The wonder is still there in Planet Earth III, but a sadness too

“A wildlife documentary!” they will say, antennae twitching in disgust. “A David Attenborough wildlife documentary! Did you not realise something was up? The bloody thing is wearing a collar!”

It’s wearing a collar, this lion, because it’s one of the first to be seen on Namibia’s Skeleton Coast for 40 years. So it’s a laudable collar, really. People need to track this lion, follow it, check it makes it through the night. Still, though. This is Planet Earth III. It’s about wildlife. Life that is supposedly wild. A collar. Grim.

The lions, anyway, eat seagulls. Doesn’t look easy, can’t taste nice. What do the seagulls eat? Chips? “The natural world continues to surprise us,” Attenborough says, “but we must now look at the world through a new lens” because it is being “transformed by a powerful force. Us.” The first episode of this new series is about coasts, most of which don’t have lions at all. Nor should they, I think, so at least that’s something.

In nearby South Africa we see seals, somehow the most British of maritime mammals wherever they are, obliged to live in massive crowds but never really giving the impression of much liking it. You can’t know exactly what they’re saying in their honking, Chewbacca voices, but it always comes across as “Sorry! Excuse me! I just need to get over there!” Once in the sea, they have to deal with predatory sharks. Look, there’s one, cruising around like a heavily Botoxed divorcee who wants to devour another husband. Eventually the seals turn on it in a mob, driving it away. It’s amazing footage, but strangely unsatisfying in that way that Planet Earth can sometimes be. You want to know more. Is this normal, or unusual? What happens next? What would happen if it stood its ground? How big a bite can a seal take out of a shark, anyway?

A logger head sea turtle in Planet Earth III

BBC

Up in the Arctic, we meet a sea angel: basically a jellyfish with good PR. Blind and translucent, it hunts sea butterflies, which are the Atlantic doppelgänger of Quidditch’s Golden Snitch. Both being slimy and tiny, neither of these is terribly easy to root for, but having seen the former extract the latter from its shell with its horrible, Zoidberg mandibles, I’m definitely team Snitch. Then we are off to meet the archerfish of Indonesia, which shoot down their insect prey by turning their mouths into water pistols. Apparently, each individual archerfish is not born knowing how to do this, but has to watch and copy all the others. Sort of like a YouTube tutorial, I suppose.

Thematically speaking, it isn’t wholly clear what any of these have to do with the lions, or the struggling turtles we meet a bit later, or the Mexican flamingos whose chicks drown in floods. All are near coasts, yes, but I don’t get any sense that mankind is particularly imperilling the archerfish, or the Golden Snitch, or even the seal, except for perhaps in the broad sense that we’re just generally killing everything. This may come later. There’s a sadness to Attenborough these days. He doesn’t even try to hide it. The wonder is still there too, but it is a wonder that has shifted from “look at all this amazing stuff!” to “look how amazing it is that all this stuff is still clinging on”. That collar. Brr.

Meanwhile, in stark competition, Netflix has given us Life on Our Planet. This one has Morgan Freeman in place of Attenborough, which could be promising. Alas, almost everything he says is bonkers. Very plausibly Freeman may not realise this. He may, indeed, not even be particularly listening to himself. In which case, lucky him.

LOOP is not a true nature documentary, but more of a documentary about the evolution of life. By necessity, lots of it is thus CGI, as seen right at the beginning when two sabre-toothed tiger things start sneaking up on some giant bird thing. The tigers look real, the bird looks a bit made up. Are we sure the beak is meant to go there? Also, the CGI gets a bit glitchy sometimes. Later, once the tigers have killed the bird, one of them seems to have a bit of a fit. Like characters do in computer games when they get stuck behind bits of scenery.

Mammoths in Life on Our Planet

Not everything here is extinct. At other times, almost at random, we find ourselves looking at present-day creatures such as lions and ants. The trouble is, by then we’re not sure what’s real and what’s been manipulated. You see four lions on the screen and you suddenly think, hang on, is that all just the same lion? Have they been replicated to look more pleasingly symmetrical? Before long, you start to doubt everything. Maybe there are no lions, nor any ants. Maybe there never were. You trust nothing.

That, though, is not the main problem. The main problem is that this is all insane. “This is the story of the great battles for survival and the dynasties that would take over the world,” Freeman intones at the beginning. Is it, though? We see some sharks, dolphins and whales milling around in some water. “Not just a gathering of marine predators,” Freeman says, “but a coming together of ancient bloodlines.” Dude, calm down. It’s not Game of Thrones.

Plants don’t just spread, but “conquer the land”. Then come the invertebrates, but “the invertebrates could not rule for ever! A new dynasty would surpass them!” The, uh, Klingons? Oh, no. The amphibians. Then reptiles. “For the first time in history,” Freeman says, I sense perhaps a little wearily, “there was a global power.” Reptiles? Power? What?

It’s all like this: a really weird vision of evolution as a series of deliberate ploys and triumphs. Freeman’s voice is of course amazing, but sometimes no amount of godly declamation can save him. “Every single thing alive today can trace its heritage back four billion years,” he tells us, which is somehow both banal and untrue, simultaneously. Trace its heritage? A daffodil? How is it going to do that? Is it going to appear on Who Do You Think You Are? Rather than filling you with awe, it ends up doing the exact opposite. “He’s overselling this,” you think. Which is an odd takeaway from the history of life itself.

Three Little Birds on ITV is surprisingly good, if not always. Written by Lenny Henry, it makes you ponder an alternative reality in which he’d been principally a scriptwriter all along and was today chin-strokingly fêted as our foremost chronicler of the British-Caribbean experience. Rather than being, well, Lenny Henry.

Based, if apparently only a bit, on the experience of Henry’s mother, it’s the story of three Jamaican girls, Leah, Chantrelle and Hosanna, who arrive in London in 1957. Played by Rochelle Neil, Saffron Coomber and Yazmin Belo respectively, they expect to be welcomed into a promised land, and instead find themselves living amid poverty, resentment and racism.

With Leah being a tough survivor, her sister Chantrelle being boy-mad and Hosanna being religious and a tad humourless, the typecasting does, at times, make you wonder if this is the work of somebody who learnt everything they know about women from watching Sex and the City. Henry’s script, though, doesn’t get too ITV too often. Hosanna has come supposedly to marry the sisters’ brother Aston (Javone Prince), but each disappoints the other. Leah is fleeing horrific domestic abuse. Chantrelle, who dreams of stage stardom, has a job as a nanny.

While none of these plot strands is wildly exciting, the world-building is simply excellent, lodging time and tone firmly in your brain. It also manages to chronicle the many racist indignities faced by the Windrush generation, from the horrifying to the ludicrous, without ever drowning in them. Which, in a very Lenny Henry way, is actually quite a feat.

Finally, Milli Vanilli on Paramount+ is broadly boggling. Generation X will require no explanation, but for those on either side, Milli Vanilli were a Franco-German pop duo of the late 1980s. Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus had dreadlocks, bandanas and shoulder pads, and all the girls fancied them, and eventually they won a Grammy. Then it was revealed that they hadn’t actually sung on any of their own songs.

At this point, I’d imagine the response from most younger readers will be a slightly mystified “so what?” All I can say is, things were different then. No matter that the band had been put together by the German producer Frank Farian, who had previously done the same thing with Boney M. No matter that Morvan and Pilatus both supposedly sang in flawless American yet in interviews struggled to speak English. No matter even — get this — that their first European album didn’t even credit them both as vocalists. The music industry nonetheless first maintained the fiction that they were the real singers, and then maintained a second fiction of being shocked when it emerged they absolutely were not.

For the two performers, the subsequent ridicule was ruinous. They were dropped by their label and some fans even sued. Pilatus would spiral off into crime and addiction and eventually die from an overdose. Here, we hear mainly from Morvan, along with the real, neglected musicians in the background. The villain of the piece — Farian, who is still alive — does not appear at all.

Overall, the message here is one of a cruel hypocritical industry, which is entirely fair. What is lacking, perhaps, is a secondary message that perhaps pop music has subsequently learnt that singing isn’t everything. Since then, any boy band or girl band you can think of has had at least one member reputed to be unable to hold a tune, or more often a maximum of one who actually can. Even the most credible of artists now allow tech wizards and sound-desks to do a lot of heavy lifting. What you can’t fake is all the other stuff, which is the stuff that Milli Vanilli actually had. Frauds or not, they were pioneers.