BBC digs up same old facts and eco-warnings
Dinosaurs, dinosaurs, dinosaurs. Why are there so many dinosaur documentaries around? If you’re a palaeontologist, you’ve probably got a queue of TV crews at your door. It wouldn’t be so bad if these shows were distinctive, but Secrets of the Jurassic Dinosaurs (BBC Two) was a retread of things we’d seen in other documentaries in the last few weeks.
Presenter Liz Bonnin introduced us to former Microsoft chief technical officer Dr Nathan Myhrvold, who has made a scale model of a sauropod tail to work out if it can break the sound barrier when cracked. If this sounds familiar, it is because Myhrvold demonstrated exactly the same thing in Channel 5’s Dinosaur with Stephen Fry, which was on only last week.
Bonnin travelled to a dinosaur graveyard in Wyoming, where teams have uncovered over 3,000 fossils. If you watched Channel 5’s Into Dinosaur Valley with Dan Snow in December, you will have seen him visit the same place. And his programme was far more interesting, because he focused on the 19th-century “dino rush” and the rivalry between two leading palaeontologists of the time. It was amusing to note that while Snow was filmed striding out into the baking sun to test out the difficult conditions, the BBC filmed a health and safety briefing from a team leader warning about the dangers of 110F (43C) degree heat.
It is also, I’m afraid to say, not terribly exciting to see fossils being unearthed. I’m sure that, if you’re at the scene, the sight of dinosaur footprints would be mind-blowing. Through the medium of television, they look like big dents in a rock. This is why shows resort to special effects, but they were used sparingly here.
The programme featured the usual CGI effects, with Bonnin standing next to a recreation of a diplodocus, just as Fry did in his show. Of course, if you missed the Channel 5 stuff then you won’t mind any of this content being repeated, and it was a perfectly serviceable documentary, made by the BBC Studios Science Unit. But it hardly fulfils the BBC promise to focus on distinctive content.
It also fits rather awkwardly with Bonnin’s recent admission to feeling “eco-anxiety” at flying across the world in order to make natural history shows.
“We’re making all these programmes… but to what end, if our carbon footprint is so high and if the story isn’t leading to tangible change so that those animals don’t go extinct?” When they’re extinct already, and other programmes have covered exactly the same ground, is there any point at all?
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