“Autumn is just round the corner, so you’d better make the best of the good times while they are here,” says narrator Andrew Scott at the close of Summer: Earth’s Seasonal Secrets (BBC 1). Advice that will have come an hour too late for many viewers who would have been far better off going outdoors to catch the dying summer’s warmth than cooped up indoors.
It’s one of television’s not particularly well-kept seasonal secrets that the Friday night of the August bank holiday is pretty much a dead zone; only the very lonely or the very bored will be watching, so there is no point in the broadcasters scheduling anything for which they want to grab good ratings. It is a time to fill the airwaves with soothing televisual Mogadon: a time for undemanding repeats. Or better still, new programmes that feel like repeats.
Summer: Earth’s Seasonal Secrets was every nature programme you have ever seen, condensed into 60 minutes of your life you will never get back. It was as if some unlucky editor had been told to dig out every cliche in the BBC’s natural history archive and cut and paste them into a summer-themed special that went big on the cute and cuddly and kept the red in tooth and claw to a minimum.
We started with a bear getting honey from an old tree trunk. Which was nice. We then saw some North American pika wandering around with flowers in their hair. They were so sweet, they were given their own hillbilly soundtrack. Which was also nice. And so on around the world in stunning time-lapse and slow-motion photography, interspersed with shots of the sun rising, the sun being very hot and the sun setting.
Wildebeest, zebras, lemurs, butterflies, ibex, crabs, lions, penguins – penguins are always good box office – albatrosses and sharks all got their few minutes in the sun. Most of them did a lazy, almost apologetic bow to the camera at the end of their turns as if to to say, “have you really not seen me do this before?”, though I did wonder what the male turtles were doing while the females were making their 1,500 mile schlep to lay their eggs. Watching this, I suppose.
