At this point, Victorian England became desperately excited about finding the last great auk, and hugely expensive expeditions were mounted to discover it. Institutions placed prices on the auk’s head. Finally, after many months of exceedingly dangerous exploration, a team found the very last one and brought it back to general hurrahs and rejoicing. It was dead, of course. They had killed it instantly. The point was to have a stuffed great auk, which was worth an awful lot more than a living one.
Now consider that story as a television programme. It would be perfect right up to the payoff, but the Victorians who killed the last auk weren’t innately any more cruel than we are — indeed, they tended towards extreme sentimentality. They just had a very different view of nature. Nothing has changed the way we see the wild world more than television. The camera, I don’t think it’s too extreme to say, invented the green movement and all its attendant special interests. Environmentalists would still be beardy, homespun specialists in tepees without the box. Television’s propaganda on behalf of nature has probably been the most successful piece of mass manipulation ever.
The BBC has created a series on the way it made nature programmes, The Way We Went Wild (Sunday, BBC2). On one level, this is a smart idea; on another, it’s an extremely dull one. We’ve already had programmes on the technicalities of nature filming, which were a bit nerdy. This time they’re looking at the presenters, who are even more nerdy. The first programme showed us the careers of Johnny Morris and Bill Oddie. Well, I had a go at Oddie a couple of weeks ago, so let’s leave the plucked parrot aside. Suffice it to say that Oddie: The Early Years was about as interesting and inspiring as watching a worm farm. Morris was another bucket of fish altogether.
Indeed, a bucket of fish was Morris’s main prop. He was forever flinging herrings at things. Animal Magic was the way many of today’s ecowarriors first came upon the natural world (hum the theme tune now and it will be in your head for a week). Around the junior nature table at school, there was an unbridgeable schism between Animal Magic enthusiasts and Zoo Quest acolytes: Morris or Attenborough. I was an Attenborough lad. I hated Morris. If you never actually saw him, he was a round-faced Welshman who did funny voices for animals while pre- tending to be a zookeeper. Actually, it was one-and-a-half voices that were supposed to fit everything.
Even as a child, I knew there was something not quite right about Morris. There was something of the carrion-eater about him. Like so many television presenters, he was a strange misfit until the camera made him complete. He was famously one of the most difficult people on television. Jeremy Clarkson still harbours strong memories of him. When he was four, he toddled across Bristol Zoo to get an autograph. The great man looked at him and told him to bugger off. “When I heard he’d died, I said ‘Good’, much to my wife’s surprise,” says Jeremy. But did he say bugger off as a sea lion or just a bad-tempered Welsh bloke? Clarkson can’t remember.
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Morris was disapproved of among the weird hobbity fraternity of naturalists for being an anthropomorphist. I don’t mind anthropomorphism. It’s quite fun in bed. What I minded was that Morris was so cloyingly parochial and suburban about it. When you think about it, all nature on television is anthropomorphic. The box imposes a plot, makes a drama for wildlife. This is no less imposing human emotions on animals than pretending a camel sounds like a dowager duchess.
I wish this programme had tackled the really interesting question of the ethics of natural-history broadcasting — the species-ism, the natural assumption that man is outside nature’s loop and always the bad guy — rather than dealing with the personalities of presenters, who are frankly less interesting than three-toed sloths. A stuffed great auk went for £9,000 at auction in 1971, a world record for taxidermy.
Homosexuals have also had their public image irrevocably changed by television. Gay men are a popular dramatic stereotype. They’re a must on gameshows and reality programmes. They are the balsamic vinegar in television’s dinner. Everything has to have a dash of gay. This doesn’t apply to gay women yet: they are still restricted to prison shows, flat shoes and faking it as heterosexuals. But male gayness has, in the words of one of my acquaintances, been shoved down our throats. They are the great fashion accessory and affectation of television.
That may take the sting out of homophobia, but it also reduces and trivialises. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (Friday, C4), a show where a screamingly camp covey of gay men make over the life of an irredeemably slobbish hetero bloke, has finally arrived on terrestrial television. The American version is much better than the British copycat one, simply because Americans tend to be enthusiastic, supportive and nice, and the British cruel, judgmental and bitchy. That’s nothing to do with being gay — that’s just being English.
The format is perfectly watchable, and the makeovers are occasionally remarkable. The gratitude of the hetero men, and of their families, wives and girlfriends, is abject and not unlike religious conversion, moisturiser standing in for the Holy Ghost. I have a suspicion that American series such as this and Will & Grace are not what they seem. Actually, they’re a deeply prescriptive right-wing religious society belittling the thing they’re frightened of. It’s not bringing acceptance of gay people into the mainstream, it’s turning them into comedy turns and sidekicks. It locks them into the box as trivial arch purveyors of hair product. That may be better than making fag jokes, but not much.
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Reality shows in America have grown very nasty. My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiancé (Thursday, E4) features a silly preppy girl who has been told she will win a lot of money if she can convince her friends and parents she’s going to marry some dire fat klutz of a man. What she doesn’t know is that he’s an actor, and it’s she who is being set up as a venal, scheming snob. All well and good: reality contestants deserve everything they get. Except that I didn’t believe a word of this one. It had too many camera angles and too much control. It looked as if it was the audience that was being set up as gullible. And then, in the credits, there was someone called a “reality casting director”. There you are: that’s my oxymoronic media job of the week.