My word. Last night's Horizon: Do You Know What Time It Is? (BBC Two, Tuesday, 2 December, 9pm) scrambled my brain so much that it feels like someone cracked open my noggin, stuck in an electric whisk, switched it on sending bits of my mind-squidge twitching across the room and popped my cranium back on and fastened it down with some gum. All because a TV show asked me what time it was? This stupendous programme showed me that even a rudimentary question like that is far more profound than we think. I mean, to figure it out, you first have to ask: What is time itself? Get ready for the headfuck...

Before I begin to pull apart the loose notions that remain from last night's show, let's look at the TV programme itself. In Professor Brian Cox we have a genuinely engaging and... get this... a genuinely cool scientist. You see, most TV scientists are tweed wearing blokes with hairy ears in their fifties. That's not a bad thing as such, as it plays into your 'I Trust Him Because He Kinda Looks Wise' thing. However, with Prof. Cox, we've got someone younger and less eccentric and as such, a bloke who you would love to go for a pint with so he could blow your brains out with weird scientific and philosophical ideas. He also looks like a bloke who doesn't mind going for a pint. AND he works just up the road from me (cue: Stalkingmof).

In this show, he somehow makes mind-melting science seem chummy, affable and accessible. Now, you may argue that Prof. Robert Winston does the same... but Cox was asking questions so mind-bending and so hard to grasp... yet somehow, a thicko like me completely got it!

I mean, Cox asked things like 'Why do we go into the future at the rate we do?' and tried to explain how one theory sees time as a material, something that we move though and thereby, if that's the case, and it's almost a tangible thing, then our future already exists somewhere, just as our present and past do. Head. Fuck.

He then gets a load of other Big Thinkers and one of them shows how the Fourth Dimension could work, with 'Brane Worlds. In a crude blackboard drawing, we're shown that our reality exists in some space worm farm, our 3D world in a pane, or membrane, and that other realities exist in parallel membranes and, the distance between the two is a fourth dimension. It's then argued that two membranes may have touched to make our Big Bang happen. Whaaaa'? Like some interdimensional fault line collision, creating an entire universe! JEEEZ!

All these weird and head-wrecking ideas we wonderfully conveyed by Prof. Cox (once in D:Ream and a stadium rock band that supported Europe who did 'The Final Countdown') in a manner that anyone watching could go along for the ride and have every single notion they had about absolutely anything challenged.

This was, by miles, the best science show of 2008. In fact, this is a show I'll talk about for years to come, no doubt. I feverishly sent texts to friends to make sure they catch this on iPlayer. It was a phenomenal piece of television that has left me completely ga-ga. In Prof. Cox, we've got a new and friendly face of science on TV. What a guy, and what an astonishing television programme.