Life at the extreme? To Davina, that means a broken fingernail
THERE are three basic units of measurement in tellyland. Height is gauged i n doubledecker buses — the Eiffel Tower, for instance, is 74 Routemasters tall.
All countries have to be compared to Wales. There’s no point in saying that 16 million people l i ve in Holland, unless you also point out that the Netherlands is less than twice the size of Wales, with a population five times bigger.
Volume is calculated in Olympic swimming pools. If 10million cubic metres of rubbish is sent to landfill every day, a TV reporter must always explain that i t’s enough to fill 4,000 Olympic pools (though doing so would actually be a serious criminal offence).
We now have a fourth yardstick for TV. All speed is measured in Bolts — the pace of 100m world champion Usain Bolt at full throttle. And so Davina McCall informed us, in Life At The Extreme (ITV), that the Namib beetle could belt along at speeds, ‘for their size, almost ten times faster than Usain Bolt’.
The lanky Jamaican superman can hit 25mph flat out. But this didn’t mean the beetles were zipping along at 250mph, like Speedy Gonzales after three cups of black coffee.
The key phrase was ‘for their size’. Namib beetles are no bigger than undernourished wasps, and they scuttle across the sands at human walking pace. Usain would have no trouble keeping up.
This was about as informative as Davina got. She was having a lovely time in southern Africa, squealing with excitement when she saw a giraffe and cooing over an orphaned aardvark. But she hadn’t bothered to do too much homework before setting off.
When she held a gecko, all she could tell us was ‘his little feet are so sweet’. Thank you, Davina Attenborough.
On a nighttime expedition through the dunes, hunting with ultraviolet torches for venomous scorpions, she seemed less than keen.
‘I have never been a huge fan of scorpions,’ she admitted. ‘There’s something quite eerie about them, the tail and the fact that they could kill me.’ She ought to have brought a chair along, so she could stand on it and scream.
It got worse when she tried camping out at night, building a wall of thorn branches round her tent to keep the lions at bay. ‘Look,’ she wailed, dropping her machete, ‘I’ve broken a nail.’
The idea of the series is that Davina will roam the world, living in its most inhospitable places, to learn how people and animals adapt to its extremes. Trouble is, she looks as though she’d struggle to cope at an all-in Mediterranean resort if the canapes ran out.
To discover if it was true that cheetahs were the fastest animals on Earth, for example, she visited a wildlife sanctuary and challenged a tame one called Kiki to a race. First, though, she wanted reassurance that the big cat wouldn’t see her as prey and maul her.
‘Dunno,’ said the keeper. ‘ No one’s ever been stupid enough to run in the cheetah camp.’
The stupidity of running formed the basis of The People v O.J. Simpson (BBC2), as the fallen football idol’ s legal team struggled to repair the damage done when The Juice, as O.J. is nicknamed, fled from arrest in a low- speed car chase, holding a gun to his own head.
Even to the defence lawyers, flight seemed a straightforward admission of guilt. To the media, it was a brazen attempt to reach the Mexican border and escape jail. But to the hundreds of millions who watched the chase on live TV, this was just celebrity in the raw. If O.J. was famous before, he was the best-known face on the planet now.
A subsidiary theme is developing in this superb production: underneath the story of the court case, there’s an examination of fame.
O. J.’ s best friend, the selfdeprecating Robert Kardashian ( David Schwimmer), i s constantly lecturing his children about the importance of family, and the insignificance of glamour.
There’s a ponderous irony in the fact that his daughters are Kim, Kourtney and Khloe, who would become more famous than anyone in history for nothing more than their vacuous celebrity.
They are so famous, in fact, that it can’t even be measured in double-decker buses.