Bradley Walsh takes new career move away from The Chase to pursue childhood passion

He’s the cheeky chappy quizmaster of The Chase whose acting prowess has won him roles in Doctor Who and but now Bradley Walsh is determined to show he’s the ultimate chameleon by combining his engineering past with his secret passion – Egypt.

The 64-year-old presenter, actor, comic and former apprentice engineer at Rolls Royce has turned his hand to a serious documentary – albeit with the occasional jokes – as he explores the North African country’s “Cosmic Code” for the Sky History Channel.

The new documentary debates whether the ancient Egyptians could have ever actually built the pyramids, and if they didn’t, then who did? Wearing an Indiana Jones hat and humming the theme tune from Raiders of the Lost Ark, Bradley is determined to discover if aliens built the awe-inspiring ancient structures… as many conspiracy theorists believe.

“I’ll be asking all the questions and we shall find out once and for all,” he promises.

Bradley developed his “very long fascination” with the ancient engineering of Egypt’s pyramids after beginning his working life at Rolls-Royce’s aircraft engine factory in Watford.

“It’s an anomaly, an absolute cornucopia of ideas and fantasies. Via my engineering and technical drawing skills, I became fascinated by the pyramids,” he explains.

“My interest all began with Cleopatra 7th – that’s Liz Taylor to you!”

He begins with the premise that the construction feats of our ancient forebears could only have been possible with the participation of some “otherworldly” or extraterrestrial influence.

And his reasoning is based on his little-known maths wizardry.

“I was good at trigonometry, I was really good at angles. I can see them. Mathematics is my thing. I realised that there was no way that the ancient Egyptians could have ever built those pyramids,” he says.

The resulting three-part series, Egypt’s Cosmic Code, charts Bradley’s first-ever trip to Egypt in search of answers to some of ancient history’s biggest mysteries – Who built the pyramids? Why and how? Could the Ancient Egyptians have had supernatural abilities, and is the Great Sphinx much older than we think?

It’s both an informative and entertaining history lesson with one of television’s best presenters.

Having learned that the Great Pyramid at Giza stands 147 metres tall and was built using two and a half million stone blocks, Brainy Bradley quickly does the maths to work out how one stone must have been laid every two and half minutes.

Put simply, is this the work of geezers or gods? Bradley rules out the former, saying it would have been impossible for ordinary mortals given how difficult it was to even crack a stone without modern-day drills, let alone move them into position without any hydraulic lifting equipment.

Yet one of the world’s top Egyptologists, Meredith Brand, 39, who takes Bradley deep inside the pyramids to areas forbidden to tourists, is happy to disagree.

“It is very challenging to think how this could have happened so I wanted to show Brad how it was done, step by step, how the technology changed over time,” she says

And to prove her theory, Meredith takes Bradley to see the Step, the Bent and the Red pyramids in Egypt, that were all built before the Great Pyramid at Giza.

“Close up we have a sense of what has gone wrong and we can see that there was an element of trial and error,” she says. “The architects took those lessons and applied them to the pyramid at Giza.”

Meredith even points out the cracks at the Red Pyramid which was built on sand not stone to which Brad replies, “We’ve all had builders like that.”

It was while working on helicopter engines at Rolls-Royce that Bradley first questioned the long-accepted theories about the construction of the pyramids, which date back over 4,500 years.

The largest formation, the Great Pyramid of Giza, towers above the dusty landscape some 481-feet-tall and is the tomb of King Khufu who ruled during Egypt’s Fourth Dynasty.

Helping Bradley discover the answers is investigative historian Tony McMahon.

“There are three theories,” he says. “One is the one accepted by most historians that it was the ancient Egyptians. Two, it was aliens, or three it was some kind of super-advanced civilisation that has disappeared into the midst of history.”

Over the course of the series, Bradley travels across Egypt, uncovering secrets hidden within the pyramids, the Sphinx, and the tomb of Tutankhamun. He is given exclusive access to the burial chamber of the Pharoah Khufu deep inside the Great Pyramid, climbs 832 steps vertically, “the length of three or four football pitches”, to reach the sacred site and wonders at the markings on the wall where the portcullis would have been at the entrance to the tomb where the huge rock would have crashed down to seal it.The main premise of the documentary, though, is built around the Cosmic Code, a concept that suggests the universe, mathematics, and even ancient monuments like the Pyramids of Egypt might all be linked through hidden patterns and knowledge.

For maths whizz Bradley, it’s a numbers game he can’t help but want to believe.

Others see the Cosmic Code as a blueprint for the universe, shaping history and even hinting at what’s to come.

Physicist Heinz R. Pagels first used the term ‘Cosmic Code’ in his 1982 book, The Cosmic Code: Quantum Physics as the Language of Nature. His work explored the foundations of physics and quantum mechanics, highlighting the contributions of Albert Einstein, Max Planck and John Stewart Bell and his ideas were founded purely in science rather than ancient history or secret knowledge.

Over time, the idea of a hidden “code” in the universe took on a life of its own. The Great Pyramid of Giza is one of the most studied structures in history. Like other historical monuments such as Stonehenge, the more experts examine its design, the stranger the details become.The strangest is the link they have discovered between the Great Pyramid and Pi (the mathematical constant, approximately equal to 3.14159, that is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.)

The pyramid’s dimensions come surprisingly close to encoding π (pi), a fundamental constant in mathematics.If you divide its perimeter by height, you get a number close to 2π. Some believe this shows an advanced understanding of geometry far beyond its time. Others simply argue that practical engineering choices led to these proportions by chance.

As Bradley reels off an astonishing list of mathematical equations and calculations that link the measurements of the Great Pyramid to the Earth’s own dimensions, Meredith concedes: “That is a lot of coincidences but I am an archaeologist and work with the physical evidence I can see.”One of the most controversial claims in Cosmic Code theories is that measurements related to the Great Pyramid of Giza match the speed of light.

The latitude of the Great Pyramid is 29.9792458N. The length of passages and chambers in the Great Pyramid is 29-97-92-45-8 metres. The speed of light is 299,792,458 metres per second in a vacuum.

But the metric system came long after the pyramids were built, so is it just a spooky coincidence, or were they thousands of years ahead of time or an extraterrestrial connection?

Zecharia Sitchin, was an author fascinated by ancient civilisations, who wrote: “Ancient astronauts and extraterrestrial beings passed down cosmic knowledge to early societies. They went on to encode it in monuments, sacred geometry and even religious texts.”

However most historians argue that ancient civilisations simply relied on trial, error and engineering expertise not secret cosmic blueprints. Even if the Cosmic Code isn’t real, patterns do exist in nature and in the pyramids.

For now, The Cosmic Code remains both a scientific fact and an open mystery. For Bradley, many of his own theories on the pyramids, including that the Great Pyramid was a giant electricity station, are debunked as he travels around the country. “I’m really glad I am wrong about some of my theories. It just shows how ingenious the ancient Egyptians were,” he says. “It was one of my ambitions to see the Great Pyramid, one of the ancient wonders of the world, the only one that is left apart from the Hanging Baskets of Basildon.”

Everyone remembers a good teacher and Bradley is no exception especially as his teacher was the great-niece of Howard Carter, the British archaeologist who first discovered the intact tomb of the 18th Dynasty Pharaoh Tutankhamun, his house at Luxor on the West bank of the Nile is now a museum.

It was this childhood connection with the mysteries of Egypt that sparked his childhood dream to travel to the Valley of the Kings.

He says: “I’ve wanted to do this for such a long time now, since the age of 12. I’ve never been to Egypt before and it was an opportunity to be able to go and put right some of the wrongs from misinformation out there on the web.”

Egyptologist Meredith Brand, who accompanies Bradley on his tour of the pyramids, could see visiting Tutankhamun’s tomb was a “very moving” experience for him.

She says: “Tut was only 19 and died suddenly and unexpectedly, which we know because his tomb wasn’t finished.

“Unlike Khufu’s which was looted years ago, Tut’s mummy and his possessions are there.

“Bradley loved seeing his death mask in the museum in Cairo, and he was absolutely blown away by its beauty and the craftsmanship involved.

“He had missed seeing it when the mask went on tour, so he was thrilled to be finally able to see it.”

* *Bradley Walsh: Egypt’s Cosmic Code starts Tuesday March 18 at 9pm on Sky History.