A MATTER OF SOME GRAVITY - MAR 28 - 3.09PM

Jim Al-Khalili, "Gravity and Me", BBC Radio Four

Professor Jim Al-Khalili, who if you listen to 'The Life Scientific" on Radio Four every Tuesday morning you'll know is masterful broadcaster, is also an astonishingly patient man. Certainly more than I am. If I'd had to endure the technical hiccups he's just had to contend with at the start of his talk, I think I might have been tempted to use the kind of language you CANNOT use over the air of our public broadcaster. Which is a shame because he really is one of the best of those scientists able to make even the most inaccessible nuggets of the Cosmos and Quantum-God-Knows-What-Else come alive. In Oxford to talk about his new BBC Four documentary "Gravity and Me: The Force That Shapes Our Lives" which (fortuitously) screens tonight at 9.00pm, it was therefore unfortunate that his audio presentation was the victim of multi-dimensional gremlins. A showman to the core however, he bravely carried on in the face of white noise, static, flickering images of Sir Isaac Newton and a two-minute clip of film that blinked, flashed and disappeared completely over almost 10-minutes to deliver what by anyone's standard could be called a bravura performance. I salute him for refusing to let a few dodgy tablet terminals get in his way of presenting a memorable talk.