Do I pay my licence fee for this? God, yes. It’s sublime
David Attenborough’s shows should, surely, come with a trigger warning. I’m still shaken by Perfect Planet, where that baby flamingo on its wobbly legs was picked off by a stork. I know we are not meant to interfere with nature, circle of life and all that, but had I been present I would have put that baby flamingo under my arm and run, run like the wind.
This is probably why I’ve never been invited to work with the BBC’s natural history unit, where you are expected to stay in a hide for several hundred hours just to get the one shot. I would break out, grab that baby flamingo, and also the baby iguana from Planet Earth II that was chased by racer snakes, miss the shot and run, run like the wind back to North London. If you ever see someone walking a flamingo and iguana on Hampstead Heath you can be pretty sure it’s me.
Like its predecessors, Planet Earth III is beautiful, spectacular, magnificent, extraordinary, but unlike, say, American wildlife shows, which tend to be sentimental – Morgan Freeman, as a narrator, uses every word for ‘dead’ apart from ‘dead’ – it does not look away from nature’s inherent brutality and the fact that life feeds on life, that it’s eat or be eaten out there.
This is the way it is, yet I still can’t watch without a knot in my stomach and mounting dread, and what does this new series open with? A baby seal. Still furry and cuddly with the big eyes and everything. And, yes, here comes the shark, and now there is blood blooming on the surface of the water. They couldn’t have eased us in? However, we’re then shown a most unexpected twist: the seals gather into a mob and chase the shark off. Amazing to see seals win for a change, but I was baffled. Seals aren’t a threat to sharks even in numbers. Why doesn’t the shark just stay put and eat them? I hope a shark isn’t reading this. I would hate to give it ideas.
The series took five years to make, in 43 countries across six continents, and do I pay my licence fee for this? God, yes. Attenborough, now 97, does not travel any more, and I miss him sitting on a log in the rainforest telling us what the ants are up to, but he does narrate, in a voice that is often quietly sorrowful. I frequently feel he is disappointed in me, personally. ‘The planet has been transformed by us…,’ are his opening words.
We visit Raine Island off the coast of Australia, which he first visited for television 66 years ago. It’s the leading breeding site for a very precious species, the green turtle, yet the island could be gone within 30 years if the sea water keeps rising.
As it is, temperature determines whether hatchlings are male or female, and now 99 per cent of turtles born there are female – males need lower temperatures – which does not bode well for the future. However, on a brighter note, the ban on commercial whaling means whales are thriving again and giving birth off the coast of Argentina. I think it was the only segment where nothing ‘passed’, as Morgan Freeman would say.
There were astonishing sights, such as the sea angel, which is small and cute and fairylike, but don’t be deceived. It’s a ferocious predator with mouth parts that invert to form deadly tentacles. (Bye bye, sea butterfly.)
There were the lions that have accrued the knack of hunting sea birds at night and archer fish that shoot down land-insects by spitting jets of water. There were also some baby flamingos, but I’m not ready to talk about that yet. It may be that I never will.
Now, on to a ferocious predator of another type. If you are fascinated by true-crime documentaries about fraudsters, conmen, charlatans – The Tinder Swindler, Love Fraud, Inventing Anna etc – then you will find The Other Mrs Jordan riveting. Actually, it’s riveting regardless, as it’s so well told, with many twists and turns.
It begins with the phone call that Mary Turner Thomson, then living in Edinburgh, received in 2006 from an American woman claiming to be ‘the other Mrs Jordan’. Thomson had met her husband, William Allen Jordan, several years earlier via online dating in the early days of the internet. ‘He was lovely, considerate, so interested in me,’ she recounts.
The one red flag was that he’d sometimes not turn up when they were due to meet, or disappear for varying lengths of time. He eventually said he was a CIA agent working in counter-terrorism. She believed him. Conmen are excellent at lying; it’s their job. ‘Don’t think this can’t happen to you,’ she cautions.
She had faith in him even though he didn’t turn up to their own wedding or for the birth of their first child. He was meticulous in his deception. He would say, for example, that he’d been dropped in some war-torn country and would send her photos of dead people and rubble in the streets.
One of the aspects I always find fascinating is the energy such fraudsters put into leading a double, or even triple life, when most of us barely have the energy for one.
I didn’t see all three episodes in advance (although they are now all available) as I was only given access to the first. So I’ve no idea where this will go – I’ve resisted looking Jordan up – how much money he will extract from these women, or whether he is still out there. I suspect so, as we also see a detective working with the women in real time. ‘He picked the wrong woman when he picked me,’ says Thomson. I am very much hoping so.