Patrick Moore is a British television presenter,
astronomer, and xylophonist, famous for helming BBC1's 'The Sky at Night' non-stop since 1957. His trademarks include a monocle, a sharp suit, a permanent squint, and an overexcited manner; he resembles the archetypal '
mad scientist', complete with a
plummy English accent. In 2001 he was Knighted, and is now Sir Patrick Moore. He has a massive
telescope, despite which he is a bachelor.
He was born in 1923 and developed a fascination for space from the age of six. He spent the war years as a navigator for the RAF but lived an uneventful life otherwise, save for his passion for space, and in particular the moon, his charts of which were used by both the Russians and the Americans for successive lunar projects. Rather like Magnus Magnusson and Murray Walker he is inextricably linked to his programme (although since writing this, both Magnusson and Walker have been extricated).
Apart from the xylophone his other hobbies are cricket, conducting, and writing operas. He retains an infectious optimism for space and manned space flight which seems out of step with the modern world; he evangelised the ISS throughout the 1990s and, with Arthur C Clarke, lives in a melancholic alternative world where Apollo was a beginning, not and end; where Vietnam, the oil crisis, economic collapse and self-doubt did not torpedo the space programme.
To impersonate Patrick Moore, read the following text:
"Aha. So... it'snotentirelybeyondtheboundsofpossibilitytosuggestthatincertain... casesEinstein's... originaltheorieswereactuallyCLOSER... tothetruth... yes?"
There is also a controversial environmental scientist called 'Patrick Moore', but that's for another write-up.