To die for

Down the Mighty River with Steve Backshall (BBC2) was perfect Sunday-night TV — one of the most enjoyable adventure travelogues I’ve watched in ages. So I was quite surprised to see it reviewed lukewarmly by another critic. One of the critic’s objections was that the scene where Backshall spots a bird of paradise through his binoculars by the Baliem river in Papua New Guinea was a bit crap. Why couldn’t we have seen it in loving close-up detail, as you would on a David Attenborough?

But this is precisely what I loved about the documentary. It had a roughness, an unpredictability, a spontaneity that you rarely find on TV any more. I’m sick to death of watching meet-ups where the roving presenter has a ‘surprise’ encounter — pre-arranged months before by his producers — with some eccentric yet typical local characters and proceeds to immerse himself comically in some humiliating regional custom: having his testicles shaved by the Lapland women’s reindeer-wrestling team, drinking the fermented digestive juices of an orangutan through a Dyak’s penis gourd, and so on.