The Wonder of Brian Cox

by Ben Falk

  Meanwhile, regular TV viewers will know that once a person appears on one show, inevitably they will show up again elsewhere, partly because producers are looking for a safe pair of hands but also because it is easier to hire someone who has already been on another show rather than look for fresh talent. Still, the brass at ITV was impressed by what they saw on the BBC and asked Cox to come in as a part-time contributor on This Morning to talk about any mainstream science issues that might crop up. He first appeared in March 2006 and went on to feature in another three episodes, alongside celebs such as Ant and Dec, as well as married tennis players Steffi Graf and Andre Agassi. Generally, his performances went down well, but there were some who were not so keen. One of his slots saw him talking about microwave devices and the possible adverse health effects. He discussed mobile phones and microwave ovens and how there was no particular evidence to suggest they caused damage to humans, as well as carrying out a small experiment over a short distance with microwaves. In addition, he talked about gadgets that purport to protect us from harmful microwave radiation, though in his capacity as a scientist, he didn’t really seem to think much of them. In fact, he argued, the only way to truly protect oneself from microwaves would be to live in a metal box.

  ‘Microwave ovens are obviously built to stop microwaves getting out,’ he said. ‘A metal box is the only way I know, as a scientist, of actually stopping that kind of radiation.’ The creator of website www.nomasts.org took exception to the way Cox had presented the evidence, writing: ‘Dr. Cox was unbelievable and grossly lacking in real information – and completely dismissive of any adverse health effects from these microwave emitting devices. On the subject of protection from microwave radiation, Dr. Cox just mentioned gimmicky items sold in shops.’ Building up a head of steam, the piece continued: ‘We challenge Dr. Cox to look into the evidence and studies carried out by Independent (sic) scientists – there is an ever-increasing amount of such studies. (We even sent him the details of some studies to start looking at.) All in all, an extremely poor presentation.’

  Cox replied to the site, though it’s difficult to tell quite how his response should be read, especially given his attitude to those working outside the scientific consensus. ‘Thanks for your mail,’ he wrote. ‘I am relieved to have received this email, because I thought I was overly conciliatory, as a few of my colleagues suggested after watched the program (sic). My fear was that I was not harsh enough. Sitting inside a microwave oven would be an effective shielding technique for EM radiation in 1cm wavelength range, as we demonstrated. Cheers, Brian.’ The media newbie had just received his first bad review.

  Undeterred, Cox subsequently appeared on BBC Breakfast in May. Then, when Granada Television decided to make a daytime lifestyle show, his name was one that came up. Hosted by Fern Britton and filmed in Wiltshire, ITV’s Looking Good, Feeling Great ran for 15 episodes during the summer of 2006. It featured Cox as the resident science guru, alongside life coach Pete Cohen and fitness trainer (and former actress) Julie Dawn Cole, who had also appeared with Cox on This Morning.

  ‘It was about debunking some of the myths about the things you do to make yourself feel better,’ explains Cole. ‘Brian was the science part of it.’ The programme-makers would come up with, for example, an old wives’ tale that supposedly did something for your health and Cox would explain the method behind it in scientific terms. ‘We’d look at fitness holistically,’ says Cole, ‘holistically and scientifically. He’d say the reason you feel better when you eat this is because there’s a chemical in it that does such-and-such. That was how it worked.’ And she appreciated Cox’s input. ‘I don’t think you can separate science from [wellbeing],’ she says. ‘You have to look at the whole picture – that’s really what we were trying to do.’ Cole recalls a neophyte television presenter. ‘He hadn’t really done very much,’ she adds. ‘He was genuinely a really nice guy. It was a very happy show and he explained science in a way that you makes you think, I almost understand this. Only fleetingly! But he’s passionate about his subject and that’s what he brings to it.’

  It was a view to be reiterated four years later when Cox’s Wonders series were broadcast. Did Cole see a future star? ‘I don’t know,’ she concedes. ‘It’s always about being in the right place at the right time but he’s got a gift for making it sound very simple without pretence.’ As each contributor waited to do their segment on-air with Fern Britton, Cole would chat with Cox in the Green Room. ‘He’s a very nice guy, very approachable, very unpretentious,’ she says. ‘And that’s what he brings to science. That’s a great gift. He didn’t need [presenting advice].’

  Though Gia was pleased and excited by her husband’s new direction, she also began to sense the seeds of what would in 2010 lead her to pen an article for the Guardian about what she dubbed ‘Invisible Wife Syndrome’ (being married to a famous person – and being ignored because of it). It was particularly annoying in 2006 because the couple had some interesting programme ideas and both had a solid media presence. Unfortunately, that didn’t seem to matter to one particular television executive. ‘Brian and I went to pitch some ideas to a producer at a well-known production company,’ wrote Milinovich. ‘I’d had a science-technology series broadcast on Channel 4 several months earlier and Brian’s appearances as the science expert on This Morning were going very well. Our agent called us the sci-tech version of Richard [Madeley] and Judy [Finnigan]. From the start, the producer’s attention was on Brian. Every time I spoke, he’d look at me as though I was interrupting their conversation. At one point, I came out with what I thought was an excellent idea. The producer again turned towards me, said nothing, then slowly turned back to Brian. About a minute later, Brian repeated my idea almost word for word and the producer told him it was brilliant. As we left the building, I angrily told Brian how awful the whole experience was for me. Of course, he hadn’t noticed a thing. As far as he was concerned, it was a very successful meeting with a very interesting and interested man.’

  Milinovich argued she felt like Yoko Ono and the Beatles, as if she was breaking something up, even though the whole point of the meeting was to pitch ideas together. It was the beginning of the end for presenting, as far as she was concerned. After a few more meetings, she decided to concentrate less on TV and instead focus on her new media skills, producing and writing for websites, as well as working as a new media advisor and expert. ‘Though I’ve accepted that Brian and I will probably never make any of the programme ideas we wrote when we first started working together,’ she wrote, ‘I’m happier not being the Yoko in our partnership.’

  CHAPTER 7

  GOING TO HOLLYWOOD

  Many of his fans think Cox has movie star looks, so it’s no surprise that Hollywood eventually came calling. It wasn’t, however, as a leading man: director Danny Boyle was looking to follow his 2004 family comedy Millions with something a little meatier. Together with Alex Garland and producer Andrew Macdonald, with whom Boyle had collaborated on The Beach, he began developing an epic science fiction film called Sunshine. The project had started eight months before in Garland’s mind. ‘I’ve always had a desire to explore this idea of a man travelling into deep space and what he discovers there, as well as what he finds in his own subconscious,’ he explains. ‘I had been looking for a storyline to hang this idea on when I read an article projecting the future of mankind from a physics-based perspective. It contained theories on when the sun would die and what would actually happen when it eventually did. What I found interesting about that was that it was easy to speculate about the potential end of mankind, billions of years from now – but what if it was a certainty within our lifetime? I was intrigued by the idea that it could get to a point where the entire planet’s survival might rest on the shoulders of one man and by the question of what that would do to his head. That became the trigger point for the story.’

  Garland worked on a first draft, then met Boyle in a London pub to see whether he would be interested in signin
g on. The auteur was concerned about doing a schlocky blockbuster, but after listening to Garland’s pitch, he realised that despite the need for a large budget (ultimately around $50 million), both were thinking of something more psychological. ‘Travelling to the sun is great concept, visually but also very interesting, psychologically,’ says Boyle. ‘There is the question about what happens to your mind when you meet the creator of all things in the universe, which for some people is a spiritual, religious idea and for other people is a purely scientific idea. We are all made up of particles of exploded star, so what would it be like to get close to the sun, the star from which all the life in our Solar System comes from? I thought it would be a huge mental challenge to try and capture that.’

  Essential for the filmmakers was to ensure the science in the work was as sound as possible. They met with personnel at NASA and chatted about the movie’s concepts with astronauts and others such as Richard Seymour, a futurist designer. ‘He’s a blue skies thinker for people like Ford and Phillips,’ says Boyle. ‘He gave us an image of the future.’ While it was important to create a design for the film that mixed the aesthetically pleasing with the realistic, Boyle and his team needed someone to advise on the specific elements of science within the script. Then in 2005, the director and his producer happened to be watching a BBC Horizon documentary called Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony and immediately realised they had their man. ‘They knew that one of the main characters in the film – Capa the physicist – was a young guy, about 30 years old,’ said Cox on the film’s DVD commentary. ‘They knew he’s got to be the best physicist in the world. So, the best physicist in the world being 30 years old bothered them because their impression of physicists is someone who looks like Einstein, some old guy with crazy hair and bad teeth. They saw me on the documentary and I don’t look old.’

  Macdonald and Boyle contacted Cox to ask if he would be interested in participating. ‘It was one of the strange things that happens to you, where you get an email from Danny Boyle,’ Cox told Radio 4. ‘But actually it wasn’t quite that simple because they sent it first to my PhD supervisor by accident. And through some correspondence they’d said to him, “We think you’d be an excellent role model, there’s going to be a young actor playing the physicist and we think you’re ideal for it because you’re a great role model for young scientists.” At that point he realised they were after me! It was one of those things where we both thought it was a joke at one point, because you don’t expect a director like Danny Boyle to get in touch with you and say “Would you like to work on my film?” It sounds like someone’s trying to wind you up.’

  For Cox, the idea presented a unique challenge because it would mean balancing his credibility as a real scientist with Hollywood’s need for spectacular fiction. He was an unabashed Doctor Who fan and had also grown up passionate about Star Wars. ‘I just grew up in that atmosphere,’ he explained, ‘so by the time Star Wars came along in 1977, I wanted to see it. I went to see that and was obsessed. I’d watched Star Trek all the way. When Alien came out in 1979, I was 11 and I saw it. Brilliant! I’ve always been like that and the only thing I can think of is just my dad being so interested in Apollo moon landings and that somehow filtered through.’

  As a result of his childhood obsessions, he had a specific idea of how sci-fi needed to be treated. ‘I am completely un-pedantic about science fiction,’ he has said on the subject of Who. ‘I think it’s about ideas and I have no issue at all with it. It drives me mad, actually, when people go “Huh! That can’t happen! That dalek just flew!” Science fiction comes from the same source as scientific thought, which is the desire to explore, think and dream about the universe and what’s out there. Obviously, it’s the same and when I was growing up, I couldn’t really tell the difference. It feels like part of the same quest to me.’

  Nevertheless, he didn’t want Sunshine to appear foolish but the idea of flying into uncharted space fascinated him and if he wasn’t going to do so in real life, maybe celluloid would be a reasonable substitute. Luckily, he received a reassurance from Boyle. ‘Danny said to me really early on that he wasn’t making a documentary,’ said Cox at the time. ‘But he wanted to make a film realistic enough that he didn’t want to jar anybody, he didn’t want to break the spell. You do really silly things – characters particularly do really stupid things that people recognise as being totally unscientific. All this techno babble that goes on in Star Trek, like tachyon fields and all that. I think it happens in Event Horizon and people turn off with all that bullshit. So we had to make sure none of that happened, because we might not have recognised if Alex happened to have written a load of crap down somewhere. [Luckily] Alex Garland is a fan of science, as well as a science fiction fan. There were a few edges we ironed out, but basically it was the backstory rather than the plot that my expertise was needed for.’

  The movie also offered Cox a chance to deal with scientific matters that had interested him for some time, as well as grappling with some heady concepts. Namely, if the sun is going to die, why should we do anything about it? Surely it is nature taking its course. ‘We know fairly accurately that the universe is 13.7 billion years old. The sun is four-and-a-half billion,’ he says. ‘When the universe began, there was only hydrogen and helium in the universe, just the two simplest elements. Now I can look at my hand, and it’s red because there’s iron in there, and carbon and oxygen. They came from somewhere, they came from stars. The only place you can make those things is in the centre of a star – that’s what stars do, they stick things together; that’s how they work. So, a star has got to do that and all that stuff is inside the star but when it runs out of fuel, it dies. And eventually it swells up and collapses and explodes. And when it explodes all that stuff gets out and goes out into the universe, re-collapses eventually under the force of gravity, these dust clouds, into new stars. They live, and they burn things, and they die. So, the stuff inside the sun and inside the earth has probably been through that cycle twice, so it’s the third time for that stuff. The reason that stuff is here, and we’re here, is because two generations of stars lived and died so it’s important that they die.’

  In other words, one might argue, what’s happening now is merely the gestation period for the next thing that comes along. ‘It is, without that you wouldn’t have any heavy elements,’ he explains. ‘And by heavy, I mean anything other than hydrogen and helium, which would be a very boring universe. [The villainous character] Pinbacker says this, he says we’re all stars and came from stardust and we’ll all go back to stardust. Why are you worried, basically? He just thinks nature should take its course and he’s right in a way.’

  The film’s plot was pretty simple. It’s 2057 and the sun has started to die. The earth is trapped in solar winter and a mission to re-ignite the sun using a nuclear weapon appears to have failed because the ship has fallen off the radar. A second mission is now underway on a spacecraft known as the Icarus II. Populated by eight of the best astronauts and scientists on the planet, they are nearing their destination when they hear a distress call from the first ship. Though the Icarus I appears to be deserted, the crew soon realises they have unleashed something unpleasant and it’s a race against time to reach the sun and detonate the Manhattan-sized bomb they’ve been carrying in order to save mankind. Pivotal to this effort is physicist Robert Capa, the only person capable of detonating their unique payload, while his colleagues include biologist Corazon and psychologist Searle, among others.

  A slew of famous actors were hired to fill out the cast, including Batman Begins’ Cillian Murphy as Capa, former Bond girl Michelle Yeoh (Corazon) and Troy’s Rose Byrne as pilot Cassie. Though Cox was to work with the whole cast, he would pay specific attention to Murphy, whose character is described as an outsider.

  ‘He’s a scientist who is into a level of physics that is way beyond normal comprehension and that does something to his mind in a way,’ says the actor. ‘He doesn’t have great people skills, though, which
keeps him removed from the rest of the crew.’ Added Cox: ‘One of things I really like about Cillian’s performance is you feel he’s not a career astronaut, which he isn’t. He will have spent most of his time doing what I do. Now he’s been thrust into this position, 16 months out, 60 million miles from home, and the responsibility of saving the human race has been put on his shoulders.’

  Ironically, Boyle’s desire to find a young scientific advisor was somewhat reflected on-screen. ‘For those who think he’s a bit good-looking for a physicist,’ says the director, ‘the uncanny thing is that he looks remarkably like our science advisor Brian Cox, which was not intentional.’ Cox himself enjoyed the comparison, telling one interviewer that if anyone could play him in the movie of his life, it would be Cillian Murphy. ‘Because he did a good job last time!’ he joked. The handsome Irish star is not the only person suggested by Cox – Johnny Depp was another suggestion. ‘But not in any film apart from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,’ he laughs.

  Lookalike or not, it was the characters of Capa and Corazon that really drew Cox in. ‘The reason I was really committed to it when I read the script was the portrayal of scientists in it,’ he says, ‘particularly Capa, but also Michelle’s character. The scientists are real, they don’t say anything stupid and they behave like scientists. It’s wonderful, actually, from Alex [Garland] because he didn’t know me or any other scientists at the time and yet he managed to write these realistic scientists.’ CERN backed the film, meaning that Cox could suspend his activities there to work on the project. ‘The reason they like it is that everyone understands that they weren’t out to make a documentary but millions of people were going to see it,’ he explains. ‘So if a generation of people grow up and you say “physicist” and they say “Cillian Murphy”, you say “biologist” and they say “Michelle Yeoh”, that’s brilliant. [What’s great is] the fact the film had a hero who’s a physicist and really importantly, it’s nature that causes the problem. It’s not some mad scientist or our knowledge which causes the problem, it’s just nature. The universe is violent and inhospitable, it’s threatening and it will get us one way or another.’