Rarely have our oceans seemed so full of wonder
Who knew kelp could be so interesting? Once again Blue Planet II (BBC One) was awash with wow factor in an episode devoted to the more vegetative areas of our oceans – vast forests of seaweed off North America’s Pacific coast, the seagrass “prairies” of Australia and the mangrove swamps of the tropics.
Although the theme was green, the opening moments were a riot of pink and orange as we watched starfish celebrating the warmth of spring sun filtering through water by spawning with a splurge. This prompted a wonderfully bizarre sequence – captured in time-lapse – of sea cucumbers, each one a mouth ringed by 10 greedy tentacles, gobbling down starfish eggs by the armload.
But that was just a taster for the pièce de résistance which shuttled us off to South Africa for a sequence that will, most likely, go down in marine film-making history, of a common octopus engaged in a battle royal with a hungry pyjama shark, and coming out of it unscathed.
That’s the thing about Blue Planet II – it doesn’t just astound with the visual beauties of sea life, it surprises at other levels, such as in exposing the intelligence of many sea creatures. Like the octopus that can not only camouflage and armour itself with a carapace of shells at a shark’s approach but knows, on being attacked, to insert its tentacles into the shark’s gills to cut off its air supply, forcing it to let go. These behaviours were never before known, let alone filmed.
Another fabulous sequence started with an entertaining tale of a Garibaldi fish’s Sisyphean efforts to keep pests off its personal patch of algae. This evolved into a powerful conservation message about nature’s balance, showing how the near extinction of sea otters by fur traders last century led to the destruction of vast areas of kelp by the otters’ vegetarian prey, sea urchins.
We were treated to armies of spider crabs sloughing off shells, a cheeky little cuttlefish outwitting a gigantic love rival and voracious shrimp ambushing their prey. We learnt how sea grass helps to reduce global warming and got another spectacular feeding frenzy when squadrons of dolphins, sealions and whales caught up with a vast shoal of anchovies in Monterey Bay, California. The images of humpback whales filling their gullets with a hundred kilos of fish at every gulp were truly spectacular. Rarely have our seas seemed so full of wonder.
‘Only connect” is the phrase most associated with EM Forster’s writings and, sure enough, it surfaced in the third episode of BBC One’s scintillating adaptation of Howards End. “I don’t intend to correct him, or to reform him – only connect,” said Margaret Schlegel (Hayley Atwell), explaining to her horrified sister Helen (Philippa Coulthard) her reasons for marrying capitalist widower Henry Wilcox (Matthew Macfadyen).
That is not quite as it was in the book, yet this penetrating adaptation by film-maker Kenneth Lonergan distils the essence of their relationship and the clash of intellectualism and materialism it embodies.
Macfadyen’s Henry may be younger and less obtuse than Forster’s, and Atwell’s Margaret less overtly determined to bridge the gulf between the prose and the passion in him. But these tweaks are convincing in a drama that can shock at times in how contemporary and relevant it feels despite the fusty Edwardian setting.
Even Lonergan couldn’t make the least credible element of Forster’s novel seem less unlikely – when Helen set the cat among the pigeons by crashing a Wilcox wedding with her “protégé” Leonard Bast (Joseph Quinn) in tow, enabling Henry to discover Mrs Bast (Rosalind Eleazar) was a prostitute he’d had a fling with in Cyprus a decade previously.
But nor was it the train wreck it might have been. It served its purpose, orchestrating the split between the two sisters, and allowing Coulthard to bring a topical twist to lines like “I blame not your wife for these things, but men.” Also, to capture convincingly the mix of guilt, indignation and high idealism that drove her into the arms of Bast – and a connection too far.
Meanwhile, Quinn brought feverishness to Bast that sharply underlined how his life, like Henry Wilcox’s, was ruled by money – but in his case not by choice and from the diametrically opposite end of the scale.
As a dissection of class, and the determinism of economic circumstance, Howards End still packs a powerful punch 107 years on.