be overheard – it’s crucial to the plot that the dodgy ankle of granny Maggie (Ellen Thomas) means she’s always in the way; Tyrone drops a fork and, going downstairs to get another, hears something he shouldn’t.
The episode was strongest on the dreadful tangle we’ve got ourselves into over sex. Whether through repressed trauma or because he’s a bog-standard child of the digital age, Isaac (Max Fincham) turned from abused to abuser when he persuaded a pubescent girl from his acting class to strip on a video call. Meanwhile his sister Jess (Olive Gray) endured a lurid audition for a reality TV show in which she was assaulted with horribly invasive questions.
At its strongest, Levi David Addai’s script is relentlessly focussed on one question: is this really who we are? The screen – at the multiplex, in the corner of the sitting room, or in your pocket – has much to answer for as an enabler of amorality.
A reckoning beckons in the finale with, fingers crossed, a more aggressive interrogation for Cheryl Denon (Rebecca Front), who belatedly resigned as Jotham Starr’s salaried groomer. And I’m eager for a flashback to Manny’s fateful signing of the NDA, when the rot was allowed to set in.
Stargazing: Moon Landing Special ★★★★ Dark Money ★★★