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Dr Mark Lythgoe is the presenter of the forthcoming BBC3 series Compatibility, and co-director of Mapping Perception, a documentary screened at the recent Berlin film festival. He is a neurophysiologist and lecturer in radiology and physics at the Institute of Child Health, University College London. He is one of the contributors to Science Not Art, last week's Radio 4 Book of the Week. He is a judge of the Gulbenkian Museum of the Year award and his next public lecture is at the IMAX Theatre in the Glasgow Science Centre on 18 March.
At five I went to The Hollies in Didsbury, Manchester, where the posh people lived. I remember that my composition and spelling were absolutely appalling. My writing was illegible and I used to put a full-stop at the end of every line.
It never dawned on me until I got to St Anne's preparatory school in Fallowfield that these were private schools. My parents were brought up on a council estate and my dad had left school at 14 to become an apprentice, which involved making the tea in the local boiler works. We had an extremely frugal lifestyle at home.
There were 37 in the form and I ranked 36th, year in, year out. I realised my parents' disappointment - they didn't express it verbally but I knew because I wasn't getting their praise. We took the 11-plus early at St Anne's, but I failed and went back for an extra year. I passed and got into St Augustine's, a Catholic grammar school. I found it incredibly difficult. The boys, the sense of failure, the teachers, the vast array of subjects - it was just too much. My father had to drive me there and Jim McCabe, the form teacher in my first year, would escort me into the school.
My lowest grades were in English and languages, but in the final term before you decided which O-levels to take, I came second in my year in physics and first in art, with an A**.
My O-levels included physics and control technology, which is the practical side of physics. (I made an automatic garage door that worked wonderfully. I was generally quite geeky, making small explosions in my bedroom with my chemistry set. I was a wonderful "systemiser" - one of those who want to understand a system through its inputs and outputs.) I scraped through English with a C, while my science O-levels were As or Bs.
I went to Xavier Sixth Form College to do A-levels, where I slipped through the net. I felt the way science was taught was very prescriptive and not pertinent to my life. Science underpins our every moment, from cleaning our teeth in the morning onwards, but that was never explained to me. My father cried when I got my A-level results: I failed maths and chemistry and got an E in physics. My mother insisted that I apply to a diploma course in radiography at Salford College of Technology - or leave home. Only 50 or 60 per cent passed the three-year course in diagnostic imaging, but I didn't find it particularly challenging.
I had jobs in Blackburn Royal Infirmary, in Israel as a dog-trainer's dummy - getting attacked by Rottweilers under instruction - and in Australia as a researcher on board the "flying doctor" plane, looking for signs of TB in aboriginal communities. I knew deep inside that I was worth more than an E in physics, so returned home and enrolled on a one-year diploma in nuclear medicine at the Middlesex Hospital, followed by an MSc in behavioural biology at Roehampton, part of Surrey University.
At the same time I was a research assistant at Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital, where Professor Isky Gordon gave me a wonderful idea for a PhD. I now supervise PhD students, lecture in radiology and run an experimental MRI scanning facility for the Institute of Child Health at UCL. I am on a lecture tour round the UK, talking about the brain, and am presenting a television series on the neuroscience behind the emotions of attraction and love.
Yet I've never been to university - at least, I don't have an undergraduate degree. If people asked me where I'd been to university I used to fudge the issue.
When I wrote my section in Science Not Art, it was the first time I had the confidence to come clean. Getting my PhD was one of the happiest days of my life. As I walked through the streets of London it was as if the pavements were made of pink fluffy clouds.