Baby (iguanas), we’re born to run
DIFFICULT to know which was the hardest thing to watch on TV last week.
It was initially a toss-up between a teak-skinned billionaire buffoon with zero political experience and a moral compass more skewiff than Marty Feldman’s glasses prescription being elected most powerful man in the world, and that lovely, softly-spoken German copper suddenly getting drilled through the skull in the climax to episode five of The Missing.
But both ended up being beaten hands down by the debut episode of Sir David Attenborough’s latest “ain’t-nature-cruel?” visual spectacular Planet Earth 2 (BBC1), which seemed to revel in showing us frame-filling close-up shots of unbearably cute penguin chicks, before adding with a conspiratorial whisper: “Cute eh? Watch out though, its head’s going to be hanging off in a minute.”
And so it came, the footage of hapless mamma penguins trying in vain to fend off predatory seabirds from nabbing their little ones, all the while waiting for their other halves to return from their epic sea-bound food forages.
But it was these feathered fathers’ attempts to make it back onto land that would prove the hardest part, the vertiginous rocky coasts of the volcanic hellhole better known as Zavodovski Island in the Southern Ocean, proving to be something of a deathtrap.
Indeed, those not already dashed to death against the rocks by towering waves faced a several mile slog back to their nest on broken, blood-soaked legs.
It was like the Normandy landings scene from Saving Private Ryan re-imagined by the cast of Pingu.
But that was nothing – NOTHING – compared to the marine iguana vs racer snake face-off that went down on the Galapagos island of Ferandina.
There tiny, but wily, baby reptiles emerged from eggs buried beneath a pebbly beach only to face the prospect of a future more fleeting than a read-through of a mayfly’s address book.
In order to reach the other section of the island where the rest of the iguanas lived they had to make their way across a shoreline dominated by speedy slithering reptiles.
Honestly, the sight of newborn igs pegging it for dear life while, at the edge of the screen, what we thought to be rock formations disassembled into a mass of slithering horror, left me clutching the armrest of my sofa.
One by one we watched the iguanas being overwhelmed by a hissing tsunami, until one plucky lizard seemed like he’d made it to safety with one last-gasp leap of desperation.
“Go on fella!” I shouted, jumping from my seat and darn near spilling warm Vimto over the cat asleep in my lap. “Now go and live a long happy, scaly life.”
“You really shouldn’t anthropomorphise us animals you know, mate,” the tabby seemed to say, squinting up at me. “No good’s gonna come of it.”
It was then I looked back at the screen just in time to see that iguana pulled back down to earth by a snake, just as adept at aerobatics, which had clamped its jaws around its head in mid-air.
“See what I mean?” yawned the cat.
LAST week’s episode of The Apprentice offered probably the first true words uttered in its entire 11-year existence.
Asked why she thought she’d been fired by Lord Sugar, the amiable but useless Rebecca offered this pearl of almost Zen-like wisdom.
“I’m not a t**t, basically,” she shrugged. Hear hear. Baby iguanas’ first steps proved absolutely terrifying