Daily Mail

Tear-jerking, superb TV ... and it’s a tragedy it had to be made

- CHRISTOPHE­R STEVENS

There has never been a lonelier animal than Sudan, the last surviving male Northern White rhino. he isn’t just the last of his kind, the last gasp before total extinction.

he’s a symbol of the obliterati­on of all Africa’s most magnificen­t creatures. Lions, gorillas, elephants, giraffes, cheetahs . . . they are all disappeari­ng at a terrifying rate.

earlier this month I interviewe­d rowan Deacon, director of the outstandin­g documentar­y Sudan: The Last Of The Rhinos (BBC2). She told me that, while filming, she took British conservati­on veteran Kes hillman-Smith back to Africa and saw this tough campaigner’s heart breaking.

Dr hillman-Smith spent 30 years battling to save the last wild herd of Northern Whites, in a reserve in the war-torn Democratic republic of Congo. She enlisted local people to protect the animals as their numbers slowly increased.

Then, almost overnight, poachers armed with grenade launchers and automatic rifles wiped the rhinos out. And when Dr hillman-Smith returned to the reserve for the first time in nearly a decade, she made another horrific discovery — elephants, which until recently roamed in herds of hundreds, are reduced to a handful of animals.

When BBC execs first saw this documentar­y, I understand they were concerned there was no happy ending. Scientists have been trying to make ‘test-tube rhinos’ using Sudan’s sperm and eggs harvested from the last two remaining females.

But in-vitro fertilisat­ion [IVF] for rhinos seems impossible. Deacon rightly resisted pressure to deliver an upbeat, hopeful coda, because that would give a false picture of the truly awful plight of Africa’s giants.

even if, by some lucky fluke, a baby Northern White could be spawned in the lab via IVF or cloning, extinction is already a reality. rhino herds, with their complex social behaviour and vocal calls, existed in Africa long before modern humans evolved. That history is over and cannot be revived.

The same catastroph­e is only a few years away for elephants, if they are killed at the current rate of one every 15 minutes.

elephants fare better in captivity than rhinos, but their exceptiona­lly rich emotional life is something that can never be replicated in a zoo or safari park. To see Sudan at his retirement home in Kenya is painfully sad. This programme resisted the temptation to be maudlin, and traced the rhino’s story in a tour de force of investigat­ive wildlife journalism.

We met the eccentric Czech naturalist who traded guns with Uganda’s war lords in exchange for animal export licences, and his daughter who used to play leapfrog over the rhinos in his Soviet-era zoo.

Surreal, fascinatin­g, tear-jerking and jaw- dropping, this was superb TV . . . but what a tragedy that it ever had to be made.

By comparison, The Week The Landlords Moved In (BBC1) was perfectly trite. Two tenants left for a week, so the owners could have a bash at living in homes they rented out.

There were problems with damp, broken appliances, overflowin­g bins and faulty plumbing. The tenants hadn’t reported any of this, presumably because they thought the landlords would find out by telepathy.

With the cameras rolling, all the problems were swiftly fixed. One grandmothe­r who couldn’t afford to pay for heating was even told her energy bills would be sorted, too.

Perhaps that touching scenario is re-enacted daily, all over the country. More likely, this show is just another slice of fake ‘reality TV’.

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