Purest animal instincts
IN years to come I fear no one will be allowed to watch programmes like DAVID ATTENBOROUGH’S ZOO QUEST IN COLOUR (BBC4). The BBC series Zoo Quest, which launched Attenborough’s broadcasting career, began in 1954. It featured a youthful Attenborough, along with cameraman Charles Lagus and the director of London Zoo’s reptile house, Jack Lester, tramping the globe in search of exotic stock.
Shot in black and white, voiced in cut-glass English and interspersed with rather awkward studio scenes, it was very much a thing of its age.
Even the discovery of three colour films from the early days (edited together into last night’s programme) couldn’t disguise the antiquity of the venture. Here were these three white chaps in safari suits, snatching wildlife from the bush, as if they had the perfect right to do it.
In between times, as if filming another sort of wildlife, they captured tribal ceremonies and village routines, with a marked fondness for sequences including young, bare-breasted ladies.
On those grounds perhaps the sorts of people who wish to ban words and remove statues would probably order Zoo Quest chucked into a skip. In doing so they would be ignoring the most important thing about history.
It is a record of ourselves, not least of our mistakes, and if we don’t have the chance to learn from them, as a famous philosopher once said, we are doomed to repeat them. There was, it’s true, something uncomfortable about watching Attenborough and Co. adopt a baby chimp as a mascot.
The same went for the ranks of collected specimens, some so clearly in need of their mothers that they had to be hand fed every few hours. That was then though.
What’s also preserved in the record is an innocent, uncynical enthusiasm for the world being discovered. Looking back on the footage, Attenborough described the first trip to West Africa.
As they stepped off the plane onto a grass runway, they spotted a chameleon in the bushes, next to that, a mantis. The restored colour footage from these early adventures was exquisite, superior to many of today’s TV images.
It was like stepping into the boyhood of broadcasting itself, a time when three, untried, relative nobodies could go off and film their adventures, learning on the job and changing roles as it suited.
The most touching sequence was the one with the Guyanese village lads, swimming with their pet capybaras. They were like a mirror image of Attenborough, Lester and Lagus, splashing about in a world that has now gone.
If you sat some people in a pub and asked them to jot down all the clichés of women’s prison dramas, they’d probably come up with the script of LOCKED UP (C4).
This Spanish import has the lot, from the communal shower scenes to the hunky guards and the innocents banged up solely because they loved the wrong bloke.
In homage to the massive laundry press in Prisoner Cell Block H, they even had someone boiled alive with a steam gun. I knew it was going to be as a dodgy as a three-day old paella when I saw the opening sequence, in which a good looking woman stared at a canary in a cage.
After the obligatory strip search and “I shouldn’t be in here,” scene, we then saw her, locked up, in a bright yellow jumpsuit. Just like a canary. Or should we say, a bit of a turkey?