SCIENTISTS have put Hollywood’s most outlandish plots under the microscope for a BBC series that begins this week.

Memorable scenes from films such as Fight Club and A View to a Kill are to be picked over for plausibility in Hollywood Science, in search of the silver screen’s most ridiculous breach of the laws of physics. Feats such as James Bond breathing underwater from a tyre and Brad Pitt making soap from liposuction fat in Fight Club will be put to the test in experiments conducted by Jonathan Hare, a Sussex University physicist.

Although many stunts are proved to be as preposterous as King Kong others turn out to be founded on remarkably sound science.

“When we start the experiments, I’ll look at the movie clips and go: ‘That’s rubbish, that won’t work,’” Robert Llewellyn, the actor who presents the show with Dr Hare, said. “Nine times out of ten, the one that I genuinely thought was a load of duff science proved to be the one that worked.”

One of the most spectacular experiments investigates whether Tyler Durden, Brad Pitt’s anti-hero in Fight Club, could really have fashioned the world’s creamiest soap from bags of liposuction fat stolen from a plastic surgery clinic. The idea of repeating the scene faithfully, using human fat, was rejected. Dr Hare added sodium hydroxide to pig fat in an attempt to make sodium stearate — the chemical on which soap is based.

“If you react fat with alkali, it creates something that closely resembles regular soap,” Dr Hare said.

“We produced something that was good enough to produce a real lather when Robert tried it in the shower, though I must say it smelt a bit rank.”

Almost as stomach-turning is a test of the late John Candy’s ability to wolf down a 2.7kg (6lb) steak, a feat that he performs in The Great Outdoors. Llewellyn managed just five hamburgers — about a fifth of what Candy apparently stuffed away. Dr Hare then created an artificial stomach to work out whether it is biologically possible to eat that much.

The verdict: not impossible, but highly unlikely, even for a man of Candy’s appetite. The average human stomach holds two litres; the steak alone would take up at least twice that space. “The Guinness Book of Records has stopped doing eating feats because people were doing themselves harm,” Dr Hare said. “You might find someone who could eat this much, but I think even John Candy would have struggled.”

The scene in The Score in which Robert De Niro’s jewel thief cracks a safe by filling it with water before detonating an explosive is based on much firmer physical ground. As water is not compressed as easily as air, De Niro’s character explains, the liquid will magnify the effect of the blast.

Dr Hare drops detonators into two safes, one of which was filled with water. “In the safe without water, it was a feeble explosion, but when we put the water in the safe, it blew the door off,” Dr Hare said.

Hollywood Science begins on BBC Two on Wednesday, April 2, at 7.30pm.

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