He’s the best-known Briton ever to have boldly gone into space: the first to board the International Space Station, the first to carry out a space walk. Major Tim Peake even ran a marathon while in orbit. So why do I wince every time I hear his name?
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Jonathan Sacerdoti
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When I was growing up, shortly after the Apollo moon landing, the portentous language of that mission – ‘The Eagle has landed’, ‘One small step’ etc – had permeated global consciousness. So when space travel was depicted in popular culture, in music and film, it was often with the atmosphere of an existential psychodrama – in Space Odyssey (Kubrick), Space Oddity (Bowie), ‘Rocket Man’ (Elton). Even extraterrestrial animals had this haunted ‘It’s lonely out in space’ quality, as in the Swedish bildungsroman My Life as a Dog (1985), which hung on Laika the Soviet dog alone in doomed orbit.
And then, on those occasions when you saw the real thing on TV news, space travel having this unearthly dimension didn’t seem implausible. Moments like the spectacular and deadly 1986 Shuttle explosion did nothing to dispel the feeling of edginess around astronauts. So, while space travel was never really my thing, I was respectful of it and of those involved. And this attitude lasted right up until the moment, ten years or so ago, when I first started encountering Major Peake.
Finally we had our own British, household-name spaceman. But instead of David Bowie, he turned out to be more of a David Brent. Or an Alan Partridge. Coolness is perhaps an overrated virtue but conversely there are few things worse, I thought, than being completely uncool. And, man, is Tim Peake completely uncool.
He was born uncool. He comes from Chichester. His middle name is Nigel. His A-levels were in maths, physics and chemistry. This was a boy who wasn’t sitting with the cool kids at the back of the bus; he was at the front, next to the driver, comparing notes on how to avoid the roadworks on the A27 between Arundel and Crossbush.
Later, when the then helicopter pilot was selected from thousands of applicants to train as an astronaut, he underwent gruelling and intensive preparations, learning how to space walk in swimming pools, how to move about in zero gravity and all the rest. The one thing they apparently didn’t get around to was teaching him how to be less glaringly uncool. His go-to pose for media appearances on the Space Station was a big grin and double thumbs-up – something not even Sir Paul McCartney has been able to prevent causing an involuntary reaction of sheer cringe.
Peake dresses like a mortgage adviser from Basingstoke. His signature music choices for his ISS mission were Queen’s ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ alongside U2 and Coldplay, as if he were an ambassador for the Radio 2 playlist of 20 years ago. Even Radio 2 isn’t that uncool now. It got so bad during the 185 days he spent in space in 2015 and 2016, when he seemed to be on the news every week, that Peake actually became a national embarrassment. I was longing for them to bring him back to earth to silence him – a case of ‘Ground Control to Major Tim’.
Peake is the person you’d scramble to avoid sitting next to at the office Christmas party, the Facebook friend request you couldn’t possibly accept
When he later went on Desert Island Discs, his choices were, once more, shockingly bad: ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ (again), ELO’s ‘Mr. Blue Sky’, and – of course – ‘Always Look On The Bright Side of Life’, making him one of the cheesiest guests of all time. Peake is the person you’d scramble to avoid sitting next to at the office Christmas party, the Facebook friend request you couldn’t possibly accept, the man ahead of you in the queue at the bank who you just know is going to say ‘Mustn’t grumble’ when they apologise for the long wait.
He is currently doing media appearances ahead of a national speaking tour, ‘Astronauts: the Quest to Explore Space’, which kicks off in the autumn. I expect you’ll be able to get a tour T-shirt from the merch stall: ‘Tim Peake 2025’, with the dates and venues on the back – ‘Inverness, Aberdeen, Dunfermline, Carlisle, Kendal, Guildford…’ Just imagine how cool that would be – shudder.
But there’s a twist to this tale, a revisionist footnote. I had finished writing this a couple of days ago but it had left me feeling there was something amiss. That evening I felt bad… off… wrong. And during the long, sleepless night that followed, I had a Scrooge-like epiphany. Come morning. I finally understood why I had felt bad.
Because it doesn’t matter if Tim Peake is uncool. He is a nice man, a very nice man. He’s a much nicer man than I am. Tim Peake hasn’t got a bad bone in his body. He’s also incredibly talented – intelligent, strong, astonishingly brave. And he’s done something truly amazing, something almost no one else has ever done. So what if he’s not like David Bowie, or some orbiting Dostoyevsky? Who cares if he likes Queen or ‘Mr. Blue Sky’? It doesn’t matter.
And why am I still using the same metrics to assess and define people as I did in 1982? Why am I still mentally stuck in my teens four decades on? Maybe, just maybe, Tim Peake is actually OK and I’m the uncool one.
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