Wild things (The Life of Mammals, Vols. 1-4 (DVD))

Name: hogsflesh

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Product:	The Life of Mammals, Vols. 1-4 (DVD)
Date:	28.03.07 (248 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Probably my favourite nature documentary ever

Disadvantages: The music is really bad

Animals. As a rule, I find animals tiresome. From that damned fox that shrieks outside my bedroom in the wee small hours, to the dog that chewed my headphones to buggery, and the woodlouse that I recently noticed crawling up my leg when I was getting out of the shower, I generally have a ‘why don’t they all just f*** off?’ attitude to animals.

In real life, that is. But I do like a good nature documentary. And if there’s one thing the BBC can still be relied on to make well, it’s nature documentaries. Some of my earliest television memories involve David Attenborough romping with gorillas, and ever since then I’ve thoroughly enjoyed watching animals kill each other, have it off or hibernate, with his kindly but no-nonsense voiceovers explaining what I’m seeing. And in recent years they’ve been getting better and better, filming animals that have never been seen before in incredible detail.

I’ve been buying up Attenborough boxsets like mad in recent months. This is my favourite of them all. Mammals are furry (for the most part), quite big, and tend to do more interesting things than birds and fish. Originally broadcast in 2002 and 2003, it’s ten episodes of hot-blooded, milk-producing action that should satisfy anyone’s appetite for nature documentaries for weeks.

Each episode is about an hour long, and focuses on one particular type of mammal, starting with the marsupials and ending with the higher primates. Typically they spend about five minutes on an individual species before moving on to the next one – so you don’t get a hugely in depth explanation of any one animal. But as a panoramic view of the wonders of furry nature, you can’t really get better than this.

How much you like each episode obviously depends on how much you like each kind of animal. I found the marsupials episode boring (apart from those cute, egg-laying platypuses), along with the ones about aquatic mammals and rodents (apart from porcupines, which rock). On the other hand, the carnivore episode was tremendous, the omnivores were great (especially the bears) and monkeys and apes are a constant source of delight.

The photography in each location is amazingly clear, and they’ve gone almost everywhere in the world. Name almost any mammal and it’s in there somewhere. There are some incredible moments – big cow things, possibly wildebeest, crossing a river when suddenly a dirty great crocodile looms up and eats one of them; grizzly bears catching salmon; elephants plodding through caverns late at night. And some of the stuff they’ve filmed is wonderful, especially the small-scale stuff – interiors of nests, elaborate tunnel systems full of grotesque bald rats, bats hibernating in pitch-black caves. There are, perhaps, slightly too many animals to keep track of – I couldn’t tell you the names of half the small rodent-y things that we were shown if my life depended on it – but it’s marvellous to just sit back and watch them go about their business.

Attenborough himself turns up a lot in person, wandering up to sloths, hiding behind trees and spying on tapirs, or going up in a hot air balloon in search of bats. He must have the best job in the world. His reliable persona guides us effortlessly through a succession of crazy animal antics – he’s been doing this for decades now, and I doubt there’s a better presenter of nature programmes anywhere in the world. His obvious fascination shines through in his delivery, and I think he might just be my favourite TV personality ever.

It’s not quite perfect. We occasionally have the technical processes by which the footage was acquired explained to us. This doesn’t interest me greatly, and seems like a waste of time when I could be watching a panda do something funny. And there’s some really ill-advised CGI stuff about what prehistoric mammals may have looked like – remember how Walking with Dinosaurs was kind of cool but kind of embarrassing at the same time? This is just embarrassing.

And the music is profoundly awful (apart from the opening theme, which is pleasantly reminiscent of the music to Band of Brothers). Orchestral and pompous for the most part, but with an occasional burst of annoying ‘world music’, it underlines what we’re seeing in the most manipulative way imaginable. Blue whales are accompanied by deep, slow, stately sounding melodies, while mice get fast, high-pitched, staccato music. And, as ever in these programmes, dolphins bring out the worst in the composers. Seriously: dolphins aren’t noble adventurers, they’re wild animals that live in the sea, eat fish and have prehensile penises.

This is probably the main problem with the music, and maybe with the show in general. It anthropomorphises. Although Attenborough himself never encourages this, the music certainly does. When the ugly-looking jackal-thing eats a seal cub, I refuse to feel any sympathy for the mother seal, in spite of what the music tells me. These are animals, not people, and almost all of them would eat us if they had the chance. To treat them differently is insipid. I wish there was an option to turn off the music and just have it with the sound effects and voiceover, but there isn’t – unfortunately, it’s not really possible to watch with the sound off in the way you can with the Blue Planet or Life in the Undergrowth. But this doesn’t really spoil things too much. The footage is good enough that you can kind of ignore the music.

It’s also sad, but obviously beyond the programme-makers’ abilities to rectify, that so many animals are so few in number. In spite of the prominent appearance on the front cover of a splendid looking tiger, the only ones they could find were living in a protected nature reserve. Truly, man is the most dangerous animal, in a tear-trickling-down-a-native-American’s-cheek kind of way, and we’ve screwed up this planet good and proper. Attenborough ends the series by wondering if we’ll ever colonise Mars. Let’s hope so.

The extras are a little disappointing, but I guess they fill space. There are a few short ‘making of’ features (which may have been broadcast along with the episodes, I forget) – as I said before, I don’t find these very interesting. I have immense respect and admiration for the work of the people who captured this footage, but I don’t greatly care how they did it. There’s a photo gallery, which has some nice pictures of koalas and the like. There’s some short text descriptions of various animals. And there’s the soundtrack. By itself. With no pictures. Not good. There’s also a ten minute piece called Video to Music, which is just a montage of animals with, er, music playing. Nice enough, I suppose, but I’m not sure what purpose it’s meant to serve.

This is close to essential viewing if you’ve any fondness for animals at a safe distance. Although I’d run a mile if I ever came anywhere near a real life giraffe, it’s great to be able to watch them on TV. It sells for £18 on amazon, well worth it, and can be picked up on ebay for slightly less if you’re lucky.

(Oh, still a few more days of the Movie competition month left – extra points will be awarded to the best reviews posted in March – get your entries in while you still can!)

Summary: The BBC's great wildlife epic collected on DVD.