An insightful and positive look at transgender issues
There’s been a huge boost in awareness around transgender issues of late, and with greater awareness comes greater curiosity. Transformation Street (ITV) set out to shed a little more light on what’s involved, following a number of individuals – from a representatively rich range of backgrounds – who had embarked on this challenging journey with the help of a specialist private clinic, the London Transgender Surgery.
From the outset, this felt like an unusually relaxed and positive documentary treatment of transgender issues, compared to what’s gone before. Using the techniques of a fly-on-the-wall show, viewers were parachuted into the clinic’s waiting room, getting a sense of the friendliness of the place, of clients comparing experiences and the entertaining chatter of the staff. A sense of normality and good humour prevailed.
It wasn’t all about operations. There was a wide variety of experiences to follow. But the undoubted “star” of the opening episode was Lucas, a 22-year-old transitioning from female to male, who, having lived as a man for two years, was about to undergo breast removal surgery. There was an engaging transparency – and laddishness – to Lucas that simply invited us to see life from his perspective.
“She baked me wrong in the oven,” Lucas laughed, in one consultation, his mother sitting beside him. She was equally empathetic, admitting to grieving the loss of her only daughter but: “Boy or girl, he’s still my child”.
We dipped in and out of Lucas’s life as pre-op testosterone treatment deepened his voice, broadened his shoulders, gave him hair on his face to shave. There were other, more painful stories. We followed Wendy, a 43-year-old former railway engineer preparing for, and undergoing, the complex surgery that saw her fully transition from male to female. And Danny, a muscle-bound, recently married former commando taking the life-rupturing first steps towards transition.
But Lucas’s story was the one that lingered. The rush of joy and relief he felt following his surgery erased any doubt that this was the right and only path for him. And it set the mood for what promises to be a series full of insight, humour and understanding.
The biggest challenge facing any wildlife documentary is the genre’s constant upping of the wonder bar. Every time a series like Blue Planet II comes along, wowing all who watch it, the bar gets raised another notch. So it’s fascinating to see natural history series like Big Cats
(BBC Two) respond to the demand for more staggering sequences, exquisite photography and relatable storylines.
Two years in the making, with 30 filming expeditions across four continents, Big Cats had a well-defined subject area that enabled it to cast its net far and wide. It opened with fabulous footage of a cheetah tearing across the Namibian desert – close-ups capturing every ripple of muscle and sinew, every paw placement – before fading into a kaleidoscope of feline faces that emphasised the similarities and differences across species.
Similarity and difference remained the governing principle. African lions were outed as the only communityminded cats. A storyline about an injured lioness and her cubs surviving with the help of the pride’s members proved the advantages of pack life. From large lions it flipped to the tiny, hyper-cute, solitariness of Sri Lanka’s elusive rusty-spotted cat, which is small enough to fit in the palm of a human hand, before skipping on to huge Siberian tigers, and caiman-killing jaguars in the wetlands of the Pantanal.
Among the most impressive sequences were those of a lone snow-leopard crying out as it sought a mate in the Himalayas. The most unusual were those of pumas preying on penguins on the shores of Patagonia – spoiled only by the voice-over, which said: “This may seem ruthless, callous even… but that’s what it takes to survive.”
Still, the superb footage of Canadian lynx that followed made up for that, before going full circle to the cheetah, and an analysis – with the help of a high-speed camera buggy – of how these animals achieve the unique mix of speed and agility that enables them to be as adept at hunting in woodland as out in the open.
A series, then, that keeps pace with the competition, although it could have done without the “Big Cats tales” section, relating how a cameraman and director burst into tears at their first sighting of a snow leopard. Call me callous, but did we really need to know that?
Transformation Street ★★★★ Big Cats ★★★