To the jungle then. No sign of Dec. Ant’s here, with his lot, a big military family, very close-knit, but quite scary, we’ll come to them. No, no, not that jungle, we won’t be going there (for reasons of old fashioned print deadlines, not good taste or snobbishness). We’re in the real jungle, for The Hunt (BBC1, Sunday). Here, the stakes are higher, the claws sharper.
The biggest forest predator of all first, in the forests of India – Tiger Woods, obviously, in a game of If the Location Were a Celebrity (it’s not a very long game). And the first bushtucker trial, I’m a Chital Deer, Get Me Out of Here … time to drop this now, this column is classier than that, we’ve got Blake: “What immortal hand or eye,/Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” Because a silent stalking tiger is a beautiful and magnificent thing.
It’s amazing to see what goes into filming one (the how-we-made-it section at the end is on the tiger hunt). A stabilised Cineflex camera mounted on a crane, mounted on a 4x4, later on an elephant, the eleflex, modified howdahs, local engineering, then weeks and weeks of patience, all for about eight minutes of television. Totally worth it, though (yeah, grubby hands off, Tories), because not only is it beautiful and magnificent, but they get their money shot: a kill. One Chital deer didn’t get out of there, he gets jumped on and eaten, accompanied by the inevitable mournful cello.
It’s only the warm-blooded that get the sympathetic strings. (I was most upset by the chimps. I thought they ate bananas, not other monkeys! No more PG Tips in my house). And The Hunt doesn’t dwell on the death of the cute and the cuddly – their end is afforded some respect.
Creepy-crawlies are fair game, though. Even that most calm of presences, David Attenborough, can’t hide his excitement when describing the superpowers of the portia spider: the ability to jump 50 times her own length, bionic eyesight, intelligence and the capacity to plan, learn and solve problems. Problems such as how to kill other spiders (the portia is a spider-eating spider). Which she’s very good at. Maybe one – a giant one – will abseil silently into your dreams tonight …
There are strings for the kill. Not mournful, but agitated pizzicato as the portia twangs the strands of the other spider’s web, mimicking struggling prey. “Drawing the spider into its death,” gasps David, and then there’s a triumphant celebratory bowed crescendo for the pounce. Gotcha!
Then those ants, army ants: “The most successful player of hide and seek on Earth.” Working as one, and for the cause, more formidable than any Soviet or Maoist army, they march across the forest floor (cue martial music). Nothing in their – its – path escapes. There’s an epic battle, with a rival colony of a different kind of ants, who haven’t a hope in hell. The enemy is vanquished, their young carted away to be eaten. Cue the cello … Oh, maybe some creepy-crawlies do get a cello sendoff? Perhaps because they’re squishy, and soft, and young. They might be maggots, but they’re also babies, this is mass infanticide, and that calls for a cello.
The music is annoying. I’m a fan of ambient sounds, especially in a tropical rainforest, which has some pretty good ones. Other than that, it’s hard to find anything not to like about The Hunt. The first one was a little unfocused (a series of unconnected chases, basically); but since then, when it has been concentrating on particular environments, it has been more meaningful and enlightening. (I loved the second most, with the polar bear and the base-jumping guillemots). Beautiful to look at, as you’d expect. Incredibly thrilling, too. I haven’t seen #ImACeleb (at time of writing), but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that The Hunt was the best jungle-based television of last night. Unless Lady Colin Campbell, whoever the hell she/he is, jumped on Duncan Bannatyne and ate him.
If Dunc weren’t in the jungle, he might be in Monaco, home to Million Pound Mega Yachts (Channel 4, Sunday). Everyone else is – all my favourite business leaders and inspirations: Lord Sugar; Howard Raymond, son of porn baron Paul; US billionaire car dealer Herb Chambers, etc.
My favourite attraction on the water? Solandge – 85m long, with a cinema deck, gym, steam room, massage parlour, dancefloor (with hole for pole), chandeliers all over the place. And a principal lounge in a kind of rococo meets Vegas meets Kardashian meets Abu Dhabi style, lots of purple, lots of gold. Yours for £130m. And if that’s not an incentive to make something of your life, then you might as well jump in the sea.
