Head in the Clouds - Owain Wyn Evans, Gavin Pretor-Pinney, Amanda Maycock

The Infinite Monkey Cage

BBC

Comedy, Science

4.7 • 9.4K Ratings

🗓️ 10 December 2025

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Robin Ince and Brian Cox look up to the heavens as they try to ‘de-mistify’ the foggy science of clouds. They’re joined by Cloud Appreciation Society founder Gavin Pretor-Pinney, climate scientist Amanda Maycock, and former weather presenter and drummer Owain Wyn Evans, for a whirlwind tour of our too often-overlooked aerial realm.

The panel explores how clouds form, why they take such extraordinary shapes, and how satellites and weather balloons help us keep track of them. They discover why low clouds cool the planet but high clouds warm it and why a cloud that weighs as much as a jumbo jet manages to stay up in the sky. From the physics of a crisp packet balancing on a cumulonimbus to the shimmering beauty of noctilucent clouds, tune in for this cirrus-ly fascinating episode.

Series Producer: Mel Brown Researcher: Alex Rodway Executive Producer: Alexandra Feachem A BBC Studios Production

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts.
0:07.0	My Christmas Mix is pure 90s festive nostalgia.
0:11.1	You know, the Christmas songs you listen to on repeat.
0:14.0	Ho!
0:14.3	Ho! Ho! No, no, no.
0:17.5	I'm all about the big hitting Christmas anthems.
0:20.4	Come on, guys. What about those tunes that really
0:22.9	Slay? It's Christmas Kitchen Disno season, surely. Give me hip-hop Christmas bangers every day. Those Christmas
0:29.1	tracks that are straight out of Lapland. Get all kinds of Christmassy. Just search Christmas music on BBC Sounds.
0:35.7	Welcome to Infinite Monkey Cage. New episodes are released weekly wherever you get your podcasts. But... If you're in the UK, you can listen to every episode a week early, first on BBC Sounds. Hello, I'm Brian Cox. I'm Robin Ince, and this is the Infinite Monkey Cage. Now, all of you, and I imagine there's been a few daydreamers here, when you stare out of the window at school, that's what they say, concentrate, what are you doing, staring out of the window? Well, for some people, it wasn't just daydreaming. It was practicing to become a meteorologist or a cloud expert. Or an astronomer, I suppose. Or an astronomer. What time did you go to school? I'm from Oldham. It was dark 24 hours a day.
1:14.1	From the sky was always dark, dark with industrial plumes.
1:18.7	You've not bought your clogs again, have you? Because they made a right racket last time.
1:23.3	I couldn't wear him standing on those volcanoes looking enigmatic, could I?
1:27.4	Because the clicking would spoil the atmosphere.
1:29.8	Oh, they're not made for going over cooled lava, are they?
1:34.2	No.
1:34.9	They made it wood.
1:36.3	It's the worst possible thing to wear, to be honest, walking through larva, isn't it?
1:40.4	Isn't it?
1:40.9	There must be something, well, paper, I suppose.
2:00.9	Oh, no. Oh, because we only had paper shoes in Oldham. Yeah, whatever. Anyway, today we're looking to the sky, but not as far as Brian likes to look. It's kind of parochial level of looking to the sky. We're going to go, well, really the level of clouds, the clouds that, of course, so often hindered your series stargazing.
2:05.6	Why were there always clouds there? Was it Dar O'Brien's head? Because I think because of the roundness of the head, they might have attracted clouds closer. Today we're asking,
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in 14 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.