Consolation

One of the ways I found to console myself over the weekend for Noi not being around was by viewing two of the episodes of the wonderful Planet Earth, the two being the last pair of the original series. (The DVD set comes with another three documentaries on an extra disk which I think are 'extras'. Good value, eh?) So I luxuriated in Seasonal Forests on Saturdays and explored the Deep Ocean on Sunday.

Each episode on the DVD set comes with a corresponding Planet Earth Diaries, a ten minute film of one aspect or another of the making of what you've just viewed. I assume these are part of the original series, being both illuminating and informative. In a way they bring you down to earth, showing you some of the impressive nuts and bolts of the filming. Watching them has served to make me more aware of the sense in which these programmes are genuine works of art. You realise just how impressive the editing of the images has been and how careful the selection has been. Ally that to the gorgeously expressive music by George Fenton and the commentary by David Attenborough which is informative, humane and emotionally engaging, often in a single finely crafted, finely enunciated sentence, and you've got something that does whatever art is supposed to do - with knobs on.

The last awesome image of the mighty blue whale making its way through the even mightier ocean, the camera then pulling away to the point the whale is no longer quite visible as Attenborough asks us do we intend to save the planet at this crucial time struck me as being as powerfully iconic as the gorilla sequence from Life On Earth - high praise indeed. The trouble is that watching it I couldn't get out of my mind the image of all that BP oil gushing into the ocean. And I still can't, despite their claims to have capped the leak.

I wonder if some hundred or so years in the future some kids will be viewing the image in a gallery somewhere as a reminder of a paradise we lost and can never reclaim. Not much consolation there, I'm afraid.