The first episode of Wonders of the Moon with Dara Ó Briain concentrates on what that eternally compelling sphere has meant to human culture, myth and spirituality. The second (of two) focuses on the science of it – the Apollo missions, roaming round the Jodrell Bank Observatory and talking to the people at the European Space Agency who are preparing for the next moon landing. It is obvious which part presenter Ó Briain, a comedian who studied mathematics and theoretical physics at university, feels more comfortable with and enthused by. But there is enough of the romantic about him to ensure the moon’s more ineffable effects on our lives are given a fair hearing first.
He starts amid the mountains of his native County Wicklow – a light-pollution-free zone that makes it perfect for stargazing. The moon is visible before nightfall and the Irish word for Venus, he tells us, translates as “afternoon star” because you can see it so early on. He then heads over to Newgrange, a Neolithic monument in County Meath that seems to have functioned not just as a burial chamber but perhaps also as a solar and – as the carvings of crescents and circles outside it suggest – lunar calendar. In case you, like me, use these documentaries to gather job titles that make you sigh with regret at roads not taken, I should tell you that this information is given to us by Dr Frank Prendergast – an archeoastronomer. I know, I know. It’s too late for me but perhaps you can still realise such a dream.
Ó Briain meets the author Anthony Murphy in a nearby pub to discuss the implications of a 5,000-year-old lunar calendar over a pint. It suggests they were able to work to a much more detailed agricultural timetable than was previously thought and also, Murphy notes, how much we have stopped paying attention to our night-time companion since. “People go mad at seeing a full moon now,” he says. “It happens every month!”
Then it’s off to a dairy farm in Cornwall to discuss the effects of the moon’s phases on cow fertility (conception rate goes up 18% at a full moon, apparently), and then on to terra more firma – or lunar more firma – with Prof Lewis Dartnell (astrobiologist, for those who have kept your notebooks to hand since the archeoastronomer) who walks us round rock pools and through the effects of moon-induced tides on evolution.
Then, Ó Briain grits his teeth and does his duty by those who believe that the moon’s gravitational pull exerts physical and mental forces on individuals, by getting his face straight and asking Dr Rohin Francis (a consultant cardiologist, but whose first degree was in “space medicine” – so start a new page in your notes) if this was at all possible, and politely nodding at the “hell, no” response. The menses and lunacy are connected to the moon only etymologically and, despite us being 70% water, we are not subject to internal tides because – and I use the technical term here – we are far too titchy and insignificant for any lunar interference to amount to anything. Not for the first time, humanity needs to get over itself.
The last part of the first episode leads us firmly out of the pseudo and into science proper as Ó Briain, always personable and articulate but now taking on an additional and irrepressibly puppyish energy as well as deeper engagement with his subject and interviewees, bounds to one of the two labs in the UK that are allowed to analyse some of the material brought back by the Apollo missions. The six landings resulted in 382kg of moon rock being returned to Earth. Perhaps the most incredible part of the story, however, is not the extraordinary labour of the 400,000 employees Nasa had at the peak of the space race, working to be the first people to put a man on the moon, but that when all the missions had ended and the rocks amassed, they locked half the material away to await the day improved technology could analyse it better than they could at the time. That’s almost as beautiful a thing as the moon itself, don’t you think?
That day has now dawned, and the next episode examines what the new discoveries – especially of the existence of water on what has hitherto been assumed to be an unforgivingly dry rock – will mean for the future of space exploration, settlement and, frankly, the way we’re going, human survival.
Ó Briain doesn’t get into the last one, actually. That’s just me, inventing my own lunar calendar as I struggle desperately to stay afloat on a rising tide of despair.
• This article was amended on 2 August 2023. There were 17 Apollo missions; but only six landed on the moon.
Wonders of the Moon with Dara Ó Briain aired on Channel 5 and is now on My5
