Who is Michael Mosley? This is the punchline of a joke Michael was telling me last week over dinner at the Hay Festival. He was very aware of the fragile and transient nature of TV popularity that for him had lasted several decades and saw no signs of fading.
I first met Michael about 20 years ago and we hit it off. He interviewed me for a TV documentary at St Thomas’ Hospital on ageing if I remember. We were talking about twin studies and he was fascinated by our work and had an insatiable appetite to learn more. He was unlike other TV presenters of the time, using his medical knowledge to great effect and always bringing the most out of the material with practical experiments, usually on himself.
We were immediately on the same wavelength and he told me how he had switched from medical school to the BBC and then briefly to the City which he hated, then back to the BBC, producing science programmes at the top level like Tomorrow’s World and The Human Body, winning many awards. Then one day he switched to being a TV presenter, then becoming an international bestselling medical author and columnist, which he loved.