BBC and the portrayal of natural Wales

Last night we watched the first of 4 episodes of the new BBC Wales blockbuster programme called "Wales: Land of the Wild."  It was big and brash, following the now standard format of 50 mins of documentary and 10 mins of "how they did it" stuff at the end.  Great photography, with some stunning landscapes, and plenty of variety (horses, dippers, black grouse, natterjack toads, daffodils, badgers, puffins etc.)  This was BBC Wales taking seriously its brief to portray Wales to the nation and to the world -- so they went for it with gusto, maybe determined to do justice to our spectacular natural history...............  maybe the bit about the human beings can come later.   

In the programme itself, there is a thunderous score by Sir Karl Jenkins and the BBC Welsh National Orchestra, and the commentary was enunciated with huge declamatory effect by Michael Sheen.    Don't get me wrong -- these two are great heroes of mine -- but in my view the whole thing was way over the top, and not helped at all by either the over-dramatic music or the pompous and rather banal commentary, which was all spectacularly mismatched with what was going on on the screen.  In truth, not very much happened.  We saw horses pottering about, puffins pottering about, and badgers pottering about, which would have been fine if we had had an intelligent commentary from somebody like the great Sir David, Iolo Williams or Chris Packham, but here it did not work at all.  In fact it was all so pretentious that it became ludicrous, and at times Inger and I were laughing out loud at the absurdity of it all.  Was it all a great spoof?  Or was it aimed squarely at an American audience, which maybe just loves this sort of stuff?

This would not have been a cheap series to make -- you don't hire in Michael Sheen and Sir Karl Jenkins for peanuts.  But I wish that more money could have been spent on the filming.  We are so used, these days, to seeing incredible wildlife sequences on TV that prolonged episodes lasting several minutes, with nothing exceptional happening, do tend to fall flat.  We, the viewers, demand action and excitement, and things never seen before.  Unfair, I know...... but sadly that is the way of the world.  I suspect it's all to do with budget.  In all the great series fronted by the indomitable Sir David, they probably use no more than 1% of the footage shot.  They can afford to pay cameramen to sit in one place for weeks on end, waiting for a few seconds of spectacular action.  Here, I got the impression that they were working to a very small budget and using maybe 10% of the footage shot.  I wouldn't mind betting that both the producers and the cameramen were desperate for more time, but that they did not get it.

Anyway, the series of 4 programmes will probably throw up some memorable sequences, and credit is due to the BBC for at least making an effort to show the wildlife of Wales to a global audience.  That having been said, I think Iolo has already done it better!