He was walking down the street on his way to a meeting when someone caught his attention. Hanging from the back of a garbage truck, a man dressed in overalls shouted at him, a wide smile on his face: “Go mathematician, come Órbita Laika!” That was the exact moment in which Eduardo Sáenz de Cabezón realized that his weekly work explaining science on TV reached homes of all types and conditions. “He was very cool,” he remembers.
The scientist from Logroño has practically just landed from a trip to Boston, where he visited MIT and Harvard: “I was amazed, it’s amazing,” he admits, and jokes: “In some things, even better than the University of La Rioja.” Humor was the incentive that brought this mathematician out of the blackboard and the formulation to make him a star of the monologue, first, and of television, later.
Since 2019, its face has been that of Órbita Laika, the La 2 promotional space produced by RTVE in collaboration with K 2000 (The Mediapro Studio) which on Tuesday celebrated 100 programs. But before reaching it there are five years and four intense seasons that were in themselves an experiment.
2 was the only sensible option, no private company would have opted for something like that
It all arose from the restless mind of José Antonio Pérez Ledo, who at that time divided his time between the scripts for Buenafuente and El Hormiguero as a profession, and the monologues on the scientific platform Naukas as a vocation. “I wanted to do my things,” he summarizes over Zoom nine years later, “and it occurred to me to merge the two worlds that I knew best: television entertainment and scientific dissemination.”
That mix of genres unknown in Spain would be born in the form of a scientific late night on December 7, 2014 on public television: “La 2 was the only sensible option, no private sector would have opted for something like that.” Órbita Laika was unequivocally announced as “a science show” and was premiered by comedian Ángel Martín, cup in hand and Martian skyline behind him, asking viewers, not without irony: “Don’t change. Give me a chance, I can do it.” Some time later he would confess that he agreed to return to television four years after the end of I Know What You Did… because that was “the strangest thing” that had been offered to him.
The “fun science” that promised the space named after the Soviet dog called to be the first terrestrial living being to orbit the Earth evolved season after season. He was testing new futuristic sets inspired now by the mythical ship Enterprise from Star Trek, now by the colorful offices of Silicon Valley, with everything and their beanbags, and his helm changed from one comedian to another with the arrival of Goyo Jiménez. Little by little, the balance tipped more towards science than fun.
We had to be an unapologetic science program with a scientist at the helm
The first years Órbita Laika applied the scientific method to itself to calibrate the tone, until Pérez Ledo stood up: “We had to do an absolute formatting,” he says, “we had to be a science program without complexes.” For that there had to be a scientist at the helm, and that was when Sáenz de Cabezón came to this story.
The key to becoming a good disseminator is, for him, focusing on the public, their needs and doubts. He becomes the spectator and transfers the questions from the couch to the set with the naturalness that comes with improvisation: how does an induction hob work? Is it true that traumas are inherited? Each program addresses a topic proposed by Pérez Ledo, but each scientific collaborator adapts it to his discipline, studies it, and writes his own script: “We are prohibited from using teleprompters, and that is our great value,” says the program’s creator.
To facilitate the explanation of complex scientific processes, the Órbita Laika team is expert in locating materials for demonstrations, not experiments, they leave that to the researchers, with the right doses of show: “We are not El Hormiguero, what we do “It always has to serve to transmit some knowledge.”
Humor helps break the idea that scientists are untouchable and distant.
Humor is the unavoidable resource to make science fun, as its leitmotif stated. “Laughter breaks the solemnity,” says the mathematician, “it eliminates the idea that scientists are untouchable and distant, and it also creates community.” For him, the formula for the success of a program with a loyal and consolidated audience, which closed the eighth season with an average of 445,000 viewers and a 3.1% share, its best historical share and above the network average. , is an ode to hedonism: “Knowledge is enjoyable,” he says, “in fact, it is more enjoyable the more you know, a bit like the Kamasutra.” That’s where it is.
A common tool in the classroom and inspiration for new scientific vocations, Órbita Laika is aware of its responsibility in a world increasingly threatened by hoaxes and misinformation. And yet, she is clear about the limits of her power. Its creator establishes them: “Our audience is already open to believing in science, what is really important is to bring dissemination to the news.”
