There was a programme the other day about reintroducing jaguars to the wild, and one of the striking things about it was the lengths conservationists went to keep the cats away from all human contact. It was different in the 1960s, when Joy and George Adamson brought up an orphaned lion they called Elsa, who lived pretty much like a big moggie, rolling around getting cuddled and tickled by her human foster parents. She was released, accompanied by many tears, and a rousing John Barry score in the famous film about it, Born Free. And of course, when the couple came back to Kenya the follow year, Elsa bounded out of the bush to show off her own cubs to them. You’d never get a blockbuster movie out of those jaguars.
For Virginia McKenna, who played Joy in the movie alongside her own real-life husband Bill Travers, it was a life-changing experience. Now, 50 years on and at the age of 85, she is back in Kenya, visiting the film’s locations, accompanied by her own eldest cub, now a middle-aged man called Will. Virginia McKenna’s Born Free (Channel 4, Sunday), it’s called.
And it’s rather lovely. Well, she is so jolly splendid, old-fashioned and English and game – a species of actress you don’t see so much of any more, not in the wild at least. I don’t think Virginia would mind being called an actress rather than an actor; she is of a time when ladies were actresses, just as Elsa was a lioness. I wouldn’t be surprised if she talked about Keeeenya … No, quite wrong, she says it like Enya, with a K. Perhaps she is less old-fashioned than she seems.
Anyway, the movie wasn’t just a big soppy animal story with a big soppy song (by Matt Monro). It said something about attachment and detachment, not just about the Adamsons and lions, but about Britain and Kenya, colonisation and independence. And it had a message about conservation before conservation became fashionable.
It was also, it turns out, in many ways a big fat lie. Far from living in lovely liony bliss, the Adamsons were miserable in their marriage. George needed a large whisky following every encounter with his wife, who was clearly a nightmare. Not that Virginia puts it like that; she’s far too classy. Joy “was a person of extremes of emotion, I think, negative and positive – there wasn’t really a middle,” she says. “She had this need for affection, and maybe because she couldn’t show it very much for humans, she tried to get it from an animal.” By which I think she means she was a crazy cat lady, except, instead of having lots of them, she just had one very big one.
More seriously, the production didn’t live up to the movie’s own environmental message or ecological soul. After filming was completed, everything was sold off – the props, Virginia’s clothes, the vehicles, and the lions (there were about 20 of them in the cast). To zoos! Oh, the irony.
And Virginia was jolly cross about it at the time. To the extent that not only did she help rescue two of the lions for release (sadly, one of them ate someone and so had to be shot), but she has been campaigning for wildlife causes ever since. Which lions really need right now: there were 200,000 in the wild when Born Free was made in 1966; there are now just 20,000. Ninety per cent gone in 50 years – that’s scary isn’t it, and shocking, and wrong.
Next time you moan about the weather, thank your lucky stars you’re not on Venus. There, according to Horizon – The Wildest Weather in the Universe (BBC2, Sunday), the forecast says to expect high pressure, about 100 times what you are used to on Earth, along with a temperature of 462C, belching clouds of sulphuric acid and a lot of carbon dioxide. Do dress appropriately. On Mars, dust storms will envelop the whole planet, for weeks. And moving to Jupiter and Saturn: windy, gusting from 650kmph to 1,800kmph, plus the chance of an ammonia shower.
Meanwhile, there is some good news on Saturn: it might rain diamonds. Is Kanye watching?
What they’re really looking for, of course, is somewhere that has weather a bit like here. Dr Brice-Olivier Demory may have found it, orbiting a star called – shush – Trappist 1. Dr B-OD doesn’t know what it’s like yet, because the there isn’t a telescope powerful enough to find out. He doesn’t even know exactly where it is. But still, if Trump, Brexit, tories4ever etc get too much, maybe it will offer an alternative glimmer of hope.
• This article was amended on 24 October 2016 to correct the first mention of Elsa’s name, from Elsie as an earlier version said.
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