Birdsong would be easy to parody ? but it brought a lump to my throat
Boom! And another chunk of northern France is blown into the air by a German mortar. The crater left is a hellhole, full of bits of men, and dying men, groaning and horribly open in the wrong places. And one very beautiful man who seems unblemished but doesn't move. He may be dead, but we've seen him like this before; he's going to open his eyes, you wait. He has a very wide mouth, enormous. And bee-stung lips, ever so slightly parted, sensual. No one has the right to look this good after being blown up. He opens his eyes. See! Eddie, not Deaddie. And he stares, at nothing, not focusing on anything except the past. He's looking to happier times when there was colour in the world and light and laughter. And Isabelle with her alabaster breasts, and a lovely little collection of moles just there on her tummy. They're making love, while a pianist's right hand tinkles ? progressive, descending open chords.
A parodist could have fun with Birdsong (BBC1, Sunday). French and Saunders, perhaps. I can see Jennifer in the Eddie Redmayne role, Stephen Wraysford, mud-spattered and deeply troubled in a tin helmet, wide lips slighty parted, staring. Urrgh, all that staring, it did get a little wearing, didn't it?
Too much music too ? not just the descending piano chords but the rising, soaring strings in moments of high drama. I don't need intrusive music, constantly, telling me what to think; I want it to sound like how it actually was. Ah yes, that's better, on a couple of occasions when you can hear ? birdsong. Was there really birdsong in the trenches? There's no grass, no trees; where did the birds live?
It could so easily have been awful, over-aesthetic and self-conscious. At times it veered in that direction, but then it sucked me in and I no longer cared or noticed, because here was also something intense and moving, a love story and an extraordinary portrait of war that felt loyal in sentiment to Sebastian Faulks's novel.
Abi Morgan, who adapted the book, does take a few liberties. She spares Stephen from Isabelle's German lover. That's OK, it's enough that Fritz has spent three years trying to kill him, and has blown all of his men to pieces ? he doesn't need to steal Stephen's girl as well. More drastically, the third time period of the book, the 1970s with Stephen's granddaughter unearthing old journals, is abandoned all together. I can see that 400 or so pages of novel might not physically fit into 180 minutes of television, but I initially worried that this might take away from the sense of legacy, and of things not being forgotten. Or rather getting rediscovered. But then Morgan does something clever ? she introduces Stephen to his own daughter at the end, so that sense is restored. With the last moment, the little girl running towards her father, a link to the future and to future generations is established. As well as a bloody great lump in my throat.
Ah, this is what Earthflight (BBC1, Sunday) has been crying out for since it started ? the how-they-did-it bit, usually a section at the end of a programme, here a whole programme at the end of the series. Perhaps they have been holding it back, because they are slightly ashamed ? that those geese, flying past the Statue of Liberty, along Monument Valley, over Edinburgh etc aren't actually wild geese at all. They are tame geese, reared by people and trained in the art of wildlife documentary making. Likewise the scarlet macaws in the South American jungle, and the vulture soaring over Africa. The vulture doesn't even take off ? he gets taken up in a plane, and then floats down with a headcam. It's like a charity sky-dive.
I don't think it really matters. Of course you couldn't get totally wild birds to do this. And it's absolutely fascinating, because with all this training you've got animals interacting with people, like this crazy French dude playing Mother Goose in his microlite. Plus there's all the amazing technology, like the clever helicopter drone that flies among the flamingos.
Earthflight has been an amazing series, but I'm not sure I've learned anything from it. It's all about the picture ? bird porn, basically. This final one has something else: it has a story.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2012/jan/29/birdsong-earthflight-tv-review
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