If you can get someone to look at you the way Francis Bourgeois looks at a Mark 3-based electric multiple unit passenger train then you will immediately understand what love is. He is the Gen Z trainspotter whose passion for choo-choos has made him a star of social media and Britain’s favourite quirky broadcaster. In Mission to Space Channel 4 packed him off to the US to undergo various training exercises in a bid to realise his dream of becoming an astronaut. It was adorable.

And while he usually spends most of his waking hours with a GoPro fixed to his head filming his face lighting up at the sight and, often more importantly, the sound of locomotives, it is clear that he is not a vain man.

During his first test, a bloodcurdling spin in an RAF human centrifuge observed by the British astronaut Tim Peake, he quickly lost consciousness. Mission aborted. Later a sequence in zero gravity in the US was (thanks to much melodious piano tinkling) set up as a great epiphany until he asked his handlers for a sick bag. His predicament meant that the large egg-based breakfast we had seen him wolfing down beforehand didn’t drop into the bag but coated his face.

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The director Jonathan Levene knew he just had to train the cameras on this fascinatingly unusual man and he would get gold. “There’s a rather satisfying storm drain underneath that flyover,” Bourgeois observed after he visited one of many dazzlingly futuristic US space research facilities. “I was confident I was making a good impression,” he noted on an occasion when he clearly wasn’t. “The workplace banter was off the charts,” went his voiceover to a sequence when the workplace banter would have struck most of us as rather dull indeed. He even asked someone who could have played a key role in turning his astronaut dream into reality whether he would be “illegible” for space training.

But even when he was looking or sounding silly, this was never cruel. At a moment of quiet despair, he headed to a boozer to drown his sorrows, asking the bartender to leave the bottle — the bottle being Worcestershire sauce, and the drink being a virgin Mary. You sensed a man who was at least partly in on the joke.

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Bourgeois may be a child of the online age but he is also proof that the internet can sniff out the phoneys when it wants and make stars of people who are wholly genuine. We also saw how much support he receives from his many followers (so much for it being a toxic, soul-destroying cesspit for all your young). Of course his quixotic adventures into a world no trainspotter from Harlesden has gone before obviously had a team of production staff arranging access to various training centres. But it was also easy to look beyond the slightly confected conceit because he is so mesmerising to watch.

A key framing device was his relationship with his girlfriend, Amy, left behind but always in his thoughts as his challenges became more intense and lonely. Astronauts tend to be tough military types and that is not a description you could ascribe to Bourgeois, however kind you want to be. In the second episode we will see him wrestling with his life’s purpose and whether he could realise his space dream on land as an engineer.

When he encounters the enormous Union Pacific Big Boy — a freight train and not a spaceship this time — his thoughts get back on track and he returns to his first love: to the buffet car and beyond!
★★★★☆
Available on Channel 4 streaming