Television
When she was winning awards for stage and screen acting, Dame Judi Dench would never have imagined that in old age she’d be trussed and bound and hoisted up a tree in Borneo to examine creepy-crawlies.
But that was her fate in Judi Dench’s Wild Borneo Adventure (ITV). As I watched, I thought you’d not have seen Phyllis Calvert doing any of this, nor Googie Withers.
She’s a game lass altogether is Dame Judi. She tickled crocodiles and vermilion frogs. She admired bats and dung beetles. ‘There are more bats here than there are people in Birmingham,’ she said with a tolerable impression of a straight face, and I just hope the bats don’t squeal in a version of the Black Country accent.
A bear Judi helped release back into the jungle promptly consumed a rare hornbill, scooping the chick out of its nest with huge, curved claws. Judi then told us she’d adopted some orang-utans.
I have been to Borneo myself, and was also tempted to add to my family. But it was the orang-utan’s unfortunate resemblance to Bruce Forsyth that always put me off – the manic, lopsided grimace, the loping, the considerable knees and elbows. The house would have been filled with game shows and softshoe shuffling with Sammy Davis Jr. I also couldn’t abide Borneo’s heat and humidity – but Judi never once complained. She chatted amiably with the scientists and conservation teams – how young they looked, and all of them with tattoos and piercings.
It was rubbed in that the wonderful emerald-green island is now under terrible threat from logging and palm-oil plantations, the delicate eco-system sent awry. We need those masses of trees to absorb our harmful carbons, or something, and Judi was on the brink of tears as she dwelt on the fate of a reticulated python.
It is 50 years since we landed on the moon, according to The Day We Walked
on the Moon (ITV) and other similar documentaries, such as Moon Landing
Live (Channel 4). The chief startling fact was that the computers available in 1969 had less capacity than those found now in an average kitchen fridge. Men were shot into outer space with valves, fuse wire, bits of string, ball-bearings and human ingenuity – graphs, slide rules, calculations made by boffins on large sheets of paper. Apparently, the White House had a sombre speech ready, in case the Apollo mission failed – sententious stuff about the brave astronauts and their sacrifice. Yet what has always remained a mystery to me is what Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s lavatory arrangements were.
I was a Mixed Infant at the time, and when adults said they were staying up to watch the moon landing, I didn’t think the live television broadcast was meant. I assumed they’d be out in the garden, looking up at the sky with
binoculars, watching, as it were, a sort of flea-circus effect – seeing silhouettes of those flimsy rockets and landing craft with the naked eye.
My grasp of distance, perspective, shape, space and so on was – and remains – weak. If I never took to science, it’s because I found Patrick Moore tremendously off-putting, especially as at the drop of a hat he’d start playing the glockenspiel. I do detest characters and deliberate eccentrics. Magnus Pyke was another.
Nevertheless, how blurry black-andwhite television used to be. Colour broadcasts were an alarming innovation, particularly as when Kenneth Kendall recited the news bulletins he was bright orange.
Tomorrow’s World, which ran for 38 years, until it was scrapped in 2003, was never for me. Who cared about all those unfeasible gadgets, such as pocket calculators, digital watches, satellites, electric potato peelers, compact discs, and Raymond Baxter in a plastic shower cap?
If I never once wanted the future, it’s because I was happy in the past – which was being merrily torn up. Without doubt, the greatest wickedness was Beeching’s destruction of the railways, in order to maximise petrol revenues from motor cars.
Walking Britain’s Lost Railways (Channel 5), with Rob Bell, was horribly bittersweet. Those abandoned Victorian arched viaducts, footbridges, goods sidings and demolished station buildings, which were once snug in the landscape – at best they are cycle routes now.
Rob showed us vanished lines in the Highlands, the Lake District and the West Country. The evidence here and there of overgrown tracks is like finding all that remains of a civilisation after a nuclear war.
Keeping Faith (BBC) is back, and Eve Myles’s doing kick-boxing is simply silly. It doesn’t help that these programmes from Wales share the same small cast. It’s always Aberystwyth in the rain, empty sheep-sheds and sullen blokes with greasy hair on quad bikes.