Forget Bear and his dim celebs. This was a real survival lesson
WHILE Bear Grylls torments his gaggle of dim narcissists on Celebrity Island under the pretext of showcasing survival skills, elsewhere, wildlife cameraman Gordon Buchanan has some genuine advice for castaways.
In the first episode of Tribes, Predators And Me ( BBC2), he discovered the three laws of spearfishing. No 1, wear a shirt — white skin scares the prey away. No 2, don’t splash: it frightens the fish. And No 3, if you meet a shark, stare it in the eyes.
Quite how you’re supposed to do that when it’s biting your head off, Gordon didn’t explain.
The sense was never far away that he found life so surreal with the Owari people of the Solomon Isles in the South Pacific, that sometimes it bordered on the ludicrous.
He laughed nervously as village warriors gave him a ritual greeting, before he had even stepped off the boat, waving broad-headed spears and shrieking: ‘ Who are you and what are you doing here?’
And he was literally gibbering with fear as they led him into the sea on a moonless night, to hunt the fish as they slept. Desperate to catch anything and get away, Gordon made a grab for a crayfish. Its spines slashed his hand open, and the blood instantly attracted sharks. Stare back — and don’t blink!
On dry land, the cousins who were his teachers seemed genuinely angry that this visitor was such a klutz. He sank their canoes just by sitting in them. And though he couldn’t catch his own supper, tradition dictated that as a guest he got the biggest portions.
All this was far more entertaining than the self-pity and attentionseeking of the Bear Grylls bunch. And the documentary took a sharp twist when Gordon demonstrated what he do well: wildlife photography.
Baiting a camera trap with crayfish, he caught footage of a wealth of sea-life, including creatures that even the Owari huntsmen rarely saw. The villagers crowded round in awe to see the pictures.
The programme hadn’t finished educating us either. The last 20 minutes were given over to evidence that the Asian hunger for shark’s fin soup risks wiping out all the ocean’s fish. More than 10,000 sharks are killed every hour, day and night, throughout the year, for their fins. But without sharks, the world’s coral reefs will be overrun by smaller predators that gobble all the fish eggs. And without fish, the reefs will vanish, too.
The oceans need sharks. That was the real survival lesson.
How on earth Safe House (ITV) has survived for a second season is unfathomable but the crime drama is back, without Christopher Eccleston. He is replaced by Stephen Moyer, as former copper Tom who runs a refuge for families living in fear of serial killers. Strangely, business is quiet, despite the epidemic of serial killers currently on TV, so Tom gatecrashes a police investigation run by a protegee. He drums up interest by approaching anyone who has recently had a loved one abducted in terrifying circumstances, and soon the guest bedrooms are filled again.
This safe house is supposed to be in Anglesey, which is a bit odd because everyone either has London or Irish accents.
But that’s not as odd as the killer, who likes breaking into people’s homes and building wigwams from blankets in their sitting room.
For some reason, the Press call him The Crow. I suppose The Red Indian would be politically incorrect.
It’s all tosh but it does co-star the brilliant Jason Watkins. Can he survive this script? We’ll see.