Then we saw Beverly Hills Cop and we heard this great voice, powerful and completely scary. Berkoff's delivery and face seem to guarantee maliciously detached violence. Longworth says: "We wanted a Richard Burton-type tone and thought of Anthony Hopkins. The band wanted an actor who could imitate the voice of a machine. The piece summoned up a familiar futuristic nightmare of computers generating other computers and by-passing their human creators.
The inspiration for the album was an article about the hugely powerful IBM computer Deep Blue. And what, more to the point, is a dance outfit hankering after youth appeal doing putting the voice of a 60-year-old on its new album and single? According to N-Trance's mixmasters Dale Longworth and Kevin O'Toole, the story goes like this: they were about to go into production for their new album, The Mind of the Machine, when they saw Beverly Hills Cop, in which Berkoff appears as an art dealing villain, a variation on a role that has become his screen trademark, from the sci-fi corporate nasty in Outland to the Eastern Bloc rogue in Octopussy. What is Steven Berkoff playing at? Why is one of our greatest contemporary dramatists, the author of Greek and Decadence, hanging out with a dance band called N-Trance, a band known mainly for shifting ludicrous quantities of singles - "Set You Free" (3-4 million), the remixed "Stayin' Alive" (1.5 million) and "D.I.S.C.O" (still counting). Astrology proves one scientific fact: there's one born every minute."`Eyes on the Universe', the 40th-anniversary edition of `The Sky at Night', is on tomorrow at 11.40pm on BBC1. "With the millennium approaching, every crackpot is coming out of the woodwork. "There's only one man we need in Parliament - Guy Fawkes."And I have no time for astrology whatsoever," he says. Have you got any?'"A cricket nut who still gets hatfuls of wickets with his medium-paced leg breaks, Moore is content with life Only two species get him down: politicians and astrologers "What a mob they are in the House of Commons," he snorts.
"One wrote to me," he recalls, "and said: `I enjoyed your programme and wanted to buy an army tank. People write in to say, `I don't know what he's talking about, but I love Patrick Moore'."Moore gets 30 to 40 letters a day from fans, all of which he replies to personally Only a few are from loonies. His warmth generates interest in him, as well as in the subject. Even the guys on passport control at Heathrow ask for his autograph.
We had an afternoon off in America recently and went to Disneyland where people kept stopping him. "Whenever he talks about astronomy, he's bubbling over with enthusiasm - as though it's the first time he's ever talked about it. The astronomer was up until 2.30am on the morning of our interview "tracking Martian duststorms" "He's an eccentric enthusiast," observes the producer. We ought to be rather more sensible."In Morpurgo's view, Moore's boundless zest for his subject is another reason for the enduring popularity of The Sky at Night. Then I knew less in 1930 and even less in 1935.' The more you know, you realise the less you know Astronomy teaches us how insignificant we are. An astronomer said to me: `I thought I knew everything about the constitution of the stars in 1925.
