Michael Mosley gets infested with parasites for science and TV

Pick of the Day: Michael Mosley: Infested, BBC Knowledge, 8.30pm.

Michael Mosley with a miniature pill camera to examine the tapeworms in his guts.

Pick of the Day: Michael Mosley: Infested, BBC Knowledge, 8.30pm.

There’s nothing Michael Mosley won’t try in the interests of science journalism, the acknowledged master of the self-experiment. He’s probably best known for the fast diet eat-for-five-days-fast-for-two phenomenon that was all the rage recently. Mosley willingly endured a regimen of intermittent fasting and filmed it for the BBC in the Eat, Fast and Live Longer documentary. There was also the best-selling book (The Fast Diet, co-written with lifestyle journalist Mimi Spencer) that followed and the promotional tours.

The success of the diet has made him a household name in Britain and increasingly well known in Australia. He’s done for medicine what Kevin McCloud has for design, tying up the science and complexity of medicine into good stories, often with himself at the centre as willing participant.

He’s one of the few presenters who can make rather informed talk of studies and evidence interesting, always cutting to the chase before we mentally wander off. And like Grand Designs’ McCloud, he has an easy manner about him, a chatty style, a crisp, wryly relaxed kind of bedside manner.

He studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford but after a couple of years enrolled in a graduate medical training scheme thinking he might try psychiatry. He left that too after graduating as a doctor and became a trainee producer at the BBC where he worked for many years behind the camera before becoming a presenter.

He’s a man who knows a lot about TV as well as medicine. In this film he looks at the relationship we all have with parasites and the way our bodies play host to them — face mites on our eyelashes to amoebas that reproduce in our mouths.

It is, as he shows, a complex and intimate relationship that has evolved over millions of years. And in the film he infects himself with some of the most powerful and surprising parasites to find out how this fascinating relationship works.