Some Attenborough insight would help.
It was a phrase David Attenborough would surely never utter. Certainly not while giggling.
“I never thought watching fish vomiting could be this much fun!”, Dr Helen Czerski told us excitedly as she explained how the tiny creatures avoid being eaten by making themselves lighter.
Helen and her colleague, Patrick Aryee, are a new species of wildlife presenter and, on this evidence, worthy of study themselves.
Why were they frequently to be seen standing motionless staring into the middle distance? Why was one of them waving a large net around in the air? And why did they keep repeating everything?
If they told us once that animals can see things humans can’t, they told us a dozen times.
You’d think the title of the programme would have been a clue to the fact that we were about to shown some extraordinary stuff, but they felt the need to hammer the point home. Again and again.
Dumbing down? Not a chance. In the space of a few minutes the terms “habituated wolf” and “apex predators” were thrown into the commentary without explanation. At which point my wife and I stared blankly at each other.
The programme did include some extraordinary stuff, such as footage showing that a dragonfly has lightning-fast reactions which allow it to catch a midge in flight.
Sadly it needs bright blue skies to do so, meaning we can’t expect much help from them in dealing with the infamous Scottish midge.
We also learned that almost all the eyes on Earth are the size of an orange or smaller, but that the giant squid has eyes the size of a human head.
Interesting though it was, I feel sure David Attenborough and his ilk could have told us everything this told us, but in half the time without the endless repetition.
I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have felt the need to bring up a vomiting fish, either.
Supersenses: the Secret Power of Animals, BBC2, Monday, 9pm.
Switch it off!
Celebrity Big Brother, Channel 5.
When the “stars” have to spend most of the first programme explaining to each other who they are, you have to question the use of the word celebrity in the title.
Most viewers would surely have struggled to name more than two or three of them if they hadn’t been captioned. Evict them all.
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