Style speaks: to TV science

Style speaks

to TV science presenter Marty Jopson

On style

Style is that which comes over substance. That said, we all know what our own personal aesthetic is, so saying I don’t believe in style is clearly tosh. Style is what happens when you get something right: when I’ve done a live stage show, and the audience is really pumped up and everybody’s excited, I know I’ve done that well – and – stylishly.

On school trips and the shock factor

Like many children from London, I came to the Island on a school trip and ended up at Blackgang Chine; I had the little bottle of coloured sand on my shelf as a kid for years. Subsequently, of course, I’ve filmed on the Island for various programmes – the One Show and others that preceded it – and been involved in a few festivals, from Hullabaloo to the Isle of Wight Literary Festival. I remember the literary festival as being good, fun, and very peculiar in its own beautiful way – I don’t think they knew what hit them. Most expect you to either stand up and do a straight talk with a book, or sit down on a couch and answer some questions. But that’s not what I do. I said I need three tables, a data projector, a mop and bucket, and all the smoke alarms off. Then in the show itself I did all sorts of crazy stuff and they loved it.

On unsung Island heroes

Robert Hooke – born in 1635 in Freshwater – was a fantastic guy, a really important scientist in the 1600s, but he doesn’t get much love. I like him because he’s a complicated character: brilliant, argumentative, wonderfully gregarious and outgoing and also a complete genius. He was a fantastic communicator of science, which is something I’m very passionate about, and published a book called Micrographia which I consider one of the first true popular science books, and the first that allowed ‘ordinary people’ to see the microscopic world, which, at that point, was a hugely new and exciting thing. A lot of what he did was overshadowed by people like Newton, who was the big man of science at the time, a bit like Brian Cox rolled into Robert Winston rolled into Gary Barlow. Hooke probably deserves a bigger part in the history of science, but he doesn’t get it.

On infinite worlds and tiny monsters

A lot of people get very excited by deep space and stuff like that. I’ve never been interested. I can appreciate it, but it doesn’t get me excited, because I can’t touch it. A few years ago, we built a garden pond, and now it’s full of the most amazing critters, like Hyrdra, these tiny tentacled, glowin-the-dark immortal monsters that self-regenerate and contain a deadly neurotoxin. These guys are literally in any pond in the country, hanging underneath the weeds.

On stinging nettles and All the Small Things

One of the most interesting things to look at under a microscope are stinging nettles: the stings themselves are fantastic to look at – a millimetre long needle, razor sharp and full of horrible toxins. Kids love that (wear gloves!) and it’s a great source material. And stone: dinosaur footprints are great, but the Isle of Wight is full of fossiliferous rock, soft sand stones and chalk full of amazing detail right under our noses. And you only need a tiny pebble.

On the invention the world needs right now

In the last few months we’ve seen – in horrible, stark reality – that we need science and technology to enable our societies to flourish. We need people to understand how science works, because they don’t. We need people to understand that science is messy, and the world is complicated, and that when you see a bunch of scientists arguing it doesn’t mean the science is wrong, it means they are moving towards it being more correct.