Philippe Cousteau, grandson of legendary explorer Jacques, on taking up the family business

Ashlan Gorse and her husband, Philippe Cousteau, are both human. It's worth making this point immediately because when you encounter the elongated, slender glow of them - that beaming wattage of people used to being loved by the camera - it's like shaking hands with a couple of charming aliens. Having landed in the desert that is the 11th-floor Starwood Preferred Guest Lounge of the Sheraton Hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui on a Friday afternoon, they look beautiful but faintly unearthly. Are they for real?

They come, of course, from Planet Hollywood, where they live, and its close cousin, Galaxy Television, where they work. If you recognise them - they're not yet stratospherically famous, although they're getting there - it's probably because you've seen Cousteau on CNN, describing his global adventures around the world's oceans, and Gorse on E!, interviewing celebrities on the red carpet.

You may also recognise Cousteau from a Gap campaign currently running here. Central MTR station has several enormous images of him (looking like a cross between Ryan Gosling and Jake Gyllenhaal), lassoed within a stripey scarf being worn by his equally glamorous sister, Alexandra. In 2010, the siblings were on Vanity Fair magazine's Next Establishment list for their environmental work, having, a decade earlier, launched EarthEcho International, an environmental-educational non-profit organisation, with their mother, Jan Cousteau.

And, yes, they're related to that Cousteau, the great Jacques, the Frenchman who co-invented the Aqua-Lung and who, from the 1940s onwards, introduced an ignorant world to a parallel universe that did, indeed, teem with truly gorgeous aliens: not a speculative one in the sky but a real one beneath the surface of the seas. Jacques had two sons by his first wife; Jan married the younger. She was three months pregnant with her second child when her husband was killed in an accident on his boat. The baby, born in January 1980 in California, was named after the father he would never know: Philippe.

Part of the glow from Les Cousteaux is surely attributable to newlywed bliss. The pair were married in France, in homage to Philippe Cousteau's ancestry, at the end of September (a chair was left empty, next to his mother, in honour of his dead father.) The day before this interview, as Gorse points out, was November 28, which happened to be both Thanksgiving and their two-month anniversary. They spent it in Hong Kong because Cousteau, in his role as president of EarthEcho International, was one of the speakers at a gala dinner that night titled "The World in 2014" and organised by The Economist.

Gorse, who left E! in June but is still fond of the words "cool" and "awesome", is now adapting to her new role as a member of the EarthEcho International team. This involves, among many other things, learning to travel light to exotic places; Cousteau only takes a carry-on.