At the risk of starting a argument about the accuracy of Wikipedia, here is his bio:-
"... Brian Edward Cox,
OBE (born 3 March 1968)
[1] is an English
particle physicist, a
Royal Society University
Research Fellow,
PPARC Advanced Fellow, and
Professor at the
University of Manchester.
[8][9] He is a member of the
High Energy Physics group at the University of Manchester, and works on the
ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)
[10][11] at
CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland. He is working on the
research and development project of the
FP420 experiment in an international collaboration to upgrade the ATLAS and the
CMS experiment by installing additional, smaller
detectors at a distance of 420 metres from the interaction points of the main experiments. ..."
I think he might have read a book or two. Maybe even did a unit or two in biology (I did a unit it music at uni, but you wouldn't think so if you heard my piano playing
).
I am not a keen fan of his presentation style, as Suzy says a bit slow and it seems to have a a lot of him "gazing into the distant horizon" but that's not the point. Like Carl Sagan,Neil deGrase Tyson, Brian Greene,
David Attenborough. and all the other people who have presented TV programs, some of them qualified in their field others not. The point of the program was to inspire and prick our interest, hopefully raising the level of interest in science in the community so that more people go further with it so that we have the scientists to do the research that will one day have some more of the answers.
Just for the record, I go with Carl Sagan's character, at the end of the film, "the universe is a very big place, so if we are the only ones in it its a an awful waste of space". 
Of cause there is, or has been other life forms, it just they may not survive, check out the Drake Equation.