Middle Class Holes 16 - Professor Alice Roberts

‘So what if I dye my hair, I’ve still got a brain up there’

A writer friend of mine coined the marvellous term ‘the Alicetocracy’ to describe the layer of nice-but-dim semi-posh execs and mezzanine-level functionaries who were giving her the endless runaround in the TV biz. (I can’t credit this colleague by name, for obvious reasons, but I doff my hat to her.)

Now there is only one actual Alice in my parade of Middle Class Holes, and she is indeed a televisionary, though on the performing side. And she is a bit too salty to stand as a true exemplar of the type. (We’ll meet a couple of Emilys who are much better representatives of the ‘Alicetocrat’, ironically.)

Professor Alice Roberts FRSB (no relation) is an alumnus of the Red Maids School in Bristol, which I have to say looks lovely, despite its unfortunate Handmaids Tale-y name. She then got a medical degree at Cardiff, following that up with a PhD in Paleopathology, the study of diseases in the remains of the very, very long deceased. So she’s a bit of an all-rounder, making her an ideal fit for TV - she can do biology, archaeology and history, which fortunately have been the three big pulls of TV pop science slots since the dawn of the medium.

Roberts hasn’t ever been very far from our TV screens for almost twenty-five years now, enthusing in her personable way, popping up everywhere from Morpeth to Mozambique to breathlessly wonder at things and look awestruck on cue. Lovely lovely science. Lashings of hot facts. Explaining things and being a right old brain box. Roberts has that telegenic boffin quality of blandness mixed with calf-eyed wonder that we see also in Professor Brian Cox. She is, after all, Professor of Public Engagement In Science at the University of Birmingham, and she’s certainly done a lot of that, taking science out to the viewing millions.

As far as it goes. Because …