St Kilda, a set of islands off the coast of Scotland uninhabited for 78 years except by around a million seabirds. Suddenly the BBC sends a crack team of exclaimers to this remote and beautiful place. ‘Amazing!’ they cry. ‘Fantastic!’, ‘stunning!’, ‘great!’, ‘breathtaking!’, ‘spectacular!’ Now and again the team try to dredge from their psyches longer phrases, entire formed thoughts. ‘It’s like another world!’, ‘I can’t believe I’m here!’, ‘if you’re into really remote, wild places, this is the ultimate!’ They are moved to something close to poetry. ‘It seems like ghosts are watching us from their abandoned houses, but only the seals have come out to greet us.’ Wandering round the stone cottages and storehouses, they have a pop at profundity: ‘You have to use your imagination to imagine what this settlement looked like.’ Yup, that’s what your imagination is for — imagining things.
Britain’s Lost World (BBC1, Thursday) is beautiful, though I fear that three one-hour episodes might be just a teeny bit too much.
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