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Has anyone else seen this?
It goes out on BBC2 at around 7 on Saturday evening, and is fairly uncomfortable viewing.
It concerns a family of meerkats, a species that somebody high up at Broadcasting House is obviously out to get, possibly because of the famous 'Meerkats United' documentary from the Seventies, in which they looked very cute.
In this though, they don't. If anthropomorphism is bad when it ascribes saintly, humanistic virtues to the behaviour of animals, it's surely even worse when it tries to portray the poor things as something akin to the cast of 'Eastenders' - Basically, somebody seems to have had the brilliant idea of bolting a narrative about everything that's wrong with Council Estate Britain onto documentary footage of meerkats in the wild in Africa. According to the voiceover (by Bill Nighy, who can't need the money that badly, so what's up with him? Substance abuse?) they 'get into rucks', they 'have the horn', they might even 'go out on the razzle' occasionally. No opportunity to lambast them as despicable human beings is missed, even though they are, you know, animals ... The show could have been called 'Meerkats: Chav Scum', given it's hostility to the species in general; 'Animals - They're Useless, Selfish, Greedy F***s, Just Like Us!' would be another title the producers might have run past marketing.
At this point in time, it strikes me that what Mother Nature probably doesn't really need is a demolition job from the home of 'Life On Earth'. And what have meerkats done to desrve this treatment? It seems like BBC2 wants us, the viewing public, to hate them, to head off down to the nearest zoo which has them in captivity, then hurl beer cans and abuse.
It plays out like genuinely nihilistic television, and I don't mean that in a good way either. |
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