Okay if I call you Horatio?
I will probably tell you all this in a big rush on Monday, but thank you so much for pestering me to buy the DVDs of Planet Earth, or I wouldn’t have, because I have a giant queue of David Attenborough productions I don’t own yet and I would have stuck it in there. And then I would have been deprived.
Swimming elephants!! Golden snub-nosed monkeys! Cranes riding thermals over the Himalayas!
So far, it’s all amazing. With the crying, as predicted. When I was very young, maybe 3, we had a mobile of cranes in our bedroom, and they looked just like the footage of the migration over the Himalayas–in that riding-thermals, kite-sail-winged, dangly-gangly-legged way. I couldn’t find any images online that capture that odd elegance. And *why* is it so delightful to watch elephants swimming? Is it just the incongruity of the largest land animal floating weightless, or is it that their knees all bend forward, plus the snorkely trunks and the evident pleasure? Ridiculously pleasing. I watched that bit four times.
Also, so I don’t forget: Pester me to write a fan letter to David Attenborough. I started one ages ago but didn’t finish, plus never found out where best (or at all) to send it. (“Sir David Attenborough, c/o The BBC” probably wouldn’t work very well, alas.)
I just realized (reading about his career) that I have clear memories (clear–full audio-visual and emotion and everything) of a show of his that aired in 1975, which means I was 4 years old. It was called “Fabulous Animals” and was mostly about mythical beasts (including those weird pictures of people with faces in their chests) but also touched on real ones like Komodo dragons, and I remember Sir David (just David, then) sticking together broken pieces of a huge bird’s egg with masking tape. Bigger than an ostrich egg. More like a really big honeydew melon. And the people who found the pieces used them to carry water. Madagascar comes to mind. (I thought it was “Madacasca” because I heard him say it before I could read.) Maybe an elephant bird? So he’s been a huge piece of my life since I was four. Very much a part of the fabric of my world. That deserves some mad fan mail.
Also I have a theory about why Sigourney Weaver did the U.S. voiceover: Sir David’s voice has lost a tiny bit of its crispness. He has a very, very faint slur on some words now (he is 80 years old, after all), and I’m guessing the American viewer isn’t prepared to deal with even faintly impaired speech, even if it’s coming from someone with 60 years of solid gold credentials. Boo on that. I’m glad I got the UK version.
I owe you one.
P.S. I couldn’t find that trailer you tried to show me (remember, I made you stop, “Crying, crying!”). And the clips I could find on the Discovery website have some random American dude doing the voiceover–neither Sigourney Weaver nor Sir David. Grumblecakes.
