radio review

"The Chinese Encyclopaedia of Celestial Knowledge," the geneticist Steve Jones said in Blue Skies (Radio 3) the other weekend, "arranged objects into categories that were logical to somebody. They included, among others: 'things that resemble flies at a distance'; 'those belonging to the Emperor'; 'those painted with a camel-hair brush'; 'those that are numerous'."

Dr Jones's recent media appearances are themselves "things that are numerous". This morning, for example, he's on Radio 4's With Great Pleasure, and he's just concluded In the Blood, a six-part BBC2 series about ancestry. He also has academic duties to perform and books to write, so it's clear the professor is very adept at keeping several balls in the air at once. Which is fortunate because, Heaven knows, he needs every last juggling skill to make sense of Blue Skies.

The next sentence would usually start, "Blue Skies is a...", followed by a pithy description like "science magazine with arty aspirations". But that fails to give the flavour of the series. Imagine instead Jones as Frankenstein (easy enough, given the soft-spoken intensity of his voice). He takes a leg from the sciences, an arm from the arts. He roughly stitches them together. Then he shoots a jolt of enthusiasm through the lot and, hey presto, a Frankenstein's monster is born. It's as likeable as it is clumsy; as interesting as it is synthetic.

Each of the four parts focuses on a human sense. On Saturday, we had "A Sense of Place" (from Robert Louis Stevenson's Edinburgh to the awareness shown by individual cells of their position within an embryo). But the Encyclopaedia of Celestial Knowledge would impose a quite different order upon Blue Skies' contents: things a scientist once told you in a pub but you drunkenly forgot; those dimly recalled from Tomorrow's World; that pertaining to the back of a box of Swan Vestas.

The other thing about Blue Skies is that it leads you to begin every other sentence "apparently". Apparently, if you divide the length of a river, twists and all, by its distance "as the crow flies" from source to sea, you get the magical number pi. Apparently, too, the fractal geometry of said river resembles that of human veins. No one said what a fractal was, although it is listed in the Encyclopaedia of Celestial Knowledge under "things once learnt in maths lessons but long forgotten". Apparently.