Creature feature

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Oct 3, 1999 | by Eddie Gibb

The BBC hopes to kill off ratings rivals with a new dinosaur show. But is their famous emphasis on accuracy facing extinction too?

Who is that familiar figure, emerging from the foliage in safari suit? Surely it's none other than Sir David Attenborough, the doyen of natural history television on another assignment deep in the steamy jungle of an unpronounceable country, whispering to the humanoids back home. But wait, it's the wrong blessed brother. In fact this is Sir Richard, a beautifully preserved specimen of a nearly extinct line of British actors. He's doing his plummy turn in Jurassic Park, the Steven Spielberg movie which brought dinosaurs back to life using the miracle of digital technology.

Anything the Americans can do, the Beeb can do a version of at the fraction of the cost using a combination of Dunkirk spirit and squeezy bottle technology developed in a Blue Peter studio. Which takes us to Walking With Dinosaurs, BBC1's flagship factual series for autumn. WWD is made by the science department, but the makers have grabbed themselves a fair bit of dramatic licence.

Uber-luvvie Kenneth Branagh does the voiceover, for goodness sake. All that's missing is Raquel Welch in her itsy-bitsy fur-trimmed bikini and you'd have the full Hollywood hokum. In short, WWD is science gone showbiz. That brachiosaurus probably has an agent by now, but at 75 tonnes he'll always be typecast as a heavy.

However simply recreating these prehistoric creatures on screen was not enough; our jaded televisual appetites demand stories, chartacters, narrative. Witness the loving didelphodon couple, defending their young against the sinister coelophysis. You may even find yourself unable to hold back the tears when Mr and Mrs D do a midnight flit, abandoning their brood in a last-ditch attempt to save themselves. And then there's the touching scene where a mummy tyrannosaurus shows her baby how to chow down on a pile of steaming offal. The BBC has created a new genre that we must inevitably refer to as dino-soap.

In the Making Of, a tried and trusted formula for disguising an extended trailer as information, Branagh lets slip that the animatronic dinosaurs are referred to as "characters". Wildlife documentaries have long imposed these human dramas on the footage of animals: will the lame wildebeest manage to outrun the hyena pack? Can the polar bear find food in the arctic wastes before starvation claims another victim? The difference is that the director of WWD is creating the drama from scratch and he's let the anthropomorphism rip.

But the series itself admits nothing of this dramatic licence. There is no admission that the way the dinosaurs look, move and eat each other is anything other than an educated guess based on a few bones dug up by dusty paleontologists. The Making Of concedes the point, while desperately trying to distract the viewer from these admissions by showing all the technical wizardy that made this "dinomation" possible.

And impressive the virtual dinosaurs undoubtedly are. The problem is that while the series is slick and entertaining, it's a tad intellectually dishonest. The Making Of shows, in the words of Des Lynam, how they did that but in doing so ruins the illusion. After you've seen a man with his hand up a rubber dinosaur's jacksie the magic is rather spoiled. The commentary claims that this kind of hi- tech trickery was the only way to make such a series. Not so. We could have had the man in a safari suit walking across dusty landscapes picking up fossils, and built the incomplete picture of what science knows from there.

Not whizzy telly admittedly, and unlikely to appeal to the American co-producers, but at least it would be more accurate. Walking With Dinosaurs glosses over the uncertainties and assumptions in favour of seamless entertainment. Basically, it's more Dickie than David.

Our television critic's weekly squint at what's best on the box Walking With Dinosaurs, Monday, 8.30pm, BBC1 Making Of, Wednesday, 8pm, BBC1