THE BBC basically has one friendly message for us all when it comes to its Sunday night schedules: "Gosh, isn't the world amazing?" Its latest nature series, Pacific Abyss, and the programme after it, Andrew Marr's Britain From Above, bow and scrape before the shining magnificence of life on Earth.
Their combined effect is akin to being scooped up by God himself (more of whom later) and taken on a guided tour of the planet in an effort to put your petty concerns into some kind of wider perspective. And it works, to an extent.
Pacific Abyss i
sn't quite as toothless as most of these cosy Sabbath travelogues, in that diving into extraordinarily deep, uncharted waters obviously presents a tangible sense of danger and risk.
The wholesome Kate Humble and her "international team of extreme underwater adventurers" spent much of this opening episode gawping at the barnacle-encrusted shipwrecks scattered beneath Chuuk Lagoon in Micronesia, an island sub-region near the Philippines.
Home to Japan's naval fleet during the Second World War, the area was devastated in 1944 by a US bombardment known as Operation Hailstone. The ghostly remnants of this attack (reportedly a dozen times more powerful than that on Pearl Harbour) have, over the decades, turned into massive artificial reefs housing a colourful array of undersea life.
But it was the remnants of war and human life that startled most: gas masks, machine guns, an operating theatre, an entirely preserved commode and, of course, human bones. However, the rest of the crew were more concerned with descending into the abyss known as "the twilight zone".
An unfeasibly enthusiastic bunch of mostly bearded, bespectacled men, they were more like a bunch of ageing hippies on a pilgrimage to Haight Ashbury. Considering the almost psychedelic nature of their underwater world, the resemblance was apt.
Notable among them was Richard Pyle who, astonishingly, prefers to dive in his street clothes. "When I'm done I can go straight to the restaurant," he grinned, before plunging into the deep. Their nerdish enthusiasm – "Oh yeah! We rock!" cried one as he discovered an unnamed species of fish – was contagious.
The episode even ended on a cliffhanger, with these avuncular adventurers having lost contact with their above-shore crew after diving deeper into the abyss than any man has ever gone before. You won't find this level of drama with David Dimbleby roaming around the Cotswolds in his Land Rover.
In the latest instalment of Make Me A Christian, the idiotic Reverend George Hargreaves dragged his gang of heathens on to a dismal countryside retreat. It didn't go well.
George, face like thunder as the heavens literally rained upon him, was dismayed someone had secretly brought food for the group. But surely that was an act of kindness? Would he admonish Jesus for doing the same? "Yes, that's all very clever young man, but I expressly said: no loaves or fishes."
George then forced the group to sing a song he'd written himself. Sadly, it wasn't So Macho, the camp 1980s pop track he wrote for Sinitta. According to Wikipedia (so it must be true), George once told Scotland on Sunday he wrote the song "for women to dance round their handbags to and for the gay scene to go mad to on poppers". A modern Kumbaya, then.
But his newer material is obviously geared more towards an audience of miserable people gathered round a campfire in the middle of a wet field. He'd be better off joining The Levellers.
The full article contains 599 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
