The secrets behind the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures

The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures

More4, nightly from 21 Dec at 7.00pm

Only her majesty the Queen and, possibly, The Wizard of Oz are a more enduring part of the Christmas TV schedules than the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures. But for such a perennial favourite, the lectures have had to wander the channels in recent years in search of a home: after decades on the BBC, they alighted on Five before, this year, finding a new home on More4.

They will be delivered by Professor Sue Hartley, only the fourth woman to have the honour since the lectures started in 1825. Prof Hartley is an ecologist from the University of Sussex, and her theme is the “epic 300-million-year war between plants and animals” – which, says Andy Marmery, the RI’s science demonstration technician, is not the easiest theme to illustrate. “We haven’t done plants in the lectures since the 1830s, and now I know why: they don’t like Christmas. Most of them are dead or leafless, which is making my props a bit of a challenge.”

Prof Hartley’s lectures will be broadcast nightly at 7.00pm, from Monday to Friday, next week. Her first lecture will show how plants are actually winning the war, using defences such as poisonous chemicals, spines and stinging hairs. In Tuesday’s lecture, she focuses on how herbivorous animals, such as sloths and aphids, have overcome the lack of nutrients in plants. “We asked for a three-toed sloth, which are the really slow ones – but, owing to a breakdown in communication, we have acquired a two-toed one instead. It’s a little more sprightly. Who knows what’ll happen …” says Marmery. “The lectures will also feature a St Bernard, a Shetland pony and a ring-tailed lemur.”

In Prof Hartley’s third lecture, she’ll address “talking trees” (plants do communicate, she explains – just not in ways that are obvious to humans). On Thursday, she will ask if humans are natural herbivores, before concluding on Christmas Day with the potential effects of climate change.

All of these themes have to be illustrated by Marmery, whose forebears in his post including none other than Michael Faraday. Marmery says he picks up ideas in the strangest places. “When I’m really stuck,” he says, “I wander the aisles of B&Q in search of inspiration. But toy shops and hardware shops are good, too. Or sometimes I simply solve a problem on my bike on the way to work.”

A physics graduate, Marmery is obliged to cross all scientific disciplines. This will be his seventh year in the post, and he admits, by the time the five-part series is recorded in mid-December, he will be almost living in his laboratory. But he won’t watch the lectures being broadcast, because he’s too shy to see himself on television. “I usually know in advance which ones are going to flop,” he says. “Two years ago, for a lecture about human anatomy, I built a 6ft 2in wooden model of myself to demonstrate how much water is contained in the human body. It proved tricky at the end when I tried to seal a sawn-in-half tube with some Perspex. I guessed it would leak with the cameras rolling. It did. But then it surprised everyone by falling over completely.”

For Marmery, the Christmas lectures are a year-round task. He knows, broadly, by March or April, what the topic might be, but the lectures, and therefore the props, are not finalised until September. Occasionally, he rules out an idea as unrealistic from the start but, usually, he’s happy to build a prototype and tinker with it until he has something fit for broadcast.

“One year, I was illustrating an insoluble maths problem about fitting boxes into the boot of a car – except we made it Christmas gifts in the back of Santa’s sleigh. I had to dress up as a master elf for that one.,” he says. “Then there was the food-safety year, when I had to show how bacterial diarrhoea works in the human colon. I suspended a piece of flue in a crate and filled it with Oxo granules. It was supposed to be mashed up with spikes on a stick. That leaked badly, too. We were awash with gravy. It was disgusting.”