To die for

Down the Mighty River with Steve Backshall (BBC2) was perfect Sunday-night TV — one of the most enjoyable adventure travelogues I’ve watched in ages. So I was quite surprised to see it reviewed lukewarmly by another critic. One of the critic’s objections was that the scene where Backshall spots a bird of paradise through his binoculars by the Baliem river in Papua New Guinea was a bit crap. Why couldn’t we have seen it in loving close-up detail, as you would on a David Attenborough?

But this is precisely what I loved about the documentary. It had a roughness, an unpredictability, a spontaneity that you rarely find on TV any more. I’m sick to death of watching meet-ups where the roving presenter has a ‘surprise’ encounter — pre-arranged months before by his producers — with some eccentric yet typical local characters and proceeds to immerse himself comically in some humiliating regional custom: having his testicles shaved by the Lapland women’s reindeer-wrestling team, drinking the fermented digestive juices of an orangutan through a Dyak’s penis gourd, and so on.

I agree that some presenters — such as Michael Mosley, who ate a sheep’s brain and braved a chilli-eating contest on the pleasantly watchable The Secrets of Your Food (BBC2) last week, and Backshall himself, who once tearily braved the ultimate pain by donning mittens filled with bullet ants — do it well. But you can have too much of a good thing and TV documentaries have long since passed that point: yes, I’m sure you’re ‘going on a journey’ (as you’re going to remind us at the beginning of each section); yes, wow, those aerial shots that you can all afford to do now you don’t need to hire a helicopter because of drones are just stunning; yes, gosh, no doubt it really is a race against time giving us the requisite sense of ‘jeopardy’ that has us all on the edge of our seats.