An hour of unadulterated natural Scandi phwoar
Remember those barnacle goose chicks that were featured in BBC nature series Life Story in 2014? Hatched atop a high Arctic cliff to avoid predators, they soon made a flightless fall of more than 100 metres to their parents below. These deathdefying stunt artists were not refeatured in Wild Scandinavia (BBC Two), but their human mimics were.
Meet the Norwegian base jumper Hege Ringard, who clambers to the tops of fjords, checks the antics of the wind whipping through waterfalls, claps twice and calmly leaps. She has the advantage over the goslings in the form of a lilo-style flying suit and a parachute. And instead of blind terror, she experiences what she calls “this sweet soft emotion”.
Natural history programmes such as this three-part Nordic tour find no end of marvels to gawp at. In the aquatic opener these included a lion’s mane jellyfish with its thicket of tentacles, a sea cucumber feeding its own ravenous maw, white-tailed sea eagles scrapping over their catches like dogfighting biplanes. Most eyepopping of all were the male puffins sparring in the snow with the aggression of territorial walruses.
But this series, in the anthropological style of National Geographic magazine, sees homo sapiens as part of the panoply. How sapiens it is to leap off a high cliff in a self-inflating duvet is a discussion for the pub. Meet also the gnarled captain of a trawler who, like a figure from a Nordic myth, explained that “you need to be at one with the ocean”.
The most remarkable human to feature was Audun Rikardsen, a scientist and photographer whose study of a pod of orcas has revealed remarkable use of echo location to entrap herring in what’s known as carousel hunting. Killer whales are regular guest stars in documentaries narrated by David Attenborough but it’s good for once to see the people who do the research not relegated to the making-of section at the end.
The narrator here was the Angloswedish actress Rebecca Ferguson, deploying a super-cut glass accent that slipped gracefully into musical Scandi whenever she talked of Odin and smörgåsbords and friluftsliv, the Norwegian word denoting passion for the outdoors (coined, says Google, by Ibsen).
The Norwegian outdoors is easy to be passionate about. In one glorious section, fishermen in yellow sealskins combined to stack cod on giant wooden racks to dry in the salty winds of Lofoten. It was a mesmerising image you’d gladly watch on an endless loop.
In 1977 a young operator at IBM called Peter de Jager spotted that their computer systems referred to the year with two digits. When the clock ticked round to 01/01/00, he calculated, every computer system in the world would think it was 1900. “Don’t worry,” chortled the shorttermists in management, “it isn’t going to happen for another 23 years.”
That the meltdown didn’t happen is partly down to the constant warnings of de Jager, who by the late 1990s was touring the globe like an Old Testament prophet. Comparing the storage-sparing use of two digits as an original sin, he foretold doom, catastrophe and meltdown while wearing a cartoon Armageddon tie. “If you can’t laugh at this,” he reasoned, “we may as well all slash our wrists.”
If you are so minded, there was much to snigger at in Time Bomb Y2K (Sky Documentaries), which knitted together archive footage to relive the story of millennial panic in America. The computers look clunky, the haircuts dorky and the Backstreet Boys are asked for a quote about the end of the world. The past is a foreign country – they do things hilariously there.
But this was a warning from history whose portents feel all too grimly accurate. Yes, as in The Day of the Jackal, you already know how it ends. The boffins averted disaster at midnight, so all those people learning Stone Age whittling skills or going back to the land could join the 21st century after all. But other fears for the future were merited. Computers really do know everything about us and really have spawned de-socialised screen addicts and free-speech maniacs. Meanwhile the religious wingnuts and government-hating militias who spied an opportunity in the threat of Y2K have only got louder and scarier.
The state-of-the-nation snapshot ended with a series of wise children sharing their hopes at the turn of the millennium. “This hasn’t been a great century,” squeaks a kid in orthodontic braces. “Fix the world, don’t screw it up.” The next day, Putin became president of Russia. The bug turned out to assume human form.
Wild Scandinavia ★★★★ Time Bomb Y2K ★★★★