Going wild about Japan
THERE are certain kinds of animal lovers who love animals because they really don’t like people. Naturalists and wildlife experts are in a different category, though. The legendary David Attenborough has spent so much of his career depending on the know-how of camera operators, sound recordists and local guides, that he must know as much about human nature as the kind found under leaves and down burrows.
Steve Backshall, a more recent recruit to the ranks, is of a similar stamp, as his stint in JAPAN’S NORTHERN WILDERNESS (Saturday, BBC2) proved. We’ve seen him chatting away fluently to Indonesian fishermen in other films, and Saturday’s showed off a solid grasp of Japanese, too. The wildlife of Japan’s remote, chilly north was much in evidence, from the snowdwelling monkeys to the serow, a sort of goat-antelope thing that looks like it comes from the pages of a children’s story.
Far more of the programme, though, in which Steve and his wife, the Olympic athlete Helen Glover, toured the quieter parts of Japan, was focused on the humans living there. They took the cosy train (as it’s affectionately known), an old chugger that bears about as much resemblance to the Bullet Train as a fish does to a bicycle.
This crosses the wintry marshes, heated by coal stoves, over which, for a fee, the bloke pushing the snack trolley will grill some squid for you. Later, they visited a spot popular with the Shugendo sect, who stand under freezing waterfalls in order to purify their minds.
On the sacred Kinkasan Island, they visited an 8th century pagoda that has resisted earthquakes, either due to divine intervention or because 8th century architects understood something 21st century ones don’t. Just like every British church, the pagoda on Kinkasan asks for a donation for the roof.
In this case, visitors purchase copper tiles and write their names and addresses on them, so that the gods know exactly who to bless.
It felt like the opposite of almost every Japanese TV adventure we’d seen before, not a neon sign or a bubble hotel in sight, yet still, clearly, celebrating the distinct otherness of this far-off land.
Remaining in the East, DARA AND ED’S ROAD TO MANDALAY (Sunday, BBC2) kicked off a three-part Asian adventure in Malaysia. Comedians can be the very worst people to travel with (in the armchair sense and otherwise), too bothered about making cracks to learn anything about the places they’re in. Dara O’Briain and fellow comic Ed Byrne have a gentle humility, however, that allows them to be funny without poking fun.
They were visibly unsettled when they visited the reclusive Batek people in the rain forest. A group of women appeared, walked past them without a glance and then led them into their jungle settlement.
Sack races and the classic egg and spoon, sort of broke the ice with the Batek kids but the adults remained on the fringes, quiet and solemn and as unsure about their visitors as they were about their future in this fast-changing world.
Talking of rain forests, crime thriller HINTERLAND (Saturday BBC4) was back, presenting a vision of Wales so different from Cardiff or Swansea, or London that it might as well be somewhere off the coast of Finland.
Remote farmsteads, ramshackle chapels, bursts of the Welsh language and the non-stop drizzle make each mystery feel as if it could only happen there.