TELEVISION
FT’s very own couch potato, STU NEVILLE, casts an eye over the small screen’s current fortean offerings
MonsterQuest
History Channel / Amazon Prime
The portentous music and narration strike up – it’s historical context setting time! These are, of course, pretty much interchangeable between one paranormal TV series and another. Sepia pics of chaps with sideboards; minor key tinkly music and underlying hum; a line drawing of an astonished, musket-wielding man in a Davy Crockett hat: “In 1728, Obadiah Drivel was out stalking loganberries on the shore, and said he saw a great snake plunge into the icy waters / a wild man, 11 feet tall / a bright light in the sky…” MonsterQuest doesn’t disappoint in this respect. In its very first episode it plunges icily into Lake Champlain, on the hunt for Champ.
The photo shows a blurry grey thing sticking out of blurry blue water
The brief history lesson over, the programme homes straight in on Champ Exhibit A, the Sandra Mansi photo from 1977, showing a blurry grey thing sticking out of blurry blue water. You just know we’ll hear more of this later, but first some anecdotal evidence, such as that provided by the splendidly monikered BJ Bombard. Looking not unlike the late Charles Napier, Bombard stands at the wheel of his boat with the sunlight glinting off the lake, his teeth and his epaulettes as he recounts his encounter, employing the audiovisual tautology beloved of this sort of series, in which action is matched to narration: “I got my binoculars out,” he recalls, getting his binoculars out and looking through them, “…and looked at the object.”
A deal of theorising follows, much of it based on the thing’s resemblance to a plesiosaur. The fact that plesiosaurs were (as far as anyone can tell) incapable of walking on land or holding their heads up for any length of time is no obstacle, as in the last 65 million years they could have evolved stronger fins, and spines, and necks, and quite possibly hats and dark glasses to evade detection.
To provide some semblance of balance, Benjamin Radford (of Skeptical Enquirer fame) sidles on and wastes little time telling us it’s a log, complete with a natty bit of computer modelling showing how a certain-shaped log would look like the Mansi pic. In fairness, it does steer clear of the more specious
Nessie-type explanations (circus elephants out for an early morning dip, carp swimming in formation), but the narration moves at a fairly swift clip back to the general tone of: “Yeah, might be a log, but it might be CHAMP!!”
“A crocodile shaped like a seal with a long neck” – as opposed to a seal shaped like a crocodile with a long neck – announces redoubtable cryptozoologist and Nick Nolte lookalike Scott Mardis. He meets Sandra Mansi in one of those fabulously awkward staged ‘approach– hello–handshake’ shots beloved of cosy programmes, and they chat amiably on a lakeside park bench.
What does shine through, though, as it does throughout the whole MonsterQuest series, is the undoubted sincerity of the witnesses. There are level-headed, bright people out there in all weathers, the year round, looking for answers; and MonsterQuest gives credit both to them and the audience for the ability to make up their own minds.