Look out for brave faces
THEY are obsessed with luck in South East Asia. Days of the week, colours, names, flowers, clouds, you name it, they’ll have a superstition about it. BURMA’S SECRET JUNGLE WAR WITH JOE SIMPSON (Saturday, BBC2) showed us why this might be so. Our presenter for this two-part adventure was a man well-acquainted with fortunes fair and foul himself.
In 1985 a daring climb in the Andes left Joe at the bottom of a crevasse, near death. He related this experience in his book Touching The Void, later a movie, and went on to pen a further six.
His father, as Joe told us, read them all and never passed a single comment. As much as this show was a tale of jungle adventure, it was also very much a personal attempt to discover something about a very private man.
Simpson’s late father Ian had been dropped in the Burmese jungle, far behind Japanese lines during the Second World War for the purposes of sabotage.
As Joe walked his father’s route it became clear what a dangerous, desperate and at times illconceived mission it had been. After a bloodbath on the outskirts of a Burmese town, Ian’s British-Indian unit, the Chindits, were whisked out, in such bad shape that many never returned to service.
Joe came to understand more deeply than he’d perhaps expected to, because his route took him through an ongoing war between Myanmar’s government troops and Kachin separatists.
Plans were continually being reworked and permissions forever withdrawn. In the midst of this Joe and his partner, explorer Ed Stafford, wandered through villages that had never known peace.
A philosophical old lady related how she’d fled her home during the Second World War, returned afterwards and used all the shrapnel to make woks. She wasn’t bitter about the past, she said, because she was too busy worrying about the future.
As a whole, Joe’s mission reminded us that there are many kinds of bravery. He was brave in confronting his feelings and talking about them. His father and his comrades bravely did their duty in a doomed situation.
Perhaps the least recognised kind of bravery of them all was seen in the little villages. Quietly trying to get on with life, never knowing when their luck would change.
ATTENBOROUGH’S PASSION PROJECTS (Saturday, BBC2) has, as a mini series, given us a grand insight into the man’s wide-ranging interests and talents and served as a fitting 90th birthday tribute.
For TV addicts it offered the chance to see his rarely shown, 1971 trek through the New Guinea Highlands. A 2000 quest for the lost civilisation of Easter Island was another vintage gem that received a much-deserved repeat.
Perhaps this is churlish but last night’s re-run of his excellent Charles Darwin And The Tree Of Life just felt like a simple re-run. It was hardly shining a light into an unknown side of Attenborough, after all, since he’s a naturalist like Darwin was. Also, it was only on our screens seven years ago.
That year, 2009, was the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and by the end of it, there was little about the man or his work that TV viewers didn’t know. What’s more, with interests ranging from musical theatre to tribal art and a career including a stint as boss of BBC2, surely Sir David had other passions to choose from?