THERE has been a lot of great programming from the BBC recently. A few weeks back Bill Bailey took us on his
Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra in his typical abstract style, including a hilarious rendition of
The Swan from the
Carnival of the Animals on alpine cow bells, and the William Tell Overture, Cockney style*.
Next came
South Pacific, a natural history documentary covering the wildlife, geography and anthropology of the islands in the world's largest ocean, from Macquarie Island south of New Zealand up to the equator and beyond. The programme is beautifully shot, with
slow motion images from inside waves, panning shots of penguin-infested beaches (the elephant seals weren't very happy about that) and images of tame eels, leaping out of freshwater pools to eat scraps provided by Solomon Island villagers. It is a little repetitive, but doesn't suffer from an overly slow pace, like I always felt
Blue Planet did. Besides, it is presented by a man called Benedict Cummerbund (sorry, Cummerbatch), which can never be a bad thing.
And then they went to
Anuta.
Meanwhile, straight after
South Pacific in the listings is
The Incredible Human Journey, in which "Dr Alice Roberts, medical doctor and anthropologist" follows and investigates the possible route of human migration out of Africa, following "in the footsteps of our ancestors". Each episode teaching a little of what we know about the ancestry of our species throughout evolution and the possible ways in which we inhabitated every corner of the planet.
The Incredible Human Journey is a good programme, for what it is trying to achieve, but it is very easy to criticize. Not least because it is the television programme that I always wanted to make. For a long time I have wanted to travel this route, investigating and telling the tale of humankind along the way and experiencing some of the hurdles that we as a species would have experienced. My journey would have started somethere like Hadar in Ethiopia, where Lucy, the fossil of an
Australopithecus afarensis, was found. I'd have seen some of the major African sites for anthropology, including Lake Turkana in Kenya, the Ethiopian Omo Valley (the Omo flows into Lake Turkana) and the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, home of the Laetoli footprints, and then proceeded north. (Dr Alice Roberts, medical doctor and anthropologist, starts her journey at Omo Kibish in the Omo Valley, where the oldest primitive human remains have been found, dating to - possibly - 195,000 years ago.) I hadn't really worked out how I would cope with passing through modern day Sudan, and how I would cope beyond Arabia when some populations proceeded into Europe and others populated Asia. What I knew for sure, however, was that I was definitely going to go to Teshik-Tash in Uzbekistan, the supposed Eastern boundary of Neanderthal migration. However, Dr Alice Roberts, medical doctor and anthropologist, and the BBC beat me to it, although promisingly she doesn't seem to be actually doing the journey itself, but popping up at key sites along the way, and there's a lot she has missed out. Nonetheless, she does get to travel the world, the lucky thing.
So, given that I wanted desperately to make this programme, I watched episode one in a somewhat
cynical frame of mind.
Her journey starts in "one of the most remote parts of the continent". She says this while driving a car. On a road. Later in the programme she spends a night in the bush to portray the dangers of how primitive humans would have lived. But she doesn't have a night vision camera, so all we see is her illuminated face, and all we hear is her complaining about the noises of the night:
"Did you hear that? I'm scared now! Is that a lion? Is that a leopard? Is that a hyena? Oh I don't like that. That's really spooky."
There's a lot of padding in this programme. It is also a little bit predictable: in the Australia programme, I knew she was heading to
Mungo before she'd even said it. The science isn't brilliant too - in fact it is entirely lacking: we hear the conclusions only, the programme makers apparently concerned that telling us the theory behind the truth would be off-putting, but I find the opposite. It is wrong to just accept conclusions without understanding where they come from, and this form of presenting is patronising. "Geneticists working for this programme have been able to calculate..." Yes, but
how?
But, these are probably minor quibbles amplified by my jealousy of Dr Alice Roberts, medical doctor and, you guessed it, anthropologist. In truth it is a good programme, and I learnt a lot from it. It has been a few years since my human evolution teaching and quite some time since reading
Humankind Emerging, and there are great gaps in my knowledge, gaps that this programme was able to fill, at least in part. Such gaps include the Africa-Israel vs. Africa-Yemen debate. So, overall, well done the BBC, although grrr, and indeed, arg.
But at the start of her quest to find Omo Kibish, Dr Alice Roberts, insert qualifications here, wanders into the local village, and enlists the help of the Nyangatom.
And here we find my concern.
Both the
Nyangatom and the residents of
Anuta have been the subject of the BBC programme
Tribe, one of my favourite shows, in which Bruce Parry spends a month with indigenous communities to learn and experience their culture first hand. He lives with a family in these communities and does everything that they do. At those times, unless I have been fooled by TV magicland, these tribes were remote, and relatively unused to western influence and presence. It therefore concerns me when a new film crew visits these people to record again. Roberts just waltzes straight in and asks to borrow two guides (Parry had to ask for permission to even enter the village).
South Pacific showed new footage of the same topics that
Tribe's Anuta programme covered - so why not use the old footage? Instead, a new crew, however small, visited Anuta. Even with the best intentions, these new visits will slowly have negative impacts on the
traditional way of life. Repeated contact is bad for the preservation of society. It might not be immediately devastating, but in my view it is sufficiently bad. This saddens me, because I would love to follow in the footsteps of people like Parry. The BBC are not to be held accountable for this, as I am sure many other crews have visited similar places and had similar effects. My point is, the appearance of a television crew
cannot be allowed to become something ordinary and familiar to these people.
*including "Have a Banana!"
