It's the biggest show on the planet!

Photo: -Darren Robinson

HELLO OLDHAM: Professor Brian Cox at the QE Hall, Oldham.

OLDHAM'S Professor Brian Cox has broken his own existing Guinness World Record for the Most Tickets Sold for a Science Tour, having shifted more than 150,000 in total.

The broadcaster and physicist had previously hit the record in December last year when his UK and Ireland tour, entitled Professor Brian Cox Live, saw him perform to more than 75,000 people from September.

More dates have now been added ­- all this month ­- to cater for the high demand from fans, meaning the overall total tickets sold has now doubled.

Professor Cox will conclude the UK leg of the tour at his biggest venue to date, London's Wembley Arena, before taking the show to Stockholm, Oslo, Copenhagen and Tallinn.

He will be at the Manchester Arena on Sunday, May 21, after opening his show last night in Peterborough.

Professor Cox said that he is "very excited" with the forthcoming shows, as performing in bigger venues this time around is allowing him to use larger screens to properly showcase the "beautiful" high resolution imagery of various galaxies from the Hubble Space Telescope.

He said: "We have a really big screen, a ridiculous screen ­- it's a state of the art LED display, it's something like 30m wide and 15m high. It's huge, and what you realise is the images we've now got from the Hubble and Cassini, which has been in the news a lot over the last few weeks, they're such incredible high-res images, when you put them on screens like that and fill arenas with them, they look spectacular.

"I don't think anyone ever gets a chance to do it, to give them the presentation they deserve because they are beautifully detailed, and that's the most exciting thing."

Professor Cox said he hopes people come away from his show with a heightened desire to learn.

He said: "They will know more in the sense that they might not have thought about the vastness of the universe, but one of the only things you can aim to do in a show is to trigger a desire to learn more."

Professor Cox, who attended Hulme Grammar School, said he hopes to answer people's questions about the meaning of life and the possibility of aliens with his shows.

For tickets visit briancoxlive.co.uk.