Innocence is dying on both sides of the BBC

I recently sat down to watch BBC2’s Springwatch presented by Chris Packham and Michaela Strachen. It was best thing on TV for a couple of weeks and it’s easy to see why. It’s live, so what you see is what you get. The presenters are engaging and friendly and over the years have developed a tangible chemistry which is the acid test for all duos on the box. Easy on the eye, Michaela with a 24/7 smile on her dial and Chris with a half-cocked eye and flattop looking every inch the steersman of a vessel that bobs about on a pool of hard facts with the odd wry pun thrown overboard.

Make no mistake, nature is a serious business. Watching the whole process via live cameras set up at various nests around the UK of eggs being laid, chicks hatching and then either taking flight or being stolen by a predator waiting to feed its own young is not for the faint hearted. Vegans please look away as this next clip shows a marsh harrier taking a leveret from under the nose of its mother whilst she throws punches to the air to try and ward it off. Or the kestrel ripping at the jacket of a small mouse with its beak and talons. There’s no shortage of the red stuff but in amongst it all our guides are reassuring with a sympathetic but honest explanation that all the birds and beasts and insects have their young to feed. ‘Unfortunately, it’s very sad but they are all nature’s creatures and for each one that is lost others will flourish.’

It’s a hard act to follow but at 9pm in the evening I was struggling to disentangle myself from the sofa. My body felt the need to burrow but my limbs had long since given up any sign of movement unless it was to go to the toilet. And to top up my tea. Both of which worked in tandem of one other. That’s nature for you.

I have this reluctance to watch TV in the evening as I know I should be doing other things that are more creative and offer me a sense of purpose (and hope) in life. I used to tell people that I have a cut-off point at 9pm when I switch the computer off and stare at some mindless junk on the box just to let my brain decompose for a couple of hours. But that switchover has capitulated during lockdown and now it’s the equivalent of going to a bar late afternoon. And like most other people our brains all end up as drunks. Can’t stay out of the place these days and the drinks are cheap.

So, I sat there in my knotted mass with my spine bent over a pile of cushions, my elbow forming a crutch to my head rather like a Dali painting. The kind of a position that would give yoga teachers everywhere nightmares and send them rushing for their mats and blocks. Yes. I was channel surfing. And when you think about it that label bears no relation whatsoever to any form of surfing does it? You might as well call it wide screen mountaineering or station to station finger skating. What it is, is slumping in a mass and pushing tiny little buttons on piece of plastic with one hand whilst pumping biscuits into your mouth with the other. This has what a million years of evolution has brought us to and become the most important connection to the outside world for a lot of people. Myself included!

Perhaps someone should organise a TV Anonymous meeting? We can all sit round in a Zoom-circle and break down in tears whilst confessing to the garbage TV we’ve been consuming for years. And just to make matters worse people now have the ability to make and distill their own low grade non-combustible content! It’s a no holds barred kind of moonshine catering for all tastes. And I use that last noun with utmost caution!

So, here I was, in my tangled non yogic mass trying to get another hit. Looking up all the dealers I knew. Netflix, Catch-up, Freeview and those odd channels in the high numbers before you get to the pay per view soft porn channels. Not that I’ve ever paid to watch anything discreetly tucked away in a high number but I was willing to try if it meant I could score before bedtime. I guess like any drug once you’ve done enough of it your body needs a higher dose and I wasn’t getting it. Suicide was out of the question. I could barely move. And besides, I might miss the one decent program that suddenly appears just as I’m on the point of passing over. Yeh, imagine taking that particular curse with you to the other side. That’s exactly how ghosts come into being! (A contradiction of terms, I know. But ghosts are a contradiction of terms, aren’t they? Wandering around after dark knocking things and frightening people. Why don’t they just call them the local party candidates?) It would be a text book haunting. Somewhere around the TV set I guess? Or maybe the sofa for the next occupant?

‘I keep turning the heating up but I just can’t get warm enough to watch the omnibus edition of All Cretins Great and Small, darling.’

‘Maybe you should call a priest? Much cheaper than a heating engineer and there’s no call out fee. Just a renunciation of all previous wickedness. And we don’t have to bleed the rads.’

Then I had a flash of inspiration. There was a new series on BBC1, Time, starring Sean Bean and Stephen Graham. Gritty ain’t the word when these two slip from the tongue in the same breath. How about gravel? A particular gritty kind of gravel? So, without much further ado I knocked on the door to see if anyone was in. It was time to …well… do some Time.

Some people get high on a particular type of drug that gives the mind a feeling of great well-being. Others head for the Mung-Zone and quickly evaporate into a hard mix of three parts sand and one of cement. Throw in some ballast and you’ve got a basic mix of concrete. The starring duo of BBC1’s latest hardball drama, Time and BBC1’s Springwatch contain similar contrasting aggregates but the content of each is not so far apart. Nature has provided all its creations with the necessary toolkit to have at least a fighting chance of survival and placed it/them into specific environments where their toolkit is at its most useful. Now you might be thinking that I’m referring to Springwatch but you’d only be half correct. If you sat each program side by side there would be little to choose between the two and their composite themes of the eternal struggle of life and death. The difference between the two is that one is a drama and the other is real.

Time’s central character Mark Cobden is played by Sean Bean, a grey, weather beaten rock-faced Midlander who is banged up for a night time roadside kill from which he’s taken flight and left his wounded victim to die where he fell. There’s no such luxury of choice for the raptures and hawks in Springwatch. They spy, they swoop, they kill and carry away to devour amongst their young. The only thing that Mark Cobden has taken back to the nest is his inability to deal with an event that will change the course of his life forever.

The innocent seem to be dying on both sides of the BBC. And innocence itself is the agonising misfortunate as Mark is incarcerated and forced to deal with the kind of stuff he was shielded from on the outside. The harsh realities of dominance and submission in an enclosed and often hostile environment play out under the watchful glare of Stephen Graham’s character, prison officer Eric McNally with twenty exemplary years in the service under his key jangling belt. He shares the same revulsion of prison life as the new inmate but keeps his emotions firmly in check whilst casting a watchful eye from his glass eyrie.

Mark is submissive and immediately places himself at the lowest end of the pecking order which ensures he undergoes a daily loss of face in front of all the other inmates. In order to survive the harshest of regimes one must either toughen up or harden to its consequences. Mark is a teacher, trained to be receptive to other peoples’ needs and not their torturous intent unless you consider school pupils life threatening. Nature has given its world of creatures the ability to camouflage and conceal the thing they most value and protect from the murderous intent of others. Mark seems to have missed that particular plug-in and his only tactic is to hide from his aggressors in the very place where they know they’ll find him: in his cell.

There’s no reassuring arm of sympathetic explanation from Chris Packham or Michaela Strachen. Mark is no marsh harrier, he is a mouse being slowly but surely devoured. A broken spirit regularly trampled on by visions of the person he killed laying lifeless in the road which thwarts any attempt to restore his self-esteem. Stephen Graham’s character, Eric, knows exactly how the laws in this particular part of the modern jungle play out. He’s seen it every day for the last 20 years and the best he can do to preserve his own sanity is to remain stony faced whilst looking down onto the jungle floor. This inevitably fails when his own brood, his only son incarcerated elsewhere, is attacked and severely injured. Then, the laws which he has attempted to enforce throughout his 20 year career come crashing down all around him. Whatever it takes to protect your young…

Cut to Springwatch and we see a Hobby, a small falcon enter the nest box of a kestrel and attempt to devour its young. But the female kestrel is sworn to protect her young protégés with every ounce of life she has in her and a battle ensues inside the cramped conditions of the nest box whilst the male kestrel looks on from outside. After a ferocious struggle inside the confines of the nest box with the chicks looking on, the female Kestrel defeats the Hobby and shares the spoils of war with her young.

In such a way, Mark, must somehow repel own his demons and although he eventually defeats its lower echelon there are bigger threats before he is able to take flight from his barbarous nest. Nature never stops working. Nature never stops teaching us and prompting us to adapt to everything that life throws at us. We’re mostly oblivious to it until sometime after the event. Then we look back and marvel at the fact that we pulled through and overcame a seemingly impossible barrier that stood in our way, crushing us and distorting our vision of the future.

As I said, nature has provided a toolkit for all her creatures in their struggle to survive and Mark decides that his way of dealing with further punishment from another inmate is to accept it on his terms. And that’s the critical point. That’s when the pendulum begins to swing in the opposite direction. Maybe its Mark’s way of serving penance on himself for the death of the cyclist he killed? Maybe in a moment of rare clarity he saw a path leading to some kind of redemption? Only he knew. But we know that he confronted his would be attacker and told him to his face that he would not be doing his bidding and preferred physical retribution to the dismantling of his newly found belief: being the ability to forgive himself.

Subsequently he is attacked in his nest box by two raptures armed with makeshift sling shots. Whilst Mark sits passively and takes the punishment he is saved from a prolonged beating by a fellow inmate who he’d helped to read and write, restoring that particular person’s sense of self belief with pencils, pen and paper. Tools which seem to carry a greater weight than a couple of billiard balls stuffed into a sock.

Mark is no longer a fledgling and is released back into the wild as Eric awaits incarceration for ensuring the safety of his only son by aiding and abetting the dominant male on the prison landing. The ferocious cauldron of nature’s lessons continues to boil and simmer and for its worst parts we are in the main, observers, most of us only catching glimpses of its shocking barbarity and relentless trial by ordeal.

And meanwhile, from the fertile marshes of Norfolk, Chris and Michaela are informing us that tomorrow night’s episode of Springwatch will be the last. That the nest boxes from various parts of the UK will be live for the last time on Friday June 11th and after that it will be left up to us to guess how its occupants fare on their passage of rites into a much bigger world. A world in which they will become either the hunter or the hunted with no Eric McNally looking on trying to maintain peace and a sense of order.

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