Somewhere between eye-opening and jaw-dropping: Sky’s Hawking – Can You Hear Me? reviewed

It is, of course, not unknown for a man to become famous with the support of his family — and, once he has, to prefer global adulation to being with them, before leaving his wife for a younger woman. What’s rather less common is when the man in question is almost completely paralysed.

This was the story told by Hawking: Can You Hear Me? and, in advance, it might have sounded an over-familiar one. After all, not only was Stephen Hawking one of the few physicists to become a tabloid staple, but he was also played to Oscar-winning effect by Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything. As it transpired, though, the programme proved somewhere between eye-opening and jaw-dropping. Hawking’s family talked about him with such frankness that it sometimes felt as if the director, Oliver Twinch, had slipped them all a truth drug rather than, more prosaically, spending five years building up their justified trust.

Leading the way in the candour stakes was Hawking’s first wife Jane, who limbered up by recalling that they’d spent their honeymoon at a science conference. ‘It was almost as if everything had to be sacrificed to the goddess of physics,’ she told us, with an unmistakably ironic emphasis on the ‘almost’. She also made it pretty clear that she’d married him, when both were in their early twenties, firmly expecting his recent diagnosis to be accurate: motor neurone disease would kill him within a couple of years. (In the event, he lasted for 53.)

Not that this cut much ice with Hawking’s equally formidable sister Mary. ‘My family had considerable reservations,’ she explained. ‘From the outside, Jane’s decision was unwise.’ That the couple went on to have children, she added drily, was ‘a surprise’.