NOT HIS FINEST HOUR
Attenborough pulled too many punches and this became an idiot’s guide to climate change
Special Forces: Ultimate Hell Week A brutal and cruel show that, while well made, was laughably macho and utterly repulsive Moving Statues It all seemed odd that they moved at such convenient times Climate Change: The Facts This was the David Attenborough idiot’s guide to climate change
Special Forces: Ultimate Hell Week RTÉ2, Thursday Climate Change: The Facts BBC1, Thursday Moving Statues RTÉ One, Monday
NEWSPAPER offices are highadrenaline environments, run to strict deadlines that demand everyone works as a team or we never would get the words on the page or the pages to the printers. As in all pressure-cooker professions, there are clashes and tantrums, and the air often turns blue, with no regard for individual sensibilities. Ten minutes into Special Forces:
Ultimate Hell Week, I had to face a sobering reality. Life in my game is a Victorian tea party compared to a week in the Army Ranger Wing, the small, elite force that, we were told, often engages on missions we never hear about.
Four assessors, now retired but who between them have over 50 years combined experience in the unit, immediately set about intimidating 24 volunteers (this effectively is a brutal gameshow, not a real exercise) and they succeeded by making them all strip to their underwear and stand perfectly still, then do squats in darkness, cold and wet. As one of the former officers said: ‘You have to scare the s***e out of them’, which actually was the longest sentence uttered that contained only one swear word, and a mild one at that.
The first test was a run wearing full kit that had to be completed in less than two hours. Two failed and immediately were sent home. Then came a yomp across the Curragh that also involved crawling through a stream. That exercise sent three more to hospital suffering from hypothermia. Two more quit as the attrition rate increased.
To be honest, I was getting more annoyed by the minute. I understand that to create discipline, you have to be tough, but this was nasty and abusive. Two recruits were hooded to make them disorientated as they were brought to face the assessors, and I found it deeply uncomfortable. Under the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions, it is forbidden to hood prisoners of war, yet seemingly perfectly acceptable to do it to your own.
We don’t appear to have any data on mental health issues in the Ranger Wing, but a quick internet search told me that there have been many suicides associated with a similar programme in the US Navy SEALs.
Call me a snowflake if you will, and tell me I’m lucky to have these men protecting me (and no woman
ever has passed the test, it seems). I hear those arguments, but I honestly found the entire process laughably macho and utterly repulsive. Technically, the programme is flawless and well cast (paramedic Debbie O’Reilly was the breakout star for resilience and guts) but, well, I quit. At least, that’s what I’d say if being polite; if I had been a contestant, it more likely would have been expressed with the same Anglo-Saxon abuse I had been subjected to.
We might need Army Rangers to protect our world, but we also need to do a little more ourselves. In Climate Change: The Facts, David Attenborough laid out the course of action we need to take to avoid a rise in average global temperature of two degrees, which many scientists believe will be a tipping point that will lead to more extreme weather events, and drought on a hitherto unimagined scale.
The problem was that, perhaps mindful of the climate change deniers who pounce on every fact only to refute it with cod science and anecdote (even President Trump appears not to know the difference between climate and weather), Attenborough pulled many of his punches.
Far too many predictions were qualified with ‘of course, that might not happen’, and far too little new information was supplied. Instead of being provocative, it felt more like a round-up of what we already knew, a sort of idiot’s guide to climate change.
As always, though, a single image can sum much of it up. This time, it was an orangutan attacking a bulldozer ploughing its way through a forest, a moving act of defiance from a creature who instinctively knows more about loss of habitat than most of us ever will learn. It was a reminder that while we often say we want to save the planet for
our children, we also maybe should remember we have to share it with other species too.
On Monday, RTÉ One revisited 1985, the year statues all over Ireland started doing the Hokey Cokey, drawing massive crowds to the likes of Co. Cork’s Ballinspittle. As it happens, I lived in London that summer and was subjected to merciless ribbing from my English friends, because it seemed like the story was on the news there every night too.
Moving Statues brought memories of this mass hysteria flooding back, and while those who saw the statues move (and some who saw more elaborate visions) still maintain the phenomenon was real, it all seems rather odd that it would happen for such a short period, in so many places, and at such convenient times (one statue of the Virgin waited until bingo was over, apparently).
Perhaps bored by all the fuss, the statues eventually calmed down and went back about their normal business of doing nothing.
That much at least I can confirm. I stopped at Ballinspittle one day and, trust me, not even a drill instructor roaring swear words at close range would have raised a peep.