Documentaries
A sighting of a very rare breed this week: a spoof natural history series. In fact, we can’t think of anything else that comes close to Round Planet (Prime, Sunday, 6.30pm).
The BBC has let comedy writers loose on its prodigious natural history archive and come up with this 10-part series that travels from the Arctic to Africa. What elevates the series from a greatest-hits clip show to genius-level fun is narrator “Armstrong Wedgewood”, actually comedy legend Matt Lucas, of Little Britain fame.
Pitching somewhere between Bertie Wooster and David Attenborough, Lucas delivers bon mots such as,
“The Arctic. Its only natural enemy is the Titanic, and it saw that off years ago”, and, “Of all the billions of planets in the universe, this planet, the
Earth planet, is the only one with cameras.”
There is also chatter aimed at producer “Tabitha Pippit-Whistle”, which we suspect might also be a pseudonym. Cameraman
“Garth de la Spong”
comes in for a bit of ribbing, too. Nevertheless, the information is real, and the photography is stunning. Killer whales in the Arctic, siamangs in Indonesia and “shedloads” of wildebeest on the Serengeti.
However, we don’t usually hear a warning to never call an ape a monkey because “it’s like calling a New Zealander an Aussie. Or a hobbit.”