Outdoors and nature shows could learn from the easydoes-it ethos of Andrew O’donnell

Ma wee grannie used to say that at bedtime ma grandpa used to play river sounds that he had recorded on his wee tape machine. She said it helped him sleep. Apparently he would press play and minutes later he’d be out for the count. He said it was like floating down the river on a comfy log.”

So says Sullivan, the fictional nature-lover played by Blane Abercrombie in Andrew O’donnell’s latest film, Sullivan’s Wild Scotland –

Rivers. Then, as if to prove the point, in the next shot we see Sullivan kick off his shoes, lie down in his inflatable kayak, which is hauled up on a sandbank by a bend in the river, and fall fast asleep.

“It’s true,” Sullivan continues in voiceover, “there’s no better lullaby than the sound of a river, running away as you drift into a dream.” And with that, the current gently lifts up the raft with Sullivan sleeping inside it and carries it sedately away.

This being an Andrew O’donnell film, however, things don’t stay sedate for long. In the next shot, the raft see-saws over a rocky ledge – but somehow Sullivan sleeps on. Then it starts blasting through a series of boiling rapids, ping-ponging off the rocks on either side – and still, Sullivan sleeps on.

A couple of shots later, we meet an apparently unscathed Sullivan gathering firewood. “For some reason I woke up 14 miles downstream,” he deadpans on the voiceover. “I wasn’t fussed though – I was heading downstream anyway.”

Back in 2016, when I wrote about O’donnell and Abercrombie’s first film, Sullivan’s Winter, I likened the character of Sullivan to the late, great Tom Weir – not just because he wears a similar bunnet, but also because of his distinctive mixture of enthusiasm and insouciance. In an age where

TV programmes increasingly seem to frame the outdoors as an arena in which we should all be looking to undergo extreme challenges of one kind or another, it’s refreshing to encounter someone who is quite content just to mosey, and perhaps to sit awhile; someone whose interest in the natural world extends beyond how simply to survive it in Very Extreme Conditions.

The plot of this latest Sullivan adventure, such as it is, revolves around a letter Sullivan’s grandfather supposedly left him when he died, asking him to make sure he paddled his boat down the River Spey at least once a year. As Sullivan says, “there are far worse requests to receive from a dead man,” and so he sets off, introducing us to some of the river’s more remarkable inhabitants along the way.

There’s a visit to a sand martin colony which Sullivan calls Sand Martin City, some incredible footage of kingfishers and dippers catching their dinner and – most mesmerising of all – slow-motion shots of leaping salmon. Significantly, we don’t just see the salmon leap – in a couple of shots we also see Sullivan sitting there watching them. We know instinctively that in order for O’donnell to get that shot the pair of them must have spent many hours down by the river, waiting for everything to come together, and we can infer from the generally unhurried atmosphere of the film that they wouldn’t have been remotely bothered by the wait.

It seems to me that none of the big TV channels really offer anything with this unhurried, happy-golucky philosophy regarding the outdoors: they have their extreme survival shows, of course, shouty like Top Gear but with extra mud and suffering, and they have bigbudget nature documentaries like

Blue Planet, wonderful to look at, but mostly presenting nature as something exotic and far away. True, we also have shows like Springwatch, but even in these there’s sometimes a sense of our relationship with the natural world being mediated by experts.

The Sullivan films, by contrast, present the natural world as something that’s right there, waiting to be enjoyed by anyone with a bit of time on their hands. Sullivan doesn’t bombard us with scientific information about, say, kingfishers, but he does tell us that we’ll stand a better chance of seeing them if we push a few sticks into the mud by the river so they have extra platforms to fish from. Sullivan’s probably too much of an acquired taste ever to make it onto the telly, but the beauty of the interweb is that we can all watch him anyway. I hope many more people do.

The Sullivan films present the natural world as something right there, waiting to be enjoyed

To watch Sullivan’s Wild Scotland – Rivers and Sullivan’s Winter, visit https://en-gb.facebook.com/ belugalagoon/