Two things puzzle me about vegetarians. Whenever they come to visit us, we always provide a vegetarian dish for them. But if you go to a vegetarian’s home, no one says, ‘I know you won’t like this lentil and halloumi lasagne, so we’ve cooked you steak and chips.’ Never. As for those who don’t eat meat on moral grounds, what’s their response to those animals who eat their comrades in the struggle against oppression?
And they don’t mess around with battery farming either. Life (BBC1, Monday) had some of the most powerful images of ferocious fauna that have ever appeared on our screens. Admittedly, the three cheetahs attacking an ostrich looked rather ludicrous, as if Barbara Cartland had got into a pub brawl, but the sight of the leopard seal eating penguin chicks by hurling them into the air to get the skin off was as horrible a sight as you might see on television.
Many of the pictures felt unreal, dreamlike. The giant orange female octopus, crawling into an undersea cave to die while her 100,000 fertilised eggs turned into more giant octopi, then floated off like tiny Christmas tree baubles. The capuchin monkey is the Delia Smith of the animal world, having learnt how to leave palm nuts in the sun till they’re cooked inside, then using rocks to crush the shells. There were images of sensational beauty — the grebes dancing across the water on an Oregon lake, a shoal of flying fish propelling themselves 200 yards over the sea. The only human with a star part was a French boatman called Jérôme Poncet, who has been sailing the Antarctic for decades, and who with his mighty moustache looks much like a walrus. You felt that he could strip a penguin in the same time you or I might unwrap a chocolate bar of the same name.
I suppose the sheer detail and dazzling quality of the images is a response to the increased sophistication of computerised images. Now that a talented boy in his bedroom could create a convincing representation of a baby penguin eating a killer whale, reality has to try so much harder to look real.
I like old-fashioned costumes, heaving bosoms, stilted language and sarcastic asides as much as the next man, which is why I was at the Conservative party conference instead of watching the first episode of Emma (BBC1). But I caught the second this week and was puzzled as to why it had received such poor reviews. The acting was fine, there was little if any anachronistic dialogue, and the whole thing was swept along by a powerful underlying stream of irony. Jane Austen furnished a claustrophobic world — it was difficult, expensive and time-consuming to travel more than five miles — and that always makes for fascinating television. Look at Albert Square, where they have the same problem.
Two fine comedies: The Armstrong & Miller Show is back on BBC1 (Friday), with their filthy Flanders and Swann act, the two jive-talking British officers, facing a firing squad this time, and a wonderful sequence in which three bright and cheery Blue Peter presenters explain to the children the drugs, sex and booze stories about them in the tabloid papers.
Modern Family from the US has started on Sky 1 (Thursday). It’s written by the people behind Frasier, and though it’s not settled down yet it does have promise. The first episode opened with the clichéd scene of a mother shouting at her brood to come for breakfast. Stroppy daughter: ‘Why are you guys yelling at us when we’re way upstairs — why don’t you just text us?’
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