Tribe with Bruce Parry ran for three fondly remembered series in the mid-2000s. Now, upgraded to Tribe with Bruce Parry, it’s back, still championing traditional ways of life – including that of a TV presenter who lives among remote peoples, takes loads of drugs with them and marvels at their closeness to nature.
Sunday’s episode featured some other age-old practices, too. Parry, for example, duly travelled up an Amazon tributary to a village where the locals were initially suspicious of ‘the white man’. He then won them over by mucking in with the chores and eating plenty of insects and grubs.
His companions this time were the Waimaha, who live in the Colombian rainforest, communing with its spirits. Before he got there, Parry excitedly told us how the ‘long knowledge’ of indigenous people has much to teach us about ‘our connection to the planet’. But he also warned that since he was last tribal on television, millions of them ‘have had to leave the place they called home’. So would he find the Waimaha ‘thriving’ or ‘under threat’ – or, as I’d suggest he really hoped, a bit of both?
Twenty years on, Parry’s enthusiasm for going native remains impressively undiminished. As ever, the early small talk tended to the awkward. (Understandably, he wasn’t sure how to reply to an opening gambit of ‘Yesterday, a jaguar ate my mother’s dog’.) But his unmistakable sincerity soon gained the trust of the elders, under whose tutelage he’d be taking part in the show’s big finish when – as you might imagine – he’d join them for some powerful hallucinogens at a ritual ceremony.
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