Mother nature can be a cruel and spiteful old mama. Come with me, let us look at the strange and complex gestation of the natural history film. Its first mating rituals happen in secluded offices, often in Bristol; nobody knows why nature films chose Bristol for their colony. The film-makers are dull, socially inept, secretive little creatures. Their mating rituals take place across continents, finding partners from the National Geographic and Discovery channels; their displays involve the waving of money. Then, years later, after unimaginable hardship, danger, boredom and unwashed underpants, miles and miles of incoherent film are born. The young are called rushes; they stay close to their parents, the film-makers, who make the perilous journey back to Bristol, where the young slowly grow into full-size films. There they live for a brief moment of flashy life, flitting across the screen in your living room, before disappearing for ever. A few will live on in ancient repeats on the unvisited reaches of the Sky box and the too-frightened-to-sleep entertainment selection on British Airways.
Natural history documentaries are some of the most popular creatures on television, and, paradoxically, as real nature hurtles to extinction, so natural history films prosper and flourish. Naturalists have predicted that in the event of a global nuclear catastrophe, the only inhabitants left on earth would be cockroaches and a documentary crew making a film about cockroaches. Bearing in mind the unspeakable misery, filth, disgusting food, rudimentary dens and risible pay that must have been endured by Paul and Richard, the cameramen of Galapagos (Friday, BBC2), I think we should all share a moment’s silence of commiseration because of what their rushes finally grew up to be. Galapagos is one of the most beautiful, strikingly shot nature films I’ve ever seen, in the finest tradition of Bristol and the BBC Natural History Unit. But they’ve put a voice-over on, emoted by Tilda Swinton (“spoken” would be too small and brown a word for what she does with her voice).
Now, we’re used to people with funny accents talking about nature: the immortal Jacques Cousteau, Armand and Michaela Denis, the high-pitched whining of Bill Oddie. But no film could stand up against the tremulous, emotion-filled, ultra-thespian enunciation of Miss Swinton, and that’s before we even get to what she is reading — a script of startlingly saccharine, purple-mood words, as informative as the collected lyrics of Enya. It’s been written by someone with a “well-thumbed” cliché dictionary, to a background tune that sounds like music to eat muesli by. A potentially memorable documentary has been turned into the television equivalent of a Hallmark card; it was like dressing an iguana in a tutu, or painting polka dots on a tortoise. I dare anyone at the BBC to tell me the look and hideous kitsch gloss of these films had nothing to do with the co-production money from the National Geographic channel. Anyway, to Paul and Richard: better luck next time.
The Wide Sargasso Sea (Monday, BBC4) might have been another nature film. Unfortunately, it was an adaptation of Jean Rhys’s slim, hallucinatory novel, the prequel to Jane Eyre, which by happy chance is already having a rather good outing at the moment. The production of Sargasso has none of the imaginative style of its Brontë predecessor. This was the usual am-dram tat of historical repro, dreadful wigs, interiors that looked like hotel rooms and costumes nobody moves about in with ease because they’ve never worn them before. The camera moves about like an insurance assessor with a Zimmer frame. I never managed to finish Rhys’s book, but I remember its long, discursive passages. The camera lingers on wafting curtains, empty rooms, fruit bowls, close-ups of hands with glasses, which is traditionally how adaptations deal with interpreting long, descriptive sections of novels.
But the real problem is Rochester. Why on earth would a beautiful woman of independent means marry this penniless, charmless younger son? Rafe Spall doesn’t help us by keeping his attractive characteristics to himself. He makes Rochester petulant, venal, bored, insensitive, mendacious, grasping, mean and stupid, and that’s before he gets drunk and starts shagging the help. Rafe is a peculiarly contemporary actor. He looks, moves and sounds like a city oik.
Irrationally, I’m more annoyed than I should be by his spelling Rafe phonetically rather than correctly, like Richardson and Fiennes. I know this is a petty snobbery and reflects worse on me than it does on him. Still, in this case, his classy pretensions are way outclassed by Rebecca Hall, who plays the maddening first Mrs Rochester. She looks like a nubile, tipsy vicuña, which is a look that, incidentally, has always done it for me.
Death of a President (Monday, More4) was a collective, indulgent piece of wish-fulfilment or a fabulously tasteless piece of global opportunism. I imagine American Tristrams sitting around asking each other which television show would be most likely to sell around the world. “Well, you know how the Twin Towers footage made us all a fortune — what do you think we’d get for Bush getting whacked?” The assassination was made in the manner of a documentary, with neatly manipulated archive footage combined with smartly staged post-construction. I have huge concerns about this as a genre. I’ve always felt uncomfortable with historic reconstructions of current affairs using the language and method of news reporting, thereby piggybacking a usurped veracity. But stitching up events that haven’t even happened is as close to Goebbels’s big lie as a free press can get, and I would judge it too close for comfort, though of course I’d never censor anyone from producing it: such is the dilemma of the liberal libertarian.
As it happened, or as it didn’t happen, Bush was no more televisual dead than he is alive. The newsy, documentary look of the piece was seamless, but the actual content was oddly flat. It was, when all’s said and done, an unsurprising scenario. There were no twists, no shocks, no revelations. It has no greater message or moral than its hypothetical happening, and as such it missed the central point of all drama, which is to be dramatic. It also missed the starting point of news, which is to be true. So, then, the shooting of the president was greatly unexaggerated.
A programme called Lead Balloon (Wednesday, BBC4) is a hostage to critical misfortune, but then I expect Jack Dee knows that. This miserabilist sitcom about the Pooterish home life of a stand-up comic, written and performed by a stand-up comic, is better than it sounds. Observational humour is as funny as the observer, not necessarily what’s observed. This series is part of a new trend of comedy shows that don’t make you laugh; you just nod your head and mutter, “That’s really funny.” It’s a Darwinian improvement on the tyranny of the set-up-gag guffaw, and I approve of it. Laughter is ugly and common.
