Human right to act silly
THOUGH I still can’t grasp why a series about people was called EARTH’S NATURAL WONDERS (BBC2), the final instalment said something important about mankind. In the Xingu National Park in Brazil, a dwindling tribe called the Kamayura risked death on a river-fishing expedition.
The braving of electric eels and crocodiles wasn’t a group of people doing what it had to do in order to stay alive but a group following its not-at-all-rational beliefs.
A massive haul of fish was brought back from the expedition to feed the warriors so that they could dance all night and please the spirits. Something equally aboutface was going on in Ethiopia where a village celebrated the arrival of a new baby. With infant mortality high, new life had to be protected. In the interests of that the family embarked on a perilous climb to a mountain-top church for a blessing.
If you listen to Charles Darwin every living thing, from an aphid to an ape, is engaged in the sensible quest to stay alive and make babies. Some anthropologists, desperately trying to make facts fit theory, would look at the dancing warriors and the mountaineering parents and say it all made sense.
Maybe the fishing ordeal brought everyone closer together.
Maybe the baby was at less risk of falling off a mountain than getting some nasty bug in the village. You’d have struggled to cling on to that kind of thinking last night, as far-off tribes were replaced by people more like us.
On a tiny island in the Faroes the men went on a perilous cliffscramble for bird eggs re-enacting something their ancestors did and they plainly didn’t need to.
In the Alps people risked broken limbs and frostbite, avalanches and death for the simple joy of zooming down a snowy mountain. This is what it means to be a human and it can’t all be made to make sense. In that sense, perhaps, we are the Earth’s one, true, natural wonder. A million years of daft antics and yet, somehow, still here.
Though I spend my life watching television, I struggle with other varieties of the visual. “Don’t you feel as if it is sucking you in?” said a girlfriend, as we looked at a big, doughnut-shaped sculpture in a gallery once (one smart answer from me and she was my ex-girlfriend).
When I watch shows like Grand Designs I wonder why everyone is so obsessed with natural light and in what sense a wooden kitchen unit really brings the outside in.
In some ways THE WORLD’S MOST EXTRAORDINARY HOMES (BBC2) proved me right last night. Double act Caroline Quentin and Piers Taylor were in Switzerland and at every property, the wow factor was provided by the mountains and lakes.
In other words, you could live in a Skoda or a skip and provided you had the same view, you’d be laughing (not that the Swiss police would let you hang around for very long in a skip laughing).
The true joy of this series, in any case, lies less in bricks and mortar and more about chalk and cheese.
It’s not the buildings but the sitcom chemistry, that perfect mismatch between playful Caroline and nerdy Piers that makes the whole thing sing. “Piers, Pier, Piers,” she crooned last night, grasping the architect’s face between her palms after he’d dropped some jargon on her. “What is a datum?”
If only every earnest expert had a sidekick like Caroline.