Brainiac Live! – Birmingham Town Hall
A brilliant blast of science, silliness and seriously loud fun…
After the hectic build-up and busy days of Christmas, we enter that brief window where it feels quite nice to do… absolutely nothing! But let’s be honest: even though the kids have only just unwrapped a pile of presents a couple of days ago, it doesn’t take long before you fancy escaping the house – or at least until the tablets come back out.
So what’s the perfect compromise? LIVE TV! You can still chill, sit and simply watch. (Maybe enjoy a short walk before or after as well). It gets everyone out of the house and doesn’t involve screens. Enter Brainiac Live! – a fantastic way to blow away the post-Christmas cobwebs.
I’ll admit it upfront: neither my daughter nor I are big science fans. Ste (my husband) definitely is, and having heard good things about Brainiac Live!, we decided to give it a go. I’m really pleased we did.
From the moment the show began, it was loud and lively. Before a single experiment had even happened, the audience was already shouting, booing, cheering and laughing, purely for the fun of it. And then… the explosions started. If the performers hadn’t already grabbed everyone’s attention, they certainly did then.
The experiments came thick and fast: dry ice explosions, a hot water bottle being blown up, and even some “TNT” (okay, probably not real TNT — but who cares when it looks good?). One of the biggest crowd-pleasers was an experiment to see how fast they could spin an office chair in just 15 seconds. Once they’d attached a fire extinguisher and two rockets to it, the answer is, very fast indeed!
Between experiments, interactive brainteasers were displayed on the big screen. These gave everyone a chance to join in and were quick, genuinely fun/interesting challenges for both kids and adults.
They also added a lot of humour throughout. My personal favourite was when one of the scientists suddenly started dancing to Beyoncé’s Single Ladies… in a leotard! He had previously seemed like a fairly boring older man (no offence to him!) but that dance completely took me by surprise – he absolutely pulled out the moves. Lily’s favourite, unsurprisingly, involved a certain very popular “6–7” reference that had the kids in hysterics.
By the end of the show, we were all completely won over. It’s rare to find something that entertains adults and children equally well. If I had one criticism of Brainiac Live!, it would be this: we wanted more!
Overall, we really enjoyed it, and we would absolutely go and see another Brainiac Live! show. It’s loud, silly, exciting, and perfect for primary-school-aged children (recommended 5+), while still being genuinely entertaining for parents too.
Thanks for a great afternoon – and fair warning: I will never hear some songs in quite the same way again. I won’t spoil that part… you’ll just have to book a ticket and find out for yourself.
To read more and book tickets visit here. It’s only on for one more day in Birmingham, but hopefully they’ll be back on another tour soon as well.
