Like birdwatching without Attenborough’s budget
As our knowledge of the world’s wonders increases, our powers to describe them shrink. Captain Scott proved mortal in the South; his prose was anything but. One intuits that a television travelogue of his journey to the Pole would have yielded more enriching epithets than “exciting”, “epic” and “insane”.
These tongue-tied outbursts of adrenalised emotion are the staples of Steve Backshall’s lexicon as he explores the inner heart of New Guinea in Down the Mighty River (BBC Two, Sunday). At one point in this first episode, he even caught his language deteriorating. “That last rapid was sick,” he found himself saying, and blamed it on his muchyounger kayaking pals.
Backshall is a companionable guide along the rarely explored river Baliem. He travels in hope, with a can-do attitude and a stubbled physiognomy hewn from granite. The problem with going where no one has gone before is that only so much recceing can smooth the path.
The party soon hit unpassable rapids and, to Backshall’s disgust, had to be choppered out, cutting a massive dog leg out of their itinerary. Then they tried to go caving in a sinkhole, only to get tangled in village politics. They explored another cave system instead, and discovered a cathedral-like cavern of rare beauty such as probably exist under every mountain in New Guinea.
Back above ground, this was a frustrating film about the slightly monotonous viewer experience of watching someone else shoot rapids, or birdwatching without David Attenborough’s budget.
Backshall’s odyssey eventually found its footing as an anthropological report on river life of the Dani tribe whose language, strangely and impressively enough, he speaks. The expedition overnighted with a hospitable village whose women cut off a finger every time a relative dies. Backshall had the dubious honour of sleeping alongside the crouching mummified effigy of a venerated warrior who now models a woollen beanie.
Younger Dani wear Western T-shirts and have camera phones, while the mainly naked elders hail from another sartorial age. And some standards apply in all cultures. A woman off camera hollered at her septuagenarian father: “Papa, make sure your penis gourd is tied on properly!” “Don’t worry, my penis gourd is fine!” he replied. Sometimes it’s best to let the pictures – and the figures in them – speak for themselves.
Elsewhere, there’s been muttering about SS-GB (BBC One, Sunday). Some viewers have been stifling their yawns and saying things like, “How could anyone make the Nazis look/sound dull?” Blame it on a highboredom threshold but I like to think Len Deighton’s alt-history thriller is coming to the boil quite nicely. I’ve not glanced at my watch once in four hours, and there’s only one more to go.
In another adaptation, SS-GB might have been in and out as a 100-minute single film, but the Netflix model and Nordic noir have reset our viewing habits and jacked up tolerance for long-running drama which twists this way and that. The BBC’s generous allowance of prime time for a series without any front-page stars has been a vote of confidence in the material that continues to pay off.
In this episode, D S Douglas Archer (Sam Riley) waved his son and landlady off to the countryside while Nazi reprisals for the Highgate bomb mainly took place off camera, give or take the odd punishment shooting. Meanwhile, there was a new candidate for Archer’s affections.
Sylvia Manning (Maeve Dermody), having earlier spat in Archer’s face, saw the error of her ways and rather hoped to reboot their romance as he tenderly bandaged her bullet wound. But his loyalty seems to lie with Barbara Barga (Kate Bosworth), who continued to perform her brand of horizontal journalism.
But then, Herr Doktor Huth of the SS (Lars Eidinger), having lost what seemed to have been a very close personal friend in the explosion, sought to replace him with Archer. A hand on the arm, a stroke of the cheek, a Faustian offer. “You can come all the way to top,” whispered Huth suggestively.
SS-GB has turned into a complex internecine face-off between the SS and the army over ownership of the nuclear future, and between the furtive and overtly violent branches of the resistance. Archer is coolly walking a tightrope among them all. It’s rarely as tense as The Night
Manager, but dull? Never.
Down the Mighty River with Steve Backshall ★★★ SS-GB ★★★★