Planet Earth: beware of the chimps
Watcher Column for The Canberra Times, Tuesday 13 February 2007 by Kaz Cooke


Some stuff you just know is going to be good. Watching Amanda Vandstone block and parry Kerry O'Brien on the 7.30 Report until he doesn't know whether to smile or scream (I wish they'd bring that back); eating at a third generation Italian restaurant, seeing a BBC natural history documentary.

The second series of BBC's Planet Earth series is running on the ABC (7.30 pm, Sunday nights), and next Sunday the focus is on jungles. I don't know how much this series cost, or how many camera folk were paid for months to stake out places where no complimentary shower cap can be found (middle of the Congo, anyone?). It's so brilliant, I almost don't care how it happened.

Incidentally, I can hardly believe there was talk recently that the ABC natural history unit might be disbanded. It's one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. It feeds into history, geography, national pride, conservation, and tourism. Has anyone checked out how popular Animal Planet and similar cable stations are going, and how much product they need? Please don't leave it to Bindi Irwin's manager. If the ABC could regularly make stuff like Planet Earth I'd pay a licence fee and stop whingeing about that uber-amateur Collectors program.

Planet Earth puts the audience in meditative state and then amazes and educates it. Accordingly, the music is sometimes a bit like the calm Enya-esque stuff piped into a salon when you get a facial, and then uses the whole drum section when the elephants hove into view. The music is all original and played by an endangered species called a real orchestra.

Even with the exquisite high-definition photography, it's hard to feel empathy with, or sympathy for the insects. Even an ant that has a parasitic fungi growing out of its brain. Yeah, yeah, I know the spiders are crucial to the food chain, plus they can abseil. But euwww. It's unfair, but cute wins, especially the wide-eyed canugo, like a possum with a flying cloak - although the English call it "the flying tea-tray".

Although the quintessential narrator, David Attenborough, doesn't stomp the point, we all know that the biggest threat to all these places, and to all these creatures is us. What's climate change going to do to a place that has 2 metres of annual rainfall? Indonesia, Malaysia and Pacific islands are ripping down forests, is Papua New Guinea far behind? What about all those countries in Africa that need money and roads? Logging companies will promise both.

As we cut up the toast soldiers, knock off the tops of the boiled eggs and sit down on Sunday night to watch Planet Earth with our children, we can't promise them any of the stuff on this episode will still be around when they grow up. Incidentally, if you are watching with the kiddies before bedtime this Sunday, you might wish to turn it off for about five minutes after the chimp posse attacks a neighboring clan. The sight of them in victory eating the recognisable extremities of a youngster is... let's just say, pretty indelible.

It's this scene which brings to a gibbering halt my ineluctable musings over the similarities between creatures and humans. Dominating "bully boy" capochin monkeys could remind you of the recent Australian cricket team. The prancing, sex-craving, costume-parading birds of paradise are reminiscent of Prince on stage. A dowdy but powerful female looks a suitor over, gives him a withering glance and sweeps away. Hello, Judi Dench. Pitcher plants (LA nightclubs) lure and gobble up gangly insects (starving young socialites). A frog in the darkness surrounded by diverse calls can hear only the warbles of its own kind (Tony Abbott). Slimy, bottom-feeding parasitic fungi; that ex-boyfriend who ...okay, this is getting kind of personal.

Thanks to this team of camera and sound folk, editors, producers - and the BBC having the money to do it - we can now "be" so close to an elephant we see every wiry hair on its crinkle parchment hide. That's why, in this episode, we see right into the eyes of those chimps, read their faces, can't dispute how similar they are to humans. Further evidence is their after-school nit check, their binge-eating of figs, and the unprovoked pre-emptive territorial attacks, right up until the - "hey, you can't eat that guy's arm!" cannibal bit. They are not us. Will we protect their habitat and let them live anyway, even though they can't fund a lobbist?

The following week, Planet Earth is going to take us underwater to see a flashing electric clam, sneaky sea snakes (try saying that after an eggnog), surfing dolphins, "rampaging" starfish and the "head-butting pygmy sea-horse". I don't think you can see better-crafted television than this. Not that includes headbutting, anyway.

*Dear Canberra Times reader. This is my last 'Watcher' column. An opportunity that could involve working on a TV production means that there is now a potential for conflict of interest as a TV critic. (It's alright, I'm not going to be on Funniest Home Videos.) Thanks for coming over to watch with me. You can have the remote back now.