Chris Packham: In Search of the Lost Girl
BBC Two
★★★★☆
All Together Now
BBC One
★☆☆☆☆
The question driving Chris Packham: In Search of the Lost Girl was, obviously, would Packham find the girl in the Indonesian forest whom he photographed 20 years ago? And we knew that the answer would be “yes”. Or, let’s face it, there would have been no programme. Happy or sad, TV demands an ending. And we got one. But it wasn’t exactly from a Disney storybook.
We could see that it was vital to Packham to trace this beautiful girl, from the Orang Rimba tribe, who was then aged about six. It was almost an obsession. “She has become a kind of barometer for me,” he said, “a way of measuring the condition of our planet.” Rapid deforestation has robbed nomadic tribes of habitat, but if the girl was still there and flourishing, he figured, hope is not lost.
Well. There was good news and bad. After a search (Packham pinpointed the exact spot where he met the tribe. “This is it! I’d stake my poodle’s life on it and I love him more than anything on Earth,” he said. Let’s hope his partner missed that bit) he found that the girl was still alive, still beautiful, with three children.
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But there was a tragic backstory. Her close family had been murdered when she was younger. Now, with the rainforest vanishing, she and her people were living under blue tarpaulin shelters and many of their natural resources were gone. “They are living in hell,” Packham said, “among the very thing that has destroyed them.” He meant palm oil, the lucrative production of which is eating up forestland.
In truth the woman, Bunga Mawar, didn’t seem ecstatic at being tracked down. She looked a bit confused and apprehensive, which is understandable. Packham lamented that he had found the same woman, but “not the same human” because she cannot live like she did. And “it’s our fault. People like us are destroying ecosystems all over the world,” he said, furiously.
The reason why I like Packham as a TV presenter is because he doesn’t care about popularity, only his message. His idea of hell, I’m sure, is a glitzy TV awards night. “If we don’t stop this nonsense, we have had it,” he told the camera. Sadly, I bet some pretentious fashion house is saying, “Ooh, she’d be amazing for our next ad campaign,” and booking flights to Indonesia right now.
If you didn’t catch All Together Now, BBC One’s new “singing contest with a twist” then, sincerely, lucky you. I haven’t seen such toe-curling, “make it stop” TV since Len Goodman’s Partners in Rhyme. Whoever thought of having 100 judges deserves to be tied to a chair and forced to watch both shows on a loop. For a week. Which is how long it seemed to last.
“The 100” sit in a massive grid of boxes, like Celebrity Squares on acid. If you get the judges on their feet singing you get a point. But the head judge is Geri Horner, formerly Halliwell, of the Spice Girls, and she looks very much as if she would rather be commanding the stage. Young people may like it and maybe I’m an old fart, but it’s such a messy and unwieldy carnival that it gave me a headache. Simon Cowell will approve, though. Shockingly, it made The X Factor look good.
carol.midgley@thetimes.co.uk