You read high level research journals, which require a subscription (or are $30 a paper!), for fun? Or do you mean his other books, which are on the scale of things just as devoid of mathematics as the Brian Cox documentary? There's a world of difference between papers in journals and the books Hawking or any other theoretical physicist writes. In "A Brief History of Time" Hawking comments how he's been told that each equation he puts in will half the sales of the book, so he puts in just one (E=mcˆ2). Contrast that to papers he's got on
ArXiv and you'll see that if he wrote books like he writes papers he'd sell about 0.0000001 books.
The stuff in his papers and the papers of other well known physicists who typically appear or are mentioned in those documentaries are extremely high level (else they'd not be the top theoretical physicists!). There's plenty of other academic physicists who don't full understand such work.
The whole point of pop science books or documentaries is to strip away all the details and just give the most superficial of overviews. Any mathematics which appears in them is almost never beyond A Level or
perhaps 1st year undergrads and even then you're just given an equation, not what the specific terms mean or how to manipulate or apply it.
Pop science books/documentaries are brilliant for getting people interested but once you've thought "I'd like to know more" and you open a textbook book entitled "An Introduction to...." pop science rapidly becomes repetitive. After all, its aim is to explain the fundamentals of science and the cutting edge of research is a long long way past the fundamentals.
), and whilst most the maths was beyond me, the explanations and theories weren't difficult to follow - and that's the bit that I'm interested in, the theories, the dreaming the cogitating as to "what if" etc... 
