An English naturalist squats in the rainforest’s canopy, 80m up, like a pasty gorilla clad in tweed. Far below, the jungle floor roils in an apocalypse of man-eating ants, winged air-breathing piranhas and poisoned-dart-secreting toads, where anacondas like tractor tyres possess higher brain functions and opposable thumbs, and where slithering scaled creatures disturb muddy pools with their evil dyspeptic outbursts. Humanity is not welcome here, but our scientist is not taking the hint.
He’s not sure how he got there, or how he’s going to get down, or when the supply canoe will come back, or whether he’s going to need surgery to remove the tiny fish that have burrowed into his urethra and stuck out small barbs in order to camp there, but he does know that everything around him is fascinating and utterly impenetrable. His cameraman rolls, and in slightly breathy, apologetic tones he starts a small lecture on the mysteries of a particular species of leech which lives for one moonlit night only before dragging itself to the top of a particular cliff, emitting a single shrill note, and bursting into flames.
These are the obscure pleasures of the nature documentary, a genre whose charm owes almost everything to the easy-going distractedness and self-confessed ignorance of its hosts. We don’t know why the thrumming goiterfish beats itself unconscious on Alaskan pebbles, the Attenboroughs of the world murmur, but they’re jolly fascinating all the same, and one day, with enough cameras hidden in fibreglass buffalo droppings, we might just find our answers.But the traditional climax of the nature doccie — a polite and resigned shrug from a silver-haired Oxbridgian, a short valediction about there being more questions than answers, and a somewhat gloomy trundle away from the camera towards a baobab or a half-eaten camel — will no longer suit. Modern audiences are accustomed to the whole truth, thanks to the diligence of myth-busters like Snuki Zikalala and Colin Powell, and explicit details with satisfying conclusions are now required.
Fortunately for documentary makers, our demand for accuracy and insight is inversely proportional to our critical abilities. After all, without emotive editing, deeply suspect research, aggressive innuendo and dazzling self-righteousness, Michael Moore would just be a fat guy in a baseball cap with a chip on his shoulder and a hillbilly underbite.
No, the times have changed, and today’s doccie producers are employing a sophisticated new tool. Its complicated technical term is ‘fiction”, but most researchers and writers at the BBC and National Geographic prefer the layman’s version, ‘making stuff up”; and it has completely revolutionised the nature film, and rewritten natural history.
Where once the dinosaurs were massive fangy geckos, bulldozing the local flora and fauna in a never-ending quest for gore-lubed Schadenfreude, today they are nurturing caregivers struggling to balance the demands of careers and family in the Jurassic socialist state. In the 1970s, children would pore entranced over illustrations of Tyrannosaurus rex, King of the Thunderlizards, brontosaurus limbs hanging out of his jaws like so many cocktail umbrellas, his seven-league feet pressing the gutted carcasses of his breakfast into the primordial muck. But just in time for the preteens of 2005 (so sure of their rights and dues, if not their multiplication tables), the T rex has been rehabilitated into a Renaissance lizard and cleared of all allegations of infanticide, cannibalism, misogyny and racism. Indeed, to the BBC, a sliver of bone dug out of a Spanish lime pit is conclusive proof that dinosaurs were tormented by self-doubt; that tooth marks suggest a frustrated attempt at crafting a flute and therefore imply a highly advanced artistic instinct in Precambrian proto-skinks.
Likewise, the discovery of a mummified humanoid laying face-down in a bog invariably triggers a digitally animated 12-part series on the love lives of cavemen, in which we are told that Thug-Ra (or ‘Butterfly Watcher” to his friends) was murdered by a jealous rival for the affections of a particularly fetching local monkey-girl, after they were discovered making tender, furry love (‘— cavemen kissed by grinding mussel shells against each other’s noses —”) in a thicket of blossoming lavender, sometime after 3pm on the 14th of March, 700 000 BC.
Is truth stranger than fiction? Ask Richard Attenborough. He probably won’t know; and that’s just the way I like him.