Dan Snow’s so enthusiastic and bouncy, he could be a labrador
ONE day, when every human can be genetically tweaked to perfection, we could all be like Dan Snow. The historian is in optimum fettle (with a splash of labrador DNA in his make-up) — making him bumptiously eager for every challenge.
Show him an icy river and he’s stripped down to his scarlet Y-fronts before you can say: ‘Good boy, Dan!’ He plunges into the water, racing across with a rope clamped between his teeth so the rest of the crew on Operation Gold
Rush (BBC2) can follow. Point him at a mountain and he gallops up it. When he reaches the summit, he looks back and sees he has left everyone behind — so he gallops down again to make sure they’re OK. Then he bounds back to the top, out-pacing them all again.
Dan was in the Yukon Territory, on the trail of the thousands of pioneers who abandoned their families and jobs in the 1890s to seek their fortune in this wildest of lands.
We joined him in Dyea on the Alaskan coast, the start of the Klondike trail — how he got there, we weren’t told, but I’d like to think he came in a car with his head out of the window, hair streaming in the wind and tongue lolling.
He was joined by Dr Kevin Fong, the NHS anaesthetist who often crops up in hospital documentaries. He explained how the human body copes with extremes of cold and fatigue.
All his glum medical facts were instantly disproved by the example of Dan, who simply got more excitable the colder and more tired his body was.
Kevin wasn’t enjoying himself quite as much. He woke at four in the morning, concerned that bears might be prowling. When he worked up the nerve to look outside, he discovered the low growling came from Dan, who had chosen to dispense with his tent and was snoring in the open, despite the Arctic night air.
Opting to take a different route to the goldfields, one that let him ride a train for part of the way instead of lugging all his provisions on his back for every step, Kevin tried to take a short-cut by abseiling down a cliff-face.
A boulder broke loose and bounced past him, grazing his rucksack. We watched it spinning past in slow motion — 12 inches to the left and it would have knocked his head off. ‘That was more of an adventure than I thought it was going to be!’ gulped Kevin.
Between his mounting misery and Dan’s gung- ho, go- fetch- it- boy enthusiasm, we got a genuine sense of how it must have been to abandon civilisation and risk everything for the elusive promise of gold.
However, what the show found harder to convey was the mass of humanity that had converged on the Yukon. It’s a deserted wilderness now, but back then, a city briefly sprang up and marched through the mountains.
That will never happen again until science is able to clone an army of Dan Snows.
Indeed, the technology of creating artificial people is the theme of Humans (C4), the science fiction serial starring Colin Morgan and Gemma Chan as a semi- cyborg brother and sister. Its first run, last year, was glitchy but thought- provoking: the updated version is far more confident and smoothly executed.
Classic sci- fi, in the pulp magazines of the Fifties and Sixties, explored ideas flung up by the Space Race and the Cold War. Hollywood may have abandoned such intellectual goals long ago, but Humans is not afraid of tackling a spot of philosophy. Robots are only machines as long as they are not conscious, realised renegade niska (emily Berrington): once they are self-aware, they are like children.
niska had another mental breakthrough at the end of the episode — once computers can think for themselves, they’ll have a right to stand trial for their crimes.
If all this feels too much like an undergraduate lecture on artificial intelligence, Humans works well as a thriller. Chan and Berrington are especially good as the highly strung androids.
Their expressions have a glaze of detachment, as if their faces are stretched over metal frames. Maybe that’s why Dan Snow is so bouncy — he’s all rubber.