Sharks so real and scary you’ll have to hide behind the sofa
When all-in-one hi-fi units were the rage in Seventies homes, one LP was perfect for demonstrating the sound quality: the swirling stereo of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon.
And when we all switched to soulless CD systems in the eighties, the ideal album to showcase our overpriced new gadgets was Brothers In Arms by Dire Straits.
Our 21st-century toy is the widescreen, high- definition telly. The sound does tend to be rubbish, unless you lash out a fortune on speakers. But the pictures are undeniably stupendous and, as of today, the best way to show off an hD screen would be to record and play
Shark (BBC1) on a loop. This documentary, two years in the making, was a constant rush of coral colours and luminous detail, with clouds of bubbles as clear as glass beads, psychedelic schools of flickering fish and, lunging through every underwater idyll like demonic hallucinations, the sharks.
These killers, the oceans’ ultimate predators for hundreds of millions of years, possess a terrible beauty that made hypnotic viewing in hD. The ragged-tooth sharks looked like drug addicts with bad dentistry. The frilled sharks resembled a human skull on the end of a snake.
Most grisly of all was the Greenland shark, a creature from an X-rated movie, marbled green and grey like a stone statue in a graveyard. From its eyeballs dangled threadworm parasites that had sucked it blind. It’s rare that TV delivers pictures we could never have imagined before, but the crew achieved it by enduring appalling conditions.
Greenland sharks live in a black abyss beneath the polar icecap: the camera team had to saw manholes through the compacted snow and leap into the slushy waters before diving into claustrophobic ice caverns. When they emerged, the crew had icicles dripping from their cracked faces.
Sharks have rubbery cartilage instead of bones, and their skin consists of thousands of enamelled teeth, we discovered from actor Paul McGann’s commentary. McGann rarely appears in front of the camera these days, but his distinctively cynical voice is increasingly in demand for nature doc voiceovers.
Most narrators on wildlife programmes try to inject an Attenborough bounce into their voices, and end up sounding like gauche schoolboys. McGann does something different: he purred with admiration at the sharks, like a gangster savouring a bare-knuckle boxing match.
The documentary’s one weakness was its narrow focus on sharks as relentless killing machines.
We watched them lie camouflaged on the sea bed to leap up and swallow their prey whole, or lurch clear of the water to catch a fur seal in their jaws in midair. Some sucked crustaceans from their shells like vacuum cleaners. Others stunned their victims with a flick of their tails. The nonstop murder became monotonous: surely these fishy psychopaths couldn’t spend their whole lives in the pursuit of death.
Oh no, McGann assured us in the final few seconds of the programme: there’s much more to sharks than that. But he didn’t say what. We’ll have to wait till next week to find out.
The first episode of Seventies’ spy thriller The Game (BBC2) had left us waiting on so many cliffhangers that we needed a comprehensive reprise of ‘the story so far’ at the beginning of part two. A quick round-up of next week’s highlights followed before the final credits.
These high- speed summaries were at odds with the slow, ominous atmosphere, so much so that they wrecked the whole mood and revealed what a slice of gammy old horseflesh The Game really was.
Arkady the Russian defector, though he’d been lecturing at a home Counties poly for years without arousing anyone’s suspicions, had an accent like one of those irritating meerkats after two raw potatoes and a pint of vodka.
‘Iya breenk greetinks from yura harnt,’ he hissed, a secret codephrase about bringing greetings from someone’s aunt, which signalled to everyone within earshot he was Definitely A Soviet Spy.
Call The Midwife’s Judy Parfitt stole the show with a single scene, after her wet son phoned to say (with a nuclear attack looming) that he loved his mummy.
‘Don’t,’ Judy snapped. ‘We’re not Spanish.’ Quite.