The Waterside Ape (Radio 4) | iPlayer
Oliver Burkeman Is Busy (Radio 4) | iPlayer
The Anatomy of Rest (Radio 4) | iPlayer
You can dump your Great British Bake Off in a rusty cake tin and shove it in an unlit gas oven. You can have Top Gear presented by the Naked Rambler and Rizzle Kicks. Fine by me. The day I stop paying my licence fee is the day the BBC allows Sir David Attenborough to leave. It’s not because he’s still foxy (he is, obviously), nor because he’s a national treasure (TM). It’s because Attenborough’s work with the corporation is so thoroughly, bewitchingly Reithian; especially on radio. His programmes ensure that fascinating ideas about life on earth are explained to those of us who never got past biology GCSE. He doesn’t care if we can’t keep up with his brain, if we smirk at his breathy voiceover, if we think he should have taken retirement by now. He wants us to know the most exciting elements of what he knows.
This week, Attenborough presented a two-part documentary called The Waterside Ape on Radio 4. It was brilliant. There were so many ideas packed into 90 minutes that I had to listen again, and even then I had to go back over bits to make sure I’d understood. The basis of the programmes was this. Today, academic scientists have accepted an idea that was derided until about 10 years ago: the notion that some of human evolution is explained if we accept that we grew up around water. So, we walk upright because we used to wade in the shallows. We are hairless because it helps us to swim. We have subcutaneous fat for the same reason. We can hold our breath underwater for far, far longer than we should be able to. We are able to swim into old age with ease. We are fishier than we think.
The level of detail was exceptional. Human babies are born covered in vernix caseosa, a strange white cheesy substance. So are seals. If you swim a lot, a bone in your ear will begin to grow to stop too much water getting in. This bone has been found in early man. All this is shifting the mid-20th century idea that we used to run around dry savannas, savagely hunting meat.
Oh, it was just all so interesting. Every minute there seemed to be a new revelation, not only about human evolution, but also about more recent incarnations of Homo sapiens and the different ways we receive ideas when they are posited by a man or a woman, a lay person or a scientist. These programmes have zoomed to the top of my favourite listening this year. I’d say they opened my ears, but actually they made me want to swim. Check my lugs (and lungs) in a few months.
Other documentaries didn’t quite stand a chance after Attenborough’s, but I enjoyed Oliver Burkeman’s five-part investigation into busyness. Suitably scheduled in the time-pressed 1.45-2pm slot, Oliver Burkeman Is Busy unpicked our modern notion of being overwhelmingly active. In truth, he said, we are busy because we want to be, because status is attached to work, because we value effort over technique, because we don’t allow ourselves to be efficient with our time. Excellent stuff.
I also enjoyed Claudia Hammond’s The Anatomy of Rest. She is such a lovely presenter, Hammond, warm and clever. Better known for her science work, she moved into strange cultural pastures in this investigation, and not always successfully. Perhaps I was too tired, or perhaps this will be covered in the next two programmes, but I wanted a bit more prosaic everyday detail as to what rest is. Instead, we had flautists playing complicated compositions; poets explaining why they wrote as they spoke. I do get the point that rest can’t exist without activity, but I felt rather busied out and unrested by the end of this programme.
