If you really want space on public transport you should carry some pornography from the 1970s and a pair of children’s safety scissors, then delicately cut out all the eyes of the glamour models whilst whistling. Every now and again mutter, ‘Why are women more beautiful when they are eyeless?’ You will be able to stretch out, though this can have ramifications such as ending up on a police list or being run out of town.

Some people may harrumph and grumble, ‘Generation Snowflake!’, but what is the harm in trying to make an individual’s life less stressful through a single simple action?

If the Royal Variety Show was put in a matter transportation machine with the Royal Institution Christmas lectures, this is what you’d get.

You always need to find the balance in the science, but the balance to talking about evolutionary theory is not to talk about creationism, that’s not a balance, that’s misleading and it’s just wrong.

I have spent a reasonable percentage of my life in libraries – I like the hush.

Science is very cross-generational; you’re not just aiming it at twentysomethings, or eightysomethings. Every town’s got a really broad selection of people and age groups interested in science.

As much as of course that Englishness of always to be embarrassed about any sense of complement, it is nice to know that a lot of the projects that I’ve worked on that people do feel there has been some effect.

We very quickly forget about the wonderful things we’ve got. People lose their excitement because there’s too much. Basically we’re experiencing nothing, because everything is available to us.

My life is constant revision but it’s not revision, a lot of it is for the first time.

I thought I better warn you that I am not one of those politically correct comedians, but it turns out that also I’m not really that racist, homophobic or woman hating either, so you might not notice.