From Harry Hill to Helen Sharman, Ince’s Christmas mashup of comedy, science and music – Nine Lessons and Carols for Socially Distanced People – reached dizzy heights
It’s Sunday morning, and Robin Ince is feeling dizzy after twentysomething hours of his 24-hour Christmas comedy-science extravaganza. Maybe it’s the tiredness, he wonders aloud – or maybe it’s that he often feels dizzy when speaking to cosmologists. In that befuddled moment, Ince stumbles upon the justification for Nine Lessons and Carols for Socially Distanced People, this otherwise barmy adventure in round-the-clock science entertainment. Unlike Mark Watson’s marathon comedy shows, say, dizziness is an apt condition in which to engage with Nine Lessons, a day-long DIY The One Show for science geeks, with oddball comedy thrown in whenever the head threatens to stop spinning.
It sometimes feels as if it’s held together by no agent more binding than Ince’s personal taste. What else unites the experience of astronauts Helen Sharman and Samantha Cristoforetti with, say, comic John-Luke Roberts’ (brilliant) Chaucer impersonation? Or the geological research of Professor Christopher Jackson with the new songs performed by a barefoot and housebound Robert Smith of the Cure? Precious little, as far as I can see – but maybe I was just too dizzy to make the connections.