Documentaries
“I’m fascinated by Cook,” says Sam Neill, opening stunning new six-part series Uncharted (Prime, Sunday, 8.30pm). “I want to know him better. I want to see what Cook saw, go where he was forbidden, and I want to meet the people of the Pacific whose lives, for better or worse , were changed forever because Cook was there.”
He’s talking about James Cook, of course. The British explorer first sailed the Pacific 250 years ago, charting islands, carrying out experiments, and setting lives and cultures on new and precarious trajectories.
Neill says he is “vitally interested” in Cook and that sincerity shines through. Along with thoughtful scripting, it’s enough to drive the show, with no need for zippy special effects or
re-enactments. For the first episode, Neill’s in Tahiti and his stories focus on Tupaia, the extraordinary Raiātea-born navigator, scholar, priest and artist, who found the powerful allies he needed in the visiting Brits. (See our feature, page 32.)
It Will Be Chaos (SoHo, Sky 010, Monday, 10.30pm, encore Wednesday, 5.55pm) follows two personal stories of migration in an attempt to humanise the horrifying, but hard-to-comprehend statistics and politics of the refugee crisis. The story cuts between 2013, as the Italian island of Lampedusa struggles with the aftermath of a shipwreck that killed 350, and 2015, as the Orfahli family prepare to flee Turkey.