A peerless insight into what lurks in the deep
The problem for a critic watching (BBC One), as with almost all of David Attenborough’s work over the past two decades, is that the programme is playing a different sport from most of what makes it onto our screens. The writing, the music, the production, the scale and the thousands of hours of work by the most talented cameramen in the world. It’s like having Botticelli stop by the village life-drawing class, or Lewis Hamilton turn up for stag-do go-karting. There’s not much to learn from comparisons. In fact, it’s tempting to give it one star, to teach it a lesson about reviewability.
Last night’s second episode of this new series focused on The Deep. “We know more about the surface of Mars than about the deepest parts of our seas,” Attenborough intoned over the opening credits. The crew launched little submarines from a specially designed boat to film at the bottom of the ocean, starting in Antarctica.
Compared to white-sand shorelines or rain-drenched emerald forests, the bottom of the ocean can be a gloomy place on television. (Perhaps in reality, too; I’ve not been.) But this was a vivid alien planet, rich in colour and strange illuminations. We met fish with huge fangs, fish with transparent heads, a fish that had evolved to walk along the sea floor and shrimps that live their whole lives encased in coral. There was the fabulously named Ethereal snailfish, which lives five miles below the surface, deeper than fish were previously thought able to survive. There was also corals older than the Great Pyramid, now threatened by zealous fishermen. And squid, hunting in vast packs.
Flabber was gasted, gobs were smacked, jaws dropped. Actually in one instance, Jaws dropped, as six-gill sharks assembled around the sunken carcass of a sperm whale, eating for what might have been their first meal of the year. Once the sharks had cleaned the flesh, zombie worms arrived, using acid to burrow into the whale’s bones.
If there is a criticism, and finding one is like fishing for seahorses in a storm, it’s the environmental tuttutting. You can hear the shift in Attenborough’s voice as he draws himself up for another sermon about the destruction we are wreaking on the planet. But has anyone ever watched an episode of Blue Planet, Life or Planet Earth without having the urge to rush out and dedicate their lives to environmental work?
The final sequence last night revealed the creatures that thrive around undersea vents, where water is super-heated by the mantle. Crabs used hairs on their legs to feed on hydrogen sulphide. Shrimp skirted temperatures that would melt lead. Some believe these geysers hold the secret to all life on Earth. For now, this geezer holds the secret to life on Earth.
Given the lightness of its format, (ITV, Sunday) made for uneasy viewing. It comprised an hour of songs, covers and show tunes, sung by Sheridan Smith, interspersed with the gentlest of interviews by Alexander Armstrong, like a hybrid of Stars in their Eyes and Life Stories. Ostensibly to promote an album she’s recorded, the programme had the sense of being a relaunch, and in this it was not wholly successful.
At her best Smith is an actor with fine comic timing, seemingly incapable of caricature and able to convey hinterlands of vulnerability with a glance or half-smile. In The Royle Family, Gavin & Stacey and Two Pints of Lager & a Packet of Crisps, she played women you laughed along with but also liked and believed in. Her Cilla Black in the ITV biopic Cilla was a triumph, and showed us she could sing. On the West End stage she confirmed it, in the musicals of Legally Blonde and Funny Girl. At only 36, she has an MBE and shelves full of awards.
Yet, by her own admission, the past couple of years have been difficult. Last year, her performances in Funny Girl grew erratic, and she was accused of drunkenness. Her father died of cancer. She lashed out at the press and checked herself into rehab. There was the usual spectacle of the press hastening to tear down someone they had built up, all the grimmer for its whiff of snobbery. A woman from Yorkshire who didn’t go to drama school had gone to London and overreached. At times last night, with her hair back-combed and eyes smudged dark with mascara, Smith projected a kind of manic energy.
The rush to set Smith in aspic as a National Treasure risks depriving us of a great talent. This kind of programme should be for stars at the end of their career, not those in their prime. Sheridan should be looking forward. There are plenty of singers better than her, but far fewer actors.
Blue Planet II Sheridan