by Ben Falk
And the reason why Cox and Cohen’s tome had gazumped the X-Factor group was because it didn’t follow the easy route of simply being a parade of pictures from the programmes. ‘Traditionally these books are quite coffee table, image-heavy books,’ said Cox. ‘The filming of the series took longer than we anticipated, so actually the book got written relatively quickly because I had time to sit down and just really write about the physics. Although it is tied with the television series, it does go quite a lot deeper in many areas. I’m quite pleased about that. So it’s more than just snapshots of my view of the physics of the TV series. I should say also, some parts of it are in the form of a diary of what it was like filming the TV series. There are always some things you do and places you go that have quite an impact on you. And I tend to take a lot of pictures, so many of the photographs in the book are mine.’
The success of Wonders of the Universe sent Cox’s popularity into the stratosphere. ‘There are lots of people who are famous in physics, but famous to a couple of hundred people,’ laughs Professor Patrick Regan, a nuclear scientist at the University of Surrey. ‘He’s a phenomenon, I suppose.’ Other high-profile scientists also praised him. ‘Brian has made more people enthusiastic about science than anyone in a generation,’ said Professor Jim Al-Khalili, a fellow BBC presenter and academic, who invited Cox to talk about his life and career at a University of Surrey debate. ‘Today he is a huge celebrity and rightly deserves all the plaudits he is currently receiving.’
He even received a nod from the Astronomer Royal, Professor Sir Martin Rees. ‘As an astronomer I’m lucky to work in a subject where there is already public interest and where it’s not too difficult to convey the key ideas and new discoveries in a non-technical and accessible way. It’s far harder to make particle physics accessible and interesting. Brian Cox is one of the few scientist who succeed in doing this and I much admire him for it.’
Professor Regan points out how hard it is for an academic to connect with an audience. ‘A lot of scientists are not very good at doing that media stuff,’ he observes. ‘They don’t want to do it. They’re afraid to talk to journalists – they’re afraid they’ll say something wrong. But it may be with his background as a performing musician, having been involved in that performance industry in another part of his life, helped him feel comfortable in the presentational aspect of what he does.’ But with the ubiquity and fame, it was sometimes difficult to remember Cox was first and foremost a driven academic. ‘I met him once in a professional sense,’ recalls Regan. ‘He was on a funding committee. I chatted to him briefly about science. The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), they’re the funding agency in the UK for particle physics, nuclear physics and astronomy. It’s effectively the government pot, which underpins fundamental research in the UK – you put grant applications in to fund your research. Brian Cox was on the PPRP; it’s a project panel and their job was basically to evaluate whether a piece of equipment was worth funding or not, so that’s how I met him. The committee he was on, there were about 15 or 16 people on it. There are no idiots on [the committee]. To be on those funding council committees, which is part of our peer review, I think it’s fair to say you have to be a respected scientist in the field: you’re there to evaluate the quality of other people’s research proposals and in order to do that, you have to be pretty good at research yourself. There are lots of other people who are very good particle physicists, but he’d be in the elite group of people in his age [group] in the UK.’
Even Regan concedes it’s hard to maintain a presence as a television presenter and research scientist, though. ‘I think probably there’s two bits to his life – one is a professional scientist and he’s a professional presenter,’ he says. ‘He is a media and TV phenomenon and I suspect he’s reasonably well-remunerated for that. I think you probably do have to give up some of the science because of the time pressures. I don’t think it makes the presentation any less valid.’
Requests for his time, while previously extensive, now became impossible to manage. ‘In a way that’s Brian’s problem. He is really nice and he wants to do everything,’ said Gia. ‘He gets asked to do talks at schools ten times a week and he doesn’t have the time – but he wants to do them. He’s trying to work out a way of doing that; he’s really keen on outreach and reaching people who aren’t necessarily already interested in science. He wants to reach new people and get them interested in science.’
And she didn’t mind exploiting her husband’s sex appeal either. ‘I’m particularly interested in reaching kids and girls,’ she said. ‘And teenage girls love Brian and it’s so awesome! We went to the Edinburgh Science Festival a few years ago and Brian did a couple of talks there and it was all old men, basically. The last one we went to, he did some talks and it was all, like, 16-year-old girls – that is really cool. Fine, it’s teenage hormones, but they’re getting interested in science and use what works!’
Indeed, Cox’s looks had become the subject of many articles and messageboards. Eleanor Mills in the Sunday Times dubbed him a ‘floppy-haired piece of intellectual crumpet’. On the Digital Spy forums, hundreds of threads opened to discuss and dissect his handsomeness. ‘I have a whopping great crush on the man,’ wrote one. ‘I haven’t had a full-on celebrity crush for a while, so I am focusing all my crush efforts on poor Brian.’ Another called him a ‘Galactic Dreamboat’, while some (male) bloggers thought he looked young for his age. With fame came the slightly peculiar posts, too. ‘As a hetero male, I would,’ said one, while another added: ‘I wonder if he can change a plug and put an IKEA chest of drawers together?’
Someone else wrote: ‘I think it looks like he is smiling when he talks because of the shape of his mouth and the size of his teeth. I don’t think he can help it. It is a bit distracting but I still listen to him.’ Above all though, they marvelled at Cox’s ability to explain science. ‘I absolutely adore the prof!’ explained coolmum123. ‘He is crazy intelligent but explains things so well they actually make sense. I wish he had been my physics teacher, I would definitely have enjoyed it more!!’ Meanwhile, Sparkle added: ‘I think he’s great. It’s very tough to find the right level on a show like this and there will be some people who already have good knowledge of the subjects, who will find flaws, and people for whom it’s still a bit too much. However, he and the production team seem to have found a level that is working for the intelligent, but non-expert general public.’ One woman decided mere comments were not enough, though. On the One Hand Clapping blog, she created a poem-cum-lyrics about him: ‘Oh, Brian Cox, Brian Cox/Let us dance beyond Orion’s rocks/Please hear this, my heartfelt petition/You can be my personal physician/You’re so steamy, so D-Reamy/I wish that we could form a teamy/Oh, Brian Cox, Brian Cox/You’re my favourite science fox/My love for you is spilling over/Please stop, before I turn supernova.’ And those were merely the last three stanzas! It’s hard to know whether it was tongue-in-cheek or totally serious.
Though Cox said he was not presenting on television to be famous, that didn’t stop him from agreeing to appear on a number of well-known TV shows. He sat on the panel of Would I Lie To You?, was interviewed by Jonathan Ross, lent his expertise to QI and even got to sit alongside one of his childhood heroes, Sigourney Weaver, on the sofa of The Graham Norton Show. He joked about his appeal to teenage girls on the CBBC show Dani’s House, appearing in a dream sequence where he talked of building a Dugong Collider (dugongs are large sea mammals) and smashing the animals together to produce a delicious substance known as ‘sea cheese’. He travelled to America and appeared on the satirical politics show The Colbert Report (he first appeared in October 2009 and returned in July 2011), where he got on really well with the presenter, Stephen Colbert, and was impressed by all the pictures of Saturn hanging in his host’s office. He even showed up on television when he wasn’t actually on TV – as an impersonation by Jon Culshaw on BBC’s The Impressions Show.
Personally, he was impressed. ‘You know what I
like about it?’ he said. ‘They usually descend into Liam Gallagher when people do impressions of me and he’s stepped back from that, so it’s a bit more gentle.’ Ricky Gervais, however, was slightly more perturbed by the caricature but only because it spoilt how the comedian saw Cox. ‘That’s terrible now, because I think [Cox] is a genius,’ he declared. ‘But now, when [Culshaw] puts in those little bits of poetry, it’s done now.’
Perhaps the strangest thing for Cox was simply how everyone seemed to want to talk to him and to ask him questions; he even signed a fan’s plaster. Some people would approach him on the street and shout something out about black holes, rather than engage him in a discussion. ‘It’s really nice when fans want to come up and want to have their photo taken with you,’ he said, ‘but it’s not just one or two people anymore. It’s 20, 30, or 40. It makes it virtually impossible for me to go shopping. At the moment, I’m just eating takeaways because I can’t go out to Sainsbury’s.’ He was aware of how abnormal it was. ‘It is unusual, because I am basically an academic,’ he said. ‘And for an academic to present some TV programmes and to get 6 million viewers and people asking for your autograph, it is different. I suppose that this is the first time a scientist or documentary-maker may get his picture in the Sun. It’s just a difference of image, really.’
His old friend Chris Evans suggested jokily they should market a Cox-branded range of telescopes. Around this time, his musical background came back into focus. A tabloid story came out stating he had turned down the chance to appear on an album sleeve for Scottish band Belle & Sebastian, with keyboard player Chris Geddes saying: ‘This band’s going to break up over Brian Cox.’ Cox responded to the fiction on Twitter, writing: ‘I’d have been on their album cover – they never bloody asked!’
It was also announced in March 2011 that he would be returning to the stage as a musician. British Sea Power were to participate in a gig alongside The Flaming Lips at Jodrell Bank Observatory and Cox tweeted he would be on stage with the former band. All 5,000 tickets were snapped up, with a spokesperson revealing: ‘Professor Cox is going to play keyboards with British Sea Power. It’s a great idea and obviously quite fitting that he plays at Jodrell Bank, given the television programmes he’s making at the moment. He will be learning some of the songs from their set but, who knows, there might be some D:Ream stuff as well.’
Unfortunately, Cox had to pull out of the concert, thanks to a timetable clash. It’s no surprise, considering how frenetic his lifestyle had become: voted 11th Most Influential Man in Britain by GQ magazine one minute, being asked if he was interested in an X Factor for scientists the next. The participants of The 38th Annual Saddleworth Beer Walk paid tribute to their local hero by going on a pub crawl wearing Cox face masks and calling themselves The Brian Cox Appreciation Society, donning T-shirts with slogans like ‘Particle Physics gives me a Hadron’ and ‘Prof says I will do science to you’. He was even mistaken for his namesake, the Scottish actor whose credits include Manhunter and the Bourne franchise.
‘I once booked a car to the airport with the same firm used by the actor,’ he told Metro. ‘The driver picked me up at 6am from a different address to the usual one and until I showed my face, he thought the other Brian Cox was having an affair.’ Ironically, before he found television fame, Cox wasn’t even the most well known ‘Professor Cox’ at the University of Manchester. Professor Brian Cox was also an Emeritus professor of English Literature at Manchester and was celebrated in his field as a scholar before he passed away in April 2008. He has since been usurped on Google.
Yet while it may have seemed easy to lap up all this adoration, there is always a downside to fame. And it wasn’t manifested in the inability to buy some oranges from the supermarket either. He told the Daily Mail: ‘The other day, a woman came to the door and said, “You’re on the telly, aren’t you?” I said, “No, I’m not. Goodbye.” And shut the door.’ Perhaps more profound was when Gia Milinovich wrote a much-debated article in the Guardian titled: ‘THE LADY VANISHES: INVISIBLE WIFE SYNDROME’. It caused something of a furore on the comment boards and she wrote a similar piece for Parentdish. There, she described an incident at one of her husband’s public appearances. ‘We attended a screening of one of his programmes to a sold-put audience,’ she wrote. Having seen the show itself, Gia simply attended the Q&A afterwards. ‘Our son luckily fell asleep in my arms just before the screening, so slept peacefully during it. The moment it ended, however, he woke up. As my husband sat down on stage, our son shouted out, so I left the auditorium and spent the next hour sitting with my son in the exit stairwell. And all I could think of was what a perfect analogy it was.’
She received lots of messages from other women who felt the same way – successful, intelligent women who were married to someone who became famous, whereupon they themselves entered a strange kind of existence. ‘It’s the experience of a lot of women,’ said Gia. ‘And I’m interested to hear the experiences of men, if their wives are well-known.’ She was accused by some of whininess and jealousy despite carefully wording her article so that she wasn’t perceived as being something she wasn’t. And she acknowledged that her husband’s success meant they finally had enough money for her to live a more comfortable life, without having to worry about rushing back to work after giving birth to George. More than anything, though, she seemed to find it baffling. ‘I have no problem with [his fame], I don’t care, I’m not jealous and that’s some of [the] things I think people thought from my article,’ she said. ‘It’s more actually in a personal situation, the way that I suddenly find people react to me in a different way because of who my husband is, which I find really bizarre. So it was nothing to do with the work that we’ve done together or anything like that. I’m very, very happy.’
In fact, it was other people and the way they reacted when Cox came into a room that caused the difference. ‘Before he was known by the wider public, we might go to a dinner party where we didn’t really know anyone and people would talk to me like I existed,’ she continued. ‘I was a person and I had people asking me about my interests, and we’d have a conversation about politics or whatever. Now, often I’m just kind of standing there and nobody talks to me and I’m starting to think about what’s the point of actually going out of my house? It’s not an unusual experience. The other thing that has started to happen is people will say “Oh well, you only think that because your husband’s a physicist” whereas before they wouldn’t have known who my husband was. Now suddenly I’m incapable of having my own thoughts because they know who my husband is. That’s a bit rubbish, actually; it’s a bit insulting. I’ve found myself in this kind of role, which isn’t necessarily what I wanted when I was 25 years old. I’m a feminist woman, and independent and all that stuff but sometimes you have to think about the wider picture and what it is that you’re trying to achieve.’
It must have been particularly difficult considering how rarely Gia actually got to see her husband Even though he was able to negotiate a bit more time at home between and during filming the big series, his increasing workload in the UK was almost undoable. She admitted having rarely seen him in the past two years. ‘He’s back for six days, but every single day he’s booked up with something,’ she revealed. ‘It’s not been easy. Of course he wants to see all these amazing places around the world and that shouldn’t be ignored. On the one hand, it’s an amazing experience. On the other hand, it’s really, really hard. Judging by the response that I had and the emails I got from people, it’s not unusual – it’s not an unusual situation for a woman or a man who’s married to someone that suddenly finds fame to experience this really strange existence.’
The attitude of the naysayers annoyed those who knew and respected Gia Milinovich. Fan Sara Webb met her on a number of occasions. ‘She came across as a very funny person; great sense of humour,’ she says. ‘Very open and straightforward, she is not shy in stating her opinions and I thought she came across as smart and articulate.’ Still, she und
erstands the internet can be a dangerous place. ‘I hate to say it, but I think there is a lot of bitchiness about Gia,’ she explains. ‘I’ve seen it and it makes me angry, as she has been a lovely person when I’ve met her. I’ve seen her unnecessarily criticised for her appearance because she is not someone who will deliberately plaster herself in make-up every time she ventures out of her house. People on the internet, who don’t know her, seem to write her off as some bit-part in Brian’s life despite the fact that she has been his rock for many years and is the mother of his child. People can be very spiteful.’
Instead, Webb was impressed by the strength of Milinovich’s character. ‘Definitely her intelligence, her sense of humour and her love for her fella (she never shuts up about him),’ she says. ‘She was saying how proud of him she is, and mentioned him a lot when we were talking – but not in a “show-off” kind of way, if that makes sense. I got the impression that they are very close and secure in their relationship.’
Meanwhile, Cox’s partnership with his friend and colleague Professor Jeff Forshaw hadn’t been left in abeyance. Forshaw had been a series consultant on Wonders of phe Universe and by October 2011, they were ready to unveil their second book together. The Quantum Universe: Everything That Can Happen Does Happen was released at the end of that month. As they saw it, quantum physics was one of the fundamental theories lay people should try to understand, not only because of its contribution to the study of science, but also real world applications like solar panels and the laser, neither of which would have been discovered if not for quantum physics. Their trademark approach to science writing was still intact. In Chapter One, ‘Something Strange Is Afoot’, they wrote: ‘Quantum theory does, admittedly, have something of a reputation for weirdness and there have been reams of drivel penned in its name.’ Though the conversational tone in the latest book was prevalent, so too was the barrage of information and facts. At the beginning of the second chapter, they explained: ‘Ernest Rutherford cited 1896 as the beginning of the quantum revolution because this was the year Henri Becquerel, working in his laboratory in Paris, discovered radioactivity. Becquerel was attempting to use uranium compounds to generate X-rays…’ Their latest book had been harder to collaborate on, thanks to Cox’s hectic international schedule this time around but somehow they had got it done. The publisher described it as a ‘brilliantly ambitious mission to show that everyone can understand the deepest questions of science’, before adding: ‘This is our most up-to-date picture of reality.’ Certainly, Forshaw believes it is for everyone: ‘We tried to write a book which actually takes people through by the hands from the beginning and explains, step by step, what quantum physics is, what it means to say that a particle behaves according to the laws of quantum physics. I firmly believe that if somebody’s interested and wants to know about these things, then they can. It’s accessible. This is definitely not stuff which is the domain of some bloke in an ivory tower.