Maybe it was stage fright, but for a man who had vowed to educate the public about postmortem examinations, Professor Gunther von Hagens often appeared out of his depth.
The German doctor behind the controversial Body Worlds exhibition certainly paid attention to medical detail while conducting Britain's first public autopsy for 170 years at the Atlantis Gallery in east London's Brick Lane on Wednesday night.
Professor von Hagens repeatedly made reference to the "pathology" of the deceased's diseased organs, displaying the swollen liver, enlarged heart, inflamed lungs, multiple gallstones and a tumour in the kidneys.
But he struggled to saw open the skull, handing over his hacksaw to an assistant as the bone splintered, and couldn't find the pancreas. It was left to an English pathologist to step in and field technical questions from the 500-strong audience.
Cristina Koppel, a fourth-year medical student from Imperial College London, said: "I feel very embarrassed with the way that von Hagens has carried out this procedure without really explaining what he was doing.
"He wanted to educate but he couldn't do it. People weren't really learning anything."
As clinical assistants, PR, security guards and TV camera crews milled around the corpse before the first incision there was no denying the sense of drama about the event.
Wrapped up in white polythene and laid out on a steel trolley, specially equipped with a drainage tube, the body of 72-year-old Peter Meiss recalled that of Twin Peaks' Laura Palmer.
Although the professor, wearing his trademark fedora, denied he is "a circus performer", most of the crowd seemed more interested in seeing a unique spectacle than getting an anatomy lesson, cheering as the organs were hefted onto the tabletop.
Once you got over the initial shock of seeing a dead body, the dissection was no more disturbing than watching someone carve up a Christmas turkey.
Indeed, the only truly stomach-churning moment came when the bladder was slit open releasing a stream of stale urine that soon cut through the sickly sweet smell of formalin, a solution used to preserve dead tissue.
Bit by bit organs were removed, sliced up with a large ham knife and placed on what looked like roasting trays until the body cavity was empty.
When Professor von Hagens produced an enormous ladle and slopped out body fluids onto a tray you almost expected someone to say, "Ah, Bisto!" No wonder one of the Channel Four camera crew whispered: "I could really do with some chips."
The professor admitted that as the deceased passed away in March, his body was not in an ideal state: "The colour would not be so pale or grey if the corpse was fresh."
But, after it was revealed that for more than 20 years he had drunk two bottles of whisky a day and smoked four packets of cigarettes a day, you hardly needed a medical degree to estimate the cause of death.
Nevertheless, the size, shape and texture of the organs surprised most of the audience. The swollen liver looked like a bloomer loaf, the brain tissue was the colour of cooked chicken and the underside of the skin, flecked with yellow fat, looked like the bottom of a mouldering Axminster carpet.
Sally Pittman, a fashion designer from London, admitted she was shocked to see in the flesh the damage caused by drinking and smoking.
"When [von Hagens] was saying that the lung was attached to the pleural lining [the membrane that covers the lungs] because of the inflamed lung that was really, really shocking because that was the damage done not just from smoking but from drinking, " she said.
"I didn't know drinking would effect your heart and lungs in that way, I thought the damage was restricted to the liver."
Despite such reactions, many will remain unconvinced that this "postmodern autopsy", as the professor billed it, was either in good taste or in the public interest.
But for those of us who were there, it will keep us in after dinner anecdotes for years to come.