Personally, I have always preferred the reptile house to the gorilla enclosure. I don’t know, somehow its inmates seem more human. David Attenborough in Life in Cold Blood (BBC One) clearly felt, however, his latest subjects needed rehabilitation if the final part of his Life work was not going to end on a dying ugh! “Reptiles and amphibians are sometimes thought of as primitive, dull and dim-witted. In fact, of course, they can be lethally fast, spectacularly beautiful, surprisingly affectionate and very sophisticated,” he began introducing a montage in which a David Mellor lookalike extended its tongue half a mile to catch a gnat, a pair of tortoises wrestled with the agility of aggrieved bungalows and two lizards waved at each other from tree branches like Tarzan and Cheetah.
We come, of course, to gawp and there was plenty to gawp at. Singed on my retina are the armadillo lizard that turns itself into a barbed wire spiral, the South American waxing monkey frog that smears itself with its own suncream and the python that we saw eating a deer. The photography was sometimes mind-bogglingly clever. On an island off Minorca we saw a fly enter the nasally challenging dead-horse arum plant pursued by a Balearic lizard. The next shot we had was from inside the plant.
But Attenborough comes to teach. The Balearic lizards were there not just because they were ugly faces but because 20 years ago a plucky one raided a dead arum plant and ate its seeds. Now all the lizards are doing it and the plant is everywhere, its seeds spread by lizard poo. Even if you did not recognise in this anecdote a lesson in evolutionary adaptation, you’d have to be remedially dim not to come away from this opening show knowing that reptiles get most of their energy from the Sun rather than from food.
Fortunately, there was never a lesson that could not be livened up by a good teacher bringing sex into it and Attenborough is the best biology master there ever was. In California, he introduced us to the attractively named side-blotched lizard where he proved, by reapportioning a pile of rocks from beneath an alpha male to beneath a loser lizard, that the female of the species chose her mates on the basis of which had the better underfloor heating. “The females do indeed go for the males with the hottest rocks,” he said, cracking as near as he gets to a smutty joke.
There is no room for sentimentality in Attenborough’s atheistic accounting for life on Earth but there is, thank Someone, room for affection in the Darwinian plan. We saw turtles feeling each other up under water and two others humping with considerable care on land. A parent lizard gently laid a hand on junior’s back. Yet the most affecting thing in the whole programme came in its Under the Skin coda (the ten minutes behind-the-scenes extra designed to fill up the gap left once the American ad breaks have been removed).
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Here we saw Attenborough circa 1960 filming Zoo Quest in Madagascar where he heard rumours about, but never saw, a pygmy leaf chameleon. For this series he returned and a local expert led him to the smallest reptile in the world. “That is the most marvellous thing I have seen for a very long time,” Attenborough laughed. I don’t care what cheating the cameras got up to for Life in Cold Blood; Attenborough remains the least fake thing on British television.
Savile Row (BBC Four) was a bespoke documentary on the London street where even a side-blotched lizard would be asked which side he dresses. The tailors feared they were being stitched up because the jean-makers Abercrombie & Fitch were opening up in the lane. The craftsmen got the last laugh, however, when Mike Jeffries, the CEO of Abercrombie, and a man with a face that looks as if it has been botched up in a Calcutta sweatshop, arrived at Norton and Sons to be measured for a suit.
Taking, perhaps, its cue from the tailors who take 15 weeks to make a bespoke dinner jacket, the series continues for another two weeks. It reminded me of the joke in Beckett’s Endgame about the much-fobbed-off customer who reminds his tailor that God took only six days to make the world: “But look at God’s world and look at my trousers,” replies the tailor. If he had seen Life in Cold Blood he could not have used that gag.
Out of the box
— I’ll be listening tonight to Radio 2’s The One to Watch about HBO, the American cable network behind The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Sex and the City. It argues that its subscription model liberates writers from the restraints of either advertisers or the licence fee. But why has British television not paid a similar tribute to HBO, the most important development in television for decades? Perhaps because its drama, by comparison, is tame, conventional and treats its viewers as though they were dim?
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— Mind you, US TV can be as craven as anyone’s. The showbiz magazine Entertainment Tonight last week obtained a video showing Heath Ledger at a party where drugs were being taken. ETsays it pulled the story out of respect. The word is that a PR firm the show relies on for its celebrity interviews went into overdrive, lobbied 30 other PRs and ET caved.