Human Planet

[Jim Ford]

Originally Posted by Deb London

What a grumpy old man you do sound like!

Hey - have you been talking to my daughters?

Victor Meldrew is just a mellow old man - an amateur at 'grumping'. I could grump for England!

Jim

[tcvarlh]

I found it 'pretty but puerile' I waited for some revelation, some new fact, something interesting, I'm still waiting. Bring back the days of BBC Docus, Attenborough and Gorillas.

The 'aquatic human' ? Hasn't that already happened?

ps
Jim
With three daughters to my name I have a theory it is daughters that make Dads grumpy, the lack of bathroom availability, strange 'healthy' foodstuffs instead of a solid Steak and Kidley, weird lads saying hello to you and expecting you to engage in football conversation, (loathe football) liberated clothing suddenly noticed traipsing out of the front door encompassing a female shape, retrieving said clothing items (hats, scarves, weskits etc) and wondering why they possess an aroma of Hugo Boss or whatever the latest perfume is labelled, having things 'tidied', (worst crime that), being talked over by two of said daughters as tho' dead or absent, reduction of sugar intake in morning coffee, being given Cafe Haag instead of a full bodied Mocca, the list continueth.
All said and done I wouldn't swap my three for Gold.

Grumps of the world unite you have nothing to lose but your patience!
h

[Gill Catton]

Originally Posted by RKB

You might have pressed a red button, I just has John Hurt.

But the programme was typical of what we get on BBC1 documentaries
now - snazzy camera footage used in the place of any narrative or cohesion. It was just a collage of expensively-captured and nice-to-look-at images. What was it supposed to be saying? Men catch whale, man catches shark, man get the bends on the end of a compressor. None of it was actually inter-linked at all, except in the loosest possible sense of it being wet.

It was also full of guff - if those people living on boats only go to shore to trade for fuel and food, then what are they drinking? And the suggested 'aquatic human mammal' would only be a realistic evolutionary prospect if it came equipped with a modern harpoon gun.

Vacuous drivel, nicely shot.

I think that's a little bit harsh - I learnt quite a bit about how other cultures live that didn't know before.

And I'm not sure that was a modern harpoon gun that the 'super-diver' used it looked like a sharp stick with guide and rubber sling attached to his wrist thing to propell it to me. Though I could be wrong, me being wrong is not iinfrequent!

I also would have liked to see how they got their freshwater, I wonder how much it rains it is possible they get quite a bit from that...

I do know what you mean though the cohesion is not there as it used to be in BBC documentaries, its infomation with tenuous links they'd perhaps be better linking things by geography rather than trying to come up with linked 'stories'.

[RKB]

Originally Posted by Gill Catton

And I'm not sure that was a modern harpoon gun that the 'super-diver' used it looked like a sharp stick with guide and rubber sling attached to his wrist thing to propell it to me. Though I could be wrong, me being wrong is not iinfrequent!

Where did he get the rubber from?! It's an industrial product (I was going to say 'it doesn't just grow on trees'!).

Originally Posted by Gill Catton

I do know what you mean though the cohesion is not there as it used to be in BBC documentaries, its infomation with tenuous links they'd perhaps be better linking things by geography rather than trying to come up with linked 'stories'.

Like almost everything the BBC have done since collaborating with Discovery Channel, it is now led by the photography rather than the 'story'. If you think back to Life On Earth, we were being told the story of evolution, a very definitive narrative that spanned 12(?) episodes. The photography was used to illustrate the story.

The Human Planet is merely a series of ravishing images, with captions added. An interesting exercise would be to compare the word count on an hour of Life On Earth, or Living Planet, with Human Plant or Blue Planet. I would put money on the former two being more than double the latter. Life On Earth was saying 'you have to know this - look, I'll show you. And this happens because of this, and results in this. Look, I'll show you'.

Human Planet is just saying 'look at this, good isn't it? Now look at this, good isn't it?' Here's how you can tell it's all about the photography: if it's called 'Human Planet' and that episode was about the sea and human extremes, then where were the submarines, oil tankers, oil rigs, trawlers and other industrial achievements? Where were the humans doing more dangerous and extreme things in less attractive settings? It basically ignored the majority of its own story, and you can only conclude that it was because grey seas and oily trawlers in the North Sea don't look as pretty as free-diving Indonesians in crystal clear waters.

[Paul mabbott]

Originally Posted by RKB

............
The Human Planet is merely a series of ravishing images, with captions added. An interesting exercise would be to compare the word count on an hour of Life On Earth, or Living Planet, with Human Plant or Blue Planet. I would put money on the former two being more than double the latter. Life On Earth was saying 'you have to know this - look, I'll show you. And this happens because of this, and results in this. Look, I'll show you'.
..........

It applies generally. I watched the first 'Men of Rock' programmes last night: just the same complaints, lots of talking - most of it by the introducer saying wow, this has always impressed me, I'm overwhelmed, I this, I that. Then lots of photographs of Edinburgh and general scenery - fine in small does but there could have been more pictures of the rocks under discussion ... could have been a lot more explanation of the geology ... also seems to be a tendency to avoid using technical terms so anyone wanting to switch from the film to a real book would have to start from the beginnining ..... generally, prettifying and dumbing down ....