THE RANDLE REPORT

THE TELEVISIONING OF WILDLIFE

Beryl.

Since the 1950s, wildlife and our fellow creatures have been a perennial source of fodder for what is perhaps the greatest raptor of them all – broadcast television. Their inherent tendency to be interesting and move about ready-made them for the medium, and their lack of interest in money or contractual obligations naturally endeared them to producers.

In the beginning, Hans and Lotte Hass, Armand and Michaela Dennis and the legend who already was David Attenborough brought us a sense of the diversity, resourcefulness and frequent stubbornness of their natural subjects, enlivened in the latter case by selections from Los Paraguayas.

Then one of those conjunctions from which showbiz legends are born occurred, when master of characterisation Johnny Morris endowed the filmed creatures with voices and personalities to create Animal Magic – still one of the best-loved and best remembered shows of the telly generation, and a large part of the foundation of that generation’s respect and affinity for animals.

While those animals went about their business, largely untroubled or inconvenienced by it, the burgeoning and oddly styled subject of TV ‘Natural History’ and its, by then, attendant departments and committees, were heading for the first of many historical revisions.

Morris, J. fell from favour, charged with the new crime of ‘anthropomorphism’ – assigning human traits and identities to the beasts of the field, fish of the sea, fowls of the air and so forth. The exigency that the orthodox scientific teachings of Konrad Lorenz derived from just such anthropomorphism was not raised in his defence.

So, while yesterday’s man went about opening fêtes and animal sanctuaries for his loyal public, a new Morris arrived on the block.

Desmond M. was out to prove that, not only were animals devoid of humanity, humans were too. 

Smarter than the average ape, he adapted to the new environment of Zoo Time and evolved into one of the first, and by no means the last, of his species to become an opinion leader by being where an opinion leader is expected to be: on the telly.

If there was one crime worse than anthropomorphism among serious minded zoologists in those days, it was Disneyfication. This is defined in this context as the business of editing clips of animals together in a sequence that, with the aid of a narrated fiction, forcibly evolves the footage from random observation to a paced and plotted adventure. This Mickey Mouse Club approach inevitably appealed to children and those in search of fairy tales by being guaranteed entertainment, with controlled highs and lows. Nobody was better at this than the Disney Organisation.

The whole idea was anathema to serious wildlife and natural history people, for obvious reasons. From pretentions of being genuine scientific study and education, these products had become a freak show, exploiting the animals as living cartoons or lay figures; unpaid actors in simple-minded tragicomedies.

It’s not clear exactly which imperative led to the complete about-face in BBC wildlife productions by the end of the century. Whether it was the acceptance that plotted programmes are more involving, or the slightly more sinister inevitability that orthodox beliefs regarding animal behaviour could be demonstrated to be true by such fakery – either way, the once despised Disney was now welcomed into the fold, its experts invited to Bristol to advise on subjects, plots and outcomes. With the BBC’s enormous and ever-growing archive, anything could be made to do anything – even more so as the technology of colour matching between clips developed.

In case there should be an inconsistency where one animal was spliced with another to move the action on, any remaining sniffiness about anthropomorphism faded in the face of the useful expedient of assigning jolly names to the lead characters. Calling fifty different meerkats Beryl sustains and reinforces the illusion that one performer is running the gamut of emotions and plot points demanded by the fabricated drama.

Meerkats have been being meerkats since time immemorial without any reference to evolutionists or behaviourists – for the greater part of that time, there were no such authorities to which to refer. They managed somehow. But telly meerkats have certain obligations. They live in time slots, they must have ‘alpha males’, and they must have evolved from something, because televolution says they must.

The mastery of television wildlife filming and presentation achieved in a few short decades by the likes of the BBC is wondrous to contemplate, but its very expertise can too easily become a liability. The computer generation exemplified in the ludicrous Walking with Dinosaurs cannot but make us wonder if anything we are looking at really came to pass.

At time of writing the BBC announces a spectacular new production in which it admits to using fakery – not merely to make one animal appear to be another, but to counterfeit interactions and events. ‘It might look like this chipmunk is about to be eaten by a very large bird. In actual fact the two never met and absolutely no chipmunks were hurt in the making of this programme. We would never do anything like this in any of our proper wildlife shows, of course.’

Oh yeah? Pull the other one, frankly.

It’s not difficult to understand the urge to make ever more spectacular television. The technical expertise is there; how can you not use it?

In the end it comes down to ethics and trust. The BBC has a high and hard-won reputation. It is highly trusted still for its original values and its vital role in the 1939-45 war. If it continues to blur the divide between fact and entertainment and to use sleight of hand to control ‘reality’, whether for relatively innocuous dramatic reasons or to enforce its preferred dogma, sooner or later it will lose that trust and wildlife television will face its own ‘extinction event’.

From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository