We couldn’t see the Congo for the presenter with ants in his pants
Back when f oreign holidays were a rarity, the Blue Peter team used to head off to some exotic location each summer to give young viewers a glimpse of abroad.
For weeks after their return, the teatime show each Monday and Thursday would feature clips from their adventures in Sri Lanka, Norway or some other far-flung place, with John Noakes and Peter Purves trying to deliver their lines while riding an elephant or husky sled.
Dan Snow’s History Of Congo (BBc2) was more like a Blue Peter Holiday than the serious documentary it wanted to be. Dan, the son of former Newsnight presenter Peter Snow, has inherited his father’s gung-ho style of presenting, but not his gravitas.
He shouted his commentary over the noise of his motor launch as they stormed upriver; he shouted over his shoulder in a LandRover bouncing over potholes; he kept on shouting as he rode the running- board hanging off a railway carriage.
He even shouted to camera from the hull of a manouvering tank. at one point, we saw him hanging his face out of the window of a speeding car like a labrador.
The narrative was just as hyperactive, pinging about from the slave trade to hydroelectric power in the space of a sentence. The statistics, like the jungle scenery, rushed by in a blur.
His story came into focus only when he stopped at the ruined palace of deranged dictator President Mobutu, built in the Seventies at a cost of $100 million. The complex deep in the forest at Gbadolite was a two-day car journey f r om t he congolese capital kinshasa, though once it had a private airport with a runway big enough for concorde.
‘It was super-luxurious here,’ said one bodyguard, walking among the overgrown swimming pools and looted marble corridors. ‘When you were here, you forgot death existed.’
But scenes of mass slaughter were never far away under Mobutu’s murderous regime. So i t was astonishingly tasteless of Snow to stage ‘the last champagne feast’ at the palace, with a bottle of bubbly and a meal cooked by Mobutu’s former chef. What was he thinking?
a completely different kind of documentary was being constructed from careful research and deep scholarship on BBc4. Historian Helen castor uncovered the rituals and dangers of childbirth during the Middle ages, in the first of her threepart series, Medieval Lives.
For anyone who enjoyed The White Queen l ast s ummer, i t was fascinating to delve into the reality of women’s lives during the 15th century. Magic and medicine were blended: one doctor told women trying to conceive that they must swallow the giblets of a hare washed down with wine.
The babies of noblewomen were born in a sort of artificial womb, a bedchamber hung with tapestries and carpeted in thick rugs, from which all men, even the doctor, were banished.
castor lost her way in the second half, relating events from Henry VIII’s reign that any schoolchild should know. New details were scarce and the show slowly filled up with padding. But the second episode, on marriage, stil l promises to be worth watching.
There was no shortage of amazing detail on The Great British Year (BBc1). Did you know that winter moth caterpillars need to consume 27,000 times their own bodyweight? Or that baby blue tits expect to be fed 500 times a day?
Joseph Fiennes’s voiceover remains distractingly stagey and this episode contained fewer stories than last week’s opener: the stop-motion photography was glorious, but our attention wandered during unconnected sequences of imagery.
When a narrative emerged, even briefly, we were gripped. It was heart-wrenching to see a mother eider duck trying to fend off a herring gull intent on snatching one of her two chicks. She had spent 30 days on the nest to hatch those eggs. She fought like fury, but could not save her baby.
Her squawk of grief was pitiful. You wouldn’t believe a duck could sound human — but she did.