Unless it’s a taster for a 12-part series to come, I’m not sure what the point of The Lake District: A Wild Year (BBC2) was. It showed a year of Cumbrian life, condensed via the magic of heavy editing and timelapse photography, into an hour, to no apparent purpose.
What do we gain by watching streams rush by at an unnatural pace, churchyards being hypermowed or – most especially – drystone walling speeded up? Dave Birkett, the national nonpareil of the art, was a blur as years of skill and centuries of tradition were accelerated into oblivion. You could do the 12-part series on him alone (he is also an expert climber and has rescued more than 800 sheep stuck on particularly peaky bits of the Peak District).
There were moments worth having – seeing flowers unfurl in unreal time is always a joy, particularly so when they are touch-me-not balsam (whose pods then explode, hurling seeds and the caterpillars feeding on them to the forest floor) – but overall it was a gimmicky game not worth the candle.
The snatches of normal footage in between made you long for what might have been. Other episodes of that putative 12-parter could have been on Beatrix Potter’s second career as a Herdwick sheep farmer and conservationist, or the Rusland village show, now entering its 133rd year, or the red deer stags – the merest glimpse of which still catapults anyone with even a vestige of romance still clinging to a soul into the immortal past and a longing to return. Or the whole thing could have followed the patient, patient shepherds still herding, shearing and tending their flocks according to the old ways (electric clippers aside), which are the only ways the old land will permit.
Never mind. It was narrated by Bernard Cribbins (now in his 89th year) and catapulted me far enough into the ancient past. Childhood lives again in every Cribbinsed syllable, and such a yearning to return.
