Fish!!
Did you ever think you'd see the day where I'd get distracted from Buffy? Well, that day has come. I've been loaned The Blue Planet on DVD and I can't get enough of it. I've only got 4 episodes of season 7 of Buffy left to watch and I'd rather watch the fishies. The other night I deliberately stopped myself with 4 episodes of Buffy left to go because I knew I'd have to watch all of them in a oner and didn't fancy staying up until 3am on a school night to get it done. "Oh, I'll just pop in the Blue Planet instead," I thought to myself. D'oh! I'm completely hooked now.
I think my favourite bit so far is the bit with the killer whales hunting sea lions and going right up on to the beach to nab them. You must have seen that bit but the brilliant thing about it is the lead-up to that in the programme. Immediately before that the viewer is treated to an account of the family life of sealions and how they raise their pups. On a quiet beach young sealion pups frolic and play. The adults keep a watchful eye on them and occasionally join in their little games. The beach they have chosen is a perfect nursery with enclosed pools for the pups to practice swimming in when the tide is out. It's now high tide and time for the young pups to take their first foray into the surf. You see a shot of the pups just on the shore and gradually your eye notes a strange black and white shape in the waves... then WHAM. SPLASH. CHOMP. There's a freaking big killer whale on the beach!!!! Just brilliant. I love it when nature programmes do things like that. I still remember that other BBC production that showed chimps hunting a monkey. Oh the outcry at the time! People thought chimps just ate bananas and drank Typhoo tea but this showed them ripping a monkey to bits and scoffing it down. That's life folks!
On a side note: I went to see Ingmar Bergman's Seventh Seal at the Film House last night. Also superb. Superficially I can see why some people might brand the film as dull and pointless but it doesn't have a reputation as one of the most iconic European 'art films' for nothing. There's tons of stuff in there, humour as well as philosophy and theology. Bergman's death is not as impartial as Terry Pratchett's but he likes a laugh. Jons the squire is the one that seems to have the most healthy outlook on things though - "Wherever you turn you'll always have your rump behind you." or, as the translation I saw last night would have it "It's your own arse you sit on." True. True.
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