The Wonder of Brian Cox Read online

  It was set up in conjunction with TV company Trans World International (TWI), the production arm of marketing behemoth IMG and based at their studios in Chiswick, where the British-based portion of the unit’s content was generated. ‘It was one of the world’s first broadband-delivered television projects,’ says Amanda Groom, the network’s head of content. ‘It involved a number of different channels and portals, six of them. The idea was you would have the linear programming, which you would have in a video player on your computer screen, whilst simultaneously relevant web pages would be available, additional supportive information would be available at the same time. It was the beginning of the multi-screen experience. I still see things today that people are describing as being absolutely cutting-edge and innovative and I think to myself, actually we were doing that a decade ago. Working there was experimental and a lot of fun.’

  Part of the issue with the channels was that they were delivered via broadband and broadband had yet to be embraced by, and manufactured properly in Europe. ‘We found it very difficult to show what was happening because [the audience] couldn’t see it,’ says Groom. ‘Southeast Asia was much more advanced in terms of broadband and of course one of the powerhouses behind the project was a company called PCCW, based out of Hong Kong. So when I say it was much too early, that was its problem. It was state-of-the-art in Asia, but it was premature for the rest of the world. It worked also on the idea that if you provide the free content, you will begin to form your audience and then they’ll be happy to pay for it. And that’s still somewhat debated today.’

  By the time Groom arrived early in the process to take on her role overseeing all the video and web output, Cox was already ensconced as part of the team. ‘It was pretty much full-time,’ she says of his job. ‘Everyone was full-time because if you weren’t actually on camera, you were back at your desk doing the supporting webpages and doing phone interviews, so it was very much a hands-on producer/presenter role. It wasn’t a “let’s roll out the host and tell him or her what to say”, it was very much that the experts within their fields who were constantly into the work then presented the shows. It was the beginning of the current trend, which is presenters who are experts in their field; this was that idea. You were brilliant or very good in your field and then part of your job was to present the show.’

  She remembers seeing Cox at his desk early every morning, preparing for what he was going to talk about on his show. ‘He would do interviews, discussion, general presenting to camera around all the topics relating to earth and space,’ she explains. ‘Obviously space is very much his area, but we also had programming on everything from great whales of the ocean to the movements of the planets, to mountains and so forth.’ Bellati also brought him in as a pundit for the Tech strand, the portal presented by Gia Milinovich. ‘Brian is just a maelstrom of ideas,’ says Bellati. ‘He didn’t necessarily get involved in the nitty-gritty of the organisational side of it or of writing scripts so much, though I think he did do some writing now and then. He was definitely a powerhouse of ideas. It was a very collaborative process. He’d come in and just suggest things, put his thinking cap on, or come in and say, “I read this, this might be interesting”. So it wasn’t about Brian coming in, reading a script and walking out again; it was very much Brian being involved, being excited and I know it’s in retrospect, but I can tell you at the time it was a real pleasure working with him because there just wasn’t a big ego there. There was just someone who was genuinely excited and genuinely very grateful for the opportunity to be doing what he was doing. He didn’t take himself too seriously.’

  Despite having to talk knowledgeably about subjects such as natural history that weren’t part of his academic background – although one of the topics he was excited about and spent a lot of time investigating was private space travel – Cox seemed on his game. ‘I don’t think he was nervous at all, he was just lovely Brian!’ reveals Groom. ‘When I see him now I just think that’s exactly who he is: relaxed, easy, friendly, nice guy. He was brilliant clearly, and he was always very easy and very nice to work with.’ Once in the studio, Cox either presented solo, or with colleagues like Jane Farnham and Richard Wiese, both professional hosts. ‘It was a very interesting virtual studio,’ recalls Groom. ‘It had extraordinary capabilities to do virtual set-ups. There were some severe limitations about camera moves and lighting, and of course there was no time between programmes because we would actually record four hours as live TV, daily. So there was no time to set up the studio differently or with any great variety, which was frustrating.

  ‘Obviously, in the studio there was always a producer on the shows and of course a studio director, so in terms of the shows there was not so much a guiding hand, but there was back-up. It wasn’t as if he was out on his own. But in terms of the content that went into his discussion, he would have been the brains behind that always. Because he understood more than anybody else! I trusted him and I knew that he knew his stuff. There was never any question of having to breathe down his neck over supervising; there was never an issue of whether he would deliver. He was very professional, that was just Brian. It was like, “Well, if Brian wants to do it, he’ll know what he’s doing”.’ The content was topical, but aware of its potentially global audience – they were not able to react directly to breaking news. Nevertheless, the format ‘let you make mistakes, which every presenter needs.’ And it gave Cox a chance to bed in on camera.

  ‘It was a nursery slope for a number of presenters but having said that, if Brian was nervous, it didn’t show and there was also something comforting that so few people across Europe were watching,’ says Groom. ‘In fact, it had quite a big audience in Asia.’ Chiara Bellati remembers a confident on-camera presence, despite being new to the game. ‘I’d say that what Brian did really well with was Brian wasn’t afraid,’ she says. ‘Sometimes with new presenters when there’s an autocue, they get nervous and you get quite a stilted performance. What Brian showed, and the reason he impressed me so much, is that he didn’t get stilted. Most of all he talked to the public through the camera, he didn’t read to the public. In interview situations for Tech, for example, sometimes we brought him in as an expert; he’d start going off on a tangent. He’d suddenly realise, but instead of getting kerfuffled and losing the plot like so many people do, he laughed it off and laughed at himself and laughed with the public, before taking it back to the point. He had a very natural confidence and ability to go, “This is me, take me as I am,” that really shone through. [The mistakes] didn’t faze him the way they do many young presenters because he had the self-confidence to go, “Hey, this is fun, isn’t it?!” He took it seriously in terms of enthusiasm and knowledge, but he never took himself too seriously.’

  The 15-minute programmes, which went out on as a box on PC screens, changed every 15 minutes, so they were like snippets of shows. ‘Because it was broadband, it was viewable with an early version of what we would now consider on demand,’ explains Groom. ‘There was a fairly complex set-up between satellite and broadband, and there was lots of video that was entirely on demand. You couldn’t say that there were certain hours it was available, though the audience could dip into the linear programming as they saw fit.’

  The core of Cox’s presenting style doesn’t seem to have changed much from those days just off the Hogarth roundabout in London. ‘At the end of the day, Brian had already been a celebrity,’ explains Bellati. ‘He’d already tasted what celebrity was like through D:Ream. And the nice thing about him is he said, “How cool is this? I got to be a pop star, and now I’m on telly and I get to do physics!” And it was just that sense of “I don’t know how this happened to me but it’s so cool I’m really enjoying it, and I’m going to really enjoy this ride and I’m going to make the best of this ride”.’

  Having subsequently worked with a lot of academics, she can pinpoint the difference between them and a television natural like Cox. ‘The thing with Brian is he didn’t bring any attitu
de with his academia,’ she explains. ‘The things that excited him and the things he wanted to share were not from an academic’s point of view. There’s a lot of academics that forget the basics of what make people excited about science – they get lost in the details and the complexities. Brian had a real knack for finding the really basic things, the really simple things that still captured the public’s imagination. The sort of things that still make us go, oh my God! I didn’t realise that, how is that possible? Or getting something we all know and making us realise it is quite incredible. It’s almost a childlike enthusiasm. Not in the sense of naïve, but in the sense of realising what is amazing about the world out there. That’s what I’ve always carried with me about Brian, that he had this ability to see things in the same way a child would see them and appreciate them, while having a very deep understanding of them.’

  Sadly, the enterprise ran out of steam pretty fast. By October 2000 – just four months after the launch – it was announced that it would be cutting back its London service. By January 2002, the UK side of the project had all but ended. ‘It existed about 18 months,’ says Groom. ‘It then trailed on with one of the portals, which was Gamer, about gaming. That continued on for longer.’ Bellati blames over-ambition. ‘It changed, the money started disappearing,’ she says. ‘They tried to do too much, too quickly.’

  Working at the company forged the kind of friendships that last a lifetime, even if it is just the occasional communication, or offer of a job, though. ‘After I left Network of the World, I was still in touch with him and I actually put him forward for a couple of other series when I was at other companies,’ reveals Bellati. ‘There’s not a lot of presenters I’ve pushed the way I pushed Brian. I have a lot of time for him. This was to do with Discovery and National Geographic. It was a company not in the UK and they decided they wanted an American presenter. It was their loss. Nothing ever came of that, much to my disappointment.’

  Bellati hasn’t seen Cox in several years, but recalls a heart-warming experience after a tentpole film she worked on in 2009 reached television screens. ‘I was really impressed because I did a film that came out on BBC2, part of a series for the natural history unit called South Pacific,’ she recalls. ‘I was amazed because literally two days after the film came out, I got an email from Brian saying, “Saw your film, absolutely loved it. It was amazing, love to work with you.” It turned out that he was working on Wonders of the Solar System. He said, “I’ve got a series happening,” and then tried to get me in touch with the exec but they’d already employed the people they needed.’

  Cox waited out the demise of Network of the World, but the end of the company he called ‘this bizarre thing’ around him was secondary to the fact that he met the young woman who would eventually become his wife and mother to his child. When she met him, Cox was still ‘wearing “student” T-shirts, spent hours playing Risk with friends and still had a single bed. He had the most horrible taste in clothes.’ He thought she was pretty when he saw her on screen, but she was disappointed that the channel had hired someone from a pop band. ‘The way she tells it is that she only talked to me because she thought I might help her get a bigger budget for her show,’ he told the Daily Mail. ‘Then she saw that my email address was from CERN. She is a geek herself, so she was like, “Oh wow. Maybe you’re not so mindless after all.”’

  Gia Milinovich wasn’t at all impressed by Cox’s cool music background: ‘When I found out, I didn’t really care,’ she admitted. ‘All that stuff didn’t really matter to me. I know loads of people in bands, it doesn’t really impress me.’ She thought he was a ‘massive nerd’, but added: ‘What mattered to me were the conversations we had, the things we were writing together.’ One of those projects was Apollo’s Children, a proposal for a TV series that has never happened in the incarnation they envisaged, but now intriguingly is the name of Cox’s personal website.

  ‘When I was at Tech, I remember him putting together the first version of Apollo’s Children,’ says Bellati. ‘[It] wasn’t Wonders of the Universe, but there were some elements that I recognised later on seeing Wonders. It made me realise there was a seed of that in Apollo’s Children, which was his and Gia’s original proposal, years and years and years ago. I thought then that it was visionary. I’m talking about a treatment I saw almost 10 years ago but I remember at the time thinking Brian is really capable of thinking big and he’s right, because they’re the stories that really need to be told. For him it was about getting people excited about exploring space. From what I remember, as well as a lot of the Wonders of the Universe-type stuff, there was a lot of what man had done to achieve the things he had done.

  ‘I knew at the time it was a very ambitious project, in the sense I knew it would be difficult to get someone to commit that kind of money, but the BBC did the right thing backing Brian. There’s not that many presenters that I was confident were going to be real stars, as I knew that Brian would be.’

  Cox and Milinovich gradually got to know each other, but it wasn’t until some months later that he plucked up the courage to ask her out. ‘Gia says she thought I was gay when we first met and therefore she could have a non-threatening night out with me,’ he says. Groom admits not realising the couple had fallen for each other. ‘I don’t think I was aware of it,’ she says. ‘There were about 200 people there. I’m sure there were a number of relationships that were starting or finishing, but I wasn’t aware of that sort of side of it. I spent most of my day running from one end of the office to the other. There was a lot of fire-fighting going on, hence I didn’t really notice when their relationship started.’

  Bellati, however, remembers the blossoming love story. ‘It was clear the two of them got on really well,’ she says. ‘They had a lot in common. I remember very clearly Brian saying to me how wonderful Gia was and how completely smitten he was. I remember even the night when they were at the pub and got talking. I remember Brian being completely besotted with Gia – it was really lovely.’

  Cox and Milinovich arranged a date up in Manchester because he had had to go back to work at the university. She travelled up to see him on 11 September 2001. ‘It was while she was on her way that the Twin Towers collapsed,’ he remembered to the Daily Telegraph. They immediately spent the journey on the phone. ‘We were both stunned – we both had a lot of friends in New York. So, on our first date we sat in and watched CNN. It was a very bonding day.’ They soon became inseparable. He revelled in her geekdom. ‘Any woman who collects Star Wars toys is fine by me,’ he said. In turn, she encouraged him to wear more stylish clothes, coached him in his presenting and helped him change his image.

  Both had the same view about science, which is that it needed to become part of the fabric of everyday life. ‘We wanted to make science part of popular culture,’ she explained. ‘That was like our one-sentence manifesto and it’s not about me, it’s not about him, it’s not about our egos: it’s actually about a much bigger picture. And there was a very obvious point when I just thought, okay, I need to think about that and how are we going to do that?’ This shared vision became the basis of the Wonders series and his subsequent outreach work. Though it didn’t set the world on fire (and no footage from the portals appear to exist on the internet today), Network of the World proved invaluable for Cox’s later television triumphs.

  ‘He hasn’t just fallen into this thing,’ said Milinovich in 2011. ‘It’s been a long time of hard work. The path he took to get where he is right now has been long and slow and there have been some deliberate decisions, I suppose, made. But TV on the whole, they don’t just throw someone on TV and give them a big series and send them all over the world – I mean, he’s been doing TV for 10 years. That’s why he’s been lucky as well. We were working at a broadcaster based in London, but broadcast out in Asia, so we had huge amounts of doing live TV programmes and things like that, and no one saw it. You get incredibly valuable experience from something like that and no one sees the mistakes that you’ve
made. He’s done loads and loads and loads of things that really not that many people have seen and he suddenly pops up and it looks like he’s come out of nowhere when actually it’s been 10 years of hard work, running concurrently with all of his research as well.’

  Chiara Bellati thinks Cox was always going to be a success on television and she could tell this, back in 2001. ‘He is very driven and clear about his ideas,’ she says. ‘He was creative, spontaneous. He had a very easy smile and a contagious smile.’ She remembers her favourite Cox moment from Network of the World: ‘I can’t remember what the subject matter was, but it was an interview he did with Gia and Mark Eddo, who were the presenters of Tech. We got Brian in to talk about something. Just with enthusiasm and excitement he started going down a completely different tangent. Started talking about stuff that made you want to go, “Brian, what planet are you on?” Then he looked at Gia and she obviously gave him this look and he just turned around and said, “Aargh! I’ve completely gone down the wrong route!” and just started laughing at himself. It was just such a spontaneous and insightful moment.’

  She compares him to Leonard of Quirm, a character created by the author Terry Pratchett in his Discworld novels. Considered to be based on a mix of Leonardo da Vinci and kooky electricity pioneer Nikola Tesla, he’s a great inventor and engineer, with a touch of mad genius about him. ‘Sometimes Brian reminded me of that,’ laughs Bellati. ‘He’d be talking about something and suddenly something else would occur to him that was really exciting and off he’d go, but with a real self-knowledge of that and an ability to bring himself back. Whatever he had decided to do, he would have been a star in the making.’