Long time in coming perhaps but an inspirational guy regarding stargazing and advancing into space.
Can't imagine his record as longest continual presenter of the same TV show being beaten!
Never married after his fiancee was blown up driving an ambulance during WW2.
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>> Long time in coming perhaps but an inspirational guy regarding stargazing and advancing into space.
+1
>> Can't imagine his record as longest continual presenter of the same TV show being beaten!
And not just a presenter - a genuine expert who did original stuff too.
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What's it going to be like without him? 'Long time in coming' is right though. He's been sounding a bit blurred and slurred for years, but just lately rather looking it too.
Would that all TV pundits were half as serious or half as personable.
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>>Would that all TV pundits were half as serious or half as personable.
+1
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Last man to wear a monocle and mean it? I like that sort of style.
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There's something overbearing about monocles. Takes a measure of hard arrogance to get away with one. My father used one before the war but I never saw him wearing it in anger. It wasn't really him, he was a bit too nice. I've still got the gold frame somewhere.
No doubt the Sky at Night will continue in the competent hands of Patrick Moore's favourite apprentices. There are two or three, one a lady who hasn't appeared recently when I have seen the programme.
I seem to remember that PM himself was rumoured to be right-wing and reactionary, perhaps a member of some English nationalist group. But somehow one didn't mind in his case because he came across as a learned, interesting gent, and quite frankly there's absolutely nothing democratic or fair-minded about the physical universe.
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>>I seem to remember that PM himself was rumoured to be right-wing and reactionary
From the BBC obit -
His wartime experiences left him with a strong antipathy to the European ideal and he became an enthusiastic member of the UK Independence party.
...
He was also, briefly, the finance minister for the Monster Raving Loony Party, of whom he said "They had an advantage over all the other parties, in that they knew they were loonies."
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Heh heh... he was pretty cool, only UKIP too. I don't mind slandering some people but I wouldn't want to slander him.
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An enduring star - he popularized a hobby for thousands. The world is a poorer place.
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An old-fashioned one-off, who could communicate his passion for his subject and get the important stuff across without pandering or patronizing.
Who will open the village fêtes of West Sussex now?
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>> Who will open the village fêtes of West Sussex now?
I try to avoid them myself. But as a replacement for Patrick Moore and something of a breath of fresh air, might I suggest a relatively unknown OCD character with a collection of photos of his car's odometer displaying Significant Numbers, each accompanied by a detailed narrative and perhaps a sub-display of holiday snaps?
A touch of Tourette's is always a help in public speaking too. Diffident Bertie Wooster types are no good at all.
Heh heh...
Last edited by: Armel Coussine on Sun 9 Dec 12 at 18:32
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RIP. No more Mr Night Sky.
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I only said last week that he looked to be fading! - I hope they name a Star or some other Celestial body after him, sort of a fitting tribute. R.I.P Sir Patrick.
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After a brief item from 'the decade' Johnny Walker opened today's 'Sound of the Seventies' with the theme from Sky at Night followed by Bowie's Starman.
A damn good tribute.
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A full blown english eccentric. Alas a dying breed, as they fade away we seem not be be producing replacements.
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>> A full blown english eccentric. Alas a dying breed, as they fade away we seem
>> not be be producing replacements.
>>
Not even............................David Beckham?
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No, I think he wants to be taken seriously.,
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Condolences to his family great man to listen to, lots of knowledge about the stars.
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Someone will be along shortly to claim he was a paedophile.
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I hope not! but he certainly grabbed me by the imagination!
A lot of knowledge lost!
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I had the great privilege of driving him to a chess event a few years back. Being into astronomy myself I was able to quiz him on a few perplexing issues. What was amazing was not just that he could answer my questions, but the level of detail he could recall in the process. Distances, time differences etc. His recollection of facts was astonishing.
He was also a really lovely person. He invited us in, showed us around, invited us to come any time "for some chicken dinner". My only regret was not having the time to take up his offer.
He was a father figure to a number of guys - I know of one or two.
Sadly in this day and age one can't appear to be a genuine caring older man without some kind of connotation of inappropriate sexual behaviour cropping up.
Perhaps that's why his passing is all the more our loss.
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>> Someone will be along shortly to claim he was a paedophile.
>>
Funnily enough, that's exactly what I thought soon after learning he'd passed away.
That has to say something quite disturbing about the society we're living in at the present. Any man who is a little (or a lot) different from the norm, especially a bachelor, is almost presumed to be a paedophile. This can't be a good thing. I'm definitely not sniping at you Cliff (should it read that way), but at our greater fear of these things, which seems to be getting out of hand.
Anyway, shame the great man has died. I didn't always agree with him away from astronomy, but what a personality and a genuine talent.
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Mrs B was lucky enough to hear him as keynote speaker at the Association for Science Education's conference a few years ago.
The only near equal to him was David Attenborough a couple of years later.
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The cost of his funeral will be astro-monocle.
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>> This can't be a good thing.
>> I'm definitely not sniping at you Cliff (should it read that way), but at our
>> greater fear of these things, which seems to be getting out of hand.
>>
I took your comment that way - it's exactly the point I was making.
The whole JS business and associated investigations is making us all suspicious of eccentric behaviour where formerly we might have been more accepting, and begin to see things involuntarily from the head-line grabbing viewpoint of the gutter press.
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>> The whole JS business and associated investigations is making us all suspicious of eccentric behaviour where formerly we might have been more accepting,
Not really CP surely? Jimmy Savile wasn't 'eccentric', he was in nearly all respects a drearily conventional person with a lot of money and perhaps a perversion. His much-hyped 'zaniness' and 'eccentricity' were entirely put on, and damned unconvincing. To me anyway.
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Diamond geezer, I've got one of his books which he published in 1954 when he was living in E. Grinstead.
Ze book is called Suns, Myths and Men and cost 12/6 in old (proper) money, must be worth 100's (of £1000's) now.
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>> Ze book is called Suns, Myths and Men and cost 12/6 in old (proper) money,
>> must be worth 100's (of £1000's) now.
Alas, Dog, you'd get about £5 at best if you sold it to, or pay about £20 to buy it from, a bookseller, assuming a first edition in top notch condition. You might scrape a tenner on the bay if you were lucky.
But if you have a first edition copy of "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem" then you're in business.
Last edited by: Crankcase on Mon 10 Dec 12 at 14:40
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Well Cc, I only paid £1 for it on ebay about 5 years ago, so I'm now going to read it as it looks quite interesting.
:)
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“We have travelled a long way since those far-orf times when the ancients gazed in wonder at the starry skies, seeing there figures of gods and heroes, fiery curtains, hairy messengers of death, and ever-hungry dragons.
We have passed through the age of arrogance, when it was believed that the Earth was the centre of the heavens; and almost through the age of humility, during which we have learned that we are as insignificant as a sand-grain in a desert.
We are ready to enter the third and perhaps final age – the Age of Travel.
Let us pause for a few moments, and imagine that we can look ahead across the blue mists of the centuries to come.
What do we see? One moment, we catch a fleeting glimpse of a wrecked world, with a few wretched survivors struggling to live on amid the radio-active wastes of the once green and pleasant Earth; the next, we see an ordered community in which reason has mastered instinct, with space-craft passing freely between the planets, bringing life to the ashy plains of the Moon, the cloud-capped lands of Venus and the deserts of Mars, with the future of mankind assured.
The choice is ours, and the crisis is at hand”.
Epilogue: Dream Of The Future, taken from Suns, Myths and Men, published in 1954 by The Great Man.
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We still haven't mastered not killing each other for bits of land or what is under the surface.
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Aren't we having the Age of Aquarius then?
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"Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding"
Perhaps not on this forum!
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>> sounds a bit fishy to me.
Gasp, retch, yuck, me too.
I was there, I still hold myself partly responsible, as part of a certain tendency, but there was a hell of a lot of smug moronic quasi-religious crap in the sixties and seventies. And that ghastly song encapsulates it.
How could you Zero (no need to answer, you just did it to make me feel a bit ill).
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Maybe its me, but that songs makes me happy. Not sure its the song itself, or the times I remember because of it, but I like the song.
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Tastes differ FMR. It doesn't mean you're bad. Just suspect.
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Strangely enough there was a woman chanting Hari Krishna in Norwich market place this afternoon. Perhaps the moon is in the seventh house.
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>> Perhaps the moon is in the seventh house.
>>
Given the state of the world, it's more likely that Uranus is in the seventh house, rather than the moon. However, that raises the spectre of The Great Beast, a man about whom I'm amazed there has never been a film made. One for BBC 4 at least I'd have thought.
Don't name him here Dog, if you read this, who knows what might happen.
Last edited by: Crankcase on Mon 10 Dec 12 at 20:53
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Was he a U7 then Cc, no surprise there of course, plenty of videos about him on YouTube.
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I remember seeing that on the London stage - and being disappointed. We thought we were were being so modern.
Some of the beaches on Ibiza reveal so much more!
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There was a very fair tribute on BBC1 last night to this wonderful, true English eccentric. It would sum up the state of the nation if SaN were to be re-run, dumbed down and fronted by Richard Hammond.
I cannot let this thread disappear without announcing that I have in my possession what is probably the only washing-up liquid bottle in the history of the cosmos that has been signed by Sir Patrick!
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Please, please cut it up and make it into a rocket, Blue Peter style. Okay, it's not a telescope, but close enough! :)
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if SaN were to be re-run, dumbed down and fronted by Richard Hammond
Heaven forbid.
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"Please, please cut it up and make it into a rocket, Blue Peter style."
Don't be silly, OB, it's a valuable artefact and, anyway, it would melt. It would also be the strangest shaped rocket in the cosmos as it's a squarish 5litre catering pack. :-)
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"Blue Peter style" required a bicycle pump and a football valve attachment, as I recall.
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I loved Clarkson's description of Patrick Moore's suit, "It fitted him like a an aircraft hanger fits a Vulcan Bomber".
Written by JC in affectionate terms, I should add.
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2 heartwarming stories other than the tabloid interference but then we would never have known.
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RIP Patrick Moore - zippy
