British TV personality, physicist and former pop star Brian Cox has spoken of his shame after he was spotted using powerful tranquilizer ketamine in a London nightclub.

Cox, was said to have been spotted “giving massive keys to himself and his mates” including Kip Thorne and Robin Ince, while espousing about the “millions and millions” of stars in the universe and molecules of ketamine in his nose before slurring his words and getting his hair in his mouth.

“He was passing keys around to everyone and laughing,” claimed a witness who said that at one point Cox began to loudly sing the words to his D:Ream hit U R The Best Thing to his bag of ketamine.

When first confronted about his ketamine abuse Cox claimed he was only using the drug to help study the effects of gravity and wobble – both of which are diminished when using the drug.

“Never mind black holes,” quipped Cox to friends before sniffing a key of ketamine that witnesses described as chunky, “I’m studying k-holes.”

“Gravity doesn’t bend spacetime, ketamine does,” continued a glassy-eyed Cox while nodding his head and slipping into a sleepy torpor and wetting himself.

Cox has reportedly been a keen drug user and dance music fan since his days playing keyboards in D:ream.

“I actually dropped my first pill in the Hacienda watching Danny Rampling in 87,” explained Cox. “I know I say in a lot of my TV shows that reading Carl Sagan’s Cosmos provided the inspiration for my becoming a physicist but that’s just something I tell people, the summer of love is what really inspired that decision.”

“I don’t even know who Carl Sagan is,” he added.

Cox follows a long list of celebrities who’ve had run-ins with drugs including Jamie Theakston, Craig Charles and Daniella Westbrooke but unlike those he wasn’t smoking crack, he still has a career and his septum didn’t fall out of his head.

The physicist released a statement following coverage of the ketamine shame and has publicly defended his position “as a psychadelic journenyman, a psychonaut exploring the very fabric of the universe through drug exploration” and said that the Royal Society were all “off their nuts, that’s how science works”.