Sir Patrick Moore: Astronomer, Broadcaster and Eccentric

Did you know there is one place from which you can see, not only Mars and Venus,

but all the other heavenly bodies?

-And where is that, may I ask?

-I'm delighted you asked me,

because I'm going to show you!

LAUGHTER

# The stars at night are shining bright

ERIC AND ERNIE: # Deep in the heart of Texas... #

There's no-one else who has been Mr Astronomy

throughout all these years except Mr Patrick Moore.

Sir Patrick Moore.

# Tiptoe through the tulips

# By the window that's where I will be

# Tiptoe through the tulips with me... #

He was a great conveyor of enthusiasm and enjoyment.

# Tiptoe through the tulips

# To the shadow of a willow tree... #

It just happened to be that his subject was the stars.

It could be that at somewhere in the universe,

some being at this very moment

is looking at a television screen and seeing...

Well, good evening and welcome to The Sky At Night.

LAUGHTER

Now, pay attention because I've got my eye on you.

He was a TV icon.

You didn't watch The Sky At Night for the astronomy.

Of course you won't see Vega looking large,

-because no telescope yet built will show a star...

-It's gone.

Is it gone? Oh, no.

Just as I got it on the cross wires, it blacked right out.

How absolutely typical, there's nothing we can do about it.

Patrick was a great eccentric and he played on his eccentricity,

and it's why, I think, he became such a household name.

We've really exciting news,

Halley's Comet has been sighted for the first time in over 70 years. Of course...

People who had no interest in astronomy

began to learn and become interested because of his own personality,

they actually looked forward to seeing this crazy man on TV.

Good evening. Well, I'm afraid Burnham's Comet

turned out to be something of a disappointment.

Quite a number of people wrote in to say they managed to see it all right,

but it didn't really come up to expectations...

Sir Patrick Moore was Britain's most famous astronomer,

a much loved eccentric,

he was a fixture on British television since 1957.

I can't, incidentally, resist quoting one letter.

Watched from 12 o'clock to 5 o'clock in the morning.

Meteors, from the sky, none.

From the wife, plenty.

He inspired generations of astronomers, and I was one of them.

He was also a prolific author, an accomplished musician

and a keen cricket player.

-I was asked to hit for an 11.

-An 11.

-Yes.

The wretched man hit the ball into the outfield,

it went in a rabbit hole and the fielder forgot to call "lost ball"

by the time it was found, they'd run 11.

Born in 1923, Patrick became hooked on astronomy at the age of six.

An only child, he was educated at home, due to a weak heart

and when war broke out, he lied about his age, faked a medical

and joined the RAF, serving with Bomber Command as a navigator.

You were on active service in the war, weren't you?

Well, I pottered about, not doing very much.

I claim to be the only pupil navigator who pinpointed Bristol when he was actually over Norwich.

War changed Patrick's life in several ways.

His only girlfriend was killed in an air raid

shortly after they were engaged.

He never married.

We were both happy. We had planned to have a son.

It never got started at all. He would have been 60 now.

Yes. I'm a bachelor.

-That really is why you are a bachelor today?

-Of course it is.

These things happen, you've got to make the best of a bad job.

She's not there, and that's it.

He never really got over it.

He said that there was never another woman for him,

but he never wanted

another relationship with a woman like that.

He said that was it, that was his one love and he didn't want another.

After the war, Patrick turned down the state grant

he needed to take up a place at Cambridge.

Whilst working as a teacher,

he pursued astronomy in his spare time.

You call yourself an amateur astronomer, I think a lot of people would say

-that you're being unduly modest.

-Not a bit of it.

My only role in astronomy these days, if I've got one at all,

is that I do a bit of observing here and there

and I've written some stuff and all I can try and do, really,

is to try and egg on those people who can do far better than I can.

Nonetheless, in 1953, he mapped the surface of the moon

to produce the most comprehensive atlas of the time.

It was Patrick's map which helped the Apollo astronauts

to land on the moon.

It was a guidance for the Russian space programme as well.

And so this amateur project that had its origins

in casual sketches of the moon then became this shot in the arsenal

for NASA and the Russian space agency to do their things.

Patrick was very proud that the work that he did

had this real fundamental importance in astronomy.

In April 1957, Patrick was asked to front a new television series

about astronomy, and The Sky At Night was born.

Good evening.

It was a great treat, because it was only on once a month.

Mercury and Venus and Mars are all so badly placed

that, to all intents and purposes, they are out of view altogether.

Patrick had a liveliness that was not on a lot of television then.

Jupiter is making quite a brave show

and you can see it in the southern part of the sky, late at night.

You felt you were members of a sort of secret society, late at night

and Patrick was the head boy, guiding us through everything.

First of all, here is a globe to represent Uranus.

And here is a globe to represent the Earth on the same scale

and you can see there's a very considerable difference.

I had a vivid picture of Patrick

staring very intensely out from the screen

and it was riveting. It was just absolutely riveting to say,

"This is what you can see and if you go out there

"you can see this in the sky."

Saturn never has been shown on direct television before

and it's a difficult object. Please don't imagine

you're going to get as large and as detailed a picture

as that very fine drawing that appeared in the Radio Times.

Because that was a drawing

and it's a very different matter from getting a picture on screen.

There it is. Yes, and there is Saturn

for the first time on direct television. You can see...

I was fascinated by astronomy as a kid

and I think really it came from seeing Patrick on The Sky At Night.

It awakened in me this absolute joy

of looking up into the night sky, which I still have,

I still have this childish awe looking at the stars

and I actually decided that rather than be a train driver,

I would be an astronomer.

That's really what I wanted to do, most in the world, alongside music.

The Sky At Night started broadcasting

at the dawn of the space age.

For those like myself who were children in the 1950s,

space travel was something futuristic,

which really belonged on a cornflakes packet

rather than anywhere else.

Of course, it was the Sputnik in 1957 which make this a reality,

followed quickly by sending up the first people into space.

You know, if I'd come on the air in 1957

when we did the first of The Sky At Night programmes

and said that within five years I'd be showing you pictures

of the first man to go around the Earth in orbit in a spaceship...

Well, I think you'd have regarded me as mad.

He perhaps was born at the best time possible,

because he saw incredible development

throughout the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st.

'It's a very exciting place to live or work.'

-Well, Patrick Moore, what did you think of that?

-Quite incredible.

One thing you've got to bear in mind, they were magnificent pictures,

I'm not going to say they show us more detail than the orbiters, but they probably do.

This has been a fantastic few decades in astronomy,

and Patrick had the joy to be able to report on it all.

'We have lift-off. 32 minutes past the hour.

'Lift-off of Apollo 11.'

The moon landing was such a huge thing for Patrick,

because there's his moon that he's been studying in his telescope,

suddenly there are people walking on it.

'We are setting down, Eagle.

'The Eagle has landed.

'Roger, Tranquillity. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue.

'We're breathing again. Thanks.'

Well, this is the moment, if there ever was a moment,

for Patrick Moore.

I feel absolutely overcome, I've lived with this idea all my life,

now that it's really happened, I can hardly believe it.

No admiration can be too great for those magnificent men

who brought this strange, spidery module down on the moon.

This obviously is a moment that humanity is never going to forget.

That's one small step for man...

..one giant leap for mankind.

I think he was rather sad, as we all were, when the moon landings finished,

but I remember a marvellous Sky At Night programme he did,

with the last man on the moon, Gene Cernan,

commander of Apollo 17,

and you really got a feel for what it was like to be there.

What about navigational problems, did you have any?

We studied, due to a great deal of your work, of course,

on the mapping of the moon,

we studied the area we were going to land so well,

that I really believe I knew it at least from the air, from above,

as well as I know my own backyard.

-ASTRONAUTS:

-# I was strolling on the moon one day

# In the merry, merry month of December... #

No, May.

Oh, what a nice day. There's not a cloud in the sky.

I think Patrick's enthusiasm and his passionate account

of what was happening on the moon added a lot to our perception.

He was able to interpret that for us and make it seem real,

make it something we could understand.

The way he came over, as this great enthusiast,

this fast-talking, this person who was bubbling for the subject,

was just the same as he was in real life.

He always saw it as his role to be, if you like, the Mr Astronomy,

the man who would try and encourage new generations of people

to take up an interest in his subject.

He had this instinct, this sense, to pick up young people,

and I was one of them,

and to get them into astronomy, to realise their enthusiasm

and he'd sort of nurture us.

Back in the 1960s when I was about to go into a career,

I couldn't work out what to do.

I was a keen young, amateur astronomer when I was about 10,

but I'd given it all up for rock bands and boys

and the usual kind of stuff you get into.

Let me ask you one direct question.

Do you think there really is a black hole in the middle of the galaxy?

I won't be positive, but I do think it's the one object,

which at the moment fits all the observations.

Well, you could be right. Let's go and look.

-I'm game if you are.

-Right.

My mother actually said to me,

"Why don't you become a professional astronomer?"

and I said, "I haven't a clue what to do."

She said, "Why don't you write to Patrick Moore?

Well, we told you it was like science fiction! Good night!

And I wrote to him and I said,

"I was thinking of going into professional astronomy..."

and put a PS at the end, "I'm a girl.

"Is this a handicap?" Couldn't believe he replied to me.

It says, "From Patrick Moore.

"Dear Ms Couper, many thanks for your letter.

"Let me assure you on one point.

"Being a girl is no handicap at all!"

I just thought that generosity of spirit was fantastic.

It really urged me on to try for a career in astronomy.

"Does this help? Let me know.

"I will do everything I can to be of assistance.

"With all best wishes, yours sincerely, Patrick Moore." Amazing.

Patrick responded to thousands of letters

on an old-fashioned typewriter,

which he refused to swap for a computer.

Most of the keys didn't work,

it drove many publishers completely berserk.

You would hear the typewriter going

and probably six times out of ten he was answering letters,

often from small boys or girls

who were interested in astronomy and he replied to them all.

It was almost sacrosanct. It was something he consistently did

right up to the time when he could hardly type.

When I was a schoolboy, I joined a local astronomical society

and Patrick made monthly visits to the society.

I was from a working-class neighbourhood

and to be able to see through the chink in the curtain

to life beyond, that was something which I valued enormously.

Patrick, right up to his final years,

was enthusing young people.

He never married, of course. In many ways, we were all his family.

We'd phoned him up and said, "We're a couple of boys at the local school

"interested in astronomy, could we look through your telescope?"

He said, "Please come down next clear night!"

I was a very short lad and couldn't reach the eyepiece

and Patrick lifted me up to the telescope

and the first thing I looked at through the telescope

was the planet Saturn, and it was just so beautiful.

I was utterly transfixed.

I'm walking along the rim

of one of the most remarkable places in the entire world.

This is Meteor Crater in Arizona, a huge gaping hole in the ground,

over 4,000 feet across. Just look at it!

The Sky At Night was commissioned for only three programs,

but under Patrick it went on to become

the world's longest-running TV series with the same presenter.

The reason why people watch your programme

-is as much for you.

-No.

-Oh, it is, Patrick.

It's your performance. Am I not right?

-Is not the performance as much as what he says?

-AUDIENCE: Yes.

People are fascinated by the way that you tell them things.

-Now, you can't deny that. You're being modest.

-No, I'm not.

It so happened that when astronomy, when I say metaphorically down-to-earth,

and this was really in 1957, when the space age started,

I was the person who was doing it, so, there I've stayed,

but astronomy is fascinating and if someone else was around at the time,

they'd be on air and be sitting talking to you, not me.

This month's Sky At Night is about the distances of the stars.

He did fill the screen and he spoke machine-gun rapid,

but articulate and entertaining.

Will you please close one eye, doesn't matter which one

and then hold up your finger and line your finger up

with my nose as you see it on the television screen, got that?

Now, without moving anything, use the other eye

and you will see that your finger is no longer lined up with my nose.

If you keep everything quite still and flick your eyes around like that,

you will see your finger apparently flashing to and fro.

It was the sheer quirkiness of Patrick

that really invited people to want to watch him.

The tides as you know are influenced by the sun and the moon

and when they pull together, as they are doing at the present moment,

the pull is added, you see, and we get high tide.

Granted that forces are enormous, just how big are they?

It's absolutely tremendous. There's no doubt at all.

Also the tides are the biggest natural force in the entire world.

As a communicator, he was the supreme professional

in that you could stand him up in front of a camera,

ask him to talk without hesitation, deviation or repetition

for two and a half minutes about some subject,

he could do this perfectly. Convey a lot of information,

he could do it even if it was some new discovery

he'd only heard about a few hours ago.

He was approached one morning by CNN

to do a broadcast for them and they said,

"The person we were due to interview has dropped out.

"Would you mind doing an interview for us?

He said, "Not at all, not at all."

They said, "How long will it take you to write the script?"

He said, "Script? I don't work from a script!

But there is one world apart from the Earth...

Patrick was a perfectionist,

but the downside of that was if it all went wrong,

he got terribly frustrated and started making...

using somewhat loose language, shall we say,

which had to be edited out of the recordings.

Look at all that volcastic... Oh!

Sorry!

Blast and hell!

When you watch yourself on television,

one always sees one's own faults very clearly.

I do. I talk far too fast, I have to, to get things in,

I realise this perfectly well, but it's no good trying to slow down,

It's just me.

A lot of people have been writing to The Sky At Night,

asking questions about astronomy and it's a fascinating subject.

LAUGHTER

People want to know why don't we put The Sky At Night on earlier

in the summertime for children, we would put it on earlier,

but we have to wait until it goes dark before we do the damn thing at all!

Patrick's character and style lent itself to impersonation.

Welcome to The Sky At Night.

I'm a very bad impression of Patrick Moore.

He was often being copied by many impressionists and comedians,

but I think it was the impersonation that Ronnie Barker did of him

that was the one he loved, he really found that so funny.

Patrick was always laughing about the orrery,

which they gave to The Two Ronnies to do the sketch.

They apparently broke while doing the programmes.

I'm sorry to have to inflict myself on you like this,

but Patrick couldn't be here, so he asked me to step into his shoes.

Why not, he's always wearing my suits!

So, here I am, and he asked me to apologise to you for not being here,

but he had to show his telescope to the local townswomen's guild.

If they like it, they're going to knit him a cover for it.

I think that you can both be prepared to sit up

and gasp in amazement, because I happen to own

the ultimate in telescopes, perfected after years of research.

-Can we see it, please?

-Of course you can.

-Yes.

LAUGHTER

-If you just cast your eyes over that.

-The ultimate in telescopes?

-Oh, yes.

-It's a very fine piece of equipment.

-Of course it is!

I'll tell you something, on a clear night,

I can see the bottom of the bed!

Many people, Patrick, might label you as being an eccentric,

would you object to that?

Not in the slightest, I'm sure it's perfectly true.

-Is it a condition that you approve of?

-Yes, I think it probably is.

It's awfully difficult to tell, you know,

does one nut think another nut is a nut or not?

It's an interesting psychological point.

Something there for psychiatrists to work out, and no-one's nuttier than they are.

The eccentricity was something that he played on,

but I think also it made him a very lovable character.

Although having the monocle was something he had obviously

ever since he was a boy, it added to the air of interest about him.

What about the real eccentrics? Flat-Earthers, and people like that.

How do you feel about them?

I have the very greatest sympathy for them. Don't forget,

many, many years ago, there was a man named Copernicus

and Copernicus said the sun does not go round the Earth,

the Earth goes round the sun, and everyone said he was a crank.

But of course, the Earth does go round the sun, at least I think it does.

MAN SPEAKS VENUSIAN

What does that mean, actually?

That means, "How are all you?

"I am very pleased to see you this afternoon."

How did you learn these languages?

These languages have been a gift sent from me from the actual people.

Patrick's talking to this man who was speaking Venusian to him

and Patrick is apparently taking it very seriously

and he's being very polite, but Patrick was always very dismissive

of anything which isn't pure science.

..one of these small steroids chased us through the copse.

And we tried in turn to chase it,

and it just went along there at a terrific pace.

It was no bigger than a soup plate.

-It must've been a robot eye.

-Yes, yes.

Or a beacon which was sent down from the craft.

I may well be missing something, I wonder.

As well as astronomy, Patrick's other great passion was music.

Patrick was a good musician. You can see in his xylophone playing,

he's no fool, piano playing as well.

We're talking about a man who could have made that his profession if he wanted to.

But his passion for astronomy overtook everything else.

We talked about music quite a bit, we had some musical evenings

and I always gave him our albums when they came out

and he would always say, "Well, it's not my cup of tea,

"but I absolutely appreciate it," you know,

but for choice he'd be listening to his own operas and classical pieces.

Although he continued broadcasting, in his late 70s,

arthritis forced Patrick to give up the things that he loved,

playing music and using his telescopes.

Patrick had this incredible fast mind that was racing

and yet the body was slowly deteriorating

and it was so sad for those of us who knew him well,

to see this person who was so full of excitement and vigour still

in a body that was just decaying around him.

As he got older, he could find humour even when he was poorly.

You've seen Halley's Comet both times, haven't you?

When he was on Have I Got News For You, he thought it was amusing

to be the butt of a bit of humour.

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

HE MUTTERS

-So, where are we?

-There's the sun.

What's happened to Uranus?

Patrick's always seeing the joke before they do,

effectively sort of caricaturing himself.

Do you still need therapy?

He even did for me, he did adverts for the air guitar collections

which I do, where he actually plays air guitar and gets into it

and does this, you know.

-No strings attached.

-I think it's a really great quality.

Patrick was awarded an OBE in 1968,

a CBE in 1998

and 2001, he was knighted

for services to science and broadcasting.

When he got the letter from the palace,

he was just so thrilled and then, of course, to get the BAFTA award

as well in the same year and presented by Buzz Aldrin,

the second man on the moon, this was such a thrill for Patrick.

Not only has this man met every single lunar astronaut,

he will modestly tell you that he's also

met both the first man in space

and the first man to fly an aeroplane.

I'm pleased to say that this special award

is being presented to my good friend, Sir Patrick Moore.

APPLAUSE

Thank you so much.

APPLAUSE

I must say, I feel really overwhelmed.

There are so many people here who have done so much more than I have.

After all, I have merely done some commenting,

I did help, I suppose, in mapping the moon,

but I have a sort of feeling that Buzz knows

a bit more about the moon than I do.

All I can say is, I don't think for one moment

that I deserve this award, but I am more than grateful.

All I can say, therefore, is, thank you very much indeed.

It has been one of the great days of my life.

Thank you.

APPLAUSE

Although a much-loved figure,

Patrick was not afraid of controversy.

He was drawn to politics, but never stood for Parliament,

stating he would make a poor candidate

because he always said exactly what he thought.

He was incredibly patriotic.

I am sorry to say that he was also slightly...

antiforeigner in some of the things he said.

But he was always somebody who was very passionately doing

whatever he was doing.

Patrick wanted to see three things during his life.

The flaming thing's stuck.

Each a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event.

Halley's Comet,

the transit of Venus across the sun

and a total solar eclipse from Britain.

Patrick had seen eclipses from all over the world,

from Yugoslavia and Siberia in the '60s

and at sea, off the coast of Africa in 1973.

One trouble is the fact that the boat will be swaying around.

How will you cope with that?

We made a home-made device from wood, which is based on pivots,

so it will move in both directions.

It looked as if you were balancing the camera on your teeth.

No, strictly speaking, it was on my nose,

quite hard on my nose, like this.

As the time drew near, the light began to go down very rapidly.

Within a few seconds, the whole ship was plunged into darkness.

And there's the corona, and there's a brilliant prominence to the side of the sun.

This is incredible, the best corona I think I've seen in my life.

Well, that was a breathtaking sight.

In 1927, before the age of television,

England saw its last total solar eclipse

and now, we can bring you

our first total solar eclipse from British soil.

The day before the eclipse, it was a beautiful sunny day

and we had this wonderful programme set up

and then the day of the eclipse, we awoke.

The weather was awful.

Patrick was pounding around like a bull with a sore head.

His producers tried to persuade him to see the eclipse from somewhere

where he would definitely see it, like Turkey or wherever it would be,

but he wanted to see it from England, his own country.

I must admit, I'm excited,

because I've been looking forward to this eclipse

for the last 70 years.

All we need now, is for these wretched clouds to clear away

and give us a nice clear sky.

Luckily, the BBC had seen fit

to have an aircraft getting pictures from space.

On the whole, at the moment, I fear it's a really rather gloomy scene,

but don't give up yet, one never knows, it could still clear,

and there's a slight lightening of the sky over there.

And there is the crescent sun

and we've just had our first glimpse of the eclipse

and the cloud is there, it's drifting,

and not very long to go now. Oh, clouds, keep away please!

And then there's the diamond ring and there, the lovely corona.

CHEERING

And that is the sight of a lifetime, and down here, sadly,

we are still under total cloud and we're missing it.

That was so sad for Patrick,

but it was an awful lot of fun to do,

because he kind of could see the funny side,

even though he was bitterly disappointed.

At least we have been through

the last English total solar eclipse of the millennium.

Here in my observatory in Sussex, the weather is absolutely perfect...

One of the rarest events in the solar system

is the transit of Venus across the sun.

Now, we know the transit is about to start.

Nobody has ever seen one before,

because there hasn't been one in any of our lifetimes,

so it really was something rather exciting.

There's Venus, just first contact,

and there's no mistaking it now.

This really is a one-off.

It will always be one of my greatest memories of Patrick.

-There, is that the backdrop there?

-That's it.

It was a perfect day, beautiful blue sky.

As soon as the transit was over, it clouded over,

so we had a gift from God, really, that day.

And so, from Brighton

where the sky is now completely overcast, good night.

Patrick lives on in the minds and the memories

of the people that he affected.

Patrick's legacy is that he changed a lot of people's lives.

And so it's glad to know, that Halley is on its way back,

the wanderer has returned at last, good night.

Possibly the most generous man I've ever met in my life.

I'll miss Patrick as a friend,

such a kind and beneficent friend,

and an inspiration.

What about the 80th anniversary of The Sky At Night programme?

Will my successor be able to talk to you

from a space station or the surface of the moon?

Quite possibly.

And of one thing we can be quite certain - whatever happens,

it's going to be exciting. Good night.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd.