Glad to know I'm not the only one who finds Cox incredibly annoying.
FWIIW, the exploratorium in SF and the Boston Science Museum both have experiments of this nature. It is a cool vacuum chamber though. Reading some of the NASA early docs on building such things can be quite fun.
I'd never heard of him before this morning, but this style of overly-polished TV production is common in the US as well. One of the things that irritates me about it is that they expend significant budgets on presenting and dramatizing quite basic things in science (which is a good thing) but all this experiential/eye-candy stuff comes at the expense of covering less material.
If you're looking for science documentaries with a little more depth, look at the series done by Jim Al-Khalili (eg., "Atom", "Absolute Zero" or "Chemistry: A Volatile History") and Michael Moseley ("The Story of Science").
In "The Story of Science", Moseley covers much the same ground as James Burke's famous "Connections" (and also his highly-esteemed "The Day thee Universe Changed") -- albeit in a more literal and less literary angle -- or indeed Sagan's eminent "Cosmos".
Al-Khalili is a physicist, though, and I think his documentaries are more to the point than Cox's, even if they're also full of excellent photography. Definitely less bubbly.
