Having been immersed in the arid world of Dune from the minute Frank Herbert launched the first book into the reading stratosphere, I almost fell over myself in my rush to see the movie the other day.

I was overwhelmed by excitement, not least because the film articulated those parts of Dune (and there’s plenty of them) that had become lost in the vast and, at times, arcane labyrinth of the Herbertian narrative.

Complexity was unravelled.

Here was the sisterhood of the Bene Gesserit made real.

The jaw dropped as the giant sandworms wove their way towards death and destruction.

Sorry if this means nothing to non-Dune readers - I got a little carried away there.

It didn’t matter that the science, weird philosophy and occasional kumbaya-ness of it all sometimes had me baffled.

The universe is such a vast template that anyone with a scintilla of astrophysical knowledge can bang on about it, and I’ll listen.

And Dune isn’t the only thing that’s made me wish I’d paid closer heed in Mr Burke’s phys-chem classes donkey’s years ago.

Let’s turn to Stephen Hawkins, he of the tinny voice and the brain the size of Jupiter.

I cannot hold hand to heart and say I didn’t get a word of A Brief History of Time because I did understand some parts.

These were the prepositions, the conjunctions and the personal pronouns.

So long as the book stayed close to words such as ‘and’, ‘to’ and ‘the’ I was right across it.

The minute I struck sentences defining Pauli’s exclusion principle on quarks, protons and neutrons, my grip on the story became about as solid as a ciggy paper.

I soldiered on, reading from cover to cover, totally mystified as to how the man could consider this intellectual food for the scientifically moronic.

However, the book’s been shoved on the shelf, sandwiched between At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig (surely the funniest travel yarn ever written) and The Fine Cotton Fiasco, Australia’s dodgiest horse race.

To round out the trifecta of abject incomprehension, I give you Brian Cox and nothing less than the entire story of the entire universe.

Prof Cox is easy on the eye, has exuberance in spades and doesn’t half know his white stars from his black holes.

Again, I found the intellectual challenge of his exposition about how the universe was formed and what it contains a bit of a battle.

It didn’t matter though.

Both the universe and the prof’s big white teeth looked stunning.

The planetary journey was spectacular.

And as was the case with Dune and Stephen Hawkins, I only got a rough approximation of what was actually going on.

When the four eps were over and we’d been swept on such a magnificent journey through space and time, me and Crawford turned to one another and gave our assessment of it all.

We’d finally got out chops around it.

We’d nailed it at last.

‘The universe is bloody big,’ we said.