Source: Times Online
Ross Kemp found himself in an unusual position in the first of his new macho-mentary series Battle for the Amazon: he needed to let his interviewees know that he was not from Greenpeace. This is a little like Norman Tebbit having to make it clear he has not turned Lib Dem. I have no idea how Kemp votes, but the Mitchell brother turned gang-buddy turned Helmand hero, does not look much like the sandal-wearing vegans who badger me to save the world on Saturday mornings.Yet down to the Amazon he went, enthusing that its rainforest was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen and tutting at the “greed” that was destroying it. With his reputation at stake, he made sure to preface proceedings with “I’m certainly no environmentalist”. But Ross on climate change remained an odd fit. The point about his documentaries, of which I am, in fact, a bit of a fan, is that he comes not to lecture but to thrill. When the going gets tough, Ross and his HD crew get filming. Simple as that. No wonder his “I’m no environmentalist” (“but I am really”) speech was duly delivered from the yawning edge of a helicopter.
Ross could afford to let nothing get lost in the telling. Poking into a lake muddy with Texaco’s left-over oil, Ross informed us he was in tears (from the fumes, not for the planet). Introduced to a clubbable Huaorani native, Ross promised us a less worldly tribe would kill him. He said f*** repeatedly when his plane only narrowly launched from a too-short jungle runway. In Manaus, he climbed up a tree house: 200ft above the forest floor, he estimated, and below him only “a decorator’s ladder”. Still not excited? Then he would just have to take us to Novo Progresso, “one of the most lawless places in Brazil”, a town so rough, they steal aircraft from airstrips and crash them and die. Well, he got a few stares.
As usual with Ross’s Sky docs, Battle for the Amazon looked great. As usual Ross demonstrated a flair for succinct explanation (although he must learn the difference between the words “refute” and “deny”). But others have done the Amazon better, and shown off less.
Great Ormond Street
BBC Two
The Great Ormond Street documentaries on sick children ended their run. I am not sure if I could have taken much more. The executive producer Roger Graef achieved here for medicine what he has spent decades doing for the police: told us the truth and it is not what we want to hear. The most disturbing of the cases followed was that of Bethany, a delightful but severely disabled 11-year-old whose parents yearned for her to have a kidney transplant, although she also probably needed a new heart and lungs.
In Sarah Ledermann they had the doctor all parents would wish for, an advocate for aggressive intervention. Whether she was the doctor they needed was another question and even she, by the end, was questioning whose interests were being pursued. Bethany died without her transplant. She would have died anyway. As the wonderful teenager Imann, who for so long resisted her own renal transplant, summarised: “There is no end. It is part of the trip. Then you’ll need another transplant, and then another transplant, and then you are dead, kicked the bucket. Then you’re done.” The programme was subtitled An Imperfect Cure. Chicago Hope it wasn’t.