Wonders of the Universe (TV) (2011)

There was a time in the Nineties when a pop video wasn’t complete without a swooping shot from a helicopter of the band’s lead guitarist playing a solo in an epic landscape, alone on a prairie, high on a clifftop or deep in the desert. It had something to do with scale: the backdrop had to be vast enough to suggest – to at least hint at – the true enormity of the guitarist’s ego.

The opening shot of Wonders of the Universe (Sunday, BBC Two) had a similar feel. There was Brian Cox, the former Nineties pop star, standing atop a snowy mountain promontory overlooking a vast landscape. It couldn’t have been more MTV if he’d had his keyboard up there, blasting out the chords to Things Can Only Get Better.

This shot, too, had something to do with scale, though not of Cox’s ego, but the scale of the universe, in space and in time, and, as soon became clear, that was going to take some describing. Words couldn’t do it. Cox had exhausted the term “vast” quite early on, “countless” was getting a thorough going over and “unimaginable” soon came into play. There was a reason for this. “When I say an unimaginable period of time, I really mean it,” Cox said. “It’s 10,000 trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion years.”

According to Cox, that was the length of time before the inescapable fact that the entire cosmos would die. This fatal trajectory of the “arrow of time” didn’t sound like much of a happy ending – what’s the point? The universe is doomed anyway – but it was clearly a long way off. It was the arrow itself that Cox was attempting to explain, in this first of four episodes, which was about the nature of time.

The explanation for why time always moves forward required Cox to make plain the second law of thermodynamics. The first law, as we all know, stipulates that when a TV scientist tries to slip the phrase “second law of thermodynamics” into a sentence, a large proportion of viewers start wondering what’s happening on MasterChef.

Cox is different. Scientists who can capture the popular imagination come along extremely rarely. Those that are also photogenic enough to look good striding along a deserted beach or gazing at a glacier are even rarer. TV science left the Tomorrow’s World studio behind a long time ago (an unimaginably long time ago). These days, science programmes regularly provide some of the most striking images ever seen on the small screen. And if you’re going to shoot epic pop science videos in locations across the world, good cheekbones are a definite plus.

The most poetic sequence was probably the one in an abandoned diamond mining town in Namibia. Founded in 1908, after a single diamond had been found in the sand, it had long been abandoned and was gradually being reclaimed by the desert. Cox used it to explain why the world doesn’t run in reverse, with the help of a sandcastle that he made with bucket and spade. It was an almost perfect snapshot of the combination of academic science and childlike wonder that Cox provides. (Set to a booming electro-bass soundtrack.)