After Louis Theroux’s documentary on assisted dying, there was a helpline number to call. He had dealt sensitively with the dying and those who wanted to. But I was already wrung out as I had watched Dynasties, the David Attenborough series. It was about penguins – and I needed a helpline. It was gruelling stuff, unbearable in places. People with cancer choosing their own end you would expect to make you cry – but penguins?
I understand George Monbiot’s point about Attenborough’s docs presenting a pristine world that does not show the extent of ecological devastation. I get it. There is surely nowhere more pristine than the crystalline whiteness of the Antarctic. But it’s not the polar caps melting that got me. Sorry George. No, what got me was the bloody penguins.
It was harrowing. Maybe I am soft in the head because of my proximity to a new baby, but the scene in which penguin mothers, whose chicks had died, fought over and stole another couple’s baby (tucking it into their nether regions – I don’t know the technical term for their fluffy front-bottom bits), was utter horror. Then Attenborough intoned mournfully that the chances of survival for the kidnapped chick were low as its bewildered parents searched for it.
We then saw dead chicks lost in blizzards, and then some mothers and chicks stuck in a ravine in which they would surely die. Nature may be red in tooth and claw, and maybe we should quit with the anthropomorphising, but this is what such a doc depends on. We relate to penguins precisely because they have relationships with each other and huddle together to keep warm.
“Have I lost my mind?” I wondered, as I wept over the fate of a penguin I have never met. Then, one of the cameramen, who had lived there for nearly a year, started crying about leaving and that was me finished.
