Forces Of Nature With Brian Cox. Science lessons on a big budget
Amazing! Do those bees construct their six sided honeycombs? Or does natural pressure turn circles into hexagons? That is the question.
Why does gravity make the Earth round? - Forces of Nature with Brian Cox: Episode 1 - BBC One
Amazing! Do those bees construct their six sided honeycombs? Or does natural pressure turn circles into hexagons? That is the question.
And to answer it, why bother with a parochial little British hive when you can spend a fortune buzzing off to Nepal to film a colony of nests hanging from a Himalayan mountain?
Welcome to Forces Of Nature With Brian Cox, a globetrotting spectacular packed with new and imaginatively expensive ways to prove the bleeding obvious.
How else to establish that human beings are symmetrical than by aiming the cameras at a bunch of giggling grannies sea-diving off the coast of a South Korean island?
Gravity? We’re off to sunny Spain to witness a festival in which the high-climbing locals form improbable people pyramids until they topple back to earth. I guess Isaac Newton’s apple falling from the tree thing was way too cheap.
Why does ice float? Never mind a couple of cubes in a glass. Let’s head to Newfoundland to wonder at the icebergs bobbing around on the freezing ocean.
In fairness, the Prof doesn’t materialise in every glamorous destination. The Floridian manatees and their heat-preserving roundness can struggle by without the star of the show. But in order to waffle on about snowflakes, he travels all the way to the Arctic. Yay.
The first of this lavish four part BBC1 series focussed on how various shapes are formed by a handful of basic forces and mathematical rules. Wow.
Heartthrob boffin Brian’s mantra is that the world is not only beautiful to look at… it’s beautiful to understand. He’s terribly keen on this sort of stuff and it’s customary to say that his enthusiasm is “infectious”. There, I’ve said it.
But at the end of a jet-setting hour of epic journeys, I’m not sure I understood much more than I did at the beginning. But I’d savoured some dazzling sights and I suppose, in telly terms, that was the point. Mission accomplished.
By no means the worst show that ever took two years to make, Cox’s fact-tastic documentary was vaguely passable in a couldn’t care less nerdy kinda way. But it was also a bit like a boring big budget science lesson. Ejucashunal innit.
When the allegedly hard up Beeb keeps moaning about not having enough cash, surely it could save a fair few quid not zooming to the four corners of the planet for the sake of a programme that could have been sign, sealed and delivered in the UK.
Anyway, for all those who were wondering how the Corporation manages to plough through £3.4 billion of our licence fee money year after lucrative year, this may provide the beginnings of an explanation.
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Brian Cox examines how talking...slowly...
Brian Cox examines how talking..... slowly..... can make it sound..... as if he's making science accessible. To the masses.
By Philip Booth
We see lots of shots of Professor Cox looking thoughtful. In exotic locations. On a small scale, he was in a band, playing keyboards. But he also scales up, on a mooch grander scale, to be a Professor of Articulation Physics, at the British Broadcasting Condescension.
Each broadcast has the same core structure - a foundation of plodding narratives that would test the patience of a sloth, a contrasting mixture of massive over simplifications one minute juxtaposed with minute detail the next so that you never really follow any logical narrative and, of course, a regular punctuation of selfies with the aid of a helpful BBC camera crew (known in the business as providing 'Cox succour').
Brian takes you to places that he'd have you believe are incredibly dangerous and inaccessible. But if you examine the budget, you'll see that Cox wasn't insured for any risky location shots and neither were the cameramen. In fact, The BBC Compliance department wouldn't let any star take the slightest risk as they couldn't get insurance. So all the action shots are faked and meaningless.
And the script is too boring to follow. So neither the words or images provide any stimulation at all. And all that energy is dissipated and lost, along with all the license fees that were burned in order to produce it.
That is the wonder of the BBC. It will keep going for thousands of years. Because it has unlimited potential and a bottomless supply of people to pay for it. And that is something Brian Cox can be forever grateful for.