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- The Guardian, Monday 16 March 2009
'It must be a place of beautiful silence, and it would have been nice to share some of that silence' ... The Lower Falls on the Yellowstone River. Photograph: BBC/Paul D Stewart/BBC NHU
I like the fox in Yellowstone (BBC2, Sunday), the one that jumps high into the air, flips over, and then plunges headfirst into the soft snow. Like Greg Louganis, but hairier. A perfect 10 for entry.
To be honest, it's not hard for a fox to make a good head-first entry - they have the right shaped face for it. If little Tom Daley from Plymouth had had a fox's face he might have come back from Beijing with a gold. Or at least something.
The otters are the best though, as they always are. There just seems to be more joy in being an otter than there is in being anything else. While all the other furry things are simply surviving, huddled together against the cold wind or trudging for miles in search of some miserable morsel of food, the otters are having a game of otter twister or hide the trout. And then, when they travel in a line, one in front of the other, leaping in ottery loops out of the snow, they turn into a little Loch Ness Monster.
Two creatures try to steal the otters' thunder - humans, both of them. First is Edmund Butt, the composer who wrote the music, a romantic score of soaring strings. It's not Edmund's fault, the music's lovely, but there's too much of it and it's too loud. At times the whole thing feels like a piece of music with some wintry pictures to accompany it. My colleague Pascal Wyse recently wrote an interesting blog on the subject of music and its overuse in wildlife documentaries. Look it up, he knows more about the subject than I do. But I can imagine that Yellowstone in winter must be a place of beautiful silence, and it would have been nice to share some of that silence.
The other human villain is Peter Firth, the actor, who does the voice-over. It's more of a soliloquy than a voiceover, delivered with such splendid grandiosity, every syllable of every word picked out, crisp as an ice crystal. "But this is a cruel beauty ... "
Lighten up fella, it's just a few moose, on the loose, in the snow, not King bloody Lear.
Not all the humans are baddies, though. There's a nice little film about the people of Yellowstone tagged on to the end, and this one focuses on a man called Jeff. Jeff has spent most of his life in the park; he should really have been born a bear. Except that he's sort of the opposite of a bear, in that he comes into his own in the winter, when the tourists have gone home, and the bears have gone to sleep in their holes.
Jeff's job is to clear the snow from the roofs of the buildings in the park, so they don't collapse. He gets up there with his big saw, and he cuts the snow into blocks, which he pushes off. Or, if the pitch of the roof is right, he can create an avalanche, so the whole lot slides off in one go. He does it year after year, on his own, and he never gets bored. Jeff's dreading the year the snow doesn't come, or he's too old to get up there on those roofs. I like Jeff - not quite as much as the otters, but nearly.
When I wrote about the pilot for The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency (BBC1, Sunday) last year, I came in for some stick - more so than usual. I called it twee, quaint and shallow. People called me a wazzock, or worse. But one woman who got in touch didn't just agree with me, she'd written her whole thesis on why Alexander McCall Smith's take on Botswana is neo-colonialist. What did she know about the place? Well, she only came from there. And she said she didn't recognise the country in the books, or in the BBC dramatisation. Oh, and guess what she did for a job in Botswana. Worked for the police. No 2 Ladies Detective. Huh!
Anyway, there's nothing in this first of a new series of six to make me feel any different. Precious Ramotswe and her sidekick are smiling a lot and being a bit dim in their crime-solving. Dim but charming, obviously. The other characters are cut out from cardboard. The camera has a rose-coloured lens. It's still Heartbeat, relocated to Botswana. I still don't like it. No doubt I'm still a wazzock, or worse.
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