Thursday, 3 March 2011
Sir David Attenborough
"Madagascar" is a masterpiece. I've been falling asleep in front of Sir David Attenborough masterpieces for as long as I can remember.
It's not boredom; it's that fruity-calm-hushed voice and the complex coloured pictures. No matter how fascinating the material, after about ten minutes the shutters slide down and that's it until the closing credits.
It's not just me. Over his 50 years in broadcasting, thousands of animals have conked-out in Sir David's presence. He puts the 'fluence on them, a Dr Dolittle whose main way of talking to the animals is "You are getting very sleepy. Your paws are heavy, your ears are floppy, your whiskers are drooping, you are just going to rest your eyes for a moment".
He had to stop talking for the famous gorilla sequence or else they'd have had nothing but a troupe of slumped and snoring primates, nestled like farting carpets on the forest floor. It was a close thing; you can see them yawning.
When Sir David was following a chimpanzee hunting yo, the pan troglodytes, being brighter than gorillas, were all screaming "Run for your life, guys, it's that sleepy man. Next thing you know he'll have us carrying his camera gear and nobody has ever got him to pay a performer yet. "
Luckily, in line with the rules about stage hypnosis, his voice changes its pattern in his closing words of any script. It tends to rise to a question, probably a very good one, but unfortunately at that moment I'm in no condition to understand it let alone answer it. Electricity supply controllers say they stand-by for the surge in demand as the nation staggers blearily to its feet and puts the kettle on.
I reckon Sir David is in the pay of international beverage merchants and what he really says is: "You are getting thirsty. You will remember nothing but in five seconds you will rise and make the tea. Three Two ONE".
Product placement of coffee machines now allowed? Pah, amateurs.
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8 comments:
He's like TV's favourite scatty but wise old uncle. He can get away with anything.
Off topic, Kenton and Joleen are getting fresh, and they should have killed off Helen. You are better off without.
Thanks for the heads-up. Reminds me to keep checking for the ratings as that will be the next chapter in the PR story.
I can't stand it. Whitburn was handed that valuable commodity; an intellectual property which had been half-engineered by the audience and therefore had extremely high audience retention.
All she had to do was keep some reasonable story lines going, instead of which she made the village unrecognizable and uninhabitable.
I hadn't realised I was being manipulated.
Frankly I love being able to see the world without getting off my backside.
PS, I've noticed that you seem to have a lot of toys.
I like that in a person.
You know, I hadn't really noticed. They drift in and take up residence, then when I turn round, there they are.
The books are the worst; there is a great barrier reef of those. A flock of hats have taken to living on the tops of the paper stacks. Every now and again a book spawns and its ideas float off to form coral islands of their own.
Never watched the programme but it does give me some thoughts when I heard the name Madagasgar, I have been doing a bit of geneology and I have a relative aged 19 who is I presume is still with his ship MV Queen Victoria in the deeps of the Mozambique channel just off Madagascar directly opp Biera, torpedoed and sunk by the Japanese submarine I11 on 28/6/1942, with no survivors, they were taking war materials from Newcastle to Aden,just a thought.
I'm sorry to hear that, Albert.
I subscribe to the unfashionable theory that the Hiroshima bomb was the lesser of the two evils; either a protracted war in which young men of both sides would die in their millions, or a decisive defeat which would crush hundreds of thousands of civilians.
The sensible thing would have been for the Japanese to face the fact that they had lost months earlier, if not right at the beginning when Pearl Harbour missed most of its intended targets, but the were simply not prepared to do that.
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