Seven Worlds, One Planet

Attenborough is back, and the BBC’s decision to schedule him in that Sunday evening slot makes drawing viewers as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.  However, shooting fish in a barrel is unethical and, probably, environmentally unsound, which means I am already making bad choices with metaphors and it’s only the second sentence of this week’s post.  If I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here can get with the times and acknowledge that insects shouldn’t be eaten alive for our entertainment, especially when the people eating them haven’t had proper telly careers for ages, then I can at least show our planet the respect that Seven Worlds, One Planet is very clear it deserves.  And by very clear, I mean smacking you in the face with it over and over throughout a single hour of television.  We’re at the height, here, of what TV can achieve.  Combining wildlife photography that easily stuns even the most soporific post-roast Sunday-evening eyeball into wholeheartedly acknowledging that everything ever on Earth is a miracle with undeniable demonstration of humans’ denigration of those miracles for our own gain, surely this programme will deliver the watershed moment where mankind stops it and tidies up?  (It being environmental naughtiness).

We all know something needs to happen, but our every subsequent action betrays a compromise of that truth.  I’m currently crawling through Connecticut on a train to Boston.  To reach the US, I generated a load of carbon emissions, but I’ll need to cross the Atlantic again by air to get back, so I already know I’ll be adding some more emissions.  I’m sorry.  Today’s been light on the old single-use plastics, yet I do have a bundle of garbage (American for rubbish) to throw in the trashcan (American for bin) when I reach my destination.  I’m sorry.  I stayed with a pal in New York whose building centrally regulates the heat for all apartments (American for flat).  The heating was therefore on too high and couldn’t be adjusted, but, no worries, the air conditioning kicked in to cool things down, burning energy at both ends in order to find the most energy-inefficient way to achieve room temp comfort.  We’re sorry.  So, can we rely on Sir David Attenborough to save the planet from climate change and plastic pollution?  The fact is, we shouldn’t have to.

Nevertheless, each episode of Seven Worlds, One Planet focuses on a different continent, detailing its unique and fragile ecological systems, so let’s review the story so far.

Antarctica

Penguins, seals and whales, with a backdrop of dramatically melting ice.  The guilt is woven in throughout, setting the tone for some uncomfortable viewing, but pulling no punches with the message that action is needed now.  We have facts and figures on population numbers that have dwindled or resurged at the hands of human activity, but there is retribution from Mother Nature when we see how seasick the production crew get as they sail to reach South Georgia.

Asia

Finally, a continent I have actually been to, though I am now of course racked with guilt at my carbon footprint following separate trips to China, Japan and South Korea.  This episode features the harrowing footage previously discussed on this blog from Netflix’s Our Planet: walruses falling to their deaths from Siberian cliffs.  Their plight is no less shocking this time around, though hopefully the BBC’s broader audience should draw greater attention to the living collateral damage my trips to the Far East have caused.  You’ll also weep for the orang-utan, both because this close cousin’s habitat is being destroyed so Iceland can make ads about it (I think) and because you’ll never pronounce the name of this animal correctly as it changes every few years.

South America

Never been here either, but we of course take time for the decades-old narrative about the disappearing rainforests.  This is chat that’s been in the media for such a long time that it’s become as easy to ignore as that rough-sleeper you walk past every morning on the way to work.  If, like me, the total number of hectares of virgin forest you have cleared personally in your lifetime is zero and you think that exculpates you, then you’re missing the point, you big silly.  But what do we do with the powerlessness we feel about the change we want to see?  This episode also delivers real novelty with animal behaviour never filmed before: pumas hunting guanacos.  I didn’t even know what guanacos were when the episode began, and now I am obsessed with them.

I’ll be catching up on Australasia once home, plus big player Africa is still to drop in the series.  I might confess early to expecting to be underwhelmed by Europe (the continent, not the political union we all want to stay in forever) as I’m not sure we can stretch foxes and squirrels out for an hour, but they might have found wilder cast members away from English suburbia.  Either way, this is the type of landmark content that makes me eager to pay my license fee (even if the BBC News app uses biased language to favour right-wing politics).  We can’t let down dear old David by carrying on as we have been doing.  I’m switching to Bulb, voting Green, shopping more at Co-op and haven’t put my heating on so far this year (mostly as I can’t work the new-fangled thermostat in my fancy newbuild) but these are drops in the plastic-filled ocean while New York is still giving out single-use plastic bags and I, ever the Millennial, jet about on fossil-fuelled aeroplanes.  Someone needs to stop me.  Someone needs to stop us.  Over to you, David.  We’ll do whatever you say.

Our Planet

You haven’t known true despair until you’ve seen a walrus inadvertently shuffle its immense mass to the sheer drop of a cliff edge, pause momentarily, eyes partially blind while out of the water, before helplessly shifting its weight an inch too far, beginning an unstoppable tumble down a hundred feet of rock face, fins pawing at thin air as its every bone crunches and cracks on solid boulders, its blubbery insulation unable to protect it as it lands crumpled and dead on the pebble beach below.  Those that don’t die instantly (or during one of the collisions as they plummet) lie paralysed in the freezing waves waiting for an end to their suffering.  Dear reader, I hear you crying out: why is this happening?  Well, the problem is us.  These walruses’ Arctic ice shelf has melted away so much on the Siberian coast that they’re forced to rest cramped in their hundreds of thousands on rocky outcrops.  Those escaping the deadly fighting that living cheek by jowl by tusk by 1,000kg body causes ascend coastal cliffs to find space.  But, they cannot see well enough out of water to get down safely, so they tumble, often to their deaths.

Filming this grisly and harrowing display is the Our Planet team from Netflix.  You might think that it’s only occasionally that a walrus slips off, or that the camera crew camped out for weeks to capture the moment, but this occurrence is common.  Never has the power of montage been used to such horrifying effect.  But, once that had passed, my next response was helplessness.  I was as helpless as those salty old souls careening down scree, all twitching whisker and beady, blinkered eye.  What could I do about the climate change that was melting their homes?  In fact, what can we do?  The screen you’re reading this on (thanks for reading, though, yeah) runs on from some sort of power source, and that power source probably has its roots in non-renewable energy.  So too, most likely, did the vehicles the film crew used to reach the walruses.  What can we do about their cruel fate when our entire way of living’s end result is this sort of dreadful circumstance?

Our Planet offers little by way of solutions, but its strength comes from forcing you to face up to the question: why do things have to be this way?  Just as Blue Planet II set the anti-plastic revolution in motion among the conscious classes, so too does Our Planet feel like the flame that might ignite explosive change for the better.  I promise I am doing my part: smugly parading around with my keep cup whenever I get coffee, shooting passive-aggressive glances at anyone still using disposable receptacles.  But this is the same look I give to any morbidly obese person chowing down on a donut or a litter bug throwing their fag end onto the streets of London, and, frankly, it doesn’t seem to be working: I still see more fat smokers each day than I ought to.  So maybe I am the problem.  I certainly was on the wrong end of the self-righteousness scale when my taxi back from a swanky media lunch was held up by congestion from the Extinction Rebellion troops currently occupying Oxford Circus.  But this blog has already firmly established the point that I am terrible.

But I don’t want David Attenborough telling me off.  That would be like having a very disappointed grandfather.  It’s one thing to want Ted Hastings wagging his anti-corruption superintendent finger at me as in some episode of Line Of Duty, but if Attenborough told me I was a twat, there wouldn’t be much bouncing back.  And this is Netflix’s strength, getting the ur-voice of natural history to do its animal programme.  He’s reminding us that this isn’t This Planet, or That Planet, or Some Practice Planet We’re Having A Go On, but that it’s Our Planet, and we’re titting it up.

Attenborough’s BBC shows typically wallowed in the majesty of the natural world before the environmental conscious sting was slipped between your ribs like a steely dagger in the last ten minutes, just before the exposition about cameraman Keith who hasn’t seen his family in six years while waiting for a nine-second shot of a snow leopard.  Our Planet’s finger wagging is woven throughout.  Here’s a lovely bird.  It’s dying out, because of you.  Here’s a rainforest.  It’s ruined, because of you.  Here’s a stunning coral reef that’s taken millennia to form.  It’s bleached, because you left that light on.  The panic really sets in during the quarter of the show taken up by showing ice caps melting.  Each time a million tonnes slips in the ocean, you’re convinced the ocean around you is rising.  I wanted to shout out for everything to stop.  Maybe I could rewind it and stick the ice back on and reverse the process by which we’ll drown ourselves.

In case you can’t tell, you need a certain resilience to cope with this show.  I had planned to ration myself to one episode a week, earmarking 9pm on Sundays for something relaxing to treat my eyes with before the final sleep preceding the return to the Monday through Friday strip-lit nonsense of office life, a sort of zoological Downton Abbey.  But it was becoming a sour full stop to my weekend.  In addition, the awesome visual feast of the photography left me unable to resist ploughing through multiple episodes.  I would just have to handle the guilt.

But is it entertaining?  Let’s be honest, this is competing with a glut of Netflix carbon-producing content.  Indeed, the first episode opened to slight disappointment.  Here, again, was a shoal of fish in the open sea, Attenborough wanging on about nutrients in the water as if someone has spilled their protein shake in the ocean, with dolphins herding the poor blighters to the surface and seabirds diving to pick off lunch and dinner until the whole lot is polished off.  Awe-inspiring, yet familiar to my jaded eyes.  But fear not, for shortly afterwards my senses were overloaded by more flamingos than I have ever conceived of, galivanting along salt plains in searing heat.  For the fair-weather viewer among you, there is plenty to enjoy and that you have never seen before.  You just need to feel guilty while you see it.

So, what can we do about that sense of helplessness?  I didn’t vote for Brexit, but it’s ruining my life.  I mustn’t use fossil fuels, but how else can I power my laptop on this crowded train?  Let’s face it, we are looking for a leader to overthrow the corporate interests that have trapped us in this consumption cycle destined for total depletion of resources.  It’s not going to be me, as snide remarks such as those I throw at TV shows here can only galvanise a people to so much action: perhaps a titter or a chortle, but not enough to overthrow governments.  Anyway, if that leader could step forward please, that would be great.  Either way, one principle will remain as true after the revolution as before it: David Attenborough’s is the only voice I can watch wildlife to.

Blue Planet II

One of the best things that can happen on telly is that David Attenborough will get wheeled out to narrate the most epically beautiful photography of Earth’s wildlife.  The BBC is currently showing a second series of The Blue Planet, following on from its 2001 predecessor with more fish, whales, corals and, er, Bobbit worms.  We’ve only waited sixteen years, but it’s been worth it.

There is no classier and more dignified voice than Attenborough’s.  He can make anything sound majestic and significant.  Imagine watching the dustmen coming down the road with a David voiceover: wheelie bins being emptied into rubbish trucks would take on a poetic beauty.  All the groupers he has watched being eaten in this current series must be so proud that their deaths in the mouths of reef sharks have been marked with a couple of dramatic sentences from this absolute idol of TV.  Surely the life goal of any animal is for their demise to feature in a BBC documentary voiced by Attenborough?

If this is what the license fee pays for, then the BBC are welcome to my money.  We pay about £9.99 a month for Netflix subscriptions just to watch old series of Teen Wolf and documentaries about prisons (just me?) – although I’m luckily able to surf a friend’s account and am therefore not paying anything (even though they keep putting the subtitles on and they’re in no way hearing impaired). 

Indeed, obtaining the awesome footage we expect can’t be cheap.  But then, at the end of each show, they explain to us how they got some of the most impressive shots.  I feel I would always rather be left wondering how on earth they have managed to film Bobbit worms ambushing fish.  There’s something nice about it being a mystery.  The explanation inevitably involves a whole load of people spending months and months in some awful place, all for a few minutes of footage.  Some poor cameraman probably didn’t see his kids or another living soul for months while looking for a little crab.  It feels like a waste of time and money, especially as I was probably whatsapping someone while it was onscreen. 

The magic also evaporates slightly when every episode comes back around to some sort of environmental guilt.  Cue image of a baby turtle wearing some sort of plastic neckpiece and looking forlorn.  It’s of course right that we must be shown this, but it takes the edge off the escapism the show otherwise provides.  Luckily, being told off by David Attenborough takes on an almost seductive element.  You feel very naughty and instinctively vow never to use another plastic product again.

And it’s that escapism that makes it perfect Sunday evening viewing (the main part of the show, I mean, before the environmental slapped wrist – I normally stop watching before it comes on).  Although, Blue Planet II can also be saved for a Monday night, when the shock of a new week and its first day hit home.  For some reason, Monday is always the most aggressive of all the commutes, but it can be washed away in a visual sea of lantern fish as they’re devoured shoal by shoal.  It might have been busy on the Tube and someone might have shoved you at Stockwell, but at least there weren’t five different types of predator racing to eat you and everyone you know.

That said, at the risk of great unpopularity, I have to confess to finding this new series slightly repetitive.  I’m sure most things were covered last time around.  There’s always a shoal being finished off in a feeding frenzy.  There’s always Attenborough explaining where nutrients are in the water due to various currents, enunciating the word nutrients until it becomes almost sexual.  Nutrientsss.  Each scene opens with some sort of curious image.  Shot after shot shows variations on the same thing as we are led to wonder what on earth this will be.  Is that a sperm whale?  Upside down?  I don’t know.  Maybe David will explain in a minute.  The problem is, that minute takes so long to come that it feels like padding.  The old confuse ‘n’ reveal ends up getting overused if it’s what frames every sequence.  I know I said I liked the mystery of not knowing how things were filmed, but I just want the straight-up facts about which animals I am watching straightaway.

But these concerns are minor.  This is must-watch TV.  There might be no snake island this time, which was YouTubed the Monday after broadcast over and over, but the drama of the real-life battles for survival that dominate the animal world easily outdo anything scripted and greenlit by Netflix.  And if you happen to be watching it in the nineties, there’s a factsheet to accompany the series, as Attenborough explains at the end of each episode.  You just have to phone up for it (again, in the nineties).  I hope Dave answers the phone.