Television - A tale of Big Bang physics that doesn't cheapen the science by Andrew Billen Hawking (BBC2)

Science is not theatre, Stephen Hawking's supervisor told him in Hawking (9pm, 13 April) after he had stood up and made a fool of Fred Hoyle at a public lecture. Clearly not - but for dramatists the question is whether it can be made into theatre. Or are boffins, who spend their days looking down microscopes and balancing equations, inherently undramatic?

That Hawking did stand up to Hoyle - or at least that dramatic licence allowed the writer, Peter Moffat, to say he did - provides the answer. Hoyle, as portrayed by Peter Firth, was gruff and self-satisfied. His steady-state theory of the universe - that it has been around for ever and ever shall be - was a symptom of his complacency. Yet there was also vulnerability in him, as if he knew, deep down, that his sums might not add up.

In Hawking, the belligerent parvenu, granted a sneak look at Hoyle's paper, wiped the blackboard clear of his equations and, like Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting, spent the night scribbling his own on it. His question at the lecture was a cathartic and dramatic moment in a film that, anyway, had all the elements of great drama - a story in which a man beset by terrible difficulty is absolved by problems greater than himself. Personal tragedy meets universal significance. Not for nothing did Moffat have Hawking go to see a West End production of Hamlet.

The other reason he went there was so that Hawking could react to the Dane's line: "O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space . . ." Bounded in the nutshell of his body, deteriorating from motor neurone disease, Hawking made himself master of the universe by redescribing it. Moffat made it clear that Hawking was never above such imperial ambition. He presented us with a boy from St Albans who played Wagner at his 21st birthday party, successfully chatted up women in pubs with the law of relativity (relatively speaking, one of the film's less convincing mo-ments), cheated at croquet, embarrassed himself by dancing at parties with his stick, and tried to best his personal time for holding his breath underwater in the bath.

Time was of the essence in this drama, and its leitmotif. When did time start (answer: the Big Bang) and when will it run out for Hawking (answer: 40 years on from his diagnosis, not yet)? His father wanted Stephen's tutor, Dennis Sciama (another first-rate cameo by John Sessions), to set him an easy subject for his PhD so he could finish it in the two years left before Stephen was due to die. Clocks featured largely. One even ran backwards.

Benedict Cumberbatch was quite brilliant as Hawking, turning in a mime of his body failing under his flailing fringe that was profoundly lacking in self-pity. But he was helped by his fellow actors also not being required to go misty-eyed. Lisa Dillon as his fiancee, Jane, looked genuinely puzzled by her decision to marry him. It was a rather beautiful film, not just because it was shot in Cambridge sunshine, but because there was so much goodwill going around and so little false sentiment.

Only Hoyle, belatedly described in a caption at the end as having a "long and distinguished career" was demonised. "If you are right, and you are not," he barked at Hawking, "there should have been some leftover radiation from the Big Bang . . . Where's the fossil?" Moffat's coup here was to unite the main story with a long interview - featuring actors playing Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, the 1978 Nobel prizewinners - that had been interrupting it. The sound they recorded on a reel-to-reel tape recorder in 1965 was exactly that fossil: the noise of the three degrees of radiation that hasn't cooled yet.

The question of whether scientists have dramatic potential has actually been answered scores of times by Hollywood. The lives of famous scientists, following as they do the trajectory of inspiration, perspiration, rejection and recognition, usually make entertaining movies - from the two films about Thomas Edison in the single year of 1940 to the Oscar-winning A Beautiful Mind, about the mathematician John Forbes Nash, in 2001.

The better question may well be this: can science be made into drama without cheapening the science? The science editor of the Observer intemperately laid into Hawking for trivialising the great man's work. As an arts graduate, I am in no position to say whether the science in Hawking was hooey. I have a strong suspicion that Hawking did not realise time went backwards while sitting on a train at Cambridge Station which was apparently moving, but not actually doing so, and that he did not then chalk up his theory on Platform One. But that - rightly or tritely - Hawking gave the impression that science is graspable, and its pursuit noble, is surely a good thing: a myth worth propagating to a science-shy nation.

Hawking was the best thing of its type since William Nicholson's Life Story (1986), about Watson and Crick's discovery of the structure of DNA. Eighteen months ago, Life Story won the European Union's Midas prize for the best drama based on real science made in the past 50 years. My question concerning dramatised science is simply this: why is there not much, much more of it?

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the Times

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