31/08/2017 The One Show

Hello and welcome to The One Show with Alex Jones.

Tonight's guest is a big reader, a lover of all genres,

Being a stand up comic he's constantly searching

There's another reason for reading(!)

And recently becoming a children's author himself,

he's been intently reading, how to pose for a promotional photo

shoot for his own book without looking slightly ridiculous.

LAUGHTER None of those were real! I did pull

the faces, yes. You have got this book out, Beyond The Sky. How easy

was it for you to get in touch with your in a child? Surprisingly easy,

I am very near to it, it is for children of all ages... No, it is

for children, this is a children's book, it is to tap into the naked

enthusiasm, I know for compact legal reasons lie and I can never appeared

together(!), I would do something that feels a lot like, the times I

get dragged into my kid's school, whenever Stargazing, to do the talk

about what we are doing. Eight to 12-year-old, seven to 14-year-olds,

it is about the day-to-day of space, certain body functions, how they

work... All that good stuff. You want to explore. This is, how do we

explore? Where do we go, how far can we take it? We will talk more about

the book, quick question, what games do you remember playing at a chart,

outdoor, on the street? I remember... Constant versions of

football. Between the two pavements? No, we would throw a ball at the

other pavement, and if it... Kerbie! If you threw it at the other

person... If you catch it, then they could not move. You know that one.

We had those games. Well, Alex Riley went to Radford

in Nottingham to meet the playful residents paving the way

for a return to the good old days. When I was a kid, me and my mates

played in the street, right outside me front door, football, hopscotch,

skipping rope, losing your marbles in the gutters... All enjoyable

memories from the past. And even asking for your ball back from the

neighbour's garden, happy days! But kids are not playing out as much as

they used to, which is why people from all over the UK are actively

involve making their streets more child and play friendly, doing this

through a new grassroots movement. We spoke with the founder. Why did

you set this out? Our children needed the chance to play out like

we did when we watch old and, to have the freedom to run around and

feel part of the neighbourhood. From there, we decided to set it up as an

organisation that could support residents anywhere to do it. Why do

you think kids have stopped playing out? Kids are -- streets are very

dominated by traffic, car drivers develop a sense that the road is

theirs... We have found that you have two legally and quite clearly

closed the roads to cars for people to take it seriously. Is it better

having the road closed? Yeah, yeah! This is better. Normally there is

cars going in and out... Every time we are at a good part, we have to

stand back and then start it again. If you are keen to run such a

session on your street, you cannot just go out and block the road, you

need to speak with someone like this councillor, David Trimble,

responsible for leisure and culture at Nottingham City Council. The

council is telling people, how to play out. We don't want organised

fun, what we want is local residents to do it for themselves. We do not

want the Council there are, that is why we stand back. Who pays for the

cones and the signs and the high visibility jackets? It is free of

charge to fill in the form, marginal costs are paid by the council. It

was your idea to organise this play out today, what are the kids getting

out of it? It is not something that is normally done, these children

would not have other places to go and play, of them have never had the

opportunity to come out and meet other children. We work together, we

unite together, children love going out to play. What happened today

brings the community a little bit closer. All the children are having

such a fun time. Have you been doing any skipping? I am a little too old

for skipping(!) what have you been playing? Skipping! Plate spinning!

Free ice! I did not know it was free! Are you enjoying it? CHEERING

Can't go wrong! They do it on my street, two hours, every Sunday

afternoon, I do the squash. Why not! We should get kerbie going again!

Kirby(!) is great, but he is no Mario(!) LAUGHTER

I never bring you the breaking edge stuff, there is something to be said

for jumping around in an enthusiastic way, somebody who can

be plain curious, but I say, yeah, but also... That would be to get

young minds going. The fact I love, space starts only 60 miles away!

Suddenly it becomes really quite close dog with plenty of journeys we

take on a weekly basis which are longer than the journey into space,

holidays we have taken which have been much further away. 100

kilometres, the actual official line, and space tourism trips, they

do not even go to that, they come back down again. Experience, for 60

miles, you did not say that but! And there is a lot that has to go in.

Trying to drag us back down again, it is surprisingly close, even the

scale of where we have gone... Where we have gone, which is really

close... The Moon is the end of the garden in terms of space, where we

are now, that is stepping out to see if you need a cold, that is the

level of journey we are taking at the moment! Lots of journeys we

cannot do. In the books, we say, we may not be able to do this, but what

we need to do is to build robots that will do these journeys. Or, sit

here, let them come to us, the most incredible thing about space, the

most amazing thing we see, we see from here, looking up, at

telescopes, like that comes to us from a long way away, and a long

time ago. So much content in the book, we cannot cover it in a single

with a little idea, a little plan, like on have I got news for you.

Mock the Week! Mock the Week, yes, Mock the Week is what I mean.

Sometimes I get mock of the week. That is one that I get sometimes.

You did not really need to bang it like that... Let's see what we've

got... This occurs in black holes, this term, black holes are dense

stars, lapsing onto themselves, and pulling everything in, there is an

event horizon around the edge where nothing can escape, if you fall into

one, the gravity starts getting really intense at a gradient, so you

will get, as you go towards, you will get stretched out! You will

become spaghetti. If you need a diet... Really good, I suppose, but

you will never see the results. Give it another bash. Perhaps a clapping

mechanism? Well-known for spotting comic, fulfilled a wish that a lot

of people had that he would be buried on the moon. -- comets. We

send people to the moon and they just land there, and his ashes

are... Some of his ashes, anyway, were placed in a canister and fired

onto the moon. The one person we have buried off the planet. Lie I'm

sure will be the next one... Not soon, hopefully, for professor lie.

I was going to say, that did sound like a threat. Now, that was

spinning before you even touched it, bring that one back to the shop(!)

planet nine, there may be a mystery planet within our solar system,

because there is a technology to planet 's, but eight acknowledged

planet 's, there may be a ninth one, you see a weird orbit of other

planets, far away, the only thing you can say, there is a planet like

object out there, and we saw it on Stargazing, my God, we need to be

able to tell people we found it, we successfully eliminated many

candidates. Which is less exciting, as a big reveal, at the end of it.

Good science, good signs often involves narrowing things down. Hit

the thing again, is there one more? It seems to be rather erratic. I

have broken it. If you have just tuned in, this is not mastermind, it

is all the content of the new book from Dara O'Briain, and it is very

funny as well. I had the scope to do that which, again, lie has to be so

serious(!) but I can do some silly jokes as well. The book is out next

Thursday, Beyond The Sky, enjoy watching it.

The world-renowned activist Malala Yousafzai has said this about

"She is our hero. Everyone must read her story.

Nujeen Mustafa, known as The Girl From Aleppo,

is an extraordinary young woman who became a poster girl

in the midst of the Syrian refugee crisis two years ago,

after she embarked on an astonishing journey.

Her time watching TV in a fifth floor apartment in Aleppo, Syria.

Nujeen's family made the decision to leave for Turkey.

Born with cerebral palsy, and unable to go to school, she spent much of

her time watching television. 16-year-old Nujeen and her

older sister Nasrine were trapped, they embarked on a three and a half

thousand mile journey for a better, Nujeen was one of the many migrants

making the hazardous crossing to Greece in a dinghy,

going on to take buses and trains across Europe sleeping in camps,

detention centres or sometimes, the open air, with the hope

of one day being reunited Over five million Syrians have been

displaced since 2011, but Nujeen wants the world

to know she is not just Wonderful to see you and hear your

story, you made it to Germany, there was a very special reason why,

specifically, you wanted to get to Germany. I missed my brother, he was

there from... Several months prior, and I just wanted to see him. The

second reason, I believed in my right to have another chance in

life. This is the wonderful moment when you were reunited with your

brother, let's have a look at this. How did you feel, when you saw him

for the first time, because he had made it... Must have been

incredible. Yes, I just wanted to cuddle him, or something. I had been

on this journey for a month, and everything seemed so new, and

different, from what I knew. From what I had known, as a girl and to

have this familiarity, finally... You have got there, you have done

it. It is an incredible feeling. You are 18 now, can we just take you

back to when you were 15, in Syria, those feelings you were having, as a

teenager, of why you needed to get out there, from your perspective?

Well, I needed to get out of there because... There is nothing worse

than living with nothing but fear. I also was afraid of oblivion. I know,

I know what happened in history, you talk about the politics, the

strategy, the military, but you forget the people. 10 million, 15

million, 20 million dead. Just statistics. I was afraid that in 50

years, they would be talking about Russia, and what Bashar al-Assad

did, China, how paralysed the international community was. And I

would be forgotten. And you said, rightly, you said, the sense of

achievement, that you had got to the end of your journey, but the

journey, we have a map of it, it was incredible, the countries we went

through, when we got to the point where you needed to cross, is it

true that you paid the smugglers $1500, to get into a dinghy which

was supposed to be for 15 people but 38 people were injured, how did you

feel, just before you set sail? I think... We are believers of

destiny... Well, we are believers in destiny

and we prayed for luck. For me and kind of made sense, like a movie

plot, I've everything or nothing! And these pictures that we are

seeing of you in your chair, travelling across this incredible

landscape, so many people helping you on your journey, what kind of

reception where you are getting as you travelled these vast distances?

What is she doing in a wheelchair? Do you speak English? The most

frequently asked questions, like my Google third, that she speak

English. What is the answer? Allen through television. I watch a lot of

documentaries. You have written about this, Nujeen, in the book.

What do you hope that people like us will take from reading the book? I

want them to know that we are people, human, we have our stories.

We also had what you have no, job, school, a family, but we have lost

it. And am quite aware that the media, makes me feel like refugees

are the nightmare that is haunting every decision in Europe. The main

messages, don't be afraid. We are not different. We like you. Yeah. We

are like you. Do you feel you are in a peaceful place now. There is not a

helicopter overhead, I have a school, I feel safe,... It is all

documented in this book, an incredible read. You'll stay with us

for a while so we won't say goodbye yet. Will talk about your future

plans, and amongst them is to become an astronaut. This is perfect, Dara.

You will get to test Dara on his knowledge! The big test is yet to

come! She's read the book. One fascinating fact, how many birth but

you could fit into the sun. It's remarkable, over a million. Just in

terms of the mass of the sun. 1.3 million. You can fit 1000 Earth but

into the great red storm on Jupiter. You have met your match, Dara! The

sun is the subject of our next film. We've gone to shed light

on the biggest stars in the art world. The sun, delicate gold, deep

pink, with such a palette of colours it is no wonder that this glowing

orb has fascinated artists for centuries. As an artist myself I

love how the light of the sun can change the mood of a scene in many

different ways, and this is one of the reasons why I started painting,

myself, to capture those subtle differences. But one artist, hero of

mine, took his fascination with the sun to a new level. Born in 1775,

Joseph Maher Lord William Turner was one of Britain's most celebrated

landscape painters. He revolutionised the way that light

was depicted, and now a new exhibition is exploring this great

artist's fascination with our nearest star. Nicola is the curator.

Before Turner, landscape artists had used the sun as a static backdrop.

What he does is to make the sun almost like a protagonist in the

painting and how that transforms the entire surface of the picture. That

is so revolutionary. And Turner's interest in the sun was scientific

as well as artistic. It's interesting because we think of

signs about being separate. In his lifetime they would not have been

such a boundary between the two. We know that Turner was friends with

Michael Faraday, the pioneer of electromagnetism. Michael Faraday

seems to have helped Turner mix the pigment that had greater

light-fastness whether colour would last longer. He also owns three

telescopes himself, he is interested in optics, and colour theory, all

quite scientific concerns. At that time one scientist in particular was

changing the way that people have viewed the sun. Brendan Owens is an

astronomer at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. In Turner's time

William Herschel was one of the most renowned astronomers worldwide,

experimenting with new ways of looking at the sun's light to try to

unravel its mysteries. It is too dangerous to view directly through a

telescope soaked in Turner's day people projected the sun onto a

surface like this. What William Herschel did that was revolutionary

was finding a way to look at the sun's light directly. Not protecting

it but having something in between his telescope tube and his eyepiece,

that could help see the sun up close in detail and this may have inspired

people like Turner. William Herschel 's discoveries revealed the sun to

be far more dynamic and fluid than previously thought. How did this

new-found understanding affect paintings by Turner? When you look

at the way he paints the sun rather than a flat pale disc it does have a

textured, tangible surface. I think, in a way, it is an instance of

people arriving at a similar point, through parallel lines, Turner is

trying to do in art what William Herschel has been trying to do

through science. Turner's paintings of the sun are extraordinary and

they have given me an idea for my own Turner inspired landscape in

which the sun takes centre stage. Just gradually bringing in some

warmth into the sky. I am trying to capture the effect of the light on

the water. Each part of the scene catching a bit of that light. Turner

used science to better understand a light that most of us take for

granted. I just hope my own attempt will do this great artist justice.

So there you have it. My own take on a Turner landscape. I am glad I have

had the opportunity to shed some light on an artistic genius whose

paintings still dazzle us today as they must have done two centuries

ago. Beautiful. Mesmerising. Lovely. Now you have swapped books. That

lovely art, lovely. I'm sure that whatever was on screen was great but

I couldn't help noticing that in your book one of your dedications

soars to Yuri Gagarin. So you are big science person as well. For

someone who has done an incredible journey what was it about Yuri

Gargan in that inspired you? I think to have that first look at how

beautiful our home looks, is something that we have lost. With

the hope that our home would look like that again inside and out. Wow.

Do you have a question for Dara? Yes, do you believe, our world is

ruled by two set of different laws. Do you believe in the extensions of

the unifying theory... How long do we have? About 30 seconds, Dara!

LAUGHTER Do you know,... I think there's a

fundamental difference between quantum and gravity in terms of how

they operate. This could go on... You carry on. Shall we talk about

the beach? Something a bit more on our travel. We go to the beach. What

do you pack? Windbreaker maybe? A towel. Bucket and spade. You pack

marbles though, widget. Marty Jopson would. This is why, it is epic.

I just get bored. Sand castles and stuff don't appeal. What else can

you do. Marble racing. Now that is for me. This YouTube smash features

one of the longest ever marble runs on sand, a whopping 250 metres.

Creating a marble run that big is impressive. So I wanted to create my

own but... Super-sized! At 80 metres high, these sand dunes near

Bridgend, South Wales, some of the highest in Europe. To pull off a

marble run here I need to speak to the who built the original, this

24-year-old from Holland. Any tips on me? Do it as fast as you can

otherwise be sand is to dry. So I need people to come a rope into help

out, and the beach? -- so I need people, but who can I rope in, to

help out, on a beach? Welcome everyone to my sand dune and

my marble run. The key to this, according to the advice I have

taken, is to do it quickly has otherwise it will dry out. Are we

already? Let's do it. # I'll be ready #.

I start by marking at the root, we want it long but also steep enough

to allow gravity to do its work, then the arduous work begins as each

team takes one section to dig. So that's about two, three, four,

ten metres. Only another 200! It's a gargantuan effort for the teams,

especially when you are a team of one. So how are we getting on. The

sand is so dry it is caving in quickly. It's really uneven, it goes

uphill. Is quite hot, everyone else has shorts on and I'm dressed up. It

is going slow. No one said it would be easy or even fun. We are getting

there, the final job is to spread the sand with water so it stays

compacted. Three hours after we started we set with commentary from

Jason Mohammad of BBC sports, it is race time. COMMENTATOR: Thank you,

Marty. Each team has their own marble, Marty is in white, the

lifeguards are in yellow, the volleyball isn't clear and the ice

cream man in a weird sort of mirror thing. Let's play marbles. Of that

amazing pace for this breeze busting Marble race. This is adrenaline in a

glass ball! The crowd are going wild. He's smiling so hard he could

break his mouth. The volleyball is and the sculptors are jostling for

first, Marty is so far back he is still in the dressing room. Marty

has stopped but is being pushed on, is that within the rules, who knows,

there aren't any! Ice cream man flicks it, the volleyball is failed

to bounce back and this is never too was race between the sculptors and

the lifeguards. But this is now a horse race. And the sculptors have

passed the lifeguards. They are used to creating castles, today they are

just decimating dreams. They think it's all over and the sculptors it

is now! That was completely awesome. It just goes to prove that there is

only one way to spend the day on the beach. And that is with a marble

run. CHEERING

We weren't expecting that, I can't wait to go on the beach now.

Thanks to the inspirational Nujeen for coming on the show -

her book The Girl from Aleppo is available to buy now.

And a big thank you to Dara, Beyond The Sky is released

in all good book stores on September 7th.

Tomorrow, Patrick Kielty will be in the hot seat and we'll be

There's only ever going to be room in his heart for one person.

You think about everything that's wrong, it's just Jane.