Eastern promise ... Steve Backshall's fantastic Secret Wilderness Japan
The BBC is making a bit of a song and dance about how it intends to "do more of what it does best" at the moment. But does Auntie know what that is? Its line-up of "unmissable" shows made available for us to watch again when we like via its new iPlayer is comprised of the usual crowd-pleasers. But does the fact that, say, Strictly Come Dancing scored so highly with the public mean that the BBC is sticking to its Reithian principles? Are we satisfactorily informed and entertained? Not ones to mess with a winning formula, having just treated us to talent shows themed around The Sound of Music and Joseph, they've now come up with The One and Only, aka Britain's Best Tribute Acts - a show so crassly unimaginative Five would surely baulk at broadcasting it.
But this is the BBC's problem. Stuck between the rock of ratings wars and the hard place of justifying the license fee, it can never truly be itself, praying instead that David Attenborough doesn't put his hip out before recording another series. However, salvation may be at hand. Buried away in the dead zone between Christmas and New Year, BBC2 have been showing reruns of Steve Backshall's fantastic Secret Wilderness Japan. Backshall is a hell of a find: informative, entertaining, enthusiastic and so knowledgeable he flits between fluent Japanese and English in order to explain a throwaway gag by the crew. And to top it all he's built like the proverbial brick outhouse, so there's little suspicion he's filming nodding shots from the comfort of a Tokyo hotel. Having watched him giggling with insane glee while canoeing through pack ice and grappling with a salamander, I'm utterly convinced: the BBC has a new unmissable star right under their nose. This is what it does best. They should be doing more of it.
