The idiotic voiceover that will leave you howling at the moon

WHAT a combination of sumptuous photography, astonishing detail, howling inaccuracies and banal twaddle. Documentary Wonders Of The Moon (BBC1) really did have it all.

the ravishing footage, taken in 2017, happily coincided with yesterday’s super blue blood moon. A full moon rose in fast-forward, bouncing up from the London Eye and over the capital’s skyscrapers. Another sank down towards a basketball court, seeming to drop through the hoop.

We stared at luminous moons over Chinese harbours, African savannahs and rolling Gran Canaria cloudscapes. Every shot must have taken days to plan and hours to film, but lasted just a couple of glorious seconds.

Super blue blood, we were told, meant the moon was unusually close (super), full for the second time this month (blue) and rosy pink (or blood orange) because of the Earth’s shadow.

that wasn’t nearly the most interesting snippet. One throwaway comment on the voiceover revealed that, in 1968, two tortoises from the Soviet Union were sent on a space mission to the far side of the moon. Sadly, they couldn’t make a lunar landing. If they had, the most famous quote of the space race might be: ‘that’s one small step for a terrapin, one giant tortoise for mankind.’

But the documentary was let down by other factoids in the commentary that were plain wrong. It claimed that many English pubs are called the Full Moon because the round, glowing countenance of the ‘man in the moon’ resembles a drunk.

that’s just bilge. I suspect the researchers were copying bits off Wikipedia verbatim without bothering to wonder if they should trust the source. Here’s a helpful tip for the Beeb: as a rule, Wikipedia is slightly less trustworthy than anything scrawled on the walls of a public convenience.

We were informed, too, that humans have evolved to be scared of the dark because prehistoric lions were more likely to eat our ancestors on moonless nights. Good grief — was this a serious astronomy show, or an episode of Horrible Histories?

the solution might have been to turn down the sound and just enjoy the cascade of images, but that would also have meant missing the soundtrack of classics... everything from Sinatra’s Fly Me to the Moon to R.E.M.’s Man On the Moon.

So we had to endure a voiceover crammed with portentous drivel (‘In the Serengeti, the great drama of hunter vs hunted is played out’) and outright nonsense (‘the moon punches well above its weight’). In the end, this was the TV equivalent of arm candy: looks amazing, ignore anything it says.

Much more intelligence was on display in Britain’s Brightest Family (ITV), a lively half-hour quiz hosted by Anne Hegerty — better known as the Governess from early evening quiz the Chase.

this show will never depose Only Connect as telly’s toughest quiz. try this — XXV, 50, 75, one hundred... what comes next in the sequence? Even if you don’t spot that XXV is 25 in Roman numerals, it isn’t hard to guess the next number is 125.

But the twist with this show is that both family teams of three are led by a child, so the grownups are not so much competing against each other as desperately attempting to maintain the respect of their offspring.

Every contestant sits in a red armchair that springs into the air on a hydraulic lift whenever they are nominated to answer a question. this looks like a silly gimmick at first, but it’s surprising how quickly a dash of vertigo can wipe the brain clean.