I don't believe it
James Delingpole
Theproblem with Walking With Dinosaurs and Walking With Beasts was that anyone with even a fraction of a brain knew that they were a load of madeup rubbish designed mainly for people who believed Jurassic Park was a plausible scenario. So this time, the BBC is trying to pull the wool over our eyes by recruiting Robert Winston to present its latest effort, Walking With Cavemen (BBC1, Thursday).
We like Robert Winston. He has delightful twinkly eyes, a warm bedside manner and a lovable comedy moustache; he displays an engaging shamelessness in front of the camera (getting two-bottles drunk to illustrate the effects of alcohol; climbing a tree in Africa and pretending the actor in a chimp costume next to him is in fact a three-and-a-half-million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis called Lucy; etc.); and, above all, he is an actual, genuine medical professor with a proper job in the field of fertility. So, if he's in charge of the programme, it must be kosher, mustn't it?
Well, possibly, I thought for about as long as it took for him to open his mouth and point to a tree and say: 'This is your distant relative from 300,000 generations ago.' And I went: 'No it's not, it's an actor dressed as a monkey. And, anyway, it wasn't that tree, that tree wasn't even there three million years ago, and even if it had been, I'll bet it was the wrong tree. In fact, you're probably not even filming this in the right country — it's supposed to be Afar in Ethiopia, but I'll bet it's just some other African country standing in for Ethiopia because you couldn't afford too many locations, so there.'
Yes, yes, of course I'm being absurdly literalist here and I realise how incredibly wearing the script would have been if it had hedged everything with 'coulds' and 'perhapses'. But I do think making statements such as 'This is the very tree where your ancestor hung out' is asking for trouble. Unless the viewer is prepared to submit with childlike wonderment, he's almost bound to go the other way and disbelieve everything.
Like the scene where, one by one, the family of ape-people bobs up poetically from beneath the long grass: is that verifiable early-man behaviour or are the ape actors just doing it because the director thought it would look pretty? And the almost-female-human wail of distress Lucy utters when her baby is nearly clobbered
by warring males: is that how early hominids really sounded?
Still, kids are going to love it, it's beautifully shot and dramatically scored, the prosthetics and action sequences are fab, and I'm sure between the bouts of silliness we might even learn something. Possibly. The main fact I picked up from part one was that the reason our ancestors learned to walk on two legs was not so that they could see further but because it used up slightly less energy — the approximate equivalent in a year of a chocolate biscuit. Except, even this one I'm not sure about. I mean, if the difference was really that marginal, what was the incentive?
Meanwhile, it occurs to me that there are quite a few programmes I don't cover just because from my position as a pop cultural whore I imagine everyone knows about them, forgetting that to you crustyold-colonel-in-the-shires types reading this they may well be terra incognita and possibly even of interest.
One of these things is Boys And Girls (Channel 4, Friday, Saturday). This is the latest attempt by Chris Evans to capture the weekend yoof TV market (because everyone hates him, he has got someone called Vernon Kay playing the Chris Evans role) with one of those Frankenstein's monster mash-up jobs that are so fashionable at the moment. Boys And Girls is made up of stitched-together pieces of Blind Date, Supermarket Sweep and Mr and Mrs.
On the Saturday night episode, which is on at 9 p.m., when anyone who might be interested is in the pub, two teams of boys and girls are asked questions about one another, and, after various humiliating stunts, one lucky winner and their personally chosen potential shag go forward into the following Friday's disgusting vulgarity and greed round. Here, they are given a week to blow £100,000, in instalments of about £25,000 which they have to spend in a limited amount of time or lose the lot. At night they are filmed getting drunk together and the general idea is for them to have sex, though no one has yet done so. When you watch it for the first time it's mildly titillating, seeing lunkheaded twentysomethings getting very quickly inured to blowing the sort of money they'll never see again in their miserable squalid lives. But it's the same every week and the only reason you watch it ever again is because it's on after Derren Brown: Mind Control (Channel 4, Friday; Saturday).
Derren Brown is great. He performs like a magician but his real skill is as a truly amazing reader of body language, with the ability to plant ideas in people's heads without their realising it. A few weeks ago, he persuaded a medical student to pass a large surgical needle through the flesh of his hand. There was no bleeding or pain. All his stunts are this good. You should watch him.
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