Unexpected wildlife-telly hit (Inside Nature's Giants)

Member Name: worst_trip

Product:	Inside Nature's Giants
Date:	18/08/09 (12 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Unusual animal-dissection format gives added interest to the subject

Disadvantages: Try to ignore the series' slightly dodgy-sounding title; only four (excellent) episodes to date

"Inside Nature's Giants" was a strangely intriguing telly programme, one that at first sight - after you'd watched the trailer featuring that team of terribly po-faced scientists clustering round a very dead upside-down crocodile - didn't look like it would've made good TV at all. The end result was however absolutely fascinating; this show, against all expectations, turned out to be an unlikely throwback to the 'proper wildlife programmes' we used to get in the 1970s and 1980s - the ones that contained actual, interesting and relevant information about animals and their environment, the shows that used to be made before grotesque levels of dumbing-down at the BBC Natural History Unit, over-reliance on bad computer graphics and the glorification of the nature cameraman as some sort of god-like aspirational figure turned the whole genre into the abject embarrassment it is today.

The format of the Channel 4 show was dissections of large dead animals mainly obtained from zoos. There were four programmes, featuring dissections of an Indian elephant, a fin whale that'd washed up dead on a rainy beach in Ireland, the aforementioned croc (which had died of unexplained causes at a crocodile farm in France) and a young giraffe. Unique morphological characteristics of each animal were related to their species' evolutionary history and / or lifestyles, as a dissection was carried out by an on-site team of scientists, each of whom had a different specialism in animal physiology.

Though the dissections were carried out very much as a team effort, the star of the show turned out - for me - to be the female American researcher who led the fin whale dissection - an operation beset with logistical problems from the outset, not least because of the unweildly size of the animal's corpse, combined with the distinct possibility that the rising tide would at any moment sweep in to wash the entire beached dissection away. The sight of this waterproof-clad but still woefully under-dressed woman crawling gamely right inside the whale's gigantic oozing body cavity, carrying with her a carving knife in order to retrieve and preserve its voice-box (as well as presumably being a whale specialist, this character was very interested in larynxes in general, a feature which cropped up in a couple of later dissetions) was for me something of a reaffirmation of my faith in human nature; in an age where we are largely defined in society by our interests in mobile bloody phones and the extent to which we have 'lived life to the full / lived the dream' (or at least, an advertising exective's idea of what that constitutes), on the contrary, I would like my daugters to be just like her, the larynx-obsessed whale-woman on that windswept Irish beach.

Richard Dawkins - you know, 'I don't belive in god' Richard Dawkins was also one of the background presenters on the show, although I'm not sure how much he really contributed. He cropped up in sound-bites throughout the shows occasionally to say how great evolution is, as if we aren't already all living proof of that, but heigh-ho. He wasn't involved directly in the dissections (although as one professional TV reviewer pointed out, he still, bizarrely, was dressed in the distinctive orange overalls that the rest of the team were wearing to stop themselves getting bits of dead elephant etc. on them) and there also was a main-guy presenter who had the job of tying all the disparate threads of fascinating information about each creature together, so if the show had a weak point (which it didn't really) possibly there being too many commentaors involved might've been it.

It was on the whole a brilliant programme - it's only a pity that they only made four episodes of it. I will be looking out and hoping for series 2 in future.

Summary: Excellent wildlife programme with fascinating factual content just like the BBC used to make