As you’ve probably noticed, TV critics spend a lot of their time trying to identify which other programmes the one they’re reviewing most resembles. Sadly, in the case of BBC2’s The Entire Universe, this noble quest proved futile. Written and emceed by Eric Idle, the show did contain plenty of familiar television elements: songs, dance troupes, Warwick Davis making jokes about how small he is, a lecture by Professor Brian Cox on the nature of the cosmos. Yet the way it mixed them together was so unprecedentedly odd that it may well have made the average Boxing Day viewer feel they must be drunker than they thought.
The basic gag was that Cox hadn’t received his email of the script — and so believed he was coming to give the studio audience a serious talk, rather than take part in a comedy musical. On the whole, this meant that he’d supply a spot of cosmological information in his usual wondering tones, before being interrupted by a related song-and-dance number, feigning annoyance and insisting that ‘science isn’t showbiz’.
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