You must have noticed there’s an awful lot of Darwin about at the moment. Now,
some people claim Darwin is due to global warming. Some say he’s a figment
of the collective “id”, an animistic need to see patterns and purpose in the
fearful random chaos of existence. Still others believe Darwin is plainly an
act of God. They point out that if you found the great naturalist sitting on
top of a Galapagos tortoise, weaving beetles into his beard in the
ready-meal aisle of Tesco, he would inescapably remind you that he had been
designed and therefore there must be a grand designer and that that cosmic
architect could only be God — or David Attenborough, as we more commonly
know him.
In Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, David, honour and blessings be
on his name, came down to television to describe for us, once again, why
natural selection works and what survival of the fittest really means. He
did this by showing a film of himself in previous incarnations. Here was
divine proof that life began with Attenborough. From the smallest curly
ammonite to the leviathans of the deep, none could exist for us if it
weren’t for the omnipresent, timeless explainer. What was mystical was that
while the ages of the world rose and fell, forests grew and receded, seas
came and went and the miracle of stop-frame photography could make eras pass
in a breath, the blessed David’s trousers remain unchanged. He was as fresh
of face and waspish of waist then as he is now. The circle of life applies
to all living things, but apparently not to Attenborough or his safari suit.
The really miraculous thing about the origin of species is that it’s the only
scientific theorem whose explanation actually makes things simpler. Ever
since the Middle Ages, every thesis and discovery has been beyond the ken of
the nonspecialist. We now accept that 99% of our lives are governed by rules
too complex to comprehend, but Darwin’s laws of life are comprehensible to
every bright 11-year-old. And of all the neat, interlocking truths of
Darwin’s brilliant discovery, their straightforward righteous simplicity is
the most satisfying and comforting. They’ve also proven to be a neat,
elasticated philosophy that can be pulled on to explain almost every
structure of human endeavour. So we can have social natural selection and
corporate survival of the fittest. There is sporting, artistic and sexual
Darwinism. It’s a theory that has prospered by exploiting gaps in the
environment, rather as it said it would. It’s bloody clever stuff.
This anniversary year has been marvellous for Darwin’s acolytes, the
explainers who cling to the old stone of academe, genetic dead ends such as
Steve Jones, who bloom with a gaudy blossom once every 50 years.
Attenborough’s run through the story of natural selection has been by far
the best of all the offerings to date, but we’re only just into February of
the bicentenary. It’s easily an improvement on the giant sloth that was
Richard Dawkins’s ranty stab at the subject. It would be nice to see the
argument for intelligent design given a separate programme that isn’t set up
as religious combat, to see someone really try to make the “invisible
watchmaker” argument believable. Not least because we should examine and
remember things and ideas that are on the edge of extinction.
In answer to Darwin, the estimable Storyville came up with Olly and Suzy, a
pair of artists who collaborate to make animal pictures. One is left-handed,
the other right-handed, and they draw marks simultaneously on the same page,
creating images that are half-found objects, sometimes comic, often
beautiful and always with the innate vibration of the wild. They work
up-close in the bush, the tundra, underwater, as close as they can get to
their subject; and they specialise in predators: lions, sharks, bears, wild
dogs, crocodiles, snakes. But there is an added element of danger, of
commitment, daring bullishness, circus and adventure. The work has elements
of performance and environmental advocacy. Olly and Suzy’s paintings are
also wild and live outside the urbane, fashionable and expensive
contemporary art market. As our own Waldemar Januszczak explained, this was
not least because animals and nature are not where the art world looks for
its art. It is a civic and urban calling, and those who want kitsch animal
paintings of thunderous elephants and suicidal partridges aren’t going to
get the expressions of zoomorphism in Olly and Suzy’s work.
As an art show, Wild Art bordered on the remedial. Its tone and inquiry
were just too tentative. It never really found out what it was actually
trying to discover. As a nature film, however, it was revelatory.
We are so used to seeing the wild on television revealed in an orthodox way;
the Attenborough version of natural-history film-making has been so
successful that it has become the one vision of how the wild world should be
approached and examined, and the lessons we should come away with are
practical, scientific, liberal and ecologically committed. But there are
other ways of seeing the world we live in and the things that live with us.
Olly said their view of animals was influenced by the romanticised
philosophy of American Indians — creatures were all brothers, dinner and
gods, a complex mystical and practical vision of nature. Their pictures
resemble prehistoric rock art — the images in Lascaux in southwest France,
the kopjes of Africa, the canyons of South America — images that are
aesthetic as a by-product of their mystical purpose. This is not just a
pre-Darwinian vision of the world, it’s a pre-Christian one. This
documentary told us something about a pair of sinewy artists, but it told us
a lot more about television’s relationship with nature and humanity’s place
in the wild.
Whitechapel is the new catwalk for the housewives’ totty, Rupert
Penry-Jones, late of Spooks and The 39 Steps. It turns out to be a
comprehensive collection — a complete lexicon — of police-station clichés,
from Jack the Ripper to posh new boys throwing up when they see their first
corpse. I once asked a criminal pathologist if they had to keep a bucket and
mop in the morgue for the rivers of puke that must flow through them. He
replied that in 40 years he’d never seen anyone be sick. The most common
reaction for people who’ve never seen violent death was inappropriate and
uncontrollable giggling. That would also be the most common reaction to
Whitechapel. It’s dire. It has a scenario, plot and characters that we
viewers solved ages ago, then tried and condemned to solitary. Who let them
out? Penry-Jones is fast outstaying the welcome of his good looks.
For a certain section of the public, Minder is the apogee, the summit
of broadcasting at its finest, TV royalty. Which is one of the reasons I’m a
republican. Any box that has Dennis Waterman in it should have pallbearers.
Remaking Minder with a new cast to attract the same audience 20 years on
sounds like an insane bet, which is presumably why Five has done it.
Actually, it starts out as an improvement on the original. The cockney
nursery-rhyme signature tune is sung by someone who isn’t Dennis Waterman.
But there is only so long that the absence of Waterman can sustain a
knockabout crim-com. After that’s worn off, it’s all ugly tosh, directed
with the panache of a Dear Deidre photo love story.
Ross Kemp is one of the great surprises of documentary television. His gang
series beat David Attenborough to a Bafta. It was survival of the fittest.
It continues to be one of the best current affairs strands on TV, one of the
few that still travels to awkward places in bad countries. His films while
embedded with British forces in Afghanistan were compelling and righteously
emotional. What Kemp brings to frontline reporting is empathy. News
reporters and foreign correspondents work hard at being dispassionate,
maintaining a professional distance. It’s important for their impartiality,
or its semblance. But it also forbids an emotional commitment from the
viewer. Kemp isn’t a reporter and is unencumbered by the baggage of being
even-handed.
Empathy is a golden thread of all TV. It’s what links the character and the
ether with your sofa. Kemp is as good as he is because he so plainly cares
for the people he talks to, and they obviously relate to him. This works on
a level that goes beyond professionalism and allows the audience access to a
story in a way reporting can’t. I also sense he has no idea how good he is
at this, which is refreshingly rare. Return to Afghanistan is as
compelling, exciting and human as the first series; if bits of it look much
the same, well, it’s a story that bears repetition.
Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life (BBC1, Sunday)
Wild Art (BBC4, Monday)
Whitechapel (ITV1, Monday)
Minder (Five, Wednesday)
Ross Kemp: Return to Afghanistan (Sky1, Sunday)
