In Shangli old town in Sichuan province, China, three men kill a pig, for new year. The animal squeals, one man stuns it, another sticks a knife into its throat. It’s always impressive, that gush, like a burst water main, only red. Do pigs have very high blood pressure? Would it be the same for us?
It’s not unnatural to be thinking about humans during Oink: Man Loves Pig (BBC4, Sunday), a documentary in the Storyville strand. It’s about us, as much as it’s about them, and about our relationship to each other.
Nowhere is this relationship closer than in China, where the ancient Chinese character for home is a house with a fat pig in front, and where more of them are killed than anywhere else. They have an old saying: “Treat your piglets like your children, and treat your sows like your wife.” Having seen how a pig is treated, I’m not sure this is good news for the wives and children of Sichuan.
In Denmark, pig death – witnessed by a party of visiting schoolgirls – is more industrial. They are gassed in chambers in the cellar before being strung up, and the knife man does his thing. The blood draws patterns on the floor; it would be nice if it drew the ancient Chinese character for home, where it’s off to. I wouldn’t be surprised if these girls went bacon-free for a couple of breakfasts.
In Arkansas, wild pigs – escapees and their descendents – run free, and God-fearing men with pickup trucks and baseball caps and dogs hunt them down. Interesting that these men, speaking their first language, require subtitles; the Danish schoolgirls, speaking their second, didn’t. One of the pigs gets away, runs all the way to Washington DC, somehow gets into the White House, sets up home, and office … No, I get the impression the men with guns wouldn’t shoot that one, they would probably be on his side.
But Trump doesn’t come into it. George Orwell does, with Ralph Steadman’s illustrations. Plus Lord of the Flies (“Kill the pig! Cut its throat!”), Margaret Atwood and Christopher Hitchens. Angus Macqueen’s thoughtful, beautiful, poetic, genuinely original film trots about in time and place. Through literature and art, as well as history and science.
To Germany, where men in white coats are putting a pig’s heart into a baboon, and you know where that’s leading to – now our relationship has got even closer. Time to get that ancient character out again, home is where the heart is. Or you’ve created a monster, depending on how you look at it. I’m not sure our pals in Arkansas would appreciate a porcine ticker.
Oh, and the film is even narrated by a pig, an English saddleback named Dorothy who has had a human voice transplanted into her. It ends the usual way for Dorothy, I’m afraid, once she has reached the required weight. A man comes with a Land Rover and a trailer. And a gun.
They are getting their revenge, though, via biotech. The last-chance antibiotic colistin is used extensively in intensive pig farming. Bacteria resistant to colistin were first identified in pigs. If those bacteria spread from pigs to humans, via the food chain or from farm waste, that is like herding us all into a trailer and driving us at full speed towards the post-antibiotic era. “Which means if you are in hospital, really sick, and you catch that superbug … it will definitely be your death,” says another man in a white coat. In China this time, appropriately. “That’s very serious,” he adds, then laughs. Maybe he’s a little bit on their side.
A time-lapse decomposing body, accompanied by Karol Szymanowski (Stabat Mater, op 53, thanks Shazam), is strangely beautiful and mesmerising. It is a pig, but it could easily be you.
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In Melvyn Bragg on TV: The Box that Changed the World (BBC2, Saturday), Lord B rounded up the great and the good at Bafta for a thorough and fascinating chinwag about what can’t really be described as a box any more. They talk about how television has levelled, challenged, enriched, empowered and enlightened, from the coronation to The Crown. And let us down, as well – particularly if, for example, you are a woman.
The Royle Family comes up, and Gogglebox, because we’ve got to television’s narcissism. Well, its interest in itself, at least. So I’m watching television about television about television … it’s like being in a terrifying spiral of self-absorption. And I’m too scared to look behind in case Jim and Barbara Royle, and Scarlett Moffatt and Steph and Dom, and probably Melv as well, are there watching me. Arggghh.
• This article was amended on 6 July 2017. An earlier version said a gene resistant to colistin was first found in pigs. This has been changed to say bacteria resistant to colistin.
