Television
Odd bods
James Delingpole
Aan Bookbinder is a genius. I've never met him or spoken to him. I don't even know what he looks like. What I do know is that he's the editor at BBC Bristol respon- sible for commissioning one of the most consistently brilliant documentary series I've ever seen. It's called Under the Sun (BBC 2, Wednesday).
The series' remit, apparently, is to exam- ine unusual cultures 'with special emphasis on the emotional texture of people's lives'. If I'd known that before, I probably wouldn't have bothered watching it. Fortu- nately, it isn't nearly as earnest and worthy as it sounds.
Indeed, one of the things I most like about the programmes I've seen is the absence of leaden editorialising. The docu- mentary a few weeks ago about two four- year-old girls competing in a grotesque tiny tot talent contest in Atlanta, Georgia, could so easily have been ruined by a qua- vering voiceover telling you just how awful it all was. Instead, it was left to the viewer to decide whether or not these brats were being warped and exploited by their hideous parents. The conclusion was fairly obvious, but at least we were credited with sufficient intelligence to reach it unaided.
This week's episode — 'Spending the Kids' Inheritance' — was similarly even- handed. It concerned the million or so oldies who migrate to a small town in Ari- zona each January in their camper vans and recreation vehicles (RVs) to soothe their arthritic limbs in the desert heat, find replacements for deceased partners, dance, ride quad bikes and generally whoop it up like geriatric adolescents.
Few chances to laugh at their expense were missed. We heard a snippet from a local radio station in which the resident medical expert advised on the best treat- ment for snake-bites and hernias; we glimpsed quacks, RV interior decorators and vendors of kitsch bric-à-brac swooping, vulture-like, on their captive market; we saw a wedding at which the groom was so doddery he couldn't keep hold of the ring. But, equally, the programme's subjects were given every opportunity to display their courage, good humour and charm. We sympathised with the woman who'd decided that, since all her ungrateful off- spring wanted was money, she would only visit them once every five years; we applauded the surprisingly numerous cou- ples who claimed to enjoy hyperactive love lives. And I was especially taken with the game old bird who announced that she wouldn't be remotely bothered if she drove her RV into a canyon. Death had ceased to hold any fears for her.
`Spending the Kids' Inheritance' could have been made as a sick joke about a few, hare-brained coffin-dodgers or it could have been a reverential account of plucki- ness in old age. How clever of it to have attempted both at the same time.
The real reason, though, that I'm being so fulsome in Alan Bookbinder's praises is the episode I saw a couple of weeks earlier, `A Caterpillat Moon', about a tribe of pyg- mies — the Aka — in the Central African Republic. If you were unlucky enough to have missed it, I insist that you cancel all engagements should it ever be repeated.
The Aka — like most pygmies — are em- ployed as virtual slaves by another tribe of larger Africans. Both sides absolutely loathe each other: the bigguns because they believe the pygmies are smelly, work-shy imps who sneak into their village disguised as animals and steal their goods; the pygmies because they think the bigguns are lazy, brutal chimpanzees, who are too cowardly to ven- ture into the jungle to forage for delicacies such as honey and hairy caterpillars.
Heaven only knows what privations the film crew must have endured as they fol- lowed the pygmies deep into the rainforest to hunt for grubs, rats and deer. But they were rewarded with footage so sublimely watchable and — in the case of the little girl whose nose was pierced, and the screaming boy who had to be held down as his teeth were filed to modish points — unwatchable that, if I hadn't been glued to the screen, I'd have been ringing all my friends urging them to tune in.
Best of all were the scenes where the Pygmies railed against their oppressors. One pygmy woman announced that she would never consider sleeping with one of the bigguns: they were dirty, and they had black penises. Besides, she said, everyone knew that when pygmies died they were reincarnated as white men.
At about this point, I fully expected an apologetic voiceover to tell us that, of course, these racist views were the grim legacy of European colonialism. But the handwringing never came. And I wasn't sure which made me happier: the thought of all the liberal-left viewers squirming in their armchairs or the thrill of watching a documentary about black Africa which dared present us with the truth — round, unvarnished and free of the tiresome sub- text that, whatever the ills of the Third World, We Are To Blame.
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