In a seemingly wi-fi neutered enclave in North London there is a hospital treating people for social media addiction.These 'people' or non-entities' spend four to five hours a day glued to their high tech accessories. I don't know or care what the treatment is for the oh so contemporary malaise of tweeting and trending, but a few minutes viewing the demise of an elephant calf last night would surely be a more effective curing pill (make that tablet).
This was a Class A piece of filming, eliciting emotions no pod or pad could ever emulate, only problem was we had rather a long wait for it.
Last week's Kalahari was so remarkable that I could forgive the almost total lack of geography and geology. I could even begin to soften towards the oft-tiresome music, last night's Savannah was generally a let down, afflicted by its own pomposity. Many have used the term 'Disneyfication' of this new series, I will not go that far.Yet.
We know the drill now: dramatic opening, Coldplay-style Olympic anthem blaring, some breathtaking views (the Simien Mountains, Ethiopia, I feel compelled to point out - the teacher's leather elbow patches are growing on my sleeves) and a pensive gelada baboon. Sir David then appears in a helicopter giving us some gravitas from starboard and we are into 'Savannah'.
I have spent years on the plains and on planes getting there and have my favourite areas, so the opening from the granite Mara Kopjes in the Serengeti (O level garnered yet ?) was welcome, but much that I liked small players such as the dung beetle and spiders from last week, the lizard gymnastics became indulgent.
'Kalahari' (not really the Kalahari but close enough?) shone new light through old windows - novel styles and tricks of filming to enliven well-known subjects, this programme shunned stuff we were expecting. If I want an alpine documentary with an orchestra I will watch one on the Andes or Alps.
Traditional test match viewers eschew the slicker SKY package sound, invariably turning it off before listening to the timeless radio hacks, I want to hear Sir David, but the Sunday afternoon matinee music is getting silly. It continued on the pious pilgrimage to the Ruwenzoris. Savannah means : n. A flat grassland -- that is what I was expecting. The endless timelapse mountain shots - hardly the most beautiful mountains in the world - diluted the appeal and after being told at least three times, we just about got that they were 'the mountains of the moon', but this was surely a little off the ''Savannah" brief. Should have been called 'Rift Valley'.
There were of course some spellbinding moments: the Bogoria flamingos doing their updated Redford/Streep cameo and the gorillas were magnificent. It was invigorating seeing so many young primates, a continuing example the Indian authorities would do well to examine; of how tourism has saved a major species. With stiff wire-like fur and endearing DNA they were a joy. Who could not be enthralled by these great balls of wire, gambolling through the canopy.
The savage cut to the avian triage of the prehistoric shoebills was harrowing, barely requiring narrative. This was new, this was savage, the hereditary brutality hideously graphic – a savage sibling apartheid. This got me out of my chair, the cameraman deserves awards for this.
In 2010 I vividly recall the awful drought that cut a dusty swathe through the East of the continent. Stinking cadavers and gnarled, bleached skeletons littered the plains, nevermore evident than in the ecologically precarious Amboseli, a park closed twenty years ago due to drought and elephant damage. As mentioned at the top of the article, this was a clinical dissection of a youngster's death march. It was not compromised, it was not humanised.
For his election campaign five years ago, Obama's Democrats used an image of a polar bear clinging onto a tiny piece of ice. Perhaps this dying infant or the more dramatic scene of the herd in the maelstrom would be better. If we continue to chuck garbage into the atmosphere at such a rate these sort of events will continue and are continuing (UK at Christmas, Tasmania this week). Should the BBC use a programme such as this as a mouthpiece for this sort of pollution abuse or indeed the ravages of poaching ... hmmm, what do you think ? They are pretty big on impartiality at the corporation.
Forty minutes in we saw a lion, a beauty, in the sunrise and I relaxed: here we go, an amazing sequence shot using a spider camera (probably), just as I had expected a croc-cam on the sadly brief crossing sequence earlier. No that was my lot. Then a flash of a cheetah, a couple of servals and I began to get angry. Show us what we want not what you think we do please.
Error, schoolboy one, big mistake, because the three-round giraffe bout of last week was superseded to three days of elephant bulls: the noise, drama and power of this heavy warfare was humbling – this was more like it .... Then that was it.
No I do not approve of the Eye to Eye bit at the end, it should be red-buttoned, but half of this was great. The cameraman who shot the elephant demise was thoughtful,clearly affected yet philosophical. When natural history people say 'we can never get involved or interfere' it makes my blood boil. It is human interference through poaching or encroachment that has normally caused the animal's malaise so this cant is dated, tiresome and shamefully pious.
This cameraman clearly would have liked to helped the little fella, we all would, but was hamstrung; this small tragedy was just a minor detail of the one going on across the whole plains. It was touching and it mattered. Seeing licence -fee covered posh cameramen (70 of them !) struggling in a bit of fog and rain to film some average mountains did not really matter. Yes they are snow-covered and near the equator, but Burton and Speke (proper explorers, not mummy's boys with Gore-tex, GPS and Ipads) told us that in 1857.
In 2001 the venerable Fergal Keane did a marvellous BBC series called Wild Africa, much of it centred around the plains. Last night did not really tell us too much more, it certainly did not show us much more. But, and it's a big one, it was worth it for those elephants alone. The old fable says they can remember, anyone who watched that sequence last night will remember it for years.
