Wild Life

I confess, I’m a bit of a spod when it comes to nature programmes on TV – always have been, and likely always will be. But at the moment there seem to be two methods of doing nature programmes, and both drive me crackers.

First of all – and probably the less offensive of the two, although not by much – is the Simon “Supersmug” King method (for examples see “Big Cat Diary”, “[Season]Watch” and the like). Here all the animals have names, and are given human emotions and feelings by the narrators. It’s a method that Simon King has made his own, and it’s incredibly bloody annoying. In fact, if he’s on, I normally mute the sound on the TV.

The second school of thought, though, drives me crackers. I just can’t actually watch the programmes. They’re the ones by people like Steve Irwin, Nigel Marven and the like – and I just don’t even understand the motivation behind them. Sure, show people the animals – but what is the point of then chasing those animals, catching them, disturbing them, and looking like an utter tit? Fair enough, in the case of Steve Irwin at least Nature fought back and showed the tit who the real boss was – and that was a great day.

I just wonder what other people think of either of these ways of showing Nature programmes. Personally, I stick with the third way, the David Attenborough type documentaries that don’t anthropomorphosise, and don’t try to capture every animal or show how heroic the hosts are.